Building and Engaging a Crypto Community — A Playbook with Example

A global community of traders, founders, investors, CAs, Lawyers (and all legit people interested in crypto)

I started learning about crypto trading since 21 May, 2017. For the next 4 months I hunted 4Chan, reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Quora and Telegram for the best and the most authentic content and learning material on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. I burnt my hands (lost my money quite a few times) via Pump and Dump groups, false promises and wrong interpretations. But, I was able to figure out by August end, what and who to learn from in crypto and blockchain.

When I used to talk to my friends about cryptocurrencies (during the same time I was learning), the biggest problem they also faced was that there was so much noise around the subject (bans, regulations, hacks etc) and more over, no one knowledgable to talk to who they knew. There was no one they could fall back on, no one to trust and they were scared.

Thus began the story of Crypto currency trading geeks on 26 Oct 2017, 4 days before my 29 birthday. A closed Facebook group gave them the safe zone to be themselves, ask any doubts they had, geek out about why is the price going up or down and engage in conversations with people just like them 😃

And boy, are we proud of where we stand today.

In 4 months, we have close to 7000 intelligent investors across 99 countries who are ready to help you come onboard the crypto train in a safe and intelligent way.

If you want to be part of the community and see what we discuss about — Join us on Facebook

Steady organic growth in the past 3 months in no of community members and their engagement. We have tried our best to maintain a global representation (evident from the top countries in the community). But, we still lack in a number of women in the community.

When we started building this community we were building for a product that we were planning — Stature Network

Stature Network was going to be in simple words — Trading View on Blockchain with incentives on sharing quality trading analysis.

While building the community we learned the following about our community members —

1. They need a lot of handholding which is not possible via building a product. Mainly because this is something a lot of the community members are doing for the first time in their lives.
2. Trading involves a lot of passion and emotion and managing this (in a positive direction) requires a high quality of human engagement.
3. Most of them are not looking to trade daily but want to understand the fundamentals and build a portfolio.
4. Social investing and quality collaboration on investment decisions will be the future of investing and portfolio management.
5. People don’t like to research (NOT THAT THEY DON’T WANT TO) before investing. If gamified right you can encourage this behavior.
6. Different community members have different needs — you can’t build a one size fits all model. For this, we diversified into various channels — Telegram (for real-time trading analysis and fundamental news), Newsletters (for thought-provoking fundamentals challenging content pieces) and Crypto Trade Talks (for strengthening the community in an offline mode)
7. Offline presence only, will not work for crypto as the audience needs a digital community to fall back on for their continuous doubts as they delve deeper. You can’t teach Blockchain and crypto in one session. It is a continuous process aided by an entire community.

Handling a community is a constant, ever evolving game. On one hand you have to cleverly weed out the toxicity, on another constantly remove spams and adverts, and on the third hand (if you have one) create content which gets people to comment and debate.

And it’s a thin red line on which you play the balancing act.

Based on the above insights, we decided to drop Stature Network for the time being and focus just on growing the community.

A few examples of the above —

1. Gamified investing challenge with Gimmer

2. Interesting experiments and passionate debates

3. Daily Discussions (FAQs) on fundamental and technical aspects of crypto trading

Daily discussions on fundamental topics and market sentimens

4. Offline community building via Crypto Trade Talks

One of the most impactful moments of working on Crypto Trade Talks was -

After putting up this comment 12 community members messaged me on Facebook to understand how can they better manage their emotions and money in this crash.

We truly felt that we have been able to make a big impact in the lives of a few of our community members.

Now we want to scale this impact to the next level and this is what we are planning.

Introducing Community Leaders who will be responsible to grow the community with us —

Rishi Agarwal — Founder of Bidstalk, Ex - MD Applift (a data driven app marketing company), Founder Coin Scenario. Rishi will be helping the community by sharing the latest fundamental news and best technical analysis as that is what he curates at Coin Scenario.

