What I Learned from 10K Telegrammers in 10 days

4 lessons from a fortnite of growth.

July 11th, 2018… This date has special meaning for me and many in our community. Ten short days ago, we embarked on a blockchain protocol right of passage: we downloaded telegram and created our group, nCent Nation. Today, we crossed 10,000 users (and also 15,000 and 16,000 but that’s for another article).

I’m deeply humbled by the support. Reflecting on how we got here, it’s clear the world is excited about the potential for a powerful, durable platform that allows people to tap the value of their networks and own that value — rather than let big companies syphon it off.

When we started, many people didn’t even know what scaleable incentive markets are. Now there is a 16,000+ and growing community eager to coBUIDL with us.

What have we learned from nCent Nation so far? Well one lesson is that it doesn’t hurt to have a mascot that is cuter than the original blockchain community builder, the dogecoin…

Porter “Popcorn” Cornelius — Global Head of Community Management and Cuddles, nCent Labs

1. We’ve just scratched the surface of the power of incentive markets. The outpouring of ideas and support from our community has been amazing. They’ve poked holes, patched them up, they’ve dreamt up novel applications, and they are chomping at the bit to start work.
2. Incentives are (mostly) intuitive: People get incentive markets when they see them in action: but only when value attribution is done properly. They understand their networks are not being put to good use and that value is too centralized. Given access to a better system, they will jump on it!
3. Trust — it’s complicated. Early on we decided to run a logo contest using our incentive structure. It worked: our new logo designs are truly amazing and far more creative than we hoped. We will reward the two high-quality entries from different people, and also the final winning chain of people contributing to bringing the winner. But it had a side-effect. Some people saw it as a scam. We got the right people, but we also caught shade from others. There is also a sybil bot issue (thankfully bots can’t draw logos!). This reinforces the need for a dedicated, trustless platform that establishes the primitives for incentive markers to form. People need to know they are dealing with something legit.
4. It’s not just about the money. It is all about a spirited community. The money is but a small thank you to the community. Our community is built around education and the teacher-learner model we have established at nCent Labs (we are hiring!). We are committed to putting out educational content, including on Medium and my talk at hacksummit.org with mega-investor Steve Jurvetson.

Feel free to email me anytime: [email protected] if any of these points resonate with you! Check us out at nCent Nation — — come to learn something and stay to teach us something! And special thanks to our nCent Minutemen who are always on watch protecting our community.

To stay in the nCent loop, hear me tweet and join our international telegram channel.