Community is Memes & Money

Community isn't a discord server. Or a Slack. Or a meetup. Community is a network bound together by common memes-- the founders' vision-- and aligned economic incentives. The earliest communities were our ancestor's hunter-gather tribes: we shared a common purpose-- survival-- common gods and rituals-- memes-- and we all feasted or starved together-- economic incentives. Tech startups must be communities if they are to succeed. This wasn't always the case. But today there is no tech startup that flourishes without a strong community. If no one cares about your product except your co-founders and friends on PH, you will 100% go nowhere, like most PH launches. Think about that for a moment. All your effort-- the code, the content, the design, the hours grinding, the friends & family investment, the hours of toil, the missed time with friends-- will all have zero ROI (except perhaps psychic income) if you don't build a community before you build an MVP. How do I know? Because I've built many hypergrowth startups over the past 10 years and I've learned the hard way that community is the key to success. In fact my first fintech startup that I launched 20 years ago in Mexico is still thriving: https://www.toditocash.com. Since then, I've built Uphold, Airtm, Cadoo, and Slyk. That last one I built to help all founders level up in exactly the way I'm describing here. So what is community for a tech startup that aspires to hypergrowth? What are the memes and what are the money? It starts with a founder with a vision to solve a problem that they care about using technology. Not a problem that they think VCs will care about (I see a lot of this meme chasing). It needs to be a problem they want to solve for themselves and others who feel the pain. Here are some examples of startups I recently funded that do this: Minimum Viable Father: a matchmaking service for the formation of non-traditional families led by a female founder who is 40 and dying to have a kid herself. She's building the product that her and her male and female friends need. Starbase: a female data scientist is building a data structuring and transformation tool that is a MMOG-- play-to-earn game that teaches people data literacy and how to become data scientists. She knows the problem that her employers face: hiring experienced data engineers is hugely expensive. Starlist (coincidence that both are Star names, but also I think a sign): Female founder who is building Airbnb/Uber for commercial female beauty-- beautiful women on demand and in command. She's a beautiful woman living in LA who has lived how broken, inefficient, and dangerous it is for models and actresses to get paid for their looks. These are just three examples of the founder vision that creates a mimetic signal that people with the same painful problem can tune into and resonate with. You need addictive viral memes if you want to build a strong community. Those memes only come from painful problems that you know well. We all have pain points-- turn those into a startup, not whatever you think VCs will fund. What about the money? Here's the problem that most founders make. You have an idea, maybe build an MVP, and then look for VC money. Wrong approach. Failure mode. Don't do it. Instead think of your startup as a hunter gatherer tribe. Create a coin that represents the shared economic incentive of your tribe-- name it after your startup. The Slyk coin is SLK. And then set rewards in that coin that you will pay for everyone who participates in your community and helps it grow. At every stage of a startup community you need different things to reach the next level. At first you need believers-- reward them for sharing your startup idea with others and boosting your signal. You need collaborators-- reward your community for growing your team. You need early adopters-- reward your community with your coin for referring them to you. Without a common money your community is high-churn, big burn, low engagement, high derangement, lots of scammers, no jammers. This is painfully obvious to everyone who launches on PH, gets to the top 5 or so and then fades away. They failed to build a base for their future network effects. The failed to build a community. Their memes were weak and they forgot about the money. Don't let it happen to you founders! Follow me on LI, Twitter, and here for more rants like this and to become part of the SLK coin-powered community. We level up together!