Nipun Gupta — Nipun lives, drinks, eats, and breathes the cybersecurity, innovation and venture ecosystem. A mentor to many entrepreneurs, he founded Veni Vidi VC podcast whose episodes ranked #1 on ProductHunt. While currently leading Deloitte’s cyber innovation ecosystem, Nipun advises the cryptocurrency Hshare ($HSR) as a side project. He continues to advise startups based in US, India, and UK. His approach has often been praised as being pragmatic and sustainable while being aligned with the business goals of a project. Based in Silicon Valley and connected to the local blockchain community, Nipun will be helping us to increase the network strength, both in quality and quantity.

Ishan Garg — One of the ICO specialist who deals in verifying and removing fake/spam ICOs from the market. He also runs a Blockchain Media company called Bitcofunds.

Anurag Yadav — got introduced to crypto in mid of 2017. It’s been around 4 months since he has been actively educating himself about this space and 2 months since he has been actively investing. The agenda is obviously to generate an income source but he is also fascinated both by the features that this tech offers and its applications to solve real world problems. He still considers himself a novice in this world but he also tries to learn something new every day. Anurag will be helping us identifying potential ICOs.

Paras Pundir — You never grow alone but always with a community. This started making sense when Paras started working as a Community Manager. After hoping designations in half a dozen companies within three years, he landed to the same designation with which he had started just after college. There was just one difference. Formally, he was given the designation of a Community Manager and this time, he chose to be the one. Paras will be helping us scale the online and offline community via events, meet-ups and digital engagements.

Rishabh Bose — Will be helping us keep things simple. With the Big Guns in the picture, we needed someone who would help make things easier to get for the people looking to get started (we call’em noobs). Marketer by profession.

Next 6 months Roadmap

1. Crypto Trade Talks — multi city (Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and so on) offline engagements in India with the possibility of international presence.
2. Video interviews on the Facebook Group — Involving the influencers of the crypto and blockchain ecosystem to discuss about how the industry is developing and what can smart investments in this space for good returns in the future.
3. Gamifying Investment Research — Involving brands to engage with the audience to incentivise them to do better investment research. We plan to do this online (in the group) and offline (in crypto trade talks) in regular intervals.
4. Celebrating intelligent crypto investors — Showcasing the stories, motivations and trading style of intelligent crypto investors so that every one else can learn from this common knowledge.
5. Building a networking loop within the community — we literally have someone from every part of the crypto ecosystem in the group, from Miners to traders, Noobs to tech enthusiasts, bloggers to founders. We plan to start creating networking opportunities for them digitally and offline.

Why are we doing it? What is in it for us?

Intangibly

1. Deep satisfaction of actually impacting someone’s investment decisions (positively) and thus his/her life.
2. Ability to use the opinion of more than 6500 intelligent investors while taking an investment decision (social investing)
3. Increasing the liquidity in the market :)
4. Enjoying the action by being right in it and not from the front seats

Tangibly

1. We plan to monetise via Brand engagements, but just enough to pay the salaries of the community members working to grow the community. We plan to have a not for profit entity structure (More updates on this coming soon). We promise to get only the best of the best crypto brands to engage with you.
2. Each of the admins and community members at some time have their own Professional projects and would expect support from the community. None of us will ever SPAM you and that is a promise.

This is an open community and we love any kind of criticism, feedback or suggestions.

Reach out to us at cryptotradetalks@gmail.com or the Facebook group :)

What positions are still up for Grabs

We are still looking for the following community members —

1. At least 2 Women in crypto who are into blockchain technology, mining or trading
2. Mining experts, Blockchain Technology experts

If you want to apply please reach out to us on the group or email us at cryptotradinggeeks@gmail.com

Or you can apply here http://bit.ly/CryptoMods

If you are passionate about crypto and want a safe, respected place to share your thoughts, doubts, discussions, opinions or innovations do check us out.