<aside> 👋 Hi there! I’m Louise. I’m the happy co founder of Hera and about one year ago, I naturally kickstarted a community on top of our product. Since then, I’ve been passionate about this new trend of community-led products.
I’m absolutely convinced that communities will in the next few years be a must have for all companies. Building a product is not sufficient anymore - having a strong community around you is what will differentiate yourself from the agressive competition! When you think about it, everything can be copied about your product - except your community. This is your best asset.
I realized this over the past year building Hera community around our product and I’d love other people to benefit from my experience!
I’m starting a series of content around building a community and starting today with 10 tips to kickstart a community, for early stage start ups. Enjoy!
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It’s never too early to bring people together. You don’t even need your product to be live yet.
On the contrary, once you have an idea of the people who will benefit from your product, bring these people together and leverage them to iterate on your idea.
Just make sure these people have an early adopter mindset and are ready to try out a potentially buggy product. It’s better to have 10 super engaged users who help you shape the product than a hundred passive people who don’t bring you anything.
Start small but start now, you will thank yourself later.
Your first goal should be to bring people together in the same place. Finding the right place is key to your community success. Ideally, you want to choose a platform your target audience is familiar with so that it’s not a big stretch for them to join and contribute. Your choice also needs to be driven by what you expect people to do in your community (discuss? post content? post videos?)
Think of:
Trying to kickstart the community on different platforms is a defocus in my opinion. I’d recommend picking one and sticking to it to start with.
In our case, we chose Slack because that’s where our target audience hangs out. This is the easiest way for them to engage and participate in the community life.
It seems simple, but most people actually skip this step. You need to ask yourself a bunch of questions to make the path clearer.
Why build a community now? What value do you want to provide to people? Where do you see the community in 2 years?
Not only you need to ask yourself these questions, but you also want to hear what people expect from your community. Ask them why did they join the community? What would they like to see more of?
Once you have these answers, it will become clearer how you should structure your channels, content you should post, persona you should attract, etc.
Here is the survey we shared with Hera community members at the beginning.
Let me be clear - if you want to be a community builder, you should put your ego on the side 😅
At the beginning, you’ll have 5 people in your community and often times, they won’t react to your posts, won’t answer your messages, etc. That’s fine, building a community takes time, and there’s no silver bullet.
Consistency will pay off. Just put yourself out there and be helpful to your community members, continuously.
Community building is a pretty new trend. I can’t think of any school or training program to become a community builder as you could find for Product Design, Product Management, etc.
Nurturing a community is hard and takes a lot of time. Only go down this path if you genuinely want to spend time with the future members of your community and see them succeed.
The best community builders I’ve met don’t have transactional interactions with their members - they sincerely want to know these people.
I found out that being authentic and passionate about what you’re doing make people want to help you in return.
Not all members of your community are equal, some provide 10x more value than others. They talk about your product on social media, they’re always here to help shape a new feature, they provide a ton of feedback, report bugs, etc.
You’ll naturally want to reward these people for taking the time to do that.
We found out that gamification was a great way of doing so. From the beginning, we’ve had this ritual of “Hera user of the week” - every Friday we would choose a very engaged user and offer them a gift. But user love lies in the details - we don’t offer a random gift. We spend time to find out who is this user, what’s their hobbies and we pick a related gift!
Another way to reward the best contributors is to make them shine on social networks! We found out that this kind of community talks was a great way of doing so.
If you’ve nurtured properly top contributors, they’ll start contributing without sollicitation - they’ll help other members to thrive with the product, will create content without sollicitation, etc.
This is one of the trickier stuff in community building. At the beginning, it’s pretty hard to understand what kind of content your community members want to see.
I recommend trying out different formats: articles, newsletters, product tips, podcasts, product updates, virtual games etc. Little by little, you’ll see what resonates best with your members and adjust. Of course, asking your users what they’d like to see more of will help you iterate quickly and find your voice.
And as always, don’t expect to have an amazing engagement from the start - it takes time and consistency.
I’d recommend posting content every 2 days.
You’re building a product, and you start to have a bunch of people in your community. Leverage them to shape features! It’s a game changer.
You have different ways to use your community to shape your product:
A few examples from Hera community 👇
Something super important: once a feature is released, always mention the users who took time to help you shape it / who asked for the feature and thank them again for shaping the product with you. It’s a nice touch and will make people engaging even more as they see their voice is heard.
Building a community is hard and unpredictable so it’s always a good idea to get help from someone that successfully built one.