Community as Product
Summary
Community is a very abstract term with little agreement on what precisely it means? Is it a social media account with followers or a Whatsapp group or a Slack channel or a newsletter with subscriber?
The answer varies depending on the context & clarity around questions such as - “Why are you building community?” & “Target Community goals” - can provide the relevant answer. We can also learn from the existing successful organisation’s & communities built to unearth valuable insights.
In this article, we will try to detail out various relevant questions around “Community Building”& “What it takes to succeed?”.
This will help you with a sound strategy on community building with appropriate resources in place & help avoid costly mistakes.
As an agenda, we will cover below major topics :-
Why build Community & clarity on goals?
Possible Risks to avoid
Researching & finalising on “Community Topic”
Audience vs Community
How to detect a failed community?
Approaching Community Building from Scratch
Selecting “Founding Community Members”
Going Live
(Optional)Major Undercurrents making “Community Building” crucial to organisations
Everything as Product
Whenever we imagine Product, we tend to often visualise either
A Physical Product ( Chair, Table , Book) or
Any Digital Solution ( Insurance app, Travel app)
This , though, is a limiting definition. Technically anything that solves a customer pain point qualifies as a product.
So, for example, a customer care number for the elderly, who are not technically savvy, for availing certain services such as Gas booking or grocery booking is a Product. It might not be very exciting to think of product in this manner. But Product thinking , when applied generally across any problem statement ,can become a source of differentiation, competitive advantage & moat.
Consider Amazon .
The product UI is probably not the most visually appealing .
The app might even confuse new users due to plethora of services they offer.
However, the organisation’s laser sharp focus around any touch point that customer has , starting from customer service to delighter experiences around delivery speed is certainly a notch higher compared to competition. The totality of experience for the end customer is how customers experience the Product, not just UI screens.
Therefore, it is indeed a very liberating mindset to try & apply Product thinking on topics which generally are not considered “Product Problems”.
In this article, we will apply Product thinking on “Community Building” for an organisation & deep dive around important variables associated.
This is not a mere thought exercise. Both Products , specially digital solutions , & Communities have very high failure rate & often require pivot based on on how much traction you are getting. Just how a Product solves a customer’s pain point & delivers value, the community helps achieve its members certain goals.
While quite a lot of books are written around how to achieve Product-Market Fit(PMF) & how to build quality Products, very little is available around community building. A lack of framework might lead to faulty execution & bigger risk is not that we did not learn much from the failure. The biggest risks will be that we end up learning the wrong lessons.
The goal of the article will be to attempt to create a framework on how to achieve “Community-Member Fit”- analogous to “Product Market Fit”. As a summary, we will try to find answer to below major items:-
Why Community building?
Similar to how before building a Product, we ask “Why are we building something new & Why Now?” - it is essential to have clarity on “Why build community & Why now?” For product building , the answers could vary - starting from Growth requirement, competitive pressure, new opportunities identified to diversify away from existing line of business etc.
More often than not, there is an intrinsic business need which drives Product building & helps shape the Product constructively.
Community building can be expensive with respect to time, effort & resources. Hence, Lack of clarity around “Why Community” & “Desired concrete goals to aim for” can be very costly for the organisation.
As per CMX’s 2021 Community Report , around 70% organisations surveyed indicated that they “plan to increase investments in already ongoing community building initiatives”. The whopping numbers provide indicative proof of how valuable communities can become to the organisations.
But even more revealing stats were around “how almost 85% organisations find community had positive impact on the organisation ”.
Defining Business Objective
Here are few options available to consider for your business objective:-
If you are a start-up in Pre-PMF stage, chances are “customer insights that help with PMF” is the most relevant.
Put simply, a community can be a shortcut alternative to often lengthy & complex user research wherein the community becomes:-
Channel to collect new customer insights organically.
Develop your Product Roadmap.
Receive direct voluntary feedback from Early Adopters.
While , along with “Generating Customer Insights” , you can try to have other goals listed above as secondary objectives, it is advisable to have one only primary goal to start with for focus on execution & evaluating progress towards that goal effectively.
Business Objective Measurability
Business Objectives should be as measurable as possible. If generating customer insights for a Product is the goal, then the measurability could be :-
Generating at least 5 new Customer Insights from the community within next 6 months on the Product Roadmap.
Or, Launch at least 1 - feature based on insight generated from the community within next quarter.
The measurability metric can be random to start with. But having a generic goal such as “generate Customer Insights” with no semblance of measurability might lead you astray. Your initial goal might turn out to be too ambitious or too low. But that’s ok. The idea is to iterate around the goal subsequently based on new learnings.
