Background
Mint Season 7 Episode 23 welcomes Reka.eth, the Co-founder of Guild.xyz. Throughout our session, we discuss how Guild has evolved since our last episode in November 2021 and how their tooling has broadened out to fit a larger audience beyond just DAOs.
Reka shares how Guild has grown into being the bridge from the point of discovery to becoming a core member of a community, helping guide new members into the creator’s audience. We discuss the mechanics of transforming an audience into a community, and how Guild can help cultivate that.
We also talk about Guild’s tooling and its place in the creator stack, with me sharing my mental model and Reka sharing her thoughts on how Guild stands as the connective tissue to bring people together.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Time Stamps
- 00:00 – Intro
- 02:08 – The Story of Reaching Out to the Guests
- 13:19 – Expanding a Web3 Native Audience to a Web2 Native Audience
- 18:05 – Guild’s Place in a Web3 Creator’s Tooling Stack
- 21:50 – Guild’s Use Cases Beyond Initial Expectations
- 28:13 – Shifts in DAOs Over the Last Year and a Half
- 33:23 – Best Execution and Governance Practices for DAOs
- 35:22 – Guild’s Approach to Media and Content Worth Collecting
- 44:25 – The Guest’s Creator Journey and Focus During the Bear Market
- 47:04 – Reka’s Other Pursuits During the Bear Market
- 49:36 – Outro
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Intro
We are back with another episode. With me today, I have one of my favorite people in web three, Reka.eth. What is up? Welcome back to the podcast.
Reka.eth: Thanks for having me, the last year and a half has been a lot of fun. I caused a lot of chaos and internet in a good way. And I’m very happy to be here and see you and talk to you. The people are not prepared for the amount of giggling that’s going to happen.
I know.
Reka.eth: If I know correctly.
This is gonna, so this is gonna be either a chaotic, like positive disaster or just, you know it, I’m not even gonna go there. This is gonna be great. Okay, this is gonna be great. Last time we ran an episode. Okay, it was November 18, 2021. And we talked about understanding Daos tools, governance, pinpoints, and more. And at the time, you guys were called agora not guild, I feel like guild was like underneath the surface, like it was there. But in spirit, you guys were agora?
Reka.eth: Yeah, the thing with that is that at that time, we were still using the brand because agora was always the studio behind guild XYZ, it still is, we just realized, it’s not a good use of your energy and time to escalate and run two brands at the same time. And we came up with guild in September, we talked in November. So that was the point where we were like, are we guild or agora? Let’s just go with agora still. And after that, we were like, okay, guild gained some traction, we had quite a few 1000 users at that point, just like, you know, get and give, growing and then we were like, great. So, of agora doesn’t really make sense to be a brand now, everybody knows guild that uses us, so or works with us or see us on the internet. So, let’s just skip agora. So, since then, actually, I think that was like our last public appearance, using the agora name and after that it’s guiled.xyz.
The Story of Reaching Out to the Guests
And a lot has happened since then. I think now that we’ve become very close friends, between you and I, and Roz and I, and just the guild team, we get to laugh at a bunch of things that sort of like we went through in the past, leading up from November 18, 2021, to where we are today, March 27, recording this episode 2023. And I’d love for you to share the story of me reaching out to you guys. Because oftentimes people ask me, like how do you start a podcast? And like what does it take to start a podcast? Like what goes into that process? And I feel like every time we talk about, or somebody asks like how did we meet? That story always comes up. So, share it from your perspective, then I’ll share it from my perspective.
