As you’d know, my day job consists of marketing, community, and growth at a credentialing protocol. Like most projects in this space, we are early and a have tiny team focussing on hypothesis validation, and the quickest way to do so is to get our product in the hands of potential users. There are two ways this can happen.

The first is to individually reach out to potential users—an activity that does not scale. The second, is to build a presence on online platforms that gradually generates inbound interest over time.

The latter is an example of an activity that pays dividends long after you have finished working on it. Thus, heavily investing in this—especially at the beginning—proves to be very beneficial down the line. The only issue in doing so, is that resources are often limited in the beginning.

With a several platforms to potentially build a presence on (YouTube, Substack, Instagram, Twitch, LinkedIn, TikTok, Discord, Medium, etc.) how does one choose between them? Well, one way of answering this question is to visualise the journey of a potential user—a journey that starts with having no clue about a product and ends with being an eager supporter of that product and maybe even a contributor to the project (in the ideal case).

To visualise the journey, I reflected on how I came to support my favourite projects. I also asked around. Turns out, most of us had a more or less similar journey to our favourite projects.

We all started with going through a project’s Twitter, followed by visiting their website, after which we checked out their blog or Discord, and then, unknowingly, formed a strong opinion of the project (this is interesting vs. this is meh boring). Interestingly, the opinion we formed at this stage took a lot of mental effort to change.

For example, I have myself dismissed really good projects because when I came across them long ago they didn’t seem cool. Similarly, I still consider some projects awesome, even though their team hasn’t shipped anythign substantial recently. Obviously, I avoided these biases as I reflected deeper about my journey to and opinion of a project, but this is not something everyone is motivated to do.

Thus, to say the least, having a good Twitter, a decent website (or at least a landing page!) and blog, and an active Discord goes miles in setting a good first impressions and attracting your earliest users.

While the above are arguably the main platforms that anyone in web3 expects a project to be present on, covering other bases surely helps. By having a TikTok, for instance, people get to interact with new projects in an environment they associate with not-serious stuff. The same can be said about Instagram.

But my personal experience states that doing few platforms properly trumps spreading yourself thin among several platforms. Plus, doing platforms such as Instagram and TikTok take more effort because audience expectation management is tougher there (for example, most “brand” TikToks are actually thought-out and have high production value. In this case, would an amateur-ish/generic TikTok work out?).

For small teams just starting out, focussing on the website and blog, Discord and Twitter should suffice. In each of these platforms, taking care of the most basic things goes a long way.

On Twitter, managing the pinned tweet, bio, header, display picture, location and link in bio is important. On Discord, having a “professional” space with verification bots, rules, a friendly welcome screen and FAQ about the project are important. On the website, if nothing at all, a good graphic and a CTA to Discord or Twitter suffices. And on the blog, the least you can have is an introduction post telling more about your project.

Good next steps would be to keep the Discord active so the server looks alive when new members join in. It should seem like something is happening here. On the blog, it is very important to be accessible to people of all skill levels, or at the least, have sections with all beginner-friendly posts in the front and all technical, or product-specific posts at the back. It is easier to navigate to the latter from the former, but not the other way around.

All this might seem trivial, but the real challenge lies in constantly keeping all platforms up to date (especially when product iterations make certain parts of your product irrelevant or add new parts to it). Also, the challenge lies in maintaining maximum consistency among all the platforms. For example, is the display picture and header same everywhere? Is the bio same everywhere? How about the links?

To scale the number of potential users willing to try our product (and thereby validate our hypothesis), I built a strategy around the above platforms (Discord, Twitter, Substack and our website) wherein I make a point to post everyday, sometimes multiple times a day on Discord and Twitter, and at least twice a week on Substack.

To keep things sane, I rely on using content pillars, wherein I create a piece of content for one platform and then leverage or modify that to fit other platforms. With a mix of re-using content across platforms and creating original content, I hope that I satisfactorialy grow our audience and connect with potential users.

Let’s see how this goes. In a future post, I shall breakdown this content strategy and review its performance as well.

In the mean time though, I invite you to peruse the below figure that visualises the journey of a superfan (from project discovery to wanting to become a contributor). Do go through it and reach out to me on Twitter (@InfiniteGwei) or DM me on Discord (@InfiniteGwei#3794) in case you have any thoughts!

You can also view this post on Substack.