Here is a framework to think of communities & How defined Community goals connect to it.
The 4 quadrants indicates :-
Quad 1 :- Few very large communities exists in this quad wherein Community purpose is well defined & understood. Instagram community for photo sharing, Bitcoin community for evangelising it as “store of value” are few examples of this category.
Quad 2 :- In this quadrant often niche & relatively smaller but multiple groups exists. Such groups are often topics of work or Hobby or similar interests. A community of Product manager falls under this category.
Quad 3 :- Communities or groups with no particularly defined purpose such family & friends group fall under this. The goal is to simply stay in touch & communicate with each other.
Quad 4 :- Such groups may have sometimes a stated goal however in practice the members do not implement it. FB groups are filled with such communities.These are often , what you could label as , failed communities.
For an organisation, goal is to be in Quad-2 & avoid ending up in Quad - 4.
Risks of Failure
After you have clarity on goals, ensure that your business goals align with the target prospective community member’s motivations as well.
So, if Customer Insight that leads to PMF is your primary major goal, chances are
People are not too bothered or motivated to try out your bulky new product.
Provide you voluntary feedback help you achieve PMF.
So, if you create a community around a specific new Product , unless the Product addresses a real burning need, chances are very few people will be interested.
Hence, keep your initial specific product idea out of picture while ideating on the community & go wide.
As a PM, getting into the motivations of your user base is crucial for building the Product . Turns out same is applicable for building Community.
Recall that for your target segment :-
Information Overload is a severe problem.
People are already inundated with countless notifications on Whatsapp groups, Telegram Channels, FB groups & Instagram DMs.
Time & Attention is their biggest constraint.
The last thing they need is one more Group.
You will first struggle with getting people to join your group. Even if you do get them to join , the probability of inaction on part of community member is extremely high.
Therefore, just as we do with Product Building , talking to your target segment & understanding their needs, motivations & pain points is mandatory.
Your potential members will join your community & engage ,because of the real value they can imagine they will receive while being part of the community.
During user research, mild interest on part of members is a serious red flag. The initial members have to be really excited for the community to take-off meaningfully.
User Research
Define your “Ideal User Profile” or “Early Adopter” segment for the community.
Try to define a Niche segment, who actually might benefit from the Community since no one else might be catering to them. For example, rather then targeting a generic broad segment of Business owners, you could try - “Handicapped Business owners” or “ Single parent Business owners” or “Business owners passionate about Sustainability” or even “Aspiring business owners”
Identify at least 10 such individuals on diverse parameters such as Job, Age, Location, Gender etc.
Request for an Interview & note down insights.
Conduct the Interview. In the interview, you may communicate if you already have a community topic in mind. Else, try & gauge what they might be most motivated to join & contribute towards.
Synthesise the learnings & finalise on purpose of the community.
Invite identified members to be founding members of the Community(Not more than 10).
Here are a few questions to consider as part of user research.
Does the goals & aspirations of this member align with the community’s goal/existing member’s goals? If not, what are their motivations?
Which major pain point(Not more than 3) the individual believes will be resolved if he/she becomes part of the community? It should closely align with how you see the pain points the community will actually solve for.
For example, If a business owner is looking to acquire new customers , whereas your community is built around skilling up marketing skills for business owners, there is an obvious mismatch & risks of spams.
Is the member already part of any community around the same pain point? If yes, then what was her experience like? If no, then why she did not look for any such solution? Past action is a major sign of motivation. If the member has not looked for solution around a pain point, chances are pain point is not a major one.
What are the major issues/objections/constraints this member might have that prevents him/her from participating ( Too busy in job & community is around a hobby topic , mild interest in topic) ?
What role the member visualises for itself once in community ( Give tips, receive tips, Ask questions , Mere observer, Share content & News etc.)?
The risks entailed in user interviews is not that you do not get enough inputs. The real challenge is how do you separate signal from the noise. The risks of wrong takeaways is quite high, which is way more harmful than having no inputs at all.
You can read more on User Interview risks here, if interested.
I myself had a pain point around acquiring new PM skills recently.
Since learning from other PMs can be helpful, i joined quite a few communities . Here is how, in my view, the community map looks like.
Few groups started out quite good i.e. they started out in Quad -1 , but then the sheer notifications & content led to FOMO(Fear of Missing Out) & Information overload. I quit almost all such groups or muted them since i felt there was too much noise & not much value. Fellow PMs were more interested in promoting themselves & getting a new Job , instead of acquiring new skills.
