Notes on building an internal community: Faces of web3 case study
What it means to be an operations manager at an early stage company.
If community building brings people together for a shared purpose, then what greater community is there than the company?
At Faces of web3, my job as CEO was “do whatever it takes to help the company scale”. I got this from Patrick McKenzie, even before I knew what that would mean in practice.
Our goal at Fow3 was to onboard creators to the world of Web3 and promote the discovery of creators from diverse communities. We also wanted to work in a somewhat decentralised manner, although this didn’t last long.
To achieve our goal, we broke up into 4 teams: The content team, the social media team, the product team and project management.
The social media team: The social media team was made up of Success, Florence and Great, three interns who were on a break from school and seeking opportunities to develop their skills and earn income. They had a simple task: to be our eyes and ears on all platforms and to make sure that whatever we published appeared on all of our socials; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Seni was in charge of this team.
Content team: Although I had started off publishing interviews and other essays by myself, I met with other friends collaborating in DAOs, and we split the effort. Our editor and writer Chidirim made sure we had whatever support was needed on the team, MJ wrote about DeFi because they were more knowledgeable, Funmi wrote about DAOs as they collaborated within Gitcoin at the time, and I would handle NFTs, interviews and other writing.
Product team: We observed that Twitter was insufficient for creators and didn't effectively support their media management and discoverability needs. To address this gap, the team included Seun our brand designer, David our CTO, Ayomikun our frontend developer and Aise our product designer, and set out to build a product specifically for creators.
From the start, I regarded Faces of web3 as an experiment; I had only one year> of working experience and wanted to build something that would exert me and expand my capacity for building.
Impact:
Goal: Onboard creators to the world of Web3 and promote the discovery of creators from underrepresented and diverse communities.
Result: Set a publishing cadence.
Result: Increase the number of subscribers to 2000 in Q2 2022.
Result: Increase the number of followers.
Result: Get some funding to validate our work.
In 6 months, we hadn’t met any of these goals. Inconsistency with publishing on our site and the content we were sharing on social was generic. I changed my title from project manager to operations manager, which expanded my function.
Here’s what I now know about the operations manager role.
The operations manager role holds more significance than the project manager role because while the project manager might manage only project deadlines, the operations manager manages the people, and the project and also sets the timelines.
Operations management and community management are the same roles, only the operations manager focuses on the internal community, and the community manager focuses on the external community.
The operations manager and the community manager role require the same skillsets: communication, empathy, listening skills, curiosity, problem-solving skills, project management, writing and management skills.
Unlike a community manager who focuses on building different communities such as communities of practice, interest, and product separately, the operations manager builds all three types of communities concurrently.
When the operations manager is bad at their job, the company suffers.
Back on track:
As Patrick McKenzie says of his time at Stripe “A well-operated early-stage startup should spend basically no time on things which aren’t either product or talking to customers. We spent ours mainly refining our internal operations.” He also says, “I will say that part of the work is doing the work, and part of the work is teaching the organization how to do the work. A major purpose of me spending an “economically irrational” amount of time working to improve one startup’s experience is to help maintain the organizational culture such that our newest employee understands that overwhelming support for startups is the default expectation.” The same is true for my work within Fow3, I needed to teach the organization how to do the work.
We needed to meet our goals and to do that, I had to:
Learn organizational design
Incentivize good work
Proactively communicate
Hold weekly learning sessions with each team
Learn to communicate successes to each team member
Learn to allocate work and make sure the team was working well together
Read wide
Practice relentless execution
Learn to document everything and to organize the documentation.
Results:
By Q4, we had increased the number of our followers to 800 from 500 in Q2 and Q3. We had more newsletters recommending our content thereby increasing our readership and we won a grant from Filecoin ($7000) and were in talks with the Tezos team for more grant allocation. We had launched our “Ownership economy cohort” course and community, and we successfully launched the Naijafloodaid campaign where we raised $5000 for communities affected by the 2022 flood in Nigeria. We also designed the UI for our social discovery web3 product
Conclusion:
Building and growing any community requires creativity, dedication, and persistence. By constantly staying in touch with my team, being intentional about building a cohesive team and listening to their needs, we were able to improve internally, which then directly impacted our business goals.