Knowledge products as Community Gravity

How to provide more value to startups?

I’ve invited my long-time friend, best-selling author of time management, Yuan Ji, to deliver an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in Campus VC’s entrepreneurs community. His topic was about lightweight startup, which he described as 3C. But his 3C (Content, Code, Community) is different from my usual definition of 3C (Content, Code, Crypto), though he has borrowed this 3C term from me.

So I have asked a question during his AMA: which C has the best price performance for a young entrepreneur to get wealth? His answer is Content, which prompts me to think about modifying my original thinking of 3C being a pyramid hierarchy. Incorporating his viewpoint, I drew a new concept picture as below:

Community, by definition, is a group of people who share the same goal and happy to collaborate with each other, by increasingly decentralized decision-making and remote working, impacted by Covid-19 in 2020. With the trend of digitization of economy, communities will only thrive if members co-working on an open source project, to produce knowledge products like Content, Code or Crypto.

Crypto is fundamentally Code (open source software), and Code is fundamentally Content (electronic files with bits of 0 and 1). Technically speaking, Crypto is more valuable than Code, and Code is more valuable than Content. But Yuan Ji’s answer is a surprise to me, as I haven’t thought about the price performance of 3C to an entrepreneur before his AMA.

Yuan said 3C all has similar huge market potential, but the difficult degree is increasing from Content, to Code, to Community, so he think the best price performance would be Content. I think about this late, from another angle. Content has a more wide audience than Code, and Code has a more wide audience than Crypto. So I tend to agree with his viewpoint now.

But difficult degree has a good side-effect as well, less people can carry on difficult task to produce Code or Crypto. So If you want to set up an higher entry barrier for potential competitors, it’s better to do Code or Crypto, than do Content. We may suggest entrepreneurs to start from Content, transiting to Code, and eventually transiting to Crypto.

In the area of community management, I recently found a good model called Orbit Model (as below). There are four key concepts of Orbit Model: Love, Reach, Gravity and Orbit Levels. I especially like Gravity as a measure of attraction for a certain community.

Back to my theory of 4C (Content, Code, Crypto, Community). I found a important connection between Orbit Model and 4C model. Gravity is the value of a community provided to its members. In digital economy, that value is very well described as digital knowledge product of 3C (Content, Code or Crypto).

I have read a paper called: “What is Value?” – A Framework for Analyzing and Facilitating Entrepreneurial Value Creation, which provides a value framework as below. That value framework is consisting of five different kinds of value: economic, enjoyment, social, harmony and influence value.

Each kind of value can be experienced and created both for oneself and for others, thus constituting a total of ten different perspectives on value. I guess those value for others can been expressed in digital knowledge products of 3C. 3C can serve others without human being and be run by robots in computing cloud.

Let’s move our discussion to application level, down from theoretical level above. I’ve seen three recent progresses among my friends and I want to share them here.

The first is from Andrew Lee of KarmaDAO who claims Crypto marketplace will replace Patreon and Onlyfans for digital arts, community and clubs, and in-game items. As a member of KarmaDAO based in Beijing, I believe in what Andrew has predicted.

The second is from Sari Azout who recently has announced an Startupy.world project, which is aiming to be a community-powered startup knowledge database. I’m curious if Sari will use Crypto to enable her community’s value exchange, as Startupy.world hasn’t been formally launched.

The third is from Peth.eth who has been going through a 3 hours product design sprint with team members and summarized what MetaGame will develop for the next stage in this post: https://github.com/MetaFam/TheGame/issues/204. I will work with my team to clarify what China team can contribute for MetaGame this week.

Campus VC is on our way to build future entrepreneurship university for China and the world. Last weekend, one of my classmate in undergraduate class passed away and I’m approaching age of 50 as well. More and more, I’m thinking about that effective altruism concept from 8000hours.org, and wish to make a bigger impact for startups in my remaining short life.

What is the best way for us to going forward? Any suggestion from my readers here? Welcome you subscribe to my newsletter here and wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. Cheers,

Jason