While starting out with community building from scratch,
If “incorrect topic is selected” for community building or “unsuitable early members” are added, your community will likely end -up in quad - 3. This is why it is vital to strive for “Community Topic & the respective member” fit.
Avoid asking close friends & relatives to join. They will join out of sheer obligation & will not be able to sustain activity within community for long.
A stranger’s vote of confidence in the community is what we should aim for directly. This provides concrete proof on Community topic selected with certainty.
After you have few members in & healthy engagement is visible, then risks around moderation & control might land your community in quad-2.Therefore, team should decide if growing the community is even required. As long as goal of generating Customer Insights is getting achieved, high growth rate in members may not be required. Quantity does not equal quality.
The most passionate communities have extremely close connections & a sense of belonging within members. It is always easier to achieve it within smaller groups.
Currently the only group i am active in is because -
Initially the cohort size i was part of had only 25 members.
The conversations were quite intense, engaging & extremely helpful.
The diverse backdrop of PMs was a real boon since we had variety on inputs on similar topic.
It appears someone in the background had done very extensive work on creating that cohort mix to ensure quality discussions.
A Brief Detour - Audience vs Community
The terminologies Audience & Community are often used interchangeably in conversations. However, they are not exactly same.
An audience is -
group of people who listen to you or give you attention in one to many fashion.
Generally an individual or an organisation is assisting other people directly with certain cadence of interaction & giving them some value directly .
For example, a singer has an audience. A radio or TV show has an audience. There is often a central item or individual ( Artists, Radio Show.Franchise etc.) which attracts this audience.
An individual on Twitter with followers has an audience since people opt in to listen to his/her views while the individual broadcast his tweets in one to many manner.
In Contrast, a Community is a -
group of people wherein individuals come together with certain innate motivations & interact with each other to achieve certain goals.
Compared to an Audience , wherein Individual or organisation is directly helping people, within a Community, the Individual or the organisation is a mere conduit & it creates suitable environment wherein people can help each other effectively.
For example, a Reddit group on sharing stock trading tips amongst each other qualifies as a community. Often the most successful & powerful communities tend to be organic bottom-up groups since the goals of the individuals align perfectly with the overall Community goal.
Communities are scalable due to in-built network effects.
As you might already be thinking, an audience can very well & often evolves into community, either organically because of intensity of the audiences involved or deliberately with encouragement .
Examples of such phenomena include Harry Potter’s Community, Barcelona(Any Football Club) Community, a former Product Manager writer own community on Slack wherein members discuss latest articles from the writer.
What does a failed community look like?
A community wherein desired goals have not been met is a failed community. Such communities still may have 1000s of members. FB groups are full of spammy useless groups on every topic imaginable. But only a fraction of them have any regular interaction going on & provide any real value to fellow members.
Therefore, to reiterate, be very clear on goals you have & evaluate progress towards that goal with certain regularity.
The goals ought to be as measurable as possible.
Here are a few reasons why communities fail :-
Lack of clarity on “Why build Community”. Such communities will probably not even get-off to a decent start. Recall some Zombie groups you might be part of wherein there is hardy any posts for months( ISB Batch PM group for me falls under this).
Limited user research & lack of focus on motivations of members , specially first founding members.
Lack of clarity & convincing enough communication on “Why members should join?”.
Sometimes even if goals & purpose are well defined , the group members don’t adhere to them in spirit.
Lack of effective moderation.
Scaling too fast with limited control on who gets in & drowning members in noise.
Cognitive load on part of new members just in ( Too many notifications, lack of context on how to start).Just check how many Whatsapp groups/Telegram channels/FB groups you are part of that are muted or inactive.
Possible ways to Approach Community Building
Once you have clarity on Community Purpose & Goals, a broad community strategy is required.
To start with, it is useful to ask yourself - “How do you want to go about building the community?”.
There are 2 broad approaches :-
“Build an audience and then transform it into community.”
“Build a Community from scratch & generate Customer Insights from organic ongoing conversations & engagement metrics”.
Either of the approach will require different roadmap & tactics & both have its pros & cons. In addition, you will need to develop different capabilities internally within the organisation that caters to the selected approach.
Post clarity on approach to take, ask yourself below quick questions & finalise on.
Internal Capability Required ( Resources)
Community Strategy horizon ( Quarterly you can start with)
Objectives & Goals for the upcoming quarter - Based on internal capability & at what stage you are in( Starting from scratch vs around 100 members in the community already ). The quarterly objectives should connect to your broader business objectives defined earlier.
