In Web3, a project's community is the gold star metric. Today, BFF speaks to three dedicated community builders who have mobilized their NFT holders, collectors and members around shared values and authentic connection.
Ahead, we hear from Mo Fiorino, founder and creative director of Connecting Roads, an NFT-gated marketplace connecting creators and their communities through once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list-worthy experiences, Nikki, social & community lead of Flower Girls NFTs, a fine-art and female-led collection of 10,000 unique digital artworks created by artist Varvara Alay and Chelsea Maclin, cofounder of R Planet, a women & minority-led NFT collection of high-quality, utility-enabled PFPs featuring diverse, rarity-powered traits, lore and characteristics.
Edited excerpts:
What makes building communities so authentic in Web3 is, for me, the fact that everyone can just truly be themselves. You can be speaking to someone for six months and all you know them as is a handle and a profile picture (PFP). You don't know where they're from. You don't know what gender they identify as. You don't know their name. You don't know their status, background or religion. But unlike in Web2, none of these things matter because you're there having this conversation and connecting and talking about stuff which truly matters to you without any of these other factors coming into it. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter if you'd get on in real life or not. The thing is, you're both here in Web2 — part of the same mission, part of the same community, able to express yourself and be a true version of yourself without worrying what other people think or the judgment or the kind of small mindedness of people. I love how unique that is, because these things, they shouldn't matter when you're connecting with people and making new friends.
I've been in consumer tech for around a decade and a half, and specifically building and scaling some of the platforms that you mentioned like Bumble (I started with a small group of us out of an apartment in Austin, Texas and helped scale to 100 million members across the world, and part of my team's goal there was to onboard ambassadors across the world and we organized over Facebook groups).
What's shocking and amazing [about Web3] to me is the speed that we're seeing here. It's more global, more decentralized, of course, and more real-time. The community and those who are ambassadors for a project or business have a bigger and better seat at the table. They have a larger voice. They're even more empowered, and I'm excited for us to continue to do that. That's the way it should have always been. To Nikki's point, I think everyone has a seat at the table and there's less judgment in this space. It's also a very harsh space. But to me, it's really the speed of execution and the speed of relationship building that happens here that is unlike anything I've ever seen in consumer tech in the past.
Something I've found so interesting since diving into Web3 is the concept of building in public. And so for Connecting Roads, we've decided to add in a whitepaper to our website. And essentially that's the most up-to-date business plan with our entire roadmap. It is an aggressive amount of information, but with that, we want everything to be on the table because we really do want to be transparent with all of the phases of our building. We've really seen this as a positive thing, because then people can see where we're at. And there's so many incredible people in this space who can guide you, who can introduce you to someone you otherwise would have never met. And so we've really, really seen this as a positive thing as it's allowed for people to understand and help direct us to a better person or direction. So that's been incredible.
And then, piggybacking off of that, once a month we do a town hall. Essentially it's just a Google meet with whomever. It doesn't have to be anyone who specifically owns an NFT. If anyone is interested in joining our next town hall, just follow me and we'll keep you posted with when that is and send out invites. But essentially this is when we talk about exciting project updates and upcoming things that are happening within our community. We talk about things we're struggling with in hopes that we can have a really open conversation about it and this is really just been super positive. And then we do post our town halls online for people to review if they couldn't make it to the live session. Really just being so open about everything, transparent, the good, the bad, the ugly has really helped us. And I haven't really seen that much in the prior Web2 space.
I love meeting IRL. It is an absolute vibe and we're definitely, definitely seeing from the very beginning we've had people wanting to meet up. We had an event during NFT NYC where the whole team got together and loads of our holders came and that was just the most amazing experience ever. We are all based around the world, so it is quite difficult getting everyone together in one place all at the same time. But we found that the desire from the community to meet up and chat and party in real life is so strong that they quite often will make their own sort of arrangements and their own meetups and their own groups.
Some of the child artists that we support — they're about 12 or 13 and there's a group of girls — they've started meeting up because our project has brought these three teenage girls together and they started doing projects together. They started doing NFTs together. I think they started doing a newsletter or a magazine together. They found each other through our drawing inspirations initiative and then connected and then taken that outside of Web3 to meet up in real life. And it's so nice to see these young creators finding each other and finding like-minded friends.
I think the desire here is for building relationships. And community is built on building relationships, which isn't scalable. It takes time and effort and conversation and ideally physical real-world interactions as well as virtual interactions. So we're focused on facilitating both virtual and IRL experiences and events, series of small intimate events, IRL, like I said, our communities all over the world. Our first ones kicked off in Austin, Texas earlier this summer and then Ashley, our cofounder, just hosted a small event in in Brazil as well. We're really hoping to build strong relationships within our community and we know that's very hard to do in large party settings. We're definitely seeing that shift in the last few years, and people are are keen to find ways to meet up IRL.
Also, we are about to launch our ambassador and grants program, where we're highlighting and featuring our stellar community members who will also be empowered to host events in different cities across the world and bring R planet and what they're passionate about as well to their local communities. Unfortunately, we're a lean and mean team, so we can't be all over the world. I wish we could be all over, but we are partnering with the community to bring that to life and are really excited to to do that in 2023.
I think this is such an important question. Yes, I see such a heavy desire for all of us to meet in real life more than ever. And just coming out of like the Art Basel high right now where I got to connect with so much of the BF community, I feel this wholeheartedly.
For ourselves and our community, we're really focusing on having gatherings multiple times a year for community members. In addition to people who've kind of followed our journey, and that is a huge portion of just everything we're doing with Connecting Roads, we recognize that everyone can use an experience that can be considered bucket list-worthy. We really want all of our experiences to be curated in a really unique way that can set up a transformational experience. If we set up a curated experience and provide all of the tools, we hope that people will have an end result of some really amazing connections or other things that can come of that.
What we are doing is in addition to building out our own experiences is working with like-minded community to curate different events for them. So at Art Basel this week we did a woman in Web3 networking experience and we were able to have panel speakers from BFF like Jackie Courtney. We also had Kashvi from World of Women in addition to some other incredible speakers. We were able to work with the BFF community specifically to allot some guest list spots for their community to be able to mingle with other attendees of the event. The goal of that was to get a group of attendees that were authentic and engaging, that would provide value to the speakers in addition to the speakers providing value to all of the attendees. So we're really focusing on building real-life experiences, but we're not just throwing parties. We're throwing experiences that have goals. Fine-tuned and bespoke is really our focus.
For more insights, listen to the full conversation with Mo, Nilkki and Chelsea here.
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