Reka.eth: Yes, you have to know the grind because Adam was not a beginner when we got on the podcast. We’ve been a year and a half ago. He was like deep in it already. So, the grind that this man is on is insanity. We, you know, we were just being founders and stuff being busy. And Adam just reached out over, I think Twitter at first and then telegram, we were entered into telegram DM. And then he kept messaging us like, Guys, I’d really love to have you on my podcast. We could talk about this, just give me a time. And then I think we ghosted him like three times because we just like, well didn’t have the bandwidth, honestly. And we also couldn’t decide like who should go on, when we should do that. Like it wasn’t honest. Like we didn’t think anything bad of that. And we didn’t even know him. We were just like great. Like we could do this sometime but we just like don’t know when. And then I kept having this like really bad feeling like we shouldn’t, like this is such a nice dude, like he’s so always reaching back again, like every few weeks. He’s like, hey, guys, I’m still open. Like let’s do this. And I think after like the fifth DM or something, we were like, okay, let’s just set a date. And then even the process of us sending images to you, to use as our like pictures on the podcast took like a month and I don’t think we even send it. That’s why we have the like OG like agora things. Also, we were kind of semi anonymous at that stage, like we weren’t as openly on Twitter and anywhere as we are now. We still weren’t really sure if we want to be there like out there. So, the grind of what goes into starting a podcast is you have to have a massive CRM, a lot of skin and just no shame reaching out to people and circling back and double texting and triple texting and quadruple texting. Because that was something that made us be like okay, so he really wants us, like even though we don’t have the time we have to go now and then we got to know him. And he’s the one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. So, just give people a chance and just fit. You know, especially someone as, like what’s a good word here? Tenacious maybe, keeps dming you, just do it, because it’s like one of my favorite things that ever happened to me. And maybe not even the podcast. Some people then later told me that they saw us on the podcast because Adams, since then, at least, and time to have grown so much, and so many people listen to the podcast, because he just keeps having awesome people week and week again, and I cannot imagine all the apps that have to be going on in the background for all those very successful people, very busy people to even take this hour with you. Like not like, you know, it’s a podcast, and it’s a great opportunity. But like the amount of people that you have, I feel like, yeah, it’s insane, the DM mechanisms there.
The DM mechanisms, that’s the secret, my mechanisms of DMing. Real talk really quick. I only bring up that story again, because many people asked me like I want to start a podcast, I want to go into the content creation game, how did you get started? And I want to highlight that story because it’s like being a podcaster it’s like nonstop DMing. And when you see something cool on your timeline, that at the time, like agora was like this mysterious thing that had a really cool brand and really cool visuals. And I still couldn’t tell it and it drove me crazy, but everybody was talking about it. So, it’s like, alright, I’m gonna figure out a way to because if I’m feeling this, probably a lot of people are as well. So, I want to be the point of like awareness. Right? That’s how I think about it. So, the DM and the tenacity, what to call it, to figure it out. It was well worth it; it was well worth it. Because through that came a really long loving friendship where we’ve, I feel like we’re very, very close. And I value that. And it started from a DMS. And that’s what I love about this entire story. And that was, like you said a year and a half ago, November 18, on my right screen I have, I’m on Adamlevy.io/blog, I found our episodes, and I’m going through it. And the title again, was understanding Daos tools, governance, pinpoints, and more. And when I look back, I’m like, and I look back, and I see where you guys were, and I see where you guys are today. And I can’t help but wonder and think Damn, you guys have made so much progress. And it feels as if since then, the narrative around Daos has shifted and so has guild.
Reka.eth: I think so too, fully agree. You’re absolutely right. I’m all the affirmative sentences here that I know.
So, walk me through that because I want to try. Oh, wait, there’s a lag again, hold on a second. Give me a second. Go ahead and take it off. And then I’ll edit it into where you start speaking.
Reka.eth: So, should I just like go with like, how the Dao has changed and how we changed?
Yeah, so start with, yes, guild has changed a ton and here’s how.
