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Pivot to Discord
67 Plays1 year ago
It's been a year between episode 2 and episode 3 and in that time we've completely pivoted our company.
Join Steve and Dylan as they talk about building and managing online communities on Discord, a group chat platform best known for gaming.
And join the Nervous Discord server here: https://discord.gg/287jm9yMKj
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Transcript
Return to Podcasting and Knowledge Sharing
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Dylan. And I'm Steve. And we are nervous.
00:00:31
Speaker
So it's been a while since we've been back on the podcast game here. So welcome back. We've been too busy working is the problem.
Pivot from Web3 to Discord Community Building
00:00:42
Speaker
And it's not that we're not busy working still, it's that we just decided that we needed to make more of an effort to like reprioritize this. Yes, I think part of that is because we both learned so well from
00:00:56
Speaker
digging deep into things and sharing that knowledge with people is important to us. And it helps us, you know, focus people on what really matters when it comes to building whatever they're building. Yeah. So in the, in the, the gap of time since episode two and this, um, we've like completely pivoted our company. Yeah. Let's see. So almost exactly a year ago actually was our last episode came out March, 2023, and it is March, 2024. So it has been a year.
00:01:26
Speaker
And in that year, a lot of stuff happened in the world. And, you know, we decided that, Hey, why don't we do something different? Because why not? Well, and it's, and honestly, the, the interesting thing about this is that it's a lot of like tech companies will like pivot because they're like, Hey, we need to go chase a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what we did is we actually
00:01:52
Speaker
We ended up pivoting into a tiny part of our business that we had been doing more or less just by accident as, as like a side effect of the main thing. So, so nervous, you know, started its life as a web three company doing like smart contracts and consulting for, you know, NFT projects, which is great.
00:02:14
Speaker
And it was, it was really fun for a minute until it kind of stopped being
NFTs and Mainstream Integration Challenges
00:02:18
Speaker
fun. But the thing about it is that like in the process of doing this, we were constantly finding ourselves helping people set up discord communities and then, you know, advising them on how to maintain those communities in order to specifically kind of facilitate and like benefit the project. But we didn't actually consider that part of what we were doing to be work.
00:02:43
Speaker
It was just what needed to be done. Yeah, it was just this thing that needed to happen in order to help the client do this thing. And what we realized over the course of this is that we liked crypto less and less, and we liked to discord more and more. It's true. I can't speak for you, but I still think that the functional technology of tokens
00:03:08
Speaker
not necessarily cryptocurrency, but the functional technology of like NFTs is still interesting. But it's attached to crypto, which kind of sucks. And it's just not fun.
00:03:19
Speaker
Well, I was actually just on a call earlier today with a friend, Chris Choice, who works over at Hypermint. And we are talking about how there's been a shift away from NFTs. Crypto is starting to have a little bit of a moment again, but NFTs are still kind of hanging out. And so much of it still comes down to it's not normal.
00:03:41
Speaker
you know, it's still
Success in Community Building over Crypto
00:03:42
Speaker
explaining to someone why they need a JPEG to get into a thing or something like that. But it was interesting talking to him and some of the stuff they're building over there because it's a lot of stuff we've talked about, like making it so, you know, you get your pass from your NFT to get into an event, but it just shows up in your Google or Apple Wallet versus having to have a separate app to do it. And so there's a lot of stuff like that that I think is really interesting, but it's still, it's still crypto and it still doesn't seem real very often.
00:04:10
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and it's still like so far away from being like easy. Yeah.
00:04:15
Speaker
So anyway, so what happened is, is, you know, we kept building up discord communities for these clients. And, um, you know, over the course of the, over the course of about, I would say probably about four or five months, we realized that that was the most fun part of what we were doing. That was the part that we were enjoying the most. And then we got an opportunity to consult for a gig enormous company on how to set up a discord community. And, uh, it turns out.
00:04:45
Speaker
that this thing that we were already really enjoying and very good at, there are other completely non-Web3 companies and projects and uses that want to do this. So we just sort of pivoted into Discord hard. And I have to say, I'm enjoying the hell out of it.
Value in Community Growth over Revenue
00:05:07
Speaker
It was a funny pivot too, because like everything at Nervous,
00:05:11
Speaker
I don't think we really talked about it. It just kind of happened. Steve and I are lucky that we're both very, very like in tune with what is awesome and what we each think is awesome, which means that when we got this opportunity to work in this huge discord and really guide from the very beginning clear through to launch and even further, it became apparent that
00:05:35
Speaker
our years of entertaining and spending time with communities and that really led to us being able to push like communities forward and help large brands understand what is a best practice versus what is like a flash in the pan idea. So the thing is, is just like everything else with Nervous, we 100% gravitated towards the things that we enjoy.
