What Makes a Good Community?
What Makes a Good Community?
So I think it's really easy when it comes to creating a B2B community for a
vendor, such as myself,
to say, let's spin up a Slack channel and invite our customers to it. And money
will just come
flowing in, right? Like, it's really easy to look at good communities that just
happen to be in Slack
and think that that's what it is. But that is not what it is. And I think, you
know,
some problems with these communities can start happening when basically like
the goal is to drive
sales because that is by definition the opposite of what community is.
Community is about, in my
opinion, it's about giving and creating a venue for people to connect with
others and expecting
literally nothing in return. A bad community is after you invite your customers
, the conversation
is about your product and features in your product, which that's just not... No
one cares, right?
Like, no one cares about your product. Like, the only reason they might care
about your product
is if it helps them in their life. And, you know, being so... So myopic is to
focus on your product.
It's just against the spirit of community because it's like... It's all taken
no give.
Another problem can be when it's... You have someone who is not the actual
expert moderating
because there is a fluency in every ecosystem. There's a shared language among
participants
that an expert in that community who moderates a community needs to be able to
speak if you want
proper engagement because... I mean, that's just literally what it is, right?
Like, I couldn't
moderate a direct consumer e-commerce community because I'm not a direct
consumer e-commerce person.
Very quickly, I learned that I couldn't speak their language. And that's just
the reality of it.
So I think that another problem with community can be actually the reporting
structure
inside of the company. So, like, if it rolls up into a revenue function, then
inevitably,
somebody, someday, is going to be like, "Well, what revenues come out of the
community the last
slap your time period on it?" Right? The answer is zero, right? Because it's
like,
there's very little attributable revenue to the efforts that you're going to
put into this.
And every single time, the investors, the execs, whatever, they go to the
person that they hired
to do all this great stuff that was awesome and it was really gaining momentum
and they're like,
"Okay, we're pulling back this year. We're going to do paid acquisition and
hire more SDRs."
That is just what happens. So, all of that is what I consider bad.
So then it's like, what is a good community? I think a thriving community is
customers and
non-customers, especially if it's hosted by a vendor. And most importantly, it
is built around
subject matter expertise in topics rather than a product and features, right?
And supporting
that product and features. So, I think I'm not going to -- actually, I'm going
to say it. I think
a prerequisite to moving a community into a space where somebody actually owns
it, whether it be
an influencer, a vendor, or someone else, is that you actually know how to
build community.
In building community, the only way to do it, as far as I'm concerned, is like,
you start writing on social and you grow your audience. And it's real people
and they have real
titles. And it's not just these pods where people are engaging and commenting
on whatever.
Like, it is your ecosystem validating your ability to grow your audience. If
you can do that,
then I think you have earned the right to ask that community to participate
with you somewhere
else. If you cannot do that, your community will fail. Full stop. That's my
belief. So,
go learn how to do this. It's a skill. It took me a year. So, with the
community,
we're making Santo Shaniah literally going to moderate it. And I think this
does a couple things.
One, we are definitely experts in what we're talking about. And like we know
that we can -- we
know what people care about because they're showing us on LinkedIn. And another
thing that this does
is I actually think the access that we're giving to ourselves is part of the
hook to get people to
actually come off of LinkedIn and participate in what we're doing. So, that's
another thing.
It would really help if there was access to someone or something that you are
not getting
elsewhere. Because ultimately, it's just like in the world of infinite
opportunity, I mean,
what specifically we're going to do is I'm going to provide access to our
weekly full-team strategy
calls every single week starting at right now where we're at $1,000 MRR. In all
of my notes,
it's a meeting that I run. So, that in a year, you can look back and see at
every given level,
at every time period, this is what our key metrics were. And this is what we're
focused on.
This is what we're focused on. This is what we're working on. I would have
killed for that with
any business that I was interested in. We're going to give you access to Santo
Shani
through and ask me anything format. We're going to do, for our elite members,
a access to our LinkedIn planning sessions. And then we're going to do post-T
aredowns for
anybody that wants us to help them with their LinkedIn game. Because, I mean,
as you know,
I think this is super important depending on what space you're in. And I would
love to know
what other things that people think that we should put in this space. Because I
'm also going to do a
course of philosophically everything, Santo Shani, and I believe about starting
startups.
So, yeah, that's our plan. In my opinion, it meets the definition of a good
community.
I'm interested to see the reception it gets. I truly believe the two moats left
are brand
and community. And that's why I'm going all in on it in 2024. And that's what I
'm going to do.
[BLANK_AUDIO]