The Community-Owned IP Flywheel
Share incentives so a community expands durable intellectual property with you
- Difficulty
- Expert
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 96%
Build intellectual property as a shared, long-term community asset rather than a one-off campaign controlled entirely by the brand. Begin with recognizable IP and define how community members may use, extend, or benefit from it. Align incentives so participants gain when the underlying property becomes more useful and valuable. This motivates members to tell stories, create products, organize experiences, and recruit others. The organization supplies stewardship, recurring releases, and a multi-year roadmap while allowing storytelling and creation to decentralize. Each new extension should create substantially more value for existing participants, strengthening their incentive to contribute again. The resulting loop connects ownership or participation, creation, distribution, increasing IP value, and renewed community effort.
Origin
The hosts and Ross Simmonds derived this flywheel from Yuga Labs and Bored Ape Yacht Club during Marketing Against The Grain.
Core principles
- 01Shared upside motivates people to increase an IP asset's value
- 02Community members can become storytellers and builders
- 03The brand should enable participation rather than control every extension
- 04Durable IP requires a multi-year roadmap
- 05Each delivered extension should increase community value
How to run it
- 1
Establish durable IP
Create or acquire a recognizable character, identity, world, or asset that can support repeated stories and extensions.
Pro tip Choose IP with enough distinctiveness to become part of a member's identity.
Watch out A generic campaign concept will not sustain years of community creation.
- 2
Align the incentives
Give members a meaningful reason to increase the IP's reach, usefulness, or value. Make the value exchange understandable and credible.
Pro tip Reward existing participants when major roadmap milestones are delivered.
Watch out Do not imply financial rewards that the structure cannot reliably or lawfully provide.
- 3
Enable community creation
Define what members may build, tell, license, organize, or remix. Remove unnecessary barriers to fan fiction, products, events, and partnerships.
Pro tip Provide clear usage rights and practical creative resources.
Watch out Ambiguous ownership rules can discourage participation or create disputes.
- 4
Adopt a collective posture
Position the project as something the community does together rather than an ego-driven brand controlled by a single visible leader.
Pro tip Celebrate member creations as part of the canonical community story.
Watch out Pretending to decentralize while retaining all meaningful control destroys trust.
- 5
Publish the long roadmap
Plan recurring extensions that deepen the property across stories, experiences, products, or partnerships over multiple years.
Pro tip Use experienced entertainment or IP operators when expansion requires specialist capabilities.
Watch out A single drop followed by silence creates a campaign, not durable IP.
- 6
Compound member value
At each milestone, increase what the community can experience, create, access, or benefit from. Let the added value motivate the next cycle of advocacy and creation.
Pro tip Evaluate whether each extension gives existing members a clear reason to remain involved.
Watch out Extracting value without returning value breaks the flywheel.
In the wild
A holder receives recognizable IP and the ability to use it in stories, products, events, restaurant partnerships, or other creative extensions. Continued releases and ecosystem developments give holders reasons to promote and build around the property.
→ Community incentives and decentralized creation broaden the IP's cultural footprint and potential value.
A startup releases a set of characters with clear commercial-use rights, creator templates, and a multi-year narrative roadmap. Members write stories, host local events, and develop licensed products while milestone releases expand the shared world.
→ The audience becomes a distributed creative and distribution network for durable IP.
Common mistakes
Using a campaign mindset
Launching one collectible or promotion to capture short-term revenue provides no reason for the community to keep building.
Keeping all the upside
Members will not consistently expand the property when the brand captures all value and offers no meaningful exchange.
Centralizing every story
Requiring all narratives and extensions to come from an internal team prevents the community from becoming a creative engine.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for brands with distinctive characters, worlds, identities, or community assets that can support long-term extensions.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal for short-lived promotional drops with no governance, participation rights, or durable roadmap.
From the transcript
“If the IP is essentially given to the community, the community now has an incentive to see that IP kind of become more and more…”
“you have a community driven story play versus kind of a brand driven story play”
“You have to say, hey, I am building a community and I'm building a long, durable set of IP that is going to have this…”
From the episode
Be The Most Interesting Brand In Your Market with Ross Simmonds
Ross Simmonds