Minumum Viable Community: A Framework for Building

Community is a feeling of fellowship with other people, as a result of sharing specific common attitudes, interests, and goals. It’s no secret that community is my jam. I’ve written about it in several posts, like this one on building a minimum viable community, this one on preparing for launch, and this one on why the time is now for community. I spent the last few years of my career building communities for coworking spaces, enterprises, and entrepreneurs. In all of these pursuits, I tried to answer a few focused questions in order to create a community plan of action.

Over the last several months, I’ve had the joy of partnering with companies that I mentor and MATH portfolio companies to design their minimum viable communities. It was incredible. I knew that I had to bottle my knowledge and experience so I could share it with a wider audience.

Behold, my framework for building a community. These are the questions and thoughts I work through with founders when they are building their minimum viable community.

What do you think of the framework? What is missing? Feel free to jump into the comments or find me on twitter @MissElisaS.

Venture Curious: Marketing is Dead, Lead with Community

Ahoy Connect, 2022

This is part 2 in a 3 part series on community. Check out part 1 on why community is on the rise here.

---

How companies and customers interact is evolving. Community is a differentiator, especially in complex sales environments because it informs so many functions of a business

Communities, if executed correctly, provide tremendous value to businesses by driving or nurturing leads, increasing customer retention, improving products, creating content, and/or increasing engagement. A community, itself, can also be monetized by effectively facilitating conversations and connections amongst members. The low cost to implement and maintain a community makes it an attractive strategy or business model.
Companies large and small are turning to communities to engage and retain customers. Communities are proactive because they encourage engagement and activity. Marketing, by contrast, is reactive because it is past data of pushed content. Today, 75% of large companies and 40% of small companies have at least one online community and 86% of companies see it as critical to their business growth. Startups, in particular, are seeing community as a competitive advantage because, according to the CMX 2020 Industry Report, 79% of startups are hiring a dedicated community manager within the first year of company existence. The shift towards community is happening and there is a lot happening to build out this new function.

There are many companies that are employing community strategy or building community products. Through research and my experience as a community leader, I’ve defined specific areas that I want to develop as part of my personal investment thesis. They are the following:

1. Startups that build tools to better measure and facilitate community will outperform. 

2. Startups that build a “go-to-community” strategy will outperform. 

3. Startups that build community products for niche communities will outperform.

Community Relationship Management Tools

Commsor, 2021

Community touches many parts of a business including, marketing, sales, product development, and customer service/success. The space for community tools overlaps heavily with marketing, events, and social media tools as well as including specialty tools for specific community purposes. Community managers have to shift between tools to complete manual processes in order to keep the community running when their time is best spent working with members.

Two of the top frustrations for community managers at companies large and small are that it’s hard to quantify the value of community and all of the efforts today are largely manual. In fact, 45% of CMX 2020 Industry Report respondents say that they don’t know how to calculate the financial and business impact on a community. With tools for community spread across social networking, email marketing, CRM systems, chat applications, and virtual event platforms, it’s difficult for small teams to determine the financial impact. It also requires many manual processes. These frustrations leave room for innovation, particularly for startups that focus on ROI and process automation improvements for both enterprise and small businesses.

The following companies are examples of how startups are solving these problems:

Commsor

Solution: Connects disparate community tools into one platform in order to determine how your community engages and the value your community provides to the business

• CRM insight into community members

• Analytics on community channels and activities

• Process automation

Commsor is an example of a startup that is working on these problems. The company was founded in 2019 by Mac Reddin, a serial entrepreneur who founded a wildly popular community for minecraft as a teen. The software connects hundreds of disparate community tools into one platform in order to determine how your community engages and the value your community provides to the business. On the surface it may look like a CRM. The key difference is that it tracks both the member’s impact on the company and how the member’s impact in the broader community. The company is focused on B2B/Enterprise customers. In addition to their core product, they run a community for community managers which includes ongoing education. Commsor also started a community VC fund in conjunction with Felicis Ventures, one of their investors.    

Ahoy Connect

Solution: Connects disparate community tools into one platform in order to provide data visibility, gain insight and act on community opportunities, and determine ROI

• Connects existing tools

• Monitor cross channel health

• CRM for community members with analytics for action

• Process automation  

• ROI calculation

AhoyConnect is another startup that wants to be the “HubSpot of Community”. The software determines the ROI on a community by connecting community tools and systems together with other functional areas, like customer success, marketing, or finance, to determine how community impacts the bottom line. The founder, Tomas Jasovsky, is a designer and product manager by training that has worked in tech for the last 10 years. Today, it is a “closed” platform, working closely with 10 initial partners with hopes to open up to the public in early 2022.

