Belu, Author at Mighty Block |

Web3 Go-To-Market Strategy: Is Go-To-Community replacement for Go-To-Market?

In my last article, we discussed the challenges a Product Manager has to deal with when they lead a web3 product. One of the main challenges we discussed was the Web3 Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy and how the frameworks we used to know became obsolete. But is that entirely true? Could we adapt those frameworks to be our baseline for building fantastic products that the community needs? Well, spoiler alert, we can.

Go-To-Market Strategy

Let’s start with a basic definition: A GTM strategy is a tactical plan detailing how we are planning to execute a successful product launch, a new market expansion, or a new customer target. It’s designed to mitigate the risk that includes the new launch.

Or, what we product people usually think, anything and everything which ensures that you build the right product so when you implement the Go-To-Market strategy, it will impact the end user positively and the business, resulting in you keeping your job 😂

Now that we have a clear understanding of what GTM is, let’s see the most common elements and how we can adapt those to our web3 products:

Main elements of a good GTM

Product Market Fit

Having a clear reason, a purpose, and a problem to solve is really important. At the moment that you are formulating the GTM, asking why are we building something is the main thing to ensure that we are not just in love with our product.

Sometimes, we know we believe that we can create needs for our users, but that it’s not entirely true. There has to be a deeper reason for people to consume our products, even if it’s not straightforward. Web3 is not an exception. To understand the product market fit, we need to be embedded in the web3 community, understand what motivates them, what challenges they have and how we can help solve them.

However, if we want to bring web3 to the masses, we need to understand which problems the people outside of Web3 have that our technology can help solve.

But first, we need to define the problem. Don’t try to create a need to be solved with blockchain.

Audience and buyers

In web3 we are familiar with what we call our early adopters, our community. They are the ones that are going to engage with the product even before we release it. Building a community is an essential step in our Web3 Go-to-Market marketing strategy.

A community is going to allow us to perform early validations, confirm our assumptions, test the product, and even participate in the decision-making process.

Competitive Landscape

Who else is doing what you are trying to do?

We used to ask some questions to identify competence such as:

What is the actors’ market share?
Who is leading?
What am I offering that is different from theirs?
What are their weaknesses?
How loyal are the users to the competitors?

There are several frameworks and tools that can help you to understand your landscape.

The most famous are the SWOT analysis, the Porter five forces, and a BCG (from Boston Consulting Group) matrix.

Are those valid for web3? Well, they have existed for a long time, and they are still valid tools, but in this particular industry, we should ask ourselves some additional questions:

Do we have a community that already supports us? If we don’t, it’s time to create it.
Is our product solving a problem that can’t be solved with web2?
What do we offer that a “traditional” product does not?
How easy is it for our potential users to switch to our tech? Is this for the masses? Or is it only for tech-savvy people?

Distribution

This is the key to how your potential users are going to access our product. For a regular one, we have tho techniques: marketing-intensive and sales-intensive. But in web3, I will say that we can have a new one: Community-centered.

And what does that mean?

As I mentioned in the previous sections, we need to create a strong community if we want to succeed in this world.

Go-to-community (GTC) is a strategy focused on building and engaging with a community of early users, that could help us to increase interest in our product as well as have early feedback.

But how to start building a community

The same as we have MVPs (Minimum Valuable Products), we could have MVCs (Minimum valuable communities). And here we have a couple of steps to start thinking about building a community from the very beginning:

First: Build

Define and share your core proposition & how co-creation works
Bootstrapping a community: use tools and applications that are already popular with these users: Discord, Twitter, Telegram, and even some web3 tooling like Crew
Depending on your product, a common practice is sharing tokens & retroactive airdrops with early contributors

Second: Engage

Gradually opening and broadening up
Depending on your organization/company structure, you can progressively decentralize governance and ownership over to the community
Prepare an onboarding journey for new members, especially for those that are newbies in the web3 ecosystem.

Third: Sustain

Getting members to actively participate, engage and contribute
Creating the right dynamics between regular members, active contributors, and the core team

Go to community timeline

And how is that going to help us with the Distribution?

Communities are leading the web3 revolution. Having early adopters with influence in the community could help us to bring real engagement to our product.

But to reach the masses, we still need to apply some of the traditional GTM strategies for distribution.

It’s because of that, that Web3 Go-to-Market and Go-to-Community need to be complementary, and we cannot have one without the other if we want to reach a broader audience.

Web3 Go-to-Market	Web3 Go-to-Community
Optimizing lead flow	Hosting meetups and creating educational content
KPIs: Conversion Rate, Repeat Rate, CAC	KPIs: growth and retention
Strategies like: “Pre-sale”, “Earlybird”	Engaged MVC
Feedback: NPS, CSAT, surveys	Feedback: Community
How many leads did the forum generate last week?	How many people did we help last week?
Value capture	Value creation

GTM and GTC comparison

Then, Is Go-To-Community the new Web3 Go-to-Market?