Reka.eth: Thanks for the prompt. So yeah, guild changed a ton. And we just realized, especially with the tooling that we’ve built, at first, it was solving something super simple. That was token gating, connecting Ethereum to discord. And then later on, as we kept working openly with hundreds of community builders in the space, including Daos, we realize we can do much more with this. And we came up with the model that we fully build out today. It’s called the guild model, very, very creatively. It’s consisting of requirements, roles and rewards, and everything else that we built before that for the token gating requirements and everything. And what we build now with mostly on the reward side fits into this. So, anything that you can think of from any permissioning or authorization requirements, like do you own my NFT? Do you follow me on Twitter? Do you support my growth? Do you, have you been a longtime supporter since 2021? How many NFT do you own since then? Are you a developer? Are you contributing to any GitHub repositories frequently? And many, many more, and then, you know, getting roles for these that match these requirements. And then at the end, you would get access or abilities in return for being yourself on the internet and participating in these activities on the internet. So, we put everything into this model. And since then, we’ve been taking more of the role. That was last year, actually, last year around this time. So, last year 2022 March, when we came out with this. And since then, we’ve just been proliferating this model and putting so, so many requirements into the requirements side, so many integrations and partnerships that people use actively to manage their memberships and roles in their communities automatically. And then this year, we were like, okay, so, we have more than 30 integrations on the requirements side, you can set up very spicy stuff for people to get access to something, what are they going to want to do with that. So, this year, we’re focusing on the reward side, and adding 30 things there. So, you can set up anything from, have you played this game at least 100 hours in Steam? if so, you can get access to the alpha release of a new map in this game, just you and a couple other people that have played over 200 hours and own these special skins. So, stuff like that, from coming from, so all the way coming from Dao and very, very web three native crypto communities, going into more broader like online community satisfaction and growth and management. It was a very straightforward pipeline for us in the past year and a half to see this happen. And it goes very well hand in hand with what we’ve been seeing as like active participants in it our space as well is that we’ve been talking about this for on other podcasts actually, for quite some time, the innovation with Daos and around Daos happen on both on a technical level and on a like human-to-human interaction level at the same time. And for some reason we wanted to do both so, so fast, and neither the tech could pick that up. But most importantly, that human to human aspect is so slow to change and make decisions and realize new patterns in. So even though I think now we have more technological advancements in this Dao to link space that could be super useful, to enable how the original Daos were dreamt up, and they could work with them. But I think we still need to work so much more on the relationship and the human aspect of it. And so, I think we need to generalize it a little more, especially with all the cool infrastructure and tooling that we have now, we can fully bring that up into a more general community experience. And not only what we named Dao strictly, you know, the fully decentralized tokenized super mega web three organizations that had no heads, I think we can so much like generalize that and open it up to different settings and communities. Because I think a lot of things that aren’t necessarily like one leader, everyone else is the audience, or a fully decentralized horizontal organization. But everything else in between can work with this technology. And I want to empower that. And I think that’s super cool. And that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve grown a ton; we’ve learned so much and we’re just starting with the cool stuff. This has been preparation so far.
Expanding a Web3 Native Audience to a Web2 Native Audience
Many products in web three that built for web three typically have a difficult time branching out and generalizing their product to fit a larger audience. But what you guys have figured out is, we don’t have to token gate based off tokens. As token gating has sort of, kind of like mass popularized its name across web three, we can gate off other requirements that are also off chain requirements too. And that kind of like goes into what you’re saying of being able to create certain criteria from like Steam players, right, and allow them access into certain stages or experiences or as you coin rewards into that community, which I think is quite fascinating. My question for you is like how do you actually broaden out something that was actually built for a web three native audience, that’s now being broadened out to more web two native audience? While realizing that gating is like a universal theme, and you could get anything, as long as it’s digital? Am I getting that correct?
Reka.eth: Yeah, absolutely. You can, one of my friends actually, who’ve dug themselves into how guild works, like to the core of it. And they said, you can lock up anything that’s guild unless or until you have a key or wait, unless you have a key, which was so beautiful. And I don’t necessarily agree with like the key lock metaphor, and in this sense, because I feel like we’re more but it’s beautiful, and it makes you understand that so much, so much better. And generalizing, I think you have to keep in mind that even though you started building in web three, you built for people. And I think in our tool, especially, the used case was always managing roles and managing memberships in a community. So, for us the context changes of who these people want to have in their communities. So, it only changes a little bit. So, if you think about how Dao wants to manage contributors, or new people who are just being on boarded to the community, and they need to learn about it, and they need to have this like peer-to-peer experience of getting accepted, and so on, that our tool can satisfy and is good for, that we built it for. That is mega similar to how a creator who posts on Spotify, posts on different platforms, wants to get to know a new audience member or a new audience member that wants to get to know the audience and their fellow, like top fans better, as they worship the same person, like I’m so, like proper fan communities. Or if you think about how I love using notion as an example, they have done such a wonderful job of building their community around the product and doing like a full proper community lead growth over time. And it’s also the same thing, it’s how do you identify people who have contributed to their notion ecosystem who have given and made templates for other people? Who do you say has been there for a long time and how do you reward them for it? Who has done what in regard to this, like small ecosystem of the internet that they’ve created for themselves? And then how do you get them to do more of that? And how do you reward them for creating this very value led vin, vin van scenarios, it’s the same logic, it’s just you might need a wallet, you might not need a wallet. And each of these used cases requires a different set of integrations. So, all three that I mentioned, uses something else as the requirement and there’s the reward. But the goal is generally super, super similar, or at least a process of it.
