Building a Gen Z Community

Capitalizing on Discord: the youth economy

So you want to be a billionaire off the Gen-Z mafia? Even schmooze the 9-year-olds in Gen-Alpha? Time to put on your degen hat and learn how to build the ultimate 12-year-old boy community. This isn’t buttoned-up Goldman anymore. 

Source Server Partnerships

You’re making an AI dating app, because you’re fed up with Hinge only serving you ugly girls. You know dating is a hard space, with Match Group snapping up anything half decent. But you’re determined to be a unicorn; to buy Match Group yourself one day. 

Your co-founder can code (and you lie that you can), so product isn’t the issue. You promised to handle the business side and … have no idea what you’re doing. You’ve heard young people these days hang on Discord, so you make a server and enlist your college-aged son and 10 of his friends to join. They fit your user persona, but you don’t know anyone else who does. 

Find Similar Servers

The mess of servers on Discord is foreign to you; a shepherd through the Gen Z homeland would help a lot. You make a list of keywords – “AI,” “dating,” “simulation” – and query them in the Discord explore page at the bottom of your left sidebar. 

You join a bunch of them, and notice that each server has a ticket channel where mods have to respond to member inquiries. You noticed that DMing mods doesn’t work well, and they’re creeped out by strangers (especially old strangers, you stalker). So instead, you open tickets inquiring about paid @everyone pings. 

You’ve learned that @everyone pings notify all members of a server with a red number count on the side, so they’re more likely to view. Just like when your boss used to ping everyone on Slack at 2am. Never thought you’d be that person, but here we are. 

If you notice that the server does other paid ads, you go straight for it and ask for a partnership. If not, you inquire whether they do ads at all. You use a message like the following when opening a ticket:

Hey there! I’m reaching out regarding a paid promotion with your server :)

For context, I’m working on a project called <name>, which is similar to <app they’d know> in which users can <app functionality>. Users have loved our alpha tests, so we’d love to give your community early access. We'd be happy to provide payment that you can reinvest in community activities <animated emoji>

You make a CRM of all your open tickets to track their status. 

Partner with Discord Marketing Managers

While impatiently waiting for a reply, you notice that some users in the right sidebar have a “marketing manager” role. You don’t care about this server’s success, and so are happy to poach their people. After adding a hot female profile picture to increase replies, you DM them asking: “yo could you help me source server partnerships?”

You learn that these “marketing managers” partner with hundreds of servers, taking commissions to funnel members between servers. You’re a cheap capitalist so you hype that your project will be the next Instagram, and get some degens to help for free. (After all, who wouldn’t want a direct line of communication to Zuck, who you’re bound to become?) You prioritize managers motivated by genuine interest in AI dating and furthering their careers. Hypnotizing everyone into free work is hard, so you agree to a sourcing fee for some degens – ranging from $10 for a 50k server to $50 for a 1M server. The best managers, though, work for the servers and so are incentivized on the other side of this Gen Z two-sided marketplace. You’ve learned from your explorations as a MLM TikTok bro, and refuse to work with managers who pay the creators for you. No scraping off the top allowed. 

Pay Fair Prices

The managers typically tell you the price of the server partnership before you agree to move forward. For each server you source yourself or are presented with, you rank their relevance based on chat health and matching user persona. You won’t be scammed by dead servers; you’ve been ghosted enough already on the dating apps.

Besides server health, you also take into account the duration your @everyone ping will remain up. You’re used to the managers sending proposals like:

40$ = 1d + everyone ping; 125$ = 7d + everyone ping

Finance-bro at heart, you do a cost-benefit analysis to determine which deals to take. You avoid deals that ask for giveaways, both because you’re a penny pincher and because you want authentic users. When you accept partnerships, you pay the mods via PayPal. They give you a direct link or their email, and you pay them through Friends & Family with a Ramp card on which you’ve demarcated your marketing budget. 

Prepare Partnership Materials 

Once all the finances have been settled, you send each mod a vanity invite link so you can track server joins per partnership, and eventually calculate your ROAS. You make sure the link never expires, has unlimited uses, and goes to an active channel in your server to increase retention. You save this link in your CRM for future reference. 

You ask them to send the message in a temporary channel that has an enticing name, like  #🌟join-hot-new-app. The message should be similarly short but catchy, like:

Community message:

⭐Announcing <app name>, a new <app one-liner>! ⭐

<Longer app description>. Many top <people your users respect> are trying it out. <App name> has limited access so join the server now to secure your spot!

<Vanity link> <animated emoji> @everyone

Maximize Joins and Retain New Members

Once the @everyone ping goes out, you join the server’s general chat and hype up members to join. You do the same in your server, welcoming each user with a direct ping at their username and inquiry about their app experience. After cycling through this process many times, you’re finally able to quit your Goldman job and delete Hinge, having a built a platform where you’ll never be ghosted.

 -Katie