Pay your community

If you decide to decompose a traditional business model into a dApp, then you need to solve the problem of attracting and retaining people who contribute to each side of the network.

Typically, your contributors fall into three categories:

• capital
• producers
• consumers

Some users will cover multiple roles, but each has separate needs.

Capital isn’t needed for every dApp, but if you do need funding, you can run an ICO, sell utility NFTs, incentivize deposits, charge transaction fees, or any number of other ways. Be sure you understand the impact on your users before you place the entire burden of capital on the other two groups.

Producers are the lifeblood of your dApp. You can’t attract consumers unless there’s something to consume. The job varies by dApp, but this is the group you want to pay for their efforts. NFT artists, liquidity providers, etc. They won’t keep coming back unless there’s a good reason (profit is a good motivator).

Consumers are the largest group. It depends on the specific kind of dApp, but it can easily range from 10-100 or more consumers for every producer. Consumers like free, easy experiences. When I talk about dApp accessibility, this is typically the group I'm targeting. You don't want consumers to be required to set up a wallet and purchase tokens before being allowed to use the dApp. That limits growth and the number of producers you can support.

But if consumers are getting in for free, how do you pay producers? Ultimately, it depends on the dApp, but I'll go into more detail on this tomorrow.

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-Luke

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