So, does that mean that you guys are after creating templates or for guild community members to create templates for other people to replicate? Am I understanding that correctly?
Reka.eth: Well, I used that as an example. Oh, that’s what notions doing. That’s how they, that’s the value that the community provides for them, like that marketplace of templates is what they found, that is super like a good spot for the team, the whole ecosystem, other users and the people who create these templates, like they found a really sweet spot. We are thinking about that too, as we got this recommendation for many, many members and users that, like some guilds work really well and they just want to copy it. And it would be so fun if we could make that happen. And so, we were thinking about it. But that’s not the point where I was trying to make, I was trying to give that as an example of what notion did.
Guild’s Place in a Web3 Creator’s Tooling Stack
That make sense. Okay, so what I think of guild today, and I think about where it stands in the creator stack. Okay, I have one way of sort of imagining the mental model around your tooling. Before I give and reveal my mental model. I’m curious, where do you see guild in a tooling stack for a web three native creator today?
Reka.eth: I’m biased, very biased, obviously. But I do see us as we, in the past year and a half, we’ve grown into being this connective tissue from the point of discovery to becoming a core member of a community, where they’re all the way managing that path, and helping guiding new members into the creators, audience or community. And I love thinking about the mechanics of how we transform an audience, which is usually a one-to-many conversation into more of a community, which is many to many types of situations, I love that we can help cultivating that. And we’ve seen some quite beautiful examples of artists who venture into the NFT space, and they use us for rewarding their highest engagement and biggest supporters and identifying them from the crowd, and then rewarding them with special treats. And just focus conversations and direct access to the artists, which I think is such a big unlock compared to like when can I talk to Drake? Like you know, like that would never happen or like whoever else that I’m listening to or, you know, like that will never happen unless it’s web three, and it’s automated. So, me proving that I’ve supported you all the way automatically and then getting the proper reward for it, such as having direct channels to chat with you. And know the first, be the first to know when you drop something, even hear a sample of what you’re making. So, guild stands as the connective tissue to make that happen. And I think that’s pretty fun. We are still very unopinionated of where we stand in this. And I feel like this is the time where we should become more opinionated and identify more of how, like what do we like double down and do the best at supporting these artists and creators. I have had such a fun time, my friend and I have went on creating journey or like this creative creator journey together. And we created multiple experiments where we will use guild amongst many other tools, including Riverside, which is what we’re recording on. We use so much, tried so many of these products, and somehow always came back to the conclusion of we’re on the right track of what we’re creating, because we’re more looking for, not just like big events of activation, where you mint one NFT and that’s the like whole thing but more focusing on building the experience. And kind of this like, share the journey with other members, but also, yeah, other committee members that have to share the shared interests and experiences with you. And then having a lot of easter eggs that you find uniquely on your path. And it’s amazing, I feel like that has never been a thing. At least I haven’t seen it or experience it maybe in some like old path on the internet, I could have found something that works like this, but I haven’t yet.
Guild’s Use Cases Beyond Initial Expectations
A lot of what you’re saying resonates with how I think of guild and my value stack. Okay. So, when I think about the concept of the theme of Season Seven of creating content worth collecting, there’s many layers to that. There’s actually the element of publishing the content, collecting it. But then there’s the after effect of building your community of collectors around that content and kind of commingling and creating experiences accordingly. And guilt has sort of become like the de facto sort of tool for a lot of crypto native creators, specifically, in the music NFT scene. What you often see, you see creators minting their music, building their collector base, and then funneling their users, from sound, from Zora, from catalog, etc., into their guild to kind of like keep that momentum alive, to keep the engagement alive to keep the emotion and the energy alive. And I think it’s such an important tool in the stack. Because right now creators build distribution and virality using web two tools. And they use value capture, the create value capture through web three tools. And I feel like guild like fits in between both. And like you said, I love that word that use, the connective tissue. So, I have a guild from my podcast NFT collectors. And I’m constantly thinking about how can I bring more people and usher people offline, right, or I guess online to like this like, sub niche pocket of my telegram community, so that I can have ways to consistently communicate to them. And I think of it as like a core tool like email, because I own the relationship between my readers and my subscribers, when I use email like Substack, or my database like HubSpot, and my CRM, right, it works as a similar way of owning my communication channels with my collectors. So, I love that element. I love the element. I’m curious, have there been any case studies or used cases, that you’ve seen people use guild that extended beyond what you thought guild would be used for?