Once you have finalised on above questions, the specifics can be answered such as :-
Channels to start with & focus on( Slack, Website, Discord, FB).
External programs to organise/attend.
Measuring growth & engagement.
Based on quarterly objectives, you will apply varied tactical moves & attempt to measure impact.
While it might be very difficult to exactly measure CMF(Community Member Fit), the idea is that “you will know it when you see it”.
Healthy engagement & positive feedback from community members will give you good enough hint if we are headed in the right direction. Ideally a satisfied community member should result in useful insights. But an inactive & annoyed member base would certainly not help. Therefore, tactical focus should be around useful metrics of engagement. Stats such as MAU & DAU are good enough to start with. As you grow, new member activation rate becomes important.
Few of the tactical ideas to consider are :-
Hosting session with certain relevant Guests
Connecting with Inactive Members
Creating Community guidelines for New members
Posting articles to stimulate conversation in groups
Help members set-up brainstorming sessions amongst themselves
Host AMA (Ask Me Anything ) Sessions
Sending “Community Summary” to members weekly /daily to avoid FOMO
Every tactical attempt should be measured broadly to gauge if it is worth repeating the same tactic.
Going Live
Ideally when you build a Product, you often do beta launch. The aim to get feedback & iterate quickly. However, “who do you take feedback from” is as important as the feedback itself. The goal is to always define your early adopter segment & consider their feedback only.
In Community building too, the Go Live ought to be limited & very special members should be invited.
In most communities, be it small ones or large ones such as twitter,
A very small group of people(<5%) create content for the rest of the passively consuming members( 95%). Such users are called “Power users” in social media parlance.
For example on Twitter, i personally fall under the passively consuming content category & i am probably not the suitable candidate to be founding member of any community.
The founding members, thus, must be power users. Identifying such power users & inviting them to be founding members can be a great organic catalysts for growth & engagement. The very first few members will set the tone of the community interaction. Therefore, it is advisable to be very intentional with Early Adopter segment for your community.
What could be their profile look like?
Someone who has credibility relevant as per Community Objectives.
Someone who is truly enthused with being the founding member & sees personal value in becoming part of it.
Someone whose past background confirms their ability to create, assist & engage.
Some who has enough time on their hand eagerness to maintain & grow the community.
The early start should be Niche & Small. Work closely with your Power users/Early Adopters/Founding Members before opening it up for others.
In all the success stories , starting from larger communities such as IndieHackers(Community of Entrepreneurs) to small Niche communities such as Knoetic ( Community for Chief People Officer’s) , the key has been starting small.
In Indiehackers for example, the founder had done extensive research on possible profiles & written very thought personal mails to 150 entrepreneurs to become part of the community. Organisations should put in extra effort in selecting such members & then go the extra mile to make them feel special. Get your CEO to write invite communications, if feasible. Make them feel empowered , in whatever way you can.
This is the only time you will be able to measure & control how the community is evolving.You can deliberately try to give it a certain cultural mould. Generally the founding members personality tends to shape the community immensely. Take active feedback from founding members & incorporate the inputs as to how they would want the community to evolve.
A significant gap between the motivations of founding members & organisation should be avoided. Also try to keep any financial incentives out of the relationship between your organisation & the founding members.
Founding members, if aligned correctly, will be your brand ambassador for the community & must be empowered as such. The organisation at the very best should server as mere catalysts & spring broad for creating value.
Once you start growing, it will be virtually impossible to have any control.
Testing out your tactical ideas on small scale is better since you can repeat the same with scale.
What are things you should try to communicate to the founding members?
The communication to founding members needs to be convincing. The below covers a templates of major variables to consider.
You cam take founding members inputs to modify it , if relevant.
Scaling Tactics
One of the most innovative ways to scale your community is to let your Community Members hosts events & Supply them with relevant support for the same. Duolingo, for example, has only 3 community members but they conduct over 2.5 k+ event monthly. Similarly, finimize, a finance community, hosts over 100 + physical event every month but has only 2 members in their community team.
In the early days, you can yourself be the conduit for such events. But gradually you can start empowering your existing members with Skills & Tools to organise such events. Similar to PMF, get it to work on small scale first before expanding it to more members.
Optional Reading
Major Undercurrents
Community Building is still presumed to be reserved for large organisations with mature products wherein community works to enhance the brand further. Generally, Community is not considered a core activity in such organisations. Often organisations start doing it simply because competition is doing it. There is an inherent mismatch within communities of such large organisations. The reason stems from the fact that the Brand towers over each individual member & members are not empowered enough.