EcoMap

Solution: Dynamic data set of resources in ecosystems with additional tools to track user behavior

• Use proprietary technologies to dynamically update ecosystem data 

• Can customize for the customer need

• Currently working with direct marketing organizations and universities

• Closed first enterprise contract with Meta where they mapped AR/VR resources. Contract included partnering with HP, Snap, Qualcomm, and other big tech firms.

Ecomap wants to be the platform that powers ecosystems. The founders, Pava LaPere and Sherrod Davis, set out to solve a problem that Pava had as a student who ran the entrepreneurship center. She used her training in data science to dynamically map entrepreneurship resources in her school’s ecosystem. Today, they are mapping ecosystems for NGOs and enterprise customers to improve connectivity within communities. They are currently members of the TechStars Equitech cohort in Baltimore. 

Community as a strategic advantage

One of the key findings I’ve had in writing this piece is that community is much more than a go-to-market strategy because community encompasses more than sales and marketing, it includes product development, customer service, and customer success. Because it can impact so many parts of a business, it can be, on its own, an effective business strategy. Products and services that are inherently collaborative benefit the most from employing this strategy. The magic of bringing a group with common interests together to learn from each other only enhances the features and use of a product or service. All of the following companies have focused on community as a strategic advantage for their business and have seen significant results from it.

Ask Zeta

Solution: Financial education and budgeting application for couples

• Creative content on how to manage finances for modern couples

• Connect all your accounts to one system and control visibility

• “Banking experience” backed by Piermont Bank for joint accounts

Ask Zeta is a financial education company that is focused on couples. Couples today manage finances very differently than in the past. Aditi Shekar taught personal finance and understood this herself, so she built Ask Zeta. The company started as an education and budgeting app and has recently started integrating banking experiences. Community is their key to growth. Ask Zeta meets customers where they are already living on the internet by working with influencers and interacting on social media sites from Instagram to Reddit. They also produce content focused on building financial success as a couple.  

Data.world

Solution: The data catalog for metadata and data management 

• Data is easily discoverable

• Functionality for self-service analytics

• Easy collaboration and access to data

• Has flexibility to work within data governance rules

Data.world set out to liberate data across enterprises so that all data consumers can leverage data and analytics in decision making. Community has been central to their business strategy from the beginning because the majority of data catalogs are technical and difficult for a nontechnical employee to utilize. This isn’t Brett Hurt’s, the founder and CEO, first rodeo. He knew how critical it would be to build a strong community around their product and made a key community hire, Patrick McGarry, former Developer Evangelist for RedHat, early in the company’s development. They established an open community where people can easily share and analyze data. They wrapped this community with events, both online and offline, to drive users to the platform. They also worked with partners to share open data sets on the data.world platform for users to access. By building a community around their product, customers could see how the product could benefit their organization, which resulted in more inbound from prospects.

Community as a product

Belonging, the desire to feel connected to others, is central to human existence. Communities provide this sense of belonging and centralize resources for members for mutual gain. Web 2.0 brought resources and people, but they are silo-ed and disconnected. For that reason, people are willing to pay to join private communities with like minded individuals and centralized resources. Technology is an efficient way to scale these communities and entrepreneurs are taking advantage. The following companies sell community as their product. 

On Deck

Solution: Highly curated cohort-based learning communities for individuals at an inflection point in their careers

• Focus on careers paths that have been created in the last 10 years

• Leverage an inflection point in one person’s career, like promotion or starting a company, as a way to build trust

• Built a large community of brand promoters

On Deck educates and empowers community members to achieve career success across professions. The company uses cohort-based learning to upskill professionals in their area of expertise, from startup founders, to data scientists, EdTech and life sciences. Founder Erik Torenburg started the business as an events community for startups. He refined the idea to become a curation business, with selected participants, and focused ruthlessly on alumni NPS. On Deck created a consistent experience with highly curated cohorts whose participants were bound to provide value to one another. They focus on the outcomes of the participants and build a hype circle around them. This community provides quantifiable value to its participants and it’s widely shared all over the internet. The creation of a highly curated learning community in specific professions has made this one of the fastest growing companies over the last year. 