00:06:02
Speaker
And it turns out that we really, really enjoy helping people create Discord communities and maintain them. And part of that that we learned, and this was what was great about this whole process is, as Steve mentioned, we've done this for a bunch of communities. We've helped them come up with best practices. We've helped them grow their community. We've done all of that. But the funny thing is, is the secret to growing a good community is to just grow your community.
00:06:31
Speaker
And so many people want there to be a magic bullet of like, oh, I do this, or I put this out here. No, it's, you build your community by offering your community value for being part of your community. And that value can be something that is completely nebulous, that doesn't make sense. Like access to the team, building a super cool project. Like that's value.
Discord's Evolution and Capabilities
00:06:50
Speaker
But value is not how do you get those people to give you money? At least not right away. You can get there, but not right away. Yeah.
00:07:00
Speaker
So let's, I mean, let's talk a little bit about Discord. So Discord is essentially like a live chat platform. It started off in 2012, I think. I actually think the initial release was May 13th, 2015. Oh, okay. It looks like the company was founded in 2012 and then it was three years before they actually dropped it. That's kind of amazing.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, it is and it's it's interesting because they've grown so big and so like
00:07:34
Speaker
robust in what they do, it makes sense that they they've become what they have because they spent a lot of time working with gaming communities was kind of how they started. And one nice thing about working with gaming communities is they're a bunch of trolls who are going to try to break your stuff or push your stuff to the limit. And Discord was able to build what they had based on what gamers needed, which then led to the Wild West.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, it started off for sure as a gaming platform, but it has definitely evolved well beyond that. It still has a lot of features and functionality that are incredibly, like, gamer-centric and gamer-friendly, but it's got a lot of functionality that is great for literally any kind of online community that you want. Now, here's the thing.
00:08:27
Speaker
this is sort of where we're going with this, right? So you've got this platform, it started off as a gaming platform. And then Web3 kind of happened. And Web3 really took Discord as like, this is gonna be our platform. And Web3 broke it. Absolutely broke it. And I mean, it was like,
00:08:53
Speaker
It's one of those things where when we talk to friends who work at Discord, the response to Web3 anything is very, very mixed. And usually there's like a little bit of PTSD happening there because Web3 essentially stress tested the Jesus out of that platform and exposed every single flaw in the whole thing from stem to stern, whether it was security issues or UX issues, whatever it is.
00:09:20
Speaker
It was a massive bit of growth for the platform, but it also very much pushed it to its limits.
00:09:27
Speaker
And the trickiest part about it for Discord and why I definitely feel for Discord when it comes to this sort of thing is that shit came out of
Public vs Private Community Management on Discord
00:09:36
Speaker
nowhere. Oh, yeah. Like there was no good place for people to do NFT things, Web3 things, to talk about it, to build their community because Twitter didn't work because you couldn't gate it and there's all this other stuff. And so everybody just showed up at Discord and Discord was probably not ready for that influx of a totally different use case.
00:09:57
Speaker
But they made it through, but they definitely do have some some PTSD from all of that nonsense. I mean, you saw a lot of traffic with early Web 3. You saw a lot of traffic on Twitter spaces and on telegram, like private telegram chats.
00:10:14
Speaker
But the thing about those is that they're just not like Twitter spaces are great for two people to talk and a bunch of people to listen and Telegram chats are great if you don't mind drowning in a group chat with like a thousand people but it's it you need some kind of structure there to like actually be able to build a
00:10:35
Speaker
community in a meaningful way. And Discord as a platform is really, really fantastic for that in a way that Slack never quite got its hands on. It's very, very similar. So for everyone at home who's listening and uses Slack for work but isn't super familiar with Discord, just imagine drinking high-speed Slack from a fire hose. That's kind of what Discord is.
00:11:04
Speaker
And Discord also lets, cause Slack, you know, you can develop things for Slack, like little bots or whatever. A lot of the Discord, like fun that people have is based around bots that people build. And they have a very robust API that allows you to build a bot that can do just about anything from playing like rock, paper, scissors, to seeing what users are the most active in your community. It's a pretty great way to do things. You can build a bot that can do just about anything as long as you have time and patience to do it.
