Let me tell you the story of how I scaled up to becoming the Head Of Community of a crypto startup in 7 months.

Disclaimer: I am a full-blown degen and nerd. I’d spent countless hours learning as much as I could about crypto, web3, NFTs & DeFi on the internet spending a rather unhealthy amount of time on Twitter. So I understood what I was getting into, I knew what the market needed, and adapted accordingly. Towards the end of this article, you’ll learn about a few things I did differently and how you too can apply them in your next application email/DM (i prefer DMs).

Let’s backtrack to a couple of months ago, September of 2021, to be precise. I recently joined the WGMI discord server. WGMI is a community - soon to be DAO, that’s solving the problem of the shortage of Community professionals in web3 and attracting enthusiastic community builders, training and empowering them with the skills necessary to build & scale communities. You can learn a lot more about them here:

Where it all started:

I reached out to a user (details hidden for privacy), who had earlier posted that they were in need of a community manager to help manage an NFT project they were working on. the above screenshot was how it got started.

My approach here was to use my previous volunteer work experience to sell myself and it worked. I did a stellar job in the end.

Long story short, I got this gig and was paid $275/day. My services for the project lasted for a week. This was also the timeline for the project. Fast forward a few days post-launch, and the actual project owners reached out to me and asked me to come on board as a community manager for another project they were working on.

Enter Space Bugs.

The Space Bugs team sent in their terms and duration of the contract, and we negotiated and came to an agreement. Things kicked off!

I went ahead to hire and lead a team of over 10 community moderators for the Spacebugs project. This went on for about 3 months I worked directly with the core team to plan out strategies, talk about security, educated them on best practices and so much more. The Space Bugs went ahead to sell out all 3,333 of their NFTs. can’t lie, the art was fire.

fast forward to a couple of weeks in late December/early January, I reached out to another member of the WGMI community who had earlier posted that they were in need of a community builder to help them with the launch of something big. Had a chat with them, and went back and forth a couple of times until we reached an agreement. worked with this team for about 2 months. Unfortunately, the project never kicked off, things didn’t quite turn out as well as the founder would have hoped. I was paid for the time spent and services provided. From that point on, I knew I wanted something long-term. I was done with these short-term, uncertain gigs. I also wanted to work with a team of builders.

Enter The Dapp List

Here’s the power of putting yourself out there. I made this simple comment under the tweet of @developer_dao, and the following screenshot shows how many interactions it got. This was followed by a few DMs, a few offers, and a few rejections from both ends until I got to pick The Dapp List. You can learn more about what The Dapp List is building here: http://thedapplist.com

Things were (and still are) going great at The Dapp List, but I particularly got interested in what the team over at mazury was building and seeing they had an opening for a Head Of Community, I applied. Sent an email, had a chat with woj, the founder, and felt it was a good fit. a couple of days later, I signed the offer to join the team as the Head Of community in April of 2022.

My time at Mazury has been fun. I built and led strategies that educated the community on the key features to pay attention to in the v2 of the app that was being built. These campaigns were very successful and gave us the desired effect.

If you’re out in the market searching for your next job, or your very first one, you’ll need to do things a lot differently. Things can get pretty rough out there, and there are just a handful of ways you can stand out. Community Builders are in high demand, but it is almost as saturated as well. So, during your application process, you really, really have to be unique. Spend some time going through the Job description thoroughly, pay attention to see if you have the required skills, draft your cover letter, and then apply!

REALLY nice to have(s):

• Ingenuity.
• Requisite Skill(s).
• Humor.
• Great storytelling.

And that’s it, folks. Of course, I had my fair share of rejections along the way. That’s just how these things are. you have to keep pushing and providing value and eventually, it’ll hit! So keep your head up, Kings & Queens. Don’t fret, wagmi!

Thank you for reading. I hope you found this useful! feel free to follow me on Twitter: @geniusyinka