Board.org
Solution: Closed curated B2B communities for executive level professionals in roles that are being created due to new technology and market trends

• Started as an association for social media and saw opportunities in CSR, Data, DEIB, and other emerging functions

• Focus is directly on businesses, not individuals

• Create a curated space for information and best practice sharing, ensuring that each member adds value

Board.org is a confidential, vendor-free, peer-to-peer membership communities for people leading change at the world’s biggest companies. The company started in 2007 when social media leaders at fortune500 companies were being overwhelmed with vendor inquiries and needed a private, confidential way to share information. Socialmedia.org became the model for other communities the company created around data, corporate social responsibility, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. In these communities, participants have access to resources and best practices used by other large brands without the fear of being pitched by a vendor. Because confidentiality is central to community success, participants share freely about plans for execution and some of the biggest challenges in their organization. This allows for high quality content and learning for all participants.

Poolsuite

Solution: A community that promises endless summer vibes

• Music player that combines the vibes of Miami Beach with 80s nostalgia 

• Launched a sunscreen that amplifies the brand essence of endless summer

It was a drab winter day in Scotland and Marty Bell, founder of Poolsuite, was listening to sexy poolside music when he had the idea to combine the music with 80’s beach videos. A designer by training, Marty gathered a group of friends to design a retro interface to listen to the music and watch the videos. It spread across the internet like wildfire because “Marty Bell knows how to make shit go viral” according to Worklife.VC. After years of being a side project, Marty decided to pursue Poolsuite full-time in 2019. In 2020, Poolsuite launched a sunscreen and sundries line, Vacation, and Jacuzzi Club, a private community for creative business leaders. It was clear, people loved the brand and wanted to be a part of the community as it grew from a cult favorite into a full blown community. 

Web3 was the obvious next step. In November of 2021, the company launched an executive membership program where it raised nearly $2.5M by selling 2,500 NFTs. These NFTs gave members access to exclusive parties and content at Art Basel, but this is only the beginning. They also plan on launching their own token to grow the creative community. This community is a great example of how web3 can better enable communities to thrive without traditional venture capital investment.

These are just a few examples of companies that are innovating in community. This is by no means an exhaustive list of innovations that are being made in community across industries. Community solutions will continue to evolve and I’m excited to see how this impacts company growth.

What community themes and companies are you most excited about? Sound off in the comments.

Stay tuned for my third installment where I dive deep into Web3 and community in a few weeks.

Venture Curious: NOW is the Time for Community

This is the first post in a deep dive on community as an area of investment. Make sure to check out parts II and III.

What is community?

A group of people with common interests that are living and working together, on a grassroots level, for an individual and collective benefit.

• A good community has:

  • A clear purpose that benefits the members

  • Rules for engagement to keep the conversation relevant

  • Has a dedicated space for information sharing

  • An opportunity to learn from and work with other members in the community for collective benefit

  • Instills a sense of belonging

Communities are essential to businesses because they provide tangible benefits that impact the bottom line. Healthy communities openly share information with each other that can increase customer lifetime value, increase sales leads, lower customer acquisition costs, and result in more growth for your organization. While they have existed to help us prosper as a society, they haven’t always existed in business. 

Communities provide a space for users of a product or service to share information amongst each other. Historically, this started with John Deere in 1895 creating a publication called The Furrow Magazine to help farmers learn best practices, tips for using their equipment, and new strategies to succeed in business. Farmers read stories about other farmers in over 17 regions. They discovered that it’s more effective to have customers tell the story of their products and services. 

Communities in business have evolved immensely since the founding of The Furrow. What was once a one way conversation between brand and customer became a two-way conversation due to digital innovation. Social media shifted the power structure between businesses and customers, by letting the customers give real time feedback. Smart phones allow people to interact with a brand and each other instantaneously. Consumers could forgo the trip to the mall by ordering online. Together, these advances in technology built digital communities that provided a space for customers to experience a brand together. This fundamentally changed the way that businesses sell to customers. People began to long for connection in a world of endless communication channels and sales began to take place within an ecosystem.  

People are searching for connection.

