Embrace Your Community and Build With the Garage Door Open
09/27/2022
“If you are Building in Public, then you're differentiating yourself as a unique brand that highly values trust, honesty, and transparency. Since you're not afraid to share the challenges, the hardships, and the embarrassing mistakes, you stand out from everyone else.”
📖 Prologue
When I was a little kid, my parents and I lived in a quaint little house in a suburban neighborhood outside of Philadelphia. Looking back, I feel like I was spoiled because it was one of those areas that you could safely ride your bike around to go knock on your friend’s door and ask them to come out and play.
When it was Halloween, we stepped out of our house into a teeming throng of trick-or-treaters and simply flowed door to door until our pillowcases were spilling over with candy. My neighbor, Vince, reminded me of Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace as his lawn was so pristine, he would scold us whenever a ball or toy of ours went over the fence into his immaculate kingdom.
One of my favorite childhood memories, however, were all the times my Dad and I would spend in the garage building cool stuff together. The funny thing is, we weren’t working on anything really technical like fixing the engine of a car. Instead, it was our mad laboratory where he helped me build projects for my science fair, model rockets, or even armor and swords from junk we had collected over the years.
Friends riding by on their bicycles and neighbors walking their dogs would stop what they were doing, walk up our driveway, and talk shop with us about the latest wild creations we were coming up with. The invitation of an open garage door was calling them like sirens to shipwreck. In those days, you simply couldn’t ignore the allure of a father and son or group of friends tinkering in their garage.
And truthfully, when I look back, those are some of the smallest moments that meant the world to me growing up. Spending time with the people you know and love, building exciting new things in an environment where everyone feels free to stop on by and weigh-in is what it’s all about. And here at Eightbit, that’s exactly the vibe we want to foster.
In fact, one of Eightbit’s core tenets is “building with the garage door open,” and you can see that on display on a weekly basis as the team makes it a point to touch base with the community every Thursday via the official Eightbit spaces. This building philosophy allows us as a team to have a direct line of communication with our community which enables us to showcase to our holders all of the exciting things we are working on.
🌳Benefits of Working Out in the Open
Open Line of Communication
One of the first benefits of building out in the open like we do at Eightbit is that you maintain a constant line of communication with your community. Not only does this keep the community abreast of what is taking place, but it also allows them to provide valuable feedback to the team in terms of things they believe are going well or could be improved. This is largely the goal of our weekly spaces - to let the community know what we’ve been working on over the past seven days and to take the temperature of the room in terms of whether or not that aligns with their expectations.
Expectation Management
Speaking of expectations, it’s so important that both the team and community are on the same page when it comes to what people are expecting. @Zeneca_33 had a great article on this titled “Impossible Expectations,” which is absolutely worth your time to read.
The gist of it, however, is that in a market largely fueled by hype and speculation, it’s vital for both a community and team to be aligned in their vision for what the future holds. Misaligned expectations are never good and can result in disappointment or even loss of trust.
Promotes Bonding
Gone are the days where communities accept executives working in the shadows behind closed doors. Particularly in web3, it’s increasingly important that the team is accessible to the community on a somewhat frequent basis. While this is obviously beneficial for a lot of reasons, something often overlooked is the fact that meaningful relationships are formed through team and community interactions that take place in a more casual setting such as Discord or on Twitter.
Accountability
The benefits of building in the public don’t just extend to the community itself. Building in public also holds the team itself accountable to ensure their best work is being put out on a consistent basis. Behind closed doors, it’s easy to get complacent. When you’re in the public view, you need to be constantly iterating and pushing forth your best ideas in order to maintain your edge.
Creation of a Trustworthy Brand
To quote a great article here, “…having a personal voice is so important these days. You might scroll past an ad from a company, but you tend to pause and listen to a person sharing an update or a story. You feel so much more connected with another human being.
If you are Building in Public, then you're differentiating yourself as a unique brand that highly values trust, honesty, and transparency. Since you're not afraid to share the challenges, the hardships, and the embarrassing mistakes, you stand out from everyone else.”
Celebrates Community
Lastly, but possibly the most important aspect of “building with the garage door open,” is that it celebrates community. By keeping that line of communication open and including the community in your processes, at a very basic level it shows that you value them and their contributions.
📊Overview: 9/19 → 9/25
Eightbit v2.5
Ecosystem Summary
Here is the most recent Eightbit Ecosystem Summary, which comes out every Sunday.
✍️About the Author
Over the past few months, my work on Proof of Update has shown me how something as “simple” as a newsletter can galvanize a community into having awesome discussions and even creating their own ways to contribute to a project. If you’re not familiar with my work on Proof of Update, it’s a daily newsletter that I started on May 27th that covers the @proof_xyz ecosystem and other market trends. I’ve sent out that newsletter for over 100 days straight, so if you’re interested in waking up to something like that in your inbox each morning, check it out below!
🔚 Wrapping it Up
In conclusion, the ultimate goal here is to continue to provide great content for our community and to also offer a centralized location for people in the greater NFT space to be able to come to for information about our awesome project. We may be tinkering with the format over the coming weeks, so if there is something specific you’d like to see in these newsletters going forward, please feel free to reach out and let us know! We hope you have a great week!