00:11:34
Speaker
Right. And the thing about discord is that like, it really has become an incredibly robust place to build, grow a community and actually be able to get like metrics on it and actually be able to like measure things and actually be able to like, you know, you know, like all of the things that you would need to do, like as a business to justify the time and the resources to maintain and grow like a real serious discord community.
00:12:02
Speaker
Like the tooling is available there for you to do it, which is why you also, you know, while web three was kind of blowing up in discord, you also started to see like the first wave of like large brands, um, setting up shop in discord, you know, everything from like, you know, clothing companies to, you know, sports teams to, you know, clothing brands and luxury item companies. I think Gucci has its own discord and like, you know, there's like multiple, like English,
00:12:31
Speaker
football teams that have their own discord communities and you've got sports betting. I mean, just kind of everything, like it's really become just an optimum platform.
00:12:41
Speaker
And honestly, kind of like the only game in town platform to have like really robust real-time conversation community online. Yeah, it's funny to imagine a clothing brand slack for their community. Like, could you even imagine? You know, and that's something that Discord does a really good job of is
00:13:04
Speaker
they have a bunch of different ways to interact with your community within their program already. So you can have text chat, you can have voice chat, you can do a stage where, you know, it's like a Twitter spaces where you get up there and you talk about whatever, but it can be video, you can share your screen. They also have forum channels which are relatively new that allow you to be things to be broken down more like a forum of the web of old.
00:13:27
Speaker
So it really does provide a lot of different ways to interact with people and it also allows users to curate how they interact with a brand by looking at certain channels or ignoring other channels. So it's a really good way to interact with your community kind of where they are rather than just expecting them to come to you.
00:13:48
Speaker
One of the interesting things too, is that like I've started using Discord, uh, both for like front facing communities, but then also it, it has completely replaced Slack for me.
00:13:59
Speaker
So, uh, with the yo-yo company that I run caribou lodge, we have like a front facing public like community discord server. But then we also have a private one with just me and a couple of team, the principals that's replaced Slack for us. Like it's very much just like we just go back there to talk about business. Um, I help a couple of artists friends with a web store and we've got.
00:14:24
Speaker
You know, they've got a front facing community for that where all the collectors can come in and be like, Oh, look at these little monster toys you guys made. And they can be like, Nope, we made some more. But then we also like, you know, created another discord server. That's just our backend so that we can coordinate, talk about sales, upload images, like, you know, fix issues with the website, just have a place to like dump info. So it's, it's very much become like a front front of house and back of house kind of workhorse for me.
00:14:53
Speaker
in
Making Nervous' Discord Server Public
00:14:54
Speaker
all of my other small businesses and side hustles. And then the other side of it that's great too is that it's really easy to iterate and adjust within your own Discord. So I wish we would have taken screenshots from early days of the Nervous Discord because it was totally different. And I think the Nervous Discord could best be described as a hot mess express where we have a little bit of everything because it has
00:15:23
Speaker
project places for all the different projects we've worked on, but it also is where we primarily communicate as a business is in Discord because it's just easier and it makes the most sense for what we're doing.
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think we should overhaul the nervous discord. It's never really been a public community discord for us. There's public channels and everything. We've got a handful of friends that hang out in there from time to time, but it's really been 90% like a work server for us. So I think we should open that up a little bit and make it
00:15:56
Speaker
Here we go. We'll announce this right here. So here's what we're going to do, Dylan. We're going to make it a place for anybody who's curious about how to start a Discord server and community can come and hang out and chat with us and decide if that's the right move for their brand.
Discord in Business Models and Sales Funnels
00:16:15
Speaker
So what you're saying is, is that we should probably put an invite link to the Discord somewhere in this podcast description so people can come visit us and check it out. That would be really, really smart. Now let's see if we're smart enough to remember it. We're done recording this.
00:16:32
Speaker
It's true. It's true. It'll be fine. It's fine. Yeah, totally fine. Totally fine. It'll also be funny if we do remember that and suddenly our server becomes a public, really public server and we have to actually interact with people.
00:16:49
Speaker
So here's the, this to me is like the next big frontier of Discord. We've talked to like a few brands that we're friendly with about, you know, kind of, some of them have Discord servers that, you know, they've kind of fallen by the wayside. Some of them are, you know, just getting started with Discord servers. But I think the next big frontier is figuring out how to use Discord to augment e-commerce.