Reka.eth: Well, it’s not in a greater sense.
Okay.
Reka.eth: But we, one is really exciting, it’s fairly new. And I have never, like offered this to anyone to use guild this way. But there’s a project who is just launching, and they have created requirements in their guild and roles, so that members who collected their announcement posts and participated in the early releases of the campaign get access to a telegram group again. But the like kick is, is that nobody can, I think that there’s no like chatting going on in the chat, is just for like the alpha release. So, those who get in, get access to the product way earlier than anyone else, which I think is so cool. And this could have been done easier through our SDK and programmatically, but I love how like it’s done through a telegram group, and it’s like much more personal. But I also really liked the idea. And I’ve seen very, very beautiful successful executions of this, is the like tagging, which I think we didn’t come up with this initially. But some users started using a guild this way, is that they set very specific requirements and many, many requirements, too many roles, that are so specific to the user’s individual journey, that even if they, even if there’s like 15 different roles, because you came from Twitter, you came from my podcasts on Spotify, you came from somewhere else, or through my mirror posted article and minted the NFT there, it doesn’t matter where you come from, you get a different role. So, you’re like tagged, so the manager or the creator knows where you’ve been before, what you’ve done, what other projects you’re interested in, based on all that history, and all those holdings and assets in your wallet. And then you get to the same place with everyone else. But the person who’s managing and building this knows, has so much more context on you, and knows how to provide a better experience for you. So like, if I have a community for like dog lovers, and I’ve seen requirements that you only have interacted with like Jack Russell content, I like know to send you Tik Tok of Jack Russell, you know, like, I’m not gonna send you pug videos, because he obviously, well, you might like it, but like, I’ll go out of my way to send you Jack Russell content, you know, like that’s obviously a silly example. But that’s the point to give more tools for the people who create these groups, to make the experience so much better for those who choose to go on this journey with them. And like in our community, I can target events, we have weekly events, multiple different types. And since our requirements setting and our role system, I can fully target, is this event for someone who’s a developer and is interested in how to build with their SDK, or is this event for someone who is a fully non-technical person, and they’re building a community and they’re interested in how to use new features, and I can fully target the whole event and the operations and the announcements of it directly for them. I also know how long they’ve been in my community, and many, many specificities. And it’s extremely helpful to make sure that my building efforts and their time is the best most values as it can be.
So, just because we’re on the topic of creators for a minute, if I wanted to create a group chat of everybody that’s listened to one of my recent singles on Spotify, assuming you guys had integrated Spotify API into guild, I could technically do that. Right? Is that the depth in which I’m thinking correctly?
Reka.eth: Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Super cool. I love it. Yes, precisely. Let’s talk about Daos for a minute, because that was the initial topic that first brought us together and made this entire familiar thing. Okay. Daos have developed tremendously the last year and a half, two years. It’s been quite a whirlwind experience. I can’t even say that word correctly, world wind experience.
Reka.eth: Whirlwind.
Shifts in DAOs Over the Last Year and a Half
November, whirlwind. November 18, 2021, agora came out as very much like Dao in front and Dao tooling. And now you guys have sort of become the rewards and access layer for both web two and web three communities. How have you seen the shift in Daos in the last year and a half to two years? Where do you stand on where we are today?
Reka.eth:I think they’re taking themselves a little bit less seriously. And I also feel like the, like last or this bearish market, whatever we call it, that we’re in right now, which is kind of crazy and wild, have shown where the true activities and engagement actually is, which is, you know, not in the places that a lot of Daos or organizations that set up to become Daos were thinking that they’re going to have those at, so the core values are being revealed. And I think that made a lot of communities’ rethinks why they exist and their value and how they want to be set up. And I think that’s super healthy, and I love it. I’m here for it. That having said that, a lot of the things and communities that we still call Daos, I don’t think or but I’ve always feel like it’s just the naming, like if, there’s like five Daos that are truly Daos that I can name right now, maybe a little bit more, but the rest are also like very Dao edition, going towards decentralization, going towards being autonomous and definitely internet native organizations that have web three native assets involved and I love it. I actually like that it’s not as serious anymore, that it’s not every wanted Dao, and everyone has to make legislative decisions being incorporated, somewhere being super official, I like how we go towards more what we’ve learned from executing Dao so far, or being, you know, this whole process of becoming Daos. And taking that into Internet communities in general. And I think there’s going to be an uprise or second wave of Dao soon, which will be much, much healthier than what we had in the past years, because of our learnings. And because there was time to rethink why we’re doing this and how we want to achieve this. So, I can’t wait for that to happen.
