A few weeks ago, I was in a project called Qwestive, where we initially want to help creators to build their community.

After talking to creators, what we found there is a gap for creators to build, maintain their active community. A tiktok creators can have 70K followers, but have no community. Those are a group of people might have shared interest, and can provide valuable feedback to creators, also support creators in a strong way.

Difference between followers & community

• Creators don’t often own the followers’ attention, it is controlled by platforms. This creates uncertainty for the creators’ content reach.
• Creators often don’t know who his core audience are.
• Followers talk to the creator, not each other.
• Followers engagement mainly from consuming content, and stops from commenting.

Benefits of building a community

• Understand who your top followers are, or core audience are. Deep collaboration with your community to understand what does the core group interested in
• Own & grow your distribution channel, not bound by platforms
• Transform some of your supports into workforce to sell/podcast your content, video editing, design, event management, etc.
• Enable your community to fund your ideas
• Extend value from not just consuming your content, but interact with people in relevant interests, which create new business opportunities for creators to design products around. e.g. IRL events

Components of a creator DAO

The question is what are the components a creator needs to transform their followers into a community?

What stops creators from transforming followers into community now?

1. Lack of knowledge to start: Firstly this concept is not common yet. Many creators don’t have the knowledge and experience on how to setup the server bot, what channels to create, what events or benefits they should put to engage communities.
2. Efforts to maintain community active: often creators work by themselves, and they are faced a lot of admin work already that stealing time from content creation. To maintain a community, it often needs a community manager who continusly post messages, reply to community members, onboard community members, initiate community events, etc.
3. Lack of enough benefits to keep community members: If it is just a discord channel, there is not a lot of stuff community members can do apart from chatting, so unless creators are actively posting stuff in the server, there is not much reason for community members to stay.

Common building blocks for DAO:

1. Chat: A place where community can chat & discuss things freely
2. Treasury: A treasury where community initiatives can be funded, and reward community activities.
3. Vote: A mechnism that enable community members with tokens to vote on initiatives.
4. Blog: A place where community, or even public can access the core information about the community, used to acquire new people