Community build on a network effect
🛒 Would you rather buy something from a community or an ad? + Your network will help you accumulate members for your community.
Hey everyone👋, welcome to the 19th newsletter.
Communities have become strong players in the startup world. Even if this word is thrown around a lot recently, it’s been here for a long time now. Entrepreneurs, creators, and founders are finding that building a community not only helps build and sell a product but also builds a solid foundation of a marketplace for the long run.
In fact, my first product failed because I didn’t focus on building a community first. And this could be the story of most of the first-time founders. As founders have an amazing idea, plan out execution and know-how to target the audience but don’t realize that trust is the first thing a user will see in them.
When you talk to most of the founders about who were their first few users they’ll say the people who know them already, people from their network, friends, or colleagues.
That’s where community plays the key role.
If you have a community, half of your promotional work is already done.
What is the community for a product/startup?
Most people are mistaken by the “audience” as the “community”.
When you build an audience your focus is on a single individual, while building a community your focus shifts from a single individual to a group where members collaborate, contribute and participate over something.
In a community, people get more value by interacting with each other on a similar topic. They had built a connection with the other members of the community so that helps gain feedbacks and build the network.
Whereas the audience only values when you create content that interests them, entertains them, or educates them.
What the audience does is act out of emotions. Communities are more bend towards building each other. Even if the audience goes, a community will stand strong like a pillar.
It’s not that hard to build a community than to build an audience as the network of valued content & members will help accumulate the people itself.
Tell me, would you rather buy from a community or an ad?
What is it like to build a community?
Imagine this scenario:
You have an idea that already has a market and you did an idea validation of it. You understand that there is a need for this product and you know who is your target audience.
You start working on designing the product, then developing it and a perfect launch plan ready to take off.
Everything goes as you planned, you’re happy, reach out to potential users (but actually they don’t know you) and you’re ready to launch. You’ve also made a teaser on social media about what you’re about to launch.
Product is launched, you’ve estimated on an average 30 users per day - some through the launch announcement, some through reach out, and some through these referrals.
But in reality, you got very few users and now the growth you expected doesn’t increase as you planned.
Because the product need isn’t important, the way you build it isn’t important, the way you’ve planned the marketing isn’t important but who you get first is. The rest will go parallel.
(Confession, this is my real story 😆)
Your first few users should
need what you’re building today and not in the future,
build a connection and interact with you, so they can suggest to you what features they need or how you can make their work easier,
happily spread and talk about your product.
Well, that’s the best a community does, you’ll get the word-of-mouth so you can move over marketing.
You start by building a community around your network who are interested in the same topic. They will add more people and more people will add more people, this way the chain will continue.
Successful representation of community building
Gen Z VCs - Meagan Loyst started building a community around her network of 50 people on Slack which grew into 1000 members in a week. It got featured in Business Insider and today the community has crossed 9000 members in just 12 months. Gen Z VCs is a global collective of young investors, founders, startup enthusiasts, aspiring VCs, and creators.
Many people rather than creating their own community start with Twitter, Telegram, Slack, Facebook, etc.
Product Hunt - Ryan started building Product Hunt with a couple of dozen influential people in the startup industry that Ryan personally knew. He started building an email list with the right people which helped him get 170 subscribers & who were enjoying his daily digest.
There are more communities that prefer having a separate place to build a collaborative place such as Maker Log, Women Make, Indie Hacker, etc.
And some communities that focus on Q&A style such as Quora, Reddit.
But the first things is to gather your network who enjoy the same topic and start from there.
Finally,
When you decide to build a community remove the time from it. As building a community is true fun but you never know when it kicks off - maybe in a week like Gen Z VCs (got 1000 members in a week) or can take months.
Communities create a place for you to work with other people not only to build your product but also to help build them. The most important thing is building a culture of like-minded people.
It takes time and dedication to keep showing up for your members with content to re-engage and flourish the growth.
Some musings 🥁
A really great 3 part series I read recently by Yin Wu about The Startup Founder's Guide to Equity published on Femstreet. When you start raising funds for your startup you want to know how to distribute the equity and how to manage your cap table is important so you don’t get to leave with the small piece.
What if you could shop through creators and friends you love? 🛒
If you haven’t read - 6 Key Takeaways From Clubhouse FOMO for First-time Founders
Here’s a great newsletter by Snaxshot - Travel's Back on the Menu
There’s an 8-week founder program inspired by Product Hunt created by Hyper, you can apply now.
Until next time! 👋
👋 PS: I’m Ritika founder, product marketer and advisor for early-stage startups, find more here or connect with her here. If you’re a first-time founder looking for curated resources, download here. If you enjoyed this post, read the past issues here. You can also promote your product in this newsletter.
A big thanks for reading & sharing!