What do you think is missing for that to happen?
Reka.eth: I think right now, a lot of people are touching grass at this exact month. I think like that’s what’s happening. And I think a lot of people lost trust in quite a few organizations and how they were set up. You know, a lot of shit went down last year, and many involved. Lots of financials that Daos were also conducting and I think the trust issues need a little bit more time to be resolved. So, having said that, the thing that I mentioned before, the human and the technical tool aspect, still have to come in alignment. I think we still, well, first of all need more specific tooling, and I couldn’t really say pinpoint what, but I feel like it’s been a very high barrier to participate in a Dao previously, I feel like that barrier has to be lowered still. And the human coordination aspect has so, so much work to be done there. In my experience, even the Dao that we call it Daos. Because they technically are, I’ve heard how centralized they are in terms of power and financials. And I think that’s going to be really hard to shake because that’s how a lot of organizations have been run in the past in human civilization. I know that’s not the only way and then there’s definitely improvements already, but I just feel like yeah, there’s more trust to be rekindled, and then are rekindled and then implementing the learnings from last year and probably.
The way I understand Dao.
Reka.eth: Also, we need stuff to do, you know, like I feel like, oh, we have a lag. Sorry. I feel like there’s, we still need stuff to do. We need to figure out the goals and be much, much stronger with the values and the mission that we’re on together as a Dao and cultivate that meticulously. Because I feel like even if trust and every financial and every different system is crumbling, if the mission is strong and the core of the whole org is going to survive in either shape, any shape or form.
Best Execution and Governance Practices for DAOs
What do you think or let me scratch that. Who do you think is executing on Daos in the thesis around Daos and the governance around Daos best today? And don’t say nouns Dao because we know their creme de la creme, but beyond nouns Dao.
Reka.eth: I actually heard pretty sick conflicts coming from noun Dao, I’ve been selling them forever. But I’ve heard there’s like pretty vague conflicts going on in there. So, I don’t know about that anymore. I feel like that turns out with every organization that I know about, like I just I named them as they’re great. And then three months later, it turns out that they have pretty systemic issues. So, like I’m scared to say anyone right now. I feel like someone who’s still have, has been working for through the Dao upsurge that we have, and still now is developer Dao I’ve always, they’ve been in my heart for a long time. There’s so hard working and yeah, I just, I appreciate the work that they do. And I feel like there’s an uprise, is that a word even? Like there’s a growing number of media-oriented communities, that are going towards decentralization, like they also started from a small core of core members, but they are actively getting contributors and they are funding themselves through selling off NFTs and I feel like tokenization is coming soon to them as well. So, I’m super excited to see that happen. You know like every, as the saying goes every web three native community is a media company at some point. And so, I’m super excited and thrilled to see how media companies function as decentralized organizations.
Guild’s Approach to Media and Content Worth Collecting
Okay, I think this is a perfect segue into talking about guild as a media company, as a creator led media company, particularly, right guys you’ve been introducing new product features new insights, with a twist, kind of like portraying yourself as a creator building guild, which I love so much. And that has sparked a lot of new creative paths for you as a creator with your Chaos journey and everything in between. So, being a brand that is actually mediate brand, right, just kind of like playing on your argument. How does guild think about media? How does guild think about content creation? And how does guild thinking about content worth collecting the theme of season seven?