Though there are some major undercurrents in technology world, specially around building the right Product & Distributing it with low enough CAC(Customer Acquisition Cost), that might transfer Community Building from the edges to core of every major technical organisation, specially for startups .
Why do i think so?
The 3 major undercurrent driving this are :-
Product Building is getting increasingly commoditised. With increasing adoption of NoCode Tools - Marketers, PMs, Operational people, basically anybody with an idea, will be able to easily build out MVPs.
There is heavy consolidation in Digital Ad markets. FB, Google & Amazon to an extent are the few viable channels to reach large audiences to test out new Product ideas. Post Covid, ad rates are increasing & CAC for such inorganic channels is unlikely to go down. Distribution will increasingly become the major bottleneck . Even a good product with unsustainable CAC will likely not survive. The “M” in PMF will probably require lot more deep thought from the beginning.
There is increasing concern around privacy. From regulators & end customers, more & more are people becoming wary of relentless unaccountable data collection & monetisation of the same by Ad companies. This trend will likely also impact effectiveness of digital ads in coming years & make reaching customers difficult.
This leaves out organic customer acquisition channel as the only alternate to consider.
This trend is part of of an ongoing shift in building product that has evolved over last 3 decades.
Early Decade( 90s-Mid 2000s)
If you were an entrepreneur in late 90s, here is all you needed to build a Product.
Raise Capital.
Buy Servers & Other Hardwares. Set-up & maintain the same(High Fixed Costs CAPEX).
Hire Engineers.
The major market was around B2B use cases. Consumer market was too small.
This resulted in :-
Limited Competition :- The high Capex requirement meant only few organisations could build out the Product to begin with & ship it successfully.
Waterfall Model :- The Product implementation model that evolved to support this model was Waterfall wherein at one go all requirements would be gathered & built out at one go.
Distribution :- Internet was too slow & had limited base. PC market was bigger in comparison & that too around Business use cases. Hence, Software products were installed with CDs. This implied having physical retail presence across the target market was required. This further limited the ability of new players to enter market, build Products & distribute it with low enough CAC to create a viable business.
Microsoft was the clear winner of this era.
Last Decade( Mid 2000s- Now)
Subsequently, few major events transpired.
PC market crossed over into Consumer market increasingly.
Internet improved and was accessible to large enough consumer market.
AWS had become operational.
As a result,
The high Capex costs from requirement list got largely eliminated.
There was a new consumer market to cater to with new use cases.
Engineers were still required.
Distribution mechanism shifted online however it still was unorganised bulky pop-up ads & prone to frauds/Theft.
However, this new era :-
Made building consumer companies increasingly attractive.
Since product was accessible from a browser as SAAS (Software as a Service) & need not be installed within the PC manually , enabled that entrepreneurs could update changes from back-end quickly. This led to the rise of “Agile Model” wherein motto was to build something quick , throw it out in market & iterate quickly to reach PMF.
More and more new entrepreneurs started entering the market.
Twitter, FB, Google were clear major winners of this era.
Post 2020s
As this Reforge column puts it aptly:-
As mentioned above, there are new undercurrents active today that will likely alter existing widely accepted practices for building the Product.
The mobile market is way bigger compared to PC & there are primarily 2 major channels to reach end customers ( Apple App Store & Google Play Store). Such consolidation already costs new startups up to 30% in taxes to the duopoly.
As building MVPs will not need Engineers always, more & more products will be built out & launched.
Customers time & attention have become the biggest constraint.
Trust will become the rarest commodity for startups to acquire from new consumers. Community provides such an alternate in this new eco-system.
In this era, the teams that earn the trust of end consumers will also likely build out great products & , more crucially, will be able to distribute with low enough CAC.
In such as an environment, building a community around specific needs , generating insights from such community & building-out products for such members can be a viable alternative to attempt.
Global Trends
While we do not direct insights into how some of the best organisations in the world are thinking on the topic of community building, we do have some credible signals in actions few of them have taken :-
Stripe has been known for its quality blog & operates a media arm called Stripe Press. Tt has also acquired “InDieHackers- A community of Entrepreneurs”. It is important to recall that Startups are major client base for Stripe.
Twitter Acquired “Revue - A Newsletter bundling platform” early this year.
HubSpot acquired a newsletter called “Hustle with 1.5 m subscribers”.
This twitter thread here provides detailed insights into how some of the largest organisations & leading thinkers view Community going forward along with few more acquisitions around the theme of community.