Tapping into Communities as Your Competitive Edge
Most projects chase users. The best ones build communities that bring users to them.
MonkeDAO started as a group of Solana NFT holders and became one of the most resilient and creatively productive communities in Web3, spawning MonkeFoundry, a builder accelerator, and MonkeVentures, an investment arm that backs ecosystem projects. Along the way they've collaborated with Nomu on limited edition plushies, Solflare on custom hoodies, and Flojo on branded drinks, proving that a strong enough community doesn't just retain members, it attracts real-world brand partners who want access to its culture.
Jemmy, Co-founder of MonkeDAO, breaks down how this happened and what builders can learn from it.
This session is directly relevant if you are building a product that needs early adopters, distribution without a marketing budget, or long-term retention that doesn't depend on token incentives. Community is not a growth hack - it's infrastructure. And the teams that figure this out early have a compounding advantage that is very hard to replicate later.
What you will walk away with: a framework for turning early users into genuine community members, how to use community as a distribution channel and not just an audience, the mechanics behind MonkeDAO's brand collaborations and what made outside partners want to work with them, and how MonkeFoundry and MonkeVentures formalised community energy into structured support for builders and founders.
If your Colosseum submission has a go-to-market problem, this session is where you start solving it.
Can't make it IRL? We gotchu!
Dial in: meet.google.com/xzd-fvxm-hcc