Community Building

Companies like Atlassian, Glossier, Datadog, Twitch, dbt, Salesforce, Peloton, and many others have succeeded in large part due to the passionate community they built around their early products. A thriving community creates a sticky and evangelical user base, becomes a great source of ideas, and can even become a clever way to scale customer support (e.g. Airbnb):

1. Should you even be investing in community?

Defining community
Aligning community to business objectives
Aligning community to your members' goals
Who should own community?
What to look for in a community hire

2. What does a community strategy look like?

The three levels of community strategy
Creating community-level goals
Creating tactical-level goals

3. How do you build a meaningful community?

Designing community programs
Launching your online community
Launching a community-led event program

Defining Community

Moderators: keep content clean and organized in the community
Facilitators: start conversations in the community and host discussions
Event organizers: start local chapters and self-organize local or virtual events
Ambassadors: advocate on behalf of the brand
Content contributors: write articles, create videos, or develop other forms of content
Committee members: join a customer advisory board to guide product direction
Power users: achieve status by being the most active members of a platform
Mentors: dedicate time to supporting other customers one on one or in small groups

Aligning community to business objectives

There are six objectives that a community can drive. To help businesses wrap their heads around the options, use the SPACES model:

Support: Create spaces for customers to answer questions and solve problems for each other. Example: Autodesk support community
Product: Create spaces for customers to share product feedback and ideas with each other and with your team. Example: Atlassian feedback section
Acquisition: Build programs that help you grow your pipeline and customer base. Example: Branch's Mobile Growth community
Contribution: Enable members to contribute content, services, or something else of value to a platform you create. Example: Notion Template Gallery
Engagement: Connect customers to each other around their common interests in order to increase customer retention. Example: Culture Amp's Culture First
Success: Enable customers to teach each other how to better use your product and be more successful in their careers. Example: Salesforce's Trailblazer program

Each objective comes with a different set of metrics that you'll likely want to use to measure the business impact of the community:

Aligning community to your members' goals

Your customers are going to join your community because of benefits, not belonging
How to conduct user research about a potential community:
1. Start a spreadsheetof the people that you'll reach out to for an interview.
2. Reach out to 10 of them to start, and ask for a 30-minute call.
3. As you grow your community, make a habit of speaking with members regularly.

Designing community programs

People: Who the program is focused on
Purpose: Why they need this program
Place: Where members will gather
Participation: What members will do
Policy: Guidelines and rules that will shape the experience
Promotion: How members will learn about the program
Performance: What success looks like

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-community