A strong community can make or break a project

The highest potential projects realize this

There are too many 2nd & 3rd order effects to list, but here are some:

**System Design**

There are tons of brilliant people in crypto that will have a perspective about your product/system you haven't thought of.

A dozen+ major system updates in @synthetix_io came from community: First liquidity mining, binary options, inflation smoothing, etc.

**Safer Contracts**

Community members will comb through system architecture and code through pure interest/curiosity. This has uncovered post professional-audit exploits in many projects I've seen

**Recruitment Tool**

It's actually quite frequent that projects end up hiring core community members. Your most active community members understand the best and have high genuine interest in what you're working on making them stellar candidates

**Ecosystem Building**

Ancillary tools is what really makes projects shine. People will spend hundreds of hours unpaid to build extremely useful tools for users of your product. @MakerDAO has many: @MakerDaiBot , http://makerscan.io , http://mkr.tools , etc

**Marketing**

Your biggest evangelists are your community members. They all want to pump their own bags, and they will probably be more effective than the team in doing so. Whether its through eduction or just memes. $LINK would not be what it is without its marines.

Some projects have evangelists that are so die hard that they spend more than a full time job's worth of effort providing high level support

@SNXified is incredibly useful in helping newcomers and even old holders understand & keep up with @synthetix_io

**PRICE**

Crypto markets are fickle and sentiment is a huge determinant of the value of your token. If your community believes in your project because you communicate and listen, this will support token price. A falling token price is bad for morale and negatively affects growth

A strong, intelligent community that actually understands your project (not airdrop spammers) can create immense network effects that accelerate a project in so many ways

AND strong communities end up saving projects time and resources

Stronger Community Stronger Project

The best way to cultivate a strong community is to communicate with them. Through blog post updates, telegram announcements, twitter updates & discussions, conversing in discord/telegram, etc.

@thorchain_org and @synthetix_io are prime examples to learn from for this

A lot of this stuff sounds obvious but there’s a world of difference between some projects and the projects above.

Projects with tens of millions raised but empty telegram/discord channels, non responsive team members, quarterly blog posts, etc