A simple and effective onboarding process for a discord community
I have been working with Micah (my co-founder) on Velera for almost 3 years now. A chance encounter on reddit, guided by the universe. That’s a story for another time. As we get ready to bring Velera, our open internet startup, to the public domain, I am coming to realize how things have moved forward in the last 3-5 years in the lean start-up feedback loop. Finding like-minded collaborators and partners that resonate with a similar vision or connecting with your audience has never been so easier.
A month ago, we decided that we need to start a focus group to understand our target audience better. I started to network over Polywork and LinkedIn to help us get the right messaging. Before we knew it, over 2 days we had 15 people join our dormant discord server. Almost overnight, we became a community. Well, I paused my networking activities cause with my experience building systems, I realized the potential issues with the scaling of the community. You always need to look 10 steps ahead. So, I went back to the drawing board to create a simple and effective onboarding process.
#who-is-here channel screenshot
I call it the #who-is-here channel. It’s one step before you get full access to the discord. In this channel, new members need to write a short bio about themselves and can add links to connect with one and another or showcase their portfolios. The reason for this channel is that as we grow and collaborate we can go back to see other people’s bio to understand the context of any feedback or contribution. We can also see the diversity within the discord. We wanted to strive for quality over quantity. This could also help with the moderation of spammers or bots. We want to engage at a more transparent level within the community. To help and support one another. Isn’t that the purpose of being part of a community?
Chats with discord developers
While talking to a couple of seasoned discord developers, none of them had ever come across such a simple and clean onboarding process. I want to believe this is an original idea but as we all know that’s more likely not the case. But, I thought I ll share it with the world, in case, it could benefit other discord communities out there trying to streamline their onboarding process.
If you liked this idea, come checkout a cooler idea that we are actively working on - building a open, safe and inclusive internet called Velera. You can join our discord or checkout our website.