As we saw in the article, one strategy does not replace the other. And both need to coexist if we want to reach a broader audience. To conquer a different niche from the tech-savvies and web3 early adopters, we need to mix traditional strategies with the new ones, to let them engage with our product but then educate them about this new paradigm.

Belu In Blockchain, Blog, MB Academy, Web3

How Product Managers need to re-invent to survive web3

This is not a magical recipe of “10 things that you must know to be a successful product Manager in a decentralized environment” or “5 must-have skills to be a web3 product VP”. This article looks to summarize the main challenges that product managers are facing in the web3 product industry.

example of a product manager meeting on the web2 — Example of a product manager meeting on the web2

Product Managers are not part of the product conception

Web3 is full of technical founders, builders, and early-adopter users. Most of the products are created with a great idea but without a Go-to-market strategy and a conscious prioritization of problems to solve or value to deliver.

We know that generally, start-ups do not start with teams that include product managers. CEOs and founders are the ones that help with the product definition. We have our first potential issue here. They are the visionaries, and the product is their baby. So, how can they be objective?

This scenario makes it difficult for a PM to take ownership of the product when one finally arrives at the company.

Products are built full of bias

As we mentioned before, all of them start with a great idea, but is that a great idea for the users as well? How is this hypothesis validated? As PMs, we have a mantra that says: “Always test your assumptions”.

That is something that does not happen often in this ecosystem. New products are created based on the assumptions and desires of the founders. Web2 has taught us that in most cases that is not enough. Of course, there are exceptions, but are you going to risk your investors, your time, and your credibility because of them?

New Dapps and new DeFi protocols sometimes get a bunch of new users when they are launched, and most of the time there is a community of web3 “influencers” being bullish about that. However, at that point, the problems start. Is the product strong enough to provide value to these users? Are they going to stay? This abrupt growth makes founders think that they are right and their path is the only valid one. Who needs hypothesis validation? I have 1M users!

Product Managers need to be able to discover where the real value is, test it quickly, to fail even more quickly. This is not only a new industry but a new era, so we are going to fail, but we need to be prepared to pivot the original idea if that is not what our community and users need.

In web3, we have an extra bias that seems to be all over the place. Products are built for people that already know how this world works. If we want to achieve the vision of blockchain and web3, bring economic freedom, or decentralize the internet, we need to include a broader audience. We cannot think only of the users that are already here.

Products are community-driven

As Product Managers, we are used to taking care of our product metrics: is the conversion rate enough? Where is the drop-off in my funnel? What about the churn? Our DAU?

From now on, if we want to succeed, we need to take care of our product and most importantly, our community: How many daily contributors do we have? And what is the retention rate of my community members?

The challenge has increased, engagement is no longer with the product but with a community that we need to build, take care of, and maintain.

Building a community is not a challenge that Product Managers are used to. We can do some analogies with the users, but it’s not the same, especially because communities are stronger actors in our product development cycle. We are talking about people that could participate in product decisions. So, we need to create a solid community, we need to be open to hearing what they have to say.

Remember when we used to be data-informed when defining our roadmap? Well now we need to develop a new skill, which is one of being community informed.

Data vs Community desires: The priority Matrix increases

So now, communities are pretty well informed about what they want, the trends, and what we should build next to keep them engaged.

Nowadays, do communities handle the roadmap? No, it is not like that. As we mentioned earlier, they are important drivers of prioritization, but they are not the only ones. One thing that we need to consider is that communities are still immature, they probably give us solutions or new cool features that they would like to implement. On some rare occasions, they are going to come to us with problems. As Product Managers, we need to be able to understand the real issues, the impact, and the value that we could deliver if we work on those.

If we have communities telling us what is next, do we need data or is it no longer relevant? In fact, data is more important than ever; the difference is that now we have more ingredients in the prioritization matrix:

Business Impact: Even if we are talking about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), or any kind of company our product needs to be aligned with the vision and objectives.
User Impact: Not all users are part of a community, so, we cannot forget to bring them value. They keep the product alive!
Community value: Our star users, early adopters, and promotors are part of the trends. Are we keeping them engaged?
Technical effort: How much does it imply? How long is it going to take us?

The Go-To-Market strategy is not enough

Another important task as a Product Manager was taking care of the Go-To market strategy. We even thought that we had some kind of recipe for it. We were full of frameworks that we could use to define our MVP, we put our users at the center, we followed prioritization techniques, and we did experiments and AB testing. But, what about now?

One trend is the Go-To Community strategy which implies defining (and building) our MVC: Minimum Viable Community. It is this minimum validation that we need to do as Product Managers, to understand if our product is going to succeed in the community.

And how can you formulate a Go-to Community strategy? Well, we will be seeing just that in the next chapter 🙂

As you can see, there are plenty of challenges that we need to deal with every day. The good news is that as Product Managers, we have developed skills that can help us with that: re-inventing ourselves, adapting to new environments, learning, and learning again. If we want to be part of this revolution, we need to evolve first.

Belu