About a month ago, Gilles pinged me on Slack and

asked whether I’d be interested in meeting him and Dr. He in San Francisco to discuss the North American Community strategy. Anytime your CEO asks you if you want to meet, you say yes.

I arrived in San Francisco on Sunday night and spent most of Monday and Tuesday morning prepping. Tuesday afternoon, I made my way to the hotel and shook hands with iExec’s co-founders for the first time.

After we exchanged pleasantries for the first 20ish minutes (“How was your flight” and “how are you feeling” and “did you know that the Duke basketball team is in town for March Madness? Oh, you’re not familiar with March Madness, here’s how it works”) it was time to get down to business.

My original agenda was much broader in scope, but I narrowed the subject matter to a simple story:
- here’s where we were (Aug 2021 - Dec 2022)
- here’s where we are (Jan 2022 - March 2022)
- here’s where we’re going (April 2022 - Dec 2022)
- here’s what we need to get there

Spoiler for those who don’t want to read the next few paragraphs: the meeting went really, really well. Gilles and Dr. He listened, asked engaging questions, and were extremely supportive of my efforts and overall plan.

Here’s the presentation and some of the things we discussed, in case you’re interested:

We start off with the importance of community. It might sound cliche, but it’s worth revisiting why are we building a community. Before we get into “we need to expand!” it’s important to remember what a community actually does. It’s a tribe, a collective of people gathered around a certain purpose. These people can exchange ideas, collaborate, and help achieve this purpose.

A community is a flywheel: we have investors. That’s probably how you got into iExec. You invested your money. Next, we have users. What if we can turn these investors into users? (You’ll probably be hearing a lot of this in the next few months). Users utilize our platform, have a good experience on it, and actually make money. Those users are transformed by the experience and go on to be marketers. These are advocates who spread the iExec message to the uninitiated, who become investors —> users —> marketers. And so the flywheel continues.

(Note: right now, the majority of our investors are holders. There’s a number of investors that have become marketers, and we’ll get to this in a bit. What I mentioned above is the ideal scenario, not as it currently exists).

So where were we? Well, Aug - Dec: the sentiment was poor. I pulled quotes from the chat from one of my first days on the job:

“here is a major disconnect between team and leadership”
“they don’t explain shit”
“It will only be bullshit "The community is important for us" "Stay tuned we'll have a little something for you" blablabla blablabla”

At this point, Gilles agreed that the community wasn’t in the best spirits and it’s a stark difference today. He said he was in the chat earlier in the day watching people interact and it was much different than before (TIL Gilles jumps into Telegram). He’s keen on how positive the vibe is. I told him I’d explain why; it goes to the work that our community has been doing to spread awareness of iExec. (This is the community-generated marketing I spoke about earlier. You see how it’s all connected?)

Where are we now? Well, between Jan - March, even tho we’re in a bear market (despite what Blair says), the community sentiment is positive. There’s an upward trend in social media impressions. Looking at our Telegram/Twitter numbers, they are way higher than they were a few months ago. This uptick can be linked to a few things:
⁃ Incentives (Community Rewards and the pending Ambassador Program)
⁃ An increase in team accessibility (our AMA, ETH Denver, more team presence online in general)
⁃ Additional content (weekly updates, increased social media presence)

And most important, sentiment is positive because of what y’all are doing. Who are y’all? I explained the top performing community members are talking on a separate Telegram channel, organizing efforts

Impressive update 👏👏👏

WoW! Amazing feedback Rafal. You should get a medal 🏅. Really nice reading. To the point. Btw: did you eat lobster?