Reka.eth: Ooh, I love that. I have a lot of thoughts. This is my bread and butter and the thing that I think about most under the shower, and I think it all started back last year. Once upon a time when I just had this feeling of having been in the space for a while and building a brand in the space for a while. And like you said we started very mysteriously both with Agora and then also with Guild and like, that was such a strong start I think and then we slowly opened up to be more and more approachable. And I feel like I have to, I just always felt like were doing such big responsibility for these teams and they trust us so much. We have to be more approachable. We have to, I want to build a soft brand. We are actually like dark themed or like arts as you can see here is pixelated, it’s very like gay Marie and I always felt like I’m a soft girly. We need to soften this up and the best way I knew how is, by showing, by always being there for our users. And then yes, back on the ominous day, I had this thought of I saw an announcement with Starbucks and Polygon I think, and I was like, like that’s such a big brand. Like if these brands keep coming in, we’re gonna be drowning. Like they have millions of dollars to throw into marketing. We’re not gonna be nowhere. We have such amazing tooling, like collectively invest and so amazing companies coming up. And if these like loyalty gigantic web two Wales come in, we’re gonna be nowhere, like we’re not going to be heard. We’re just going to drown in the ocean of cool things to do and collect and I was like, no, no, no, that cannot happen. And my solution in my head was whichever web three native and kind of like, you know, a company that lives the web three thesis, so that in being that different than the web two companies that are arriving right now into the space. Whatever company figures out, being approachable, being a recognized known brand and creating digestible, fun, relatable content continuously, even if it’s mediocre, but it’s continuous and it’s out there, is going to be so ahead of the curve. And whenever these big giants come in, they won’t drown. And I had this vision, I think over a year ago, but it took me so long because I’m like everyone, I’ve been a creator on not web three. Well, let’s continue the water theme on that web three oceans before overseas. And so, it’s not like brand new for me. But I still have such a big like, what am I going to say? Like I need to figure out how am I going to make a video, I need to figure out what tooling I need, like editing takes so much time. I’m a founder, like how am I going to juggle being consistent with content it’s so, it’s a full-time job. And then I figured it out. I had a great accountability buddy that we continued to assure each other into the right direction. And give validation constantly whenever each other feels like oh, we don’t want to be online. I don’t want to be perceived stuff perceiving me. We just talk to each other and validate each other and that was enough and so I figured everything out. I trial error. I tried so much tooling. I did the things and then here we are in the space where I can comfortably, like before this podcast, I set all of this up, the lighting, my phone records, my mic, another light, so that I’m balancing out the big light. All of this was set up in eight minutes, and the flowers and the background and everything and because I’ve done this, it’s the practice my babes. They’re not lying to you. I’ve done this at least seven times now, this whole setup, like I have the practice, it’s gonna be seven minutes next time, catch me doing that instead of and so it really is, it’s the elbow grease. And people are very shy to put content out. And I feel, I always just feel like it’s silly because whenever you feel like people aren’t going to relate to you, you’re going to be looked down upon. It’s not true. People aren’t going to say that. There’s so many people out there, even on the small crypto Twitter that is and people are going to find and gravitate towards you who are like you and that’s enough and you’ll find each other, if you keep consistently putting out stuff, you just find each other and it works. It’s perfect. On the other hand, it’s a scarier thing to be a face of a brand, which I also am in this journey because that’s why I was like, do I go and put like my silly little videos when I’m practicing on my personal account or do, I already posted on the guild brand account with like 80,000 followers? I didn’t there, so I actually, my pseudo videos went out on my own profile, which is perfect, because why not? Whatever I’m doing is guild anyways. My whole life is just guild, I’m incorporated into the product. Putting out something on an official branded account is a little bit scarier because you’ll be judged more, and it also is saying everything about your company or the company that you’re putting out it for. So, it has to be a little bit more polished and a little bit better, have more context. And to this day, in our audience I still get a few comments that there’s, my co-founder is also handling that Twitter account and our styles is mad different and some of the people don’t understand my style at all, which I think it’s a cute thing, you know, but that’s what I’m saying. The rest do and they love it. And we’ve just been in Denver at a conference, and it’s been so wholesome to see because at Denver it was core Ethereum community, so like fully the people that we want to talk to you and talk to on a regular basis. And since I’ve been putting on my solidity videos, I’ve not only been perceived as a creator and someone who bravely like shares on the internet, but you’re recognized, you’re given opportunities, people are kinder to you. They have more point of connection to put to your face and then this faceless, semi anonymous PFP world, that’s such a priceless thing. So, as hard as this journey is and as much bravery and courage it takes, I can only recommend people start doing it and the chaos thing that Adam was talking about, or what you were talking about is, we it was more like, at first it was an experiment, so we can support each other with my friend LDF in this creator journey. But it also ended up being, us being super public about our journey and experience and creating this movement. So, others will also start posting themselves a little bit more and putting out more of themselves. And it worked really, really well. And we’ve encouraged so many people to start doing the same. So, do it. I also need water, can I grab water?
Go grab water, yeah.
Reka.eth: Thanks, that was a wild.