00:17:14
Speaker
And I think that figuring out a way to make a Discord server not just a feel-good community kind of space, but to figure out a way to make it a real, true, legitimate sales funnel so that not only are you building community, but you're making sure that the community is in a position to continue supporting the business that is putting together this community. Business has got to run. Everybody needs money.
00:17:43
Speaker
You know, you do still have to sell stuff So figuring out a way to make discord like not just an integral part of that process But make it a really truly helpful part of that whole process I think kind of like the next big frontier and that's certainly what we're starting to tackle with some of our client base Yeah, we want to we want to build a
00:18:07
Speaker
communities with brands and with anybody probably, that will be beneficial to both the community and the brand. And as I said earlier, you can't just be like, we have a Discord, now we want to sell you stuff. There has to be value to the consumer that's coming into your Discord while also providing you with a reason to continue to have your Discord.
Interactive Customer Communication via Discord
00:18:29
Speaker
But that's probably a discussion for another day. Probably. So realistically, why should you use Discord?
00:18:37
Speaker
Are you asking me? I mean, I mean, I'm, I'm putting forth, I'm putting forth the Royal. Why? I mean, like, I, I feel like I've done a good job of explaining it, but at the same time, like I'm also already, I've already drunk the Kool-Aid, right? Like I already liked Discord as a platform.
00:18:53
Speaker
I like it as a company. I think that there's a bunch of good people doing good stuff and it has become a really enjoyable part of my day participating in all these different Discord communities that I'm in. But as a brand, why should a brand that has never considered Discord before consider starting a Discord community? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest reasons is that
00:19:22
Speaker
it changes how you communicate with your customers. So right now, most brands are doing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, social media marketing, and I will never call it X, it will always be Twitter. So rather than focusing on a one-way conversation of, hey, I made this thing come buy it, on a Discord, you say, hey, we listened to your feedback, we made this cool thing,
00:19:48
Speaker
Here's, you should go buy it. It's more of a two-way conversation and you're not fighting the algorithm to get more views because people are part of your community. They're choosing to be there. And so they're already more bought into your brand and community than they are if they just follow you on Twitter.
00:20:04
Speaker
And you're not like people, if you make an announcement about something, people get to comment on it and ask questions about it in real time. They also get to see it for sure. In real time, you're no longer like having to fight the algorithm and hope, you know, that like over 10 years of having your Instagram account, you've managed to get 18,000 followers. And then you, you put out a post about like a brand new product that's dropping in the store tomorrow and you get 200 likes.
00:20:33
Speaker
And you know damn good and well that out of those 18,000 people, a lot more than 200 of them are interested in that product or would like to be interested in that product in the unlikely event that the fucking post ever got into their feed. But, you know, with discord, like you actually just get to talk directly to people and you're not going to necessarily have, you know, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, like it's really cheap for someone to like, you know, what I call drive by likes.
00:21:02
Speaker
You know, they're just going to like something and then move on and then probably never interact with you again. But on Discord, you get the people who are really legitimately there to participate in your brand and participate in your community. And when people are there because they want to be, then that means that you're going to get that feedback from them in real time. You're going to get that interest. You're going to get those questions. You're going to get that pushback. You know, you're going to find out real fast if you are moving in the wrong direction.
00:21:32
Speaker
But you're also going to find out real fast if you're moving in the right one. And the other part of it, and this is something was taught to me by my mentor way back when when I used to work in sales for a hospice company. More on that another time. One of the things she told me was the more touches you have with a member of your community, a customer, the more money you can ask them for. And Discord gives you a much more personal way to talk to people than
00:22:00
Speaker
you know, just a tweet that goes out to the general public. You can tailor them to your community a lot better because you'll get to know your community. Yeah, for sure. So I think as so has Nervous pivoted to become like very, very focused on Discord community, so too is this podcast.
00:22:17
Speaker
So we're going to record a lot more episodes and talk about all different aspects of how to create a Discord server safely, how to build a community well, how to maintain that community, and just generally how to use Discord to better grow your business.
00:22:39
Speaker
Hear me out. If you decide this is super interesting to you and you want to talk more directly about specifics for your brand, your business, whatever hit us up. We can go to our website, nervous.net. You can email us questions. If we like your questions, you might answer them on the podcast or we can set up a call and we can actually talk you through like what making a discord would look like for your brand. So drop us a line. Hello at nervous.net or pop into our discord server. The link will be in the episode description.
00:23:09
Speaker
And we cannot wait to talk to you more and drop more podcasts into your ear holes about all things community. Have a good rest of your day. Bye.
00:23:43
Speaker
Bye bye.