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Dear subscribers,

I’m grateful to all 10,000+ of you who subscribe to this newsletter. For my last post of the year, I want to share some practical tips from building a:

• 300+ moderator community for Reddit

• 3,000+ member community for learning web3

Building community is the most important skill that I learned this year.

If you’re in tech, I have no doubt that this skill will only become more important in the future. Read on to understand how I built these communities and why you should learn too.

How I built a moderator community at Reddit

The views below are mine only, not my employer’s.

At work, I’m a product lead for Reddit Talk, our live audio product:

When I joined Reddit, I quickly realized that moderators were our most important customer segment.

I decided to build Talk through community-led product development with our most trusted moderators:

Here’s how we did it in practice:

1. Created a community for Reddit moderators to try Talk.

2. Built with moderators by having daily dialogue about the product. We shared designs and responded to feedback openly.

3. Made time to hang out by posting memes and doing live calls.

The mods in our community really appreciated the open dialog with the Talk team. They started posting comments like this:

If you make time to build a customer community, they will become an extension of your product team. I can’t tell you how much of a privilege it’s been to work directly with customers to build a product for them:

Also, who knew that Reddit mods would be so great at shitposting?

Check out my post on community-led product development for more examples of this process in action.

How I built a 3,000+ member community for learning web3

I’ve been lucky enough to grow my audience to 30K Twitter followers and 10K newsletter subscribers through a combination of useful advice and shitposting. 

I knew that I wanted to build a community from this audience. But the community needs to be about something more important than me.

In September, I wrote a curious beginner’s guide to crypto that “explained like I’m five” key web3 concepts. The post was widely shared on social media.

I decided to build a community to co-create quality, free web3 education to help one million people transition to web3:

Two months after tweeting the above, the community now has 3,000+ members, ranked #1 in product hunt, and we’ve raised $100K+ to fund our efforts.

<div class="tweet" data-attrs="{"url":"https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1471870014772813824?s=20&quot;,"full_text":"Introducing @odyssey_dao, a learning DAO creating high-quality, 100% free web3 education 💫\n\nStart learning now by visiting our website below or read on to learn about…\n\n1. What is Odyssey?\n2. What do backers get?\n3. What do we want to achieve?\n\nodysseydao.com","username":"petergyang","name":"Peter Yang","date":"Fri Dec 17 15:48:52 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"retweet_count":124,"like_count":766,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.odysseydao.com/&quot;,"image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/b2c22fae-d528-435a-a883-ab98f4227e83_1200x630.jpeg&quot;,"title":"Odyssey DAO – Your Odyssey Awaits","description":"We’re building a learning community to help one million people join the ownership economy","domain":"odysseydao.com"},"video_url":null}”>

Peter Yang @petergyang

Introducing @odyssey_dao, a learning DAO creating high-quality, 100% free web3 education 💫

Start learning now by visiting our website below or read on to learn about…

1. What is Odyssey?
2. What do backers get?
3. What do we want to achieve?

odysseydao.comOdyssey DAO – Your Odyssey AwaitsWe’re building a learning community to help one million people join the ownership economyodysseydao.com