Rahul (name changed), a community leader at a Web3 startup, and his team have spent the last couple of months rebuilding the firm’s Discord community, taking it to 7,000 members, after it was hacked in late 2021. The 15,000 Discord members the company gained through an aggressive marketing strategy had been reduced to just about 2,000 by the attack.
What's the big deal, one may ask? Probably not much, unless you are a startup in the world of Web3, the newest iteration of the internet and a term used to describe digital services built on blockchain technology.
According to Rahul, initial members of the community serve as its top evangelists because they are the ones who help spread the word about the company.
The goal is always to get more people to join the community, and those who are leading it are at the heart of any Web3 startup. As a result, people capable of running Web3 communities in the country are hugely sought-after.
Discord is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) that allows users to communicate directly through voice, video, or text. The platform has a strong community of gamers and is now used by the Web3 folks. Globally, Discord has 150 million monthly users.
The concept of communities is hardly new. It has existed over the last three-four years in Web2. The key role of the community is to engage with users but this happens only when the group or community attains a certain audience reach that requires it to find a manager to engage users.
As a user, you hardly have any say in how the platform functions, and the new features it launches. If you don’t like the features one platform offers, you move on to another and then another.
But in Web3, where products and services are built on blockchain, the concept of communities acquires a different note.
In the new era of Web3 products, which by nature are decentralised, users have a lot more say in the kind of products that are being built, and hence feel they are part of the product, said Subhendu Panigrahi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Skillenza, an online platform for hackathons, coding challenges, networking and community building. This makes a huge difference.
Panigrahi is also a part of OGClub, a social Decentralised Anonymous Organisation IDAO, in which every member has a stake and no single person owns or controls the organisation.
“The first set of communities, once they see value, obviously they'll bring in more people and the flywheel takes effort,” he said.
Take for instance Komet, a Web3 startup that acts as a wallet service. Kush Ratna Gupta, co-founder and CEO, started working with the community in its Discord channel from day one. It was important for Gupta for a couple of reasons.
He was building a Web3 wallet service similar to Metamask. So he wanted to understand the pain points of existing services from the community and build a better product. So the company had a community lead from day one.
So did Shaamil Karim, founder & CEO, Diginoor, a cine NFT platform. “At Diginoor, community is one of the key pillars. We had a manager right from the get go.”
The company hired a community manager from the time the platform was launched in June 2021. Diginoor has 2,000 members in its Discord channel and has three community managers.
Panigrahi said, “In Web3, a community team is as important as a product team.” That is also the reason why there is a huge demand for community managers among Web3 startups in India.
Suhas Motwani, co-founder of The Product Folks and Indistractable, said, “In Web2, the role is treated as a support function and not core, which is why there was a dearth. This has changed in Web3 where it starts with the community, followed by the product.”
“This is now replacing what product management was a few years back. If you now have done some work in community building, you can ask for an exorbitant amount. That’s also why now, these community managers would rather contribute to three DAOs than work with one company.”
Demand for community managers
According to the Web3.Career site, there are 367 community manager jobs in Web3, of which 177 are remote. Close to five companies like Polygon and Binance are looking for community managers in India.
But this may not reflect the actual demand as most Web3 companies are always on the lookout for community managers. Gupta and Karim, founders of Komet and Diginoor respectively, concurred.
In fact, most managers are hired through their own Discord channels. Community managers in Diginoor were hired from its Discord channel.
Motwani said, “There are different roles within community management- designer, manager and operations. But often, people doing it for the first time merge these roles and that becomes a challenge.”
Designers are generally seniors who help to strategise, understand the target audience, and plan the roadmap. Acquisition of users, retention and growth are their main focus areas. Manager and operations personnel focus on execution. These hires also work with marketing and execute day-to-day work or campaigns and conferences.
These managers are also paid much higher than their Web2 peers. Panigrahi of Skillenza said that good managers with significant experience can earn as much as Rs 40-50 lakh a year for five-six years.
But hiring a community manager is easier said than done.
Anshu Dhir, co-founder of EasyFi, a decentralised finance (DeFi) lending protocol, said that hiring a Web3 community manager has been a struggle for most Web3 founders as it is important that they have clout, network and good communication skills.
Web3 is new and the number of people who can understand it is limited. The managers should also have multiple skill sets across design, operations, moderating the community and organising events, which makes hiring a good community manager a tough job and retaining them even tougher.
As Dhir pointed out, EasyFi attracted a lot of interest from candidates for the community manager's role, but retaining the people who fill the role has been a challenge, which only keeps growing as the firm scales up across locations.
The company has a global community across seven national communities based on languages. “Every community has linguistic barriers, so you need specialised moderators or managers who can communicate with the members,” he added.
While the salaries can be high, commensurate with experience, the starting pay could be as low as Rs 20,000.
Lower pay, along with longer work hours leading to burnout, does not help.
As Motwani pointed out, while there are multiple roles for community managers, most of the startups in India have merged these roles, leading to burnouts.
Raj Karia, who leads the community at QuestBook, works for at least 12-14 hours a day. “There are days when you have 8-10 back-to-back meetings and no fixed working hours,” he said.
While Karia enjoys his work, this does take a toll on people and it is a key challenge for the community managers.
Kushagra Singh, Growth and Marketing, Gitopia, a decentralised code collaboration platform, said, “Being a community manager is 24x7 job. It can’t be 9-5 pm since you have to be present all the time to engage with the governance and work for longer hours.”
But there are things that companies can do to alleviate this. Instead of being active 24x7, he says, one just needs to find power users, who are actively involved in the community and make them moderators. “These users have been following you and are actively involved. So they know the process even when you are not there,” he added.
Also, companies should empower the community to answer questions from users. While things might be challenging originally, this gets easier after you are established when an active community member can step in when you are not present, he added.
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