Web 2.0 opened the doors to sharing between people and businesses. Customers and companies leverage new technologies to communicate quickly and directly with each other and other stakeholders. Content is king – from blog posts, to webinars, to paid influencer ads.  We are spending more time online, particularly among Gen Z and Millenials. People are bombarded every day to buy and people’s behavior online is changing as a result. The share of people who use social media to document their lives has decreased to 20% in 2019 from 27% in 2014. So what are people doing when they are spending so much time online?

Finding connection. GlobalWebIndex and Reddit conducted a study in 2020, mid pandemic, to study online communities. They discovered that participants yielded more value from communities than social media. Communities made users feel more self confident, more validated, and less intimidated. What’s more, is that people don’t mind brand’s building communities on existing communities sites or their own. 

Through more meaningful conversations with a narrower group of individuals, communities encourage meaningful connections. Traditional marketing that pushes messaging on consumers does not work in this context. Businesses had to adjust by encouraging conversation. This caused a shift in selling for ecosystems of buyers and stakeholders.

The shift to ecosystem selling.

Sales, today, happen in an ecosystem. Selling is social thus increasing the complexity of sales regardless of the customer type or business model. The ecosystem participants are different institutions or groups that have common interest in a set of products and services and all can influence a buying decision. These participants are all interacting and communicating constantly, thanks to advances in technology. To employ an ecosystem selling strategy requires participants to build relationships and establish alignment with one another in order to succeed. One to one communication and relationships shifted into multiple communication channels across stakeholders. Community as a strategy allows businesses to address all channels and participants, regardless of goals.

An early example of a very successful company that leveraged its ecosystem for sales is Salesforce. They work with many ecosystem partners to sell add-on products it’s marketplace that deepen the customization of an instance, therefore deepening the dependency on their products. Salesforce supports communities to increase user participation and understanding of a product. They even build channel sales agreements with partners. Partners gain customers and Salesforce creates deeper relationships with customers, everyone wins. 

The reason why community is so effective for ecosystems is that community reinforces the value of the product to as many players in the ecosystem at once. Community members gain knowledge and build relationships with one another. The collective benefit of community instills belonging in members, which is sorely needed in today’s world.

Both ecosystem selling and changing consumer sentiment make the market primed for community. The time to invest in community is now.

Stay tuned for next week where I will dig into a few areas and companies that I am excited about in the community space.

Resources:

This report from Pew Research on online behavior was invaluable.

This report from Reddit on community adoption was also extremely helpful.

This journal article from the Journal of Marketing was was the foundation for ecosystem selling.

Minimum Viable Community Part 2: Preparing to Launch

This is the second post in a series of posts on community. Check out the first post here.

Community building takes time and careful planning. Launch is your time to shine or fail, so you have to do it carefully and methodically. You’ve done the strategic work to define the purpose, where the community will live, key archetypes, rules, and started to engage plants. Before you breathe life into the community, there is a bit more preparation you have to do.

First, you must build critical mass.

You identified and signed on your plants to join your community. You may remember from part one that these are people who are highly engaged and represent the key archetypes. You now need to get a critical mass of people like them. The first way to do this is simple, ask your plants. Who do they know in their lives who would gain benefit from being a part of your community? The second way to find a critical mass is to go to them. Where do they live on the internet today? Are they having conversations on social media? Are they hiding out in their jobs, wistfully wishing for someone like them to talk to? Are they at industry conferences or specific events? Find these archetypes in the wild and pitch your community to them. Gather a list and update them along the way as you start to build critical mass.

But how much is a critical mass?

This is a consulting answer -- it depends. I’ve launched communities with 15 member companies and I’ve launched communities with hundreds of people. You need to think about the value you provide to members and how you are going to deliver it. For example, if you wanted to build a community for entrepreneurs (key archetype) to share (value) best practices through a (delivery) question and answer forum, you would need hundreds of participants. The delivery method is such that people won’t be checking it all the time, so you need more people to be able to participate in the discussion. If you had a community dedicated to data analytics for the oil and gas industry that held monthly live discussions to share learnings from specific initiatives, you could launch with a group of ten experts. The content focus is narrow, the delivery is more infrequent, and you will still find a range of experiences amongst experts from different organizations. If you can confidently say that enough of your waitlist will participate when you launch, you have a critical mass.

Second, prepare topics for initial discussions.

