Lessons in community building on Solana from memecoins & NFTs
Originally written for the Solana Scribes contest https://earn.superteam.fun/listings/hackathon/the-creator-economy/
I’ve learned some interesting designs and strategies from degening around with Solana memecoins and various NFT collections. Things a lot of creators could be using right now to help build their communities.
Of course the BEST way to grow a community is make a popular web3 app!
But often that requires thousands/millions of dollars in funding and many months/years of full-time work.
What if you’re an artist, author or researcher that simply wants to grow a community around what you do?
Memecoins are interesting because they are very often small teams and relatively non-technical people.
Ditto for many NFT collections.
Let’s dig into the simple and effective ways I’ve seen various projects leverage the existing tools Solana offers small teams and solo creators.
Leverage tokens
Tokens are the lifeblood of crypto. They are the building blocks on which everything is built. They can be whatever you want them to be. And on Solana they are cheap and easy to create and deploy.
A protocol like Guacamole lets you mint and manage your token very easily.
- Launch your token (more liquidity options coming soon): https://www.guacamole.gg/launch
- Manage your token: https://www.guacamole.gg/tools
- Docs: https://docs.guacamole.gg/
Having a token opens up a range of options to you. Here are some examples:
- Set up an LP on permissionless DEXs like Meteora or Orca to provide markets. Yes it’s a bit technical but it doesn’t require any code, just the ability to read documentation and the patience to experiment.
- If you’re setting up an LP consider carefully the token you pair with. Most LPs have either SOL or a stablecoin (e.g., USDC) as the other token. But you don’t HAVE to do this. Aggregators like Jupiter will enable people to swap pretty much any token with yours so think more broadly about how you can best leverage your token’s mindshare. Here’s some ideas:
- Does your token align with a larger project on Solana that also has a token? Why not pair their token and use that as a way to open a dialogue with them. For example:
- a gaming strategy community could pair their token with ATLAS/POLIS and use this as a way to engage with the Star Atlas team over content for that game
- An NFT news and reviews community could pair their token with the up-coming Tensor token
- Even if you don’t have a project you align well with, pairing with a LST (e.g., jitoSOL, bSOL etc..) instead of just SOL means any liquidity provided by your community in that LP will earn trading fees AND whatever yield the LST provides. It’s a nice little bonus you can add for free to your LP. Better still, if you mint a Sanctum LST for your project you can pair with that for even more value capture for your project and community (see below)
- Does your token align with a larger project on Solana that also has a token? Why not pair their token and use that as a way to open a dialogue with them. For example:
- If you’re setting up an LP consider carefully the token you pair with. Most LPs have either SOL or a stablecoin (e.g., USDC) as the other token. But you don’t HAVE to do this. Aggregators like Jupiter will enable people to swap pretty much any token with yours so think more broadly about how you can best leverage your token’s mindshare. Here’s some ideas:
- Sell your token as a way to raise funds (of course you’ll need to be mindful of all the applicable fundraising laws in your particular jurisdiction) for a project
- Use your token to fund projects that grow your community (that’s if you’ve established a market for it) in the way of grants. Bonk has done this very successfully throughout their existence and continue to do so today.
- Give away your token to incentivise behaviours you want to see from your community. This could be as simple as sharing updates on social media to actually creating products and services that help grow the community as a whole.
- Airdrop your token as marketing for your project/community. Use tools from place like Guacamole to help you manage this.
- Famously Bonk saw huge engagement with their initial large airdrop across the Solana community and have continued to drive huge engagement with similar ones since. https://decrypt.co/209906/solana-devs-bonk-airdrop-worth-300-last-christmas-now-worth-500000
- Recently memecoin $CWIF have effectively used multiple token airdrops to engage a wider audience in their unique token design
- Use your token to restrict access to parts of your Discord or other community platform which allows for wallet verification. This is an easy way to segregate your community for different tiers of engaged users. This also works with NFTs (see below). It’s pretty simple to set up as there are a multitude of user friendly tools/services that offer this functionality (especially for Discords) https://www.alchemy.com/overviews/nft-token-gating
- Incentivise LPs for your token. This is very simple on DEXs like Raydium https://docs.raydium.io/raydium/pool-creation/creating-a-standard-amm-pool/creating-an-ecosystem-farm and a little harder, but still simple enough for newbies, on DEXs like Orca https://docs.orca.so/orca-for-asset-listers/how-to-guides/how-to-add-rewards-to-a-pool
- Incentivise NFT staking with your token (see below for more details)
- Whilst tools like Guacamole (and others) enable you to mint your own token and deploy onto the Solana blockchain, there also exist platforms that streamline the token creation process and provide the tools required (within the platform itself) to build a community around that token. Gary’s Club https://gary.club/home/activity and Solcial https://solcial.io/feed are both platforms which offer ‘user token’ minting and management features.
