NFT pivot after the hype: who should own “utility growth” now?

amanda smith · 2025-11-09T12:29:43+00:00

I’m consulting for an India-based NFT brand that minted during the 2022 wave. Back then it was loud — ~12K holders, collabs, Discord energy, the usual “we’re early” feeling.Now it’s a different reality: Discord shows ~600 active users and the founders are trying to reposition as a membership / identity product. They want “utility” to be the next story — staking, ticketing, token-gating — but internally there’s confusion on ownership.The current growth lead has been running community + partnerships (and honestly that’s what kept the brand alive so far). But the founders are asking if a product marketer should take over because this next phase feels less like hype and more like adoption.My struggle is: if we don’t define ownership properly, we’ll end up with two people doing “growth things” and nobody owning activation/retention.In your experience, when an NFT project shifts from hype to utility, who should own the growth mandate — community/growth lead, product marketing, or a hybrid? And how do you split responsibilities without breaking the community trust that was built in the hype phase?

NFT pivot after the hype: who should own “utility growth” now?

amanda smith
@DecentralizedDev

Updated: Jan 12, 2026

Views: 173

I’m consulting for an India-based NFT brand that minted during the 2022 wave. Back then it was loud — ~12K holders, collabs, Discord energy, the usual “we’re early” feeling.
Now it’s a different reality: Discord shows ~600 active users and the founders are trying to reposition as a membership / identity product. They want “utility” to be the next story — staking, ticketing, token-gating — but internally there’s confusion on ownership.
The current growth lead has been running community + partnerships (and honestly that’s what kept the brand alive so far). But the founders are asking if a product marketer should take over because this next phase feels less like hype and more like adoption.
My struggle is: if we don’t define ownership properly, we’ll end up with two people doing “growth things” and nobody owning activation/retention.
In your experience, when an NFT project shifts from hype to utility, who should own the growth mandate — community/growth lead, product marketing, or a hybrid? And how do you split responsibilities without breaking the community trust that was built in the hype phase?

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Abdil Hamid

@ForensicBlockSmith • 2mos

I’ve been in a similar pivot (mint → “membership utility”) and the biggest trap was arguing about roles before defining the loop.

If “utility” means staking + token-gating + ticketing, that’s still not a loop. That’s features. The loop is something like: holder discovers benefit → takes 1 action → gets a reward/status → comes back because it compounds.

Once you write that loop in one sentence, ownership becomes obvious:

Product marketing should own activation: messaging, onboarding, “why now?”, and getting first-time users across the line.
Community/growth lead should own trust + re-engagement: “why this isn’t another pivot,” what’s changing, what stays sacred, and pulling people back in.

In our case, the handoff worked when the community lead stopped being measured on “Discord vibes” and started being measured on re-activation (e.g., “how many dormant holders did we bring back to do 1 utility action”). Product marketing owned conversion and retention metrics. And we stopped announcing features until we could explain the exact user behavior it unlocked.

CryptoCoder_AJ

@CryptoCoderAJ • 2mos

Hot take: if the founders are asking “who owns growth now?” it usually means they don’t have conviction on what the product actually is post-mint.

Because in the hype phase, growth is a machine you can run even with a fuzzy product. Post-hype, growth exposes the truth — either the utility has pull or it doesn’t.

I’d avoid making it “growth lead vs product marketer.” Instead, appoint one person as the “utility GM” for 6–8 weeks. Not a title change, just accountability. Their job: pick one utility use-case and ship the smallest version that creates repeated behavior. If you try to do staking + ticketing + token-gating together, you’ll get noise and nobody will adopt any of it deeply.

Also, Discord going quiet in India isn’t always death. A lot of “real” engagement migrates to WhatsApp/Telegram/IRL. So I’d first map where the 600 active actually live and what they already do. Then build utility around that behavior, not around what looks cool on a roadmap.

AshishS

@Web3SecurityPro • 2mos

I worked with an NFT community that had the same “12K holders, 500-ish active” situation. The fix wasn’t a marketing hire — it was deciding what counts as success.

We created three buckets:

Speculators (won’t convert, just watch price)
Social holders (want belonging, status, access)
Utility users (will do actions if value is clear + friction is low)

Then we built one metric per bucket, so we weren’t fooling ourselves:

Social holders: event attendance / participation rate
Utility users: “completed 1 utility action” and “repeat within 14 days”
Speculators: basically ignore for “utility adoption” targets

After that, ownership split was easy:

Community lead owned moving people from bucket 1→2 (trust, story, belonging)
Product marketer owned moving 2→3 (activation messaging, onboarding, habit formation)
Someone (Growth Ops / analyst) owned the dashboard so debates didn’t become vibes-based

One more thing: “whoever owns Dune owns growth” sounds smart but it can be wrong. Data ownership without narrative ownership becomes spreadsheets nobody acts on. The best setup is: Growth Ops publishes a weekly 1-page “what changed + what we’ll do next,” and product/community execute together.

Shubhada Pande

@ShubhadaJP • 2w

This thread is basically describing the moment when “growth” stops being a content/calendar job and becomes a systems job — instrumentation, activation, and retention loops. The recurring failure pattern we see is teams celebrating community spikes while utility usage stays flat (this one’s worth reading alongside it):

https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/what-to-do-when-community-kpis-clash-with-real-growth-metrics-in

If anyone here has done the hype → utility pivot, I’m curious: what was your first real adoption metric (not Discord engagement), and who owned it? For more context, these adjacent threads connect tightly:

Measuring NFT growth without vanity metrics: https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/how-you-masure-growth-in-early-stage-nft-projects-without-vanity-metrics

Paid acquisition vs organic retention in Web3 apps: https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/how-to-balance-between-paid-ads-vs-organic-retention-in-web3-app

Retention definitions after token/airdrop phases:

https://artofblockchain.club/discussion/how-dao-growth-teams-define-retention-after-an-airdrop

Would love examples from India brands too — what worked when the “membership promise” had to become real.