But wait, Elisa, that means that it’s not an organic conversation. Yes, I know preparing topics for initial discussions means that it isn’t *truly* community driven, but you have to start somewhere. A church may only have a few members, but they have a guide of what they cover and what they don't. You’ve created the rules, boundaries, and limitations for your community. Use those along with community discovery interviews, think of these as customer discovery interviews for your community, to create a list of key topics that people in the community want to discuss. This could be something that a plant is an expert in that they can share with the community. It could be a topic that a lot of folks in the community struggle with that another archetype in the community can share best practices. Make a list of those topics, stack rank, and start assigning dates and people to be involved in these discussions. Schedule these discussions with your plants and others who may be interested in your community so that you can ensure participation. By preparing topics and ensuring a lively discussion, you will show quick value to members. 

Finally, you have to build the hype. 

FOMO is real and you want people who are inside and outside of your community to feel that if they don’t participate at launch, that they are missing out. As you are building the waitlist, you are conducting community discovery interviews with members. Use the information they provide on where they see community value to build your messaging and communications plan. Get quotes from members and sprinkle them throughout your communications as social proof of what you are building. Your plants are central to building hype. Work with them to promote some of the key discussions you may be having and what value they are excited to get from other members. Finally, over communicate before launch to both people on your initial launch list and the broader community you want to reach. 

With all this in mind, you’ll be as prepared as you can be for the launch of your community. In my next installment of this community building series, I’ll talk about the launch and how to obtain and maintain engagement from your community along with key metrics.

If there is anything that I missed, feel free to jump into the comments or find me on twitter at @MissElisaS. 

Building a Minimum Viable Community

Community has supercharged many of the biggest movements and companies in the startup ecosystem in the past few years. Tools like discord servers are growing exponentially, serving online gamers, NFT enthusiasts, and even big brands. More and more companies are using community as a way to better connect with their audience and gain feedback on their products or services. This movement isn’t going away, in fact, many see it as the future to a company’s competitive advantage.

All of the information and tools available can be paralyzing. As in most cases with startups, it’s best to think lean and start now. 

This post is the first in an ongoing series of posts about building, growing, and serving a community for your startup.

Like content, building community is a long-tail play that will require consistent effort.

I like to use the following framework when building a minimum viable community:

1. Decide whether community is your go-to-market strategy or your product. The strategies for these two are quite different. One you will monetize and one you will not. For the purpose of today’s exercise, we focus on the go-to-market strategy. 

2. Define who the key archetypes are that will be a part of your community. You must have exclusivity to get value out of the community because you want to keep the conversation focused and members to realize benefits from the focused conversation.  Inviting everyone without having clear screening criteria is an invitation to chaos. Focused, specific conversations drive more meaningful value to participants than general platitudes. A key takeaway is that it may not be JUST the customer who is part of the community, it may be service providers, influencers, and other stakeholders in your customer’s ecosystem.

3. Define where and how people will interact with one another. This could be through a newsletter and events using a tool like Luma. It could be a slack group that poses consistent questions to engage members in discussion. This could even be a weekly call of experts in a specific area that get to discuss some of the biggest challenges in their lives. Define how you want people to interact and in what format that you can consistently maintain over a period of time. Remember, keep this lean and simple to start.

4. Define rules, boundaries, and limitations of interaction. Determine what content is in scope and out of scope for the community so you can keep the conversation focused. I’ll say it again, focused, specific conversations drive more meaningful value to participants than general platitudes. Create a list of content that is in and out of scope so you can ruthlessly prioritize these discussions and delete the others. Make sure that you have this list and methods for redirecting the conversation to something more valuable for whatever format you will be delivering to the community. 

5. Identify and engage individuals who will be top contributors and super fans. I like to call these people plants. Just like you plant questions in a crowd for lectures or laughs at a comedy show, you want to plant both brand super fans and individuals with specific areas of expertise in your community. Think of this like a brand ambassador program where they will become de facto community leaders by modeling the behavior you want in the community. Recruit these plants to be your initial top users that will actively spark discussion and answer questions. By modeling the behavior you want in the community, the plants will spur participation from other members, even if it is a heavy lift at first. This may mean that you have to reach out to people in the community to participate behind the scenes, that is normal.

Now that you have all the framework together for a community, it’s time to start building. In my next post, I’ll talk about how to execute on this framework and what key metrics you should be tracking in order to drive growth for your company.

What am I missing? Feel free to jump into the comments to let me know any other things that you would include in a framework to build a minimum viable community.