Secure the network to Grow your engagement
$BONK has a Solana validator https://stakewiz.com/validator/J1to3PQfXidUUhprQWgdKkQAMWPJAEqSJ7amkBDE9qhF
$SILLY has one too https://stakewiz.com/validator/Eg8Avg6ZV9XQJkj3zU2TUsxhengsxT36bz5w1waPsNSV
Allowing your community to support your project via also securing the Solana network is gold. It’s a win win.
And now we have Sanctum who allowing you to take that a step further and create your own LST (liquid staking token) https://www.sanctum.so/
Bonk is an example of a Solana project/memecoin that now has an LST on Sanctum.
Use NFTs creatively
You don’t have to just mint one NFT collection and then sell it.
NFTs are another way for your community to engage with you and each other.
There’s many ways to use NFTs on Solana. And a lot of them are very cheap. Here’s some examples/ideas.
Give away NFTs as rewards to valuable community members
Give away NFTs as rewards to community members instead of giving away more of your token.
Recently memecoin token2022 project $CWIF minted a limited edition of NFTs they gifted to their top 50 token holders.
https://x.com/catwifhatsolana/status/1760713058165608466?s=20
Engage with regular small batch mints on Solarplex
Solarplex use cNFTs (compressed NFTs) to allow creators to mint and sell NFTs directly in their feed on Solarplex. There’s also an option to tip posts (currently 7 different Solana tokens are available).
Solarplex allows you to easily mint many small batches of content, allowing your community to engage with a range of content over time. You can even make these free mints if you want.
The downside is you will have to apply for the creators program on Solarplex to access these features. The upside is they accept small creators and people just getting started so it’s not as hard to get into as something like DRiP is https://www.solarplex.xyz/creator-tools (though this can act as a launchpad to get to DRiP I should think).
Let your community stake your NFTs
Provide rewards for staking your NFTs on Anybodies https://anybodies.com/.
You have to apply but it’s an easy way to distribute rewards in a controlled manner to your NFT holders.
$FRONK used this strategy effectively with their Fronk Farmers NFTs where they were able to spread their rewards to holders out over a longer period, gradually getting their tokens into the market over time to engaged community members e.g., those how invested in the Fronk Farmer NFTs.
NOTE: Fronk’s staking program was originally through Cardinals but when that shut down it eventually transitioned to Anybodies.
Leverage someone else’s NFT collection
There’s nothing to say you can't use existing NFT collection/s to help build your community.
Whilst you won’t record any royalties from their sales, there’s just so many different collections out there (especially now DRiP has seen inventories explode with their integration of cNFTs) that you could use any number of collections to form the basis for many of community building actions an NFT collection can bring.
The advantage here is if you can align your community with one or more other communities via the NFTs you select you can instantly grow your audience. Many of the basic functionality you get from NFTs (like token gating and community engagement) are just as possible from your own NFTs as they are from NFTs you can buy on the general marketplace.
Another advantage is that when you use existing NFTs, those NFTs already have holders. Sounds obvious but any new collection you make you’ll need to get into the hands of people. That can be quite hard given you need to both offer a value proposition that is appealing and have a collection that is appealing for aesthetic reasons. An existing collection that has sold all it’s NFTs at least once has already proved it can garner interest.
Another reason to go with an existing collection is that you’ll be able to more easily get legit users. Sweatshops and bot accounts are rarely able to spend much money as their strategies rely on high amounts of spam transactions to farm tokens. They’re also often very new accounts. By selecting for NFT collections that have been around for a while and have gone down in value/out of favour (because wash trading bots dump their holdings regularly) you’re most likely going to have a potential community largely free of the low value users which plague most crypto projects today.
We’re not early in terms of tools, but we are in terms of use cases
The time for experiments is now for creators. We’re still so early in terms of use cases for this tech but the tooling is actually finally here in most part. It is stupidly easy to mint tokens and NFTs and to set up functioning markets for them on Solana.
There also exists a wide range of tooling to help you manage both NFTs and tokens to help build communities.
There’s no excuse not to get out there and start experimenting!
The future of community building is being written in front of us right now.