The Guest’s Creator Journey and Focus During the Bear Market
Ready. 3, 2, 1. I feel like it’s always difficult and uncomfortable putting yourself out there. But I feel like long term it makes sense and it becomes super worth it. So, I commend you guys for just like embarking on the creator journey as cringy as that sounds, but I really think it is a journey and documenting your process and creating content around it and finding your voice through content. It’s like a, I want to say it’s a small w but it’s also a big W at the same time. I guess on that topic, okay. What is your creator journey look like from here on out, like what are you focusing on in this bear market? What are you going to be covering? What are you going to be documenting beyond what you’re already doing right now?
Reka.eth: I think so far, I’ve become very comfortable with posting feature updates on the guild account like this. And I’m also extremely comfortable posting silly little thoughts on my own account. I want to focus more on creating, like case study videos and this just in general like inspiring people to do cool stuff on the internet with how other people have done it and how we’ve helped other people do it. And I’m really excited to keep doing this, as I’m going to be traveling a lot this year and that’s also always a challenge, how to keep up consistency, quality and all of that, while you’re living out of a suitcase and this baby little mic is going to be coming with me everywhere, also my tiny tripod for my phone is going to come everywhere. And I think I’m going to trust natural lighting for my lighting situation. But yeah, I think I’m just going to focus more on trying to remain consistent, as I feel like I’ve reached the level of quality that I wanted with my editing, with my direction, with my everything. Oh, a new video was coming out this Wednesday. You will love it. It’s such, it’s my best direction ever. It’s like a YouTube video, like proper top tier 2016 video, you’ll love it.
Wow. Let’s go.
Reka.eth: It’s about creating tokens of appreciation and also using a new feature video. Because that’s the perfect combo of creating fun content and also showing your own stuff. New features and yeah, so staying consistent because that’s the hard part, at least for me.
Reka’s Other Pursuits During the Bear Market
Totally. Totally. Okay, final question I have for you is, what are you spending your time on during the bear market, beyond content creation, beyond guild, whether it’s spending your time on, like actually doing work or thinking about deeply? I’m trying to get a better sense of where your head’s at in this bear market.
Reka.eth: Well, it’s not gonna be easy to say a creative answer because I just work all the hours in the day right now. But I do think I’m, oh, I’m very into health practices that don’t take too much of your time. So, I’ve picked up sauna every few times a week, to just kind of cool off as an activity, otherwise I’m like barely doing anything aside from work. And what I’m thinking about though, which I do too much is, a lot of how we scale and distribute media better. So, in my opinion, every, I’m sorry, I’m stuck in the creator track but it’s who I am. So, I feel like every community, every creator needs two types of tooling and platform. One for permanence and just sharing it and one for distribution. And, you know, in a web two sense, somewhere where you would share it for permanence is YouTube or Spotify or well, even Instagram, and then where you get distribution is different type, which is like shorts, Tik Tok, Twitter, stuff like that. And I’m trying to think of how do we elevate it in a web three way and because I feel like with the tooling that I’m seeing people building right now, we are doing both at the same time in some cases, and I’m trying to think of how that’s going to be a better experience instead of making it worse. So, I’ve been grinding my brain cells on that one. Otherwise, I’m just living growing, finding balance in everything, like usually.
Outro
I love it. I love it. Well, look, I’m excited for you. I’m excited for your creator journey, all the content that we’ll be rolling out soon. Before I let you go, where can we find you? Where can we learn more, where can we learn more about guild specifically and all the cool things you guys are up to? Show it away.
Reka.eth: You can find me mostly on Twitter, Reka_eth and for guild, same on Twitter, guildxyz without the dot, sorry. And then we also have a YouTube channel which, where I post a lot of our content, even our community events, which are usually closed but I post the recordings of that, so that others can learn from what we teach each other there about community building, new projects and stuff like that. I also post a lot of fun guides and little videos there. It’s on YouTube guildxyz. And yeah, I want to help you make your community experiences better. So, get on guild. It’s free. Create group chats for your friends and or just like your biggest fans. I have one for everyone that’s created with me ever. I give them a pull app, and that’s an NFT and then I just created a guild for them, and they don’t talk to each other because they’re like random people, they’re sort of know each other because they’re acquaintances, so I don’t know what my goal with that was, but they’re in a group together, and it’s fun.
Soon hopefully, it won’t take another year and a half to get another episode but till then, wishing you well and thanks again.
Reka.eth: Thanks for having me. So nice to see you.
