When you hear "Build a Community"
Put down the megaphone and listen up...
Hey Friends!
When we were at Startup Grind, one of the hottest topics was building *community*.
But the founders touting it made it sound very much like a megaphone-type activity. It was something they did at people, not with people.
In today’s episode, we do a deep dive on how to get community right:
When we first got into B2B SaaS a decade ago, community meant everything from social media to field marketing to customer support. It ran the gamut of all non-revenue producing, relationship activities.
And that’s what's happened with “community” as a word.
It never settled into a consistent definition among all of those practices. Founders and marketers use it to mean whatever it meant at their previous company.
→ Rather than all using our own individual definitions and piecemeal tactics, zoom back up to what community is to human beings. Think about how a philosophy of building relationships and belonging translates into business practices.
The goal of community is to make people feel that they belong. Community building says, “You belong here. This [content, product, event] is for you, because I understand deeply who you are. Here are other people like us. Everything that we’ve created is bespoke to help people like us.”
If you’re in scale mode and only focused on efficiency, you’ll miss on building community every time. Especially the beginning of community, everything is unscalable and everything is slow. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Do it right, and you’ll create a group of fanatic customer advocates who will talk about your company every chance they get.
Share today’s episode with someone that needs to update their definition of community.
(Let’s be honest, you know exactly who needs it…)
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