Welcome community enthusiasts! 👋 I’ve had a great chat with Addison Schultz lately, Product Specialist at Framer and one of the key figures in the community efforts at Framer.

Addison shares a lot about the experimentation and evolution of where they host their community, the pros and cons of those platforms, how members are involved in the product development process, and we touch upon the topic of product-led vs interest-based communities. 🔥

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About Framer and Addison

Framer is an all-in-one tool that helps teams design every part of the product experience. Most design and prototyping tools today are just systems to paint your ideas on a canvas. Framer is built on Web technologies and puts interaction and actual building at the forefront. Or how Addison put it in the interview below: “Pictures are great for postcards, but buttons were meant to be clicked."

Addison works as a Product Specialist at Framer. He has a design and development background but started out in Sales at Framer. He transitioned into Customer Success and, amongst others, got to run the community part. As a real community enthusiast and someone with a lot of different skills, it was a unique fit and opportunity. More on that below, let’s dive in!

​How did you get involved with the Framer community?

I currently work as a Product Specialist at Framer. I was hired right before we launched Framer X, one of our previous products, and have been here for about two and a half years. I started on the sales team doing SDR work. But given my experience as a developer and designer and the fact I had already been using Framer, I was one of the only sales team members that understood how to use the product. This led me to transition into a Customer Success role. Back then, we didn't even have a CS team. As we started to build it, we also started to manage the community aspects of it. I was already interested in and a part of various tech communities. So getting to help run one was an exciting experience for me. 

​How is the community run nowadays?

Our Customer Success team manages our community. Right now, there are four of us. Often, Customer Success teams also manage a lot of the community aspects or are involved with it. It makes sense: You need people who are communicating with your customers and product users all the time. A vital point about Framer is that everyone on the CS team is either quite technical or has a good design background. This becomes super helpful when working for a design tool because you can communicate issues and product features that come up in a more personal way. 

​At what stage did Framer start with this community effort?

Framer wasn't always a product. We've always built products, but we started as a JavaScript animation library. And, as it happens with many programming communities, you have a place for people to bounce ideas off each other. As far as I know, the Facebook community was the very first community effort. Since the two founders were ex-Facebook designers, they first set up the community on Facebook. However, as the company and the community started to grow (the Facebook community had reached about 25 thousand members), it became more challenging to manage it as a group effort. They needed a designated team for this particular task. That was about the time I hopped on board, and we began forming the CS team. So all these pieces fell in the right place at the right time. 

​Can you walk us through a bit of that history? What were the phases you went through?

As more users started joining the Facebook group, it became more than a place for people to ask questions. It also got harder to manage expectations and build something for everybody. Eventually, people started building prototypes with Framer Classic, many of whom liked to show the work they had done – which we began to encourage in the community. So it turned into a place where members asked questions but also talked about prototypes and shared projects. Then questions and statements began to pour in from outside of the product. Things like "I'm looking to get into UX design, how can I start?" These weren't directly related to Framer – but still concerned the field we were in. And once you get people outside of that support group, the community starts to take shape and grow.

​There was a period when you were on Spectrum. Was that the next step for you? Did you initiate it to try to solve specific issues that weren't working on Facebook?

When I joined, we were only on Facebook. We also used Slack as a direct line to our enterprise clients simply because it was an easier way to set up a channel for them to ping questions off. Eventually, Slack was open for everyone. Still, we didn't advertise it as much as Facebook, where most of the discussions were held. The main reason why we opened up a Slack – and why people started getting in there – was discoverability. If you're looking for something specific like a product feature or a bug, it's a lot harder to find it on Facebook. And we were looking for new ways to make it easier to find and engage with our users.

We tried out Spectrum for roughly a year and a half. Things became a lot more searchable. It was nice to have a thread-based platform. Yet, we lacked a community aspect. It felt like we had traded the engagement factor from Facebook for the thread-based support discussions. And we wanted something in between.

Meanwhile, my CS colleague Viktor and I were tasked to find a place to host our new community. While it was good that we already had a Slack community, given our size, the cost was an issue. We saw a lot of companies making a move to Discord. Being a community-based tool, it made a lot of sense for us to migrate. And considering our size, it was still affordable.

Being a part of many tech communities, I see that many technologies I like to use are also bringing their community to Discord, so I get a feeling that we made the right choice.

We switched to Discord last March, just when the pandemic started. It's been going well. Being a part of many tech communities, I see that many technologies I like to use are also bringing their community to Discord, so I get a feeling that we made the right choice. We have also evolved quite a bit in terms of organizing it. For us, the biggest thing about Discord was a direct line of communication to our users and the opportunity to have built-in video streaming.

At present, we host many Framer Live Sessions, where we do live Q&As and chat with people. I think this is better than having to set up a recurring event – we can just hop in the channel and start talking to people right away.

​Can you point out any particular pros and cons you've discovered so far?

I wouldn't say Discord is the perfect tool. But we're probably going to stay here for the foreseeable future. We've just passed 5 thousand users last month. A big pro for us is that it's effortless to join. Engaging members via videos, direct communication, and channels is also straightforward. Plus, a lot of people are on here already – and it's cheaper than Slack. 

The biggest con would be organizing the content that is on there. Since it is very channel-based, you can't start a thread out of someone's question to address the issue. So you end up having to parse through different conversations to find what you need.

That said, another upside, and part of the reason we migrated, is that it is very searchable. If you search, you will probably find an answer – or a conversation that leads to an answer. Still, following that conversation becomes a bit tedious, which seems to be one of the biggest complaints from users.

​That seems to be the trade-off we've seen a lot. It is easier to find what you need in thread-based platforms, but it is harder to stimulate serendipitous conversations in such environments, right?

Exactly. The trade-off is engagement versus usefulness. But so far we're happy with it. And I believe that if you organize your community by channels, it becomes easier to search through it. We have also been tapping into various features which facilitate the managing of users and working with moderators. Our product team is in our Discord quite often, and our whole CS team is in there all the time. We have a great cadence and workflow. Every member of our CS team is on at least one of our different product teams, so we have complete visibility over everything that is going on. Therefore, it becomes easier to give more access to moderators and other active community members to help out others.

Speaking of moderators. Would you say that there are different levels or types of users regarding how involved they are? How do you reward these people for their efforts?

All of our community moderators were already acting as such even before we rendered them the title. They are people who, through their Framer journey, the CS team came to know well beyond their online presence, back when we were organizing a lot of meet-ups. Besides supporting their work as moderators, we give them early access to features and swag. Viktor, part of the CS team, works closely with the moderators. He does monthly syncs to make sure they are up to date. He uses our moderator channel to address any questions they may have.

It's pretty easy to tell when someone moves from being a lurker to a helper: the latter helps out a lot on Discord. When that is the case, we might ask them to become a moderator. Some people have been building a lot of stuff with Framer and want to be involved but may not have enough time to be a moderator. For those, we have a channel in our internal Framer Slack (not the public Slack) called Framer Creators.

​Are the discussions in this Slack channel more related to product development?

Yes. These people are using Framer all the time. Many of them are also educators, people who, for instance, make Framer tutorials in their own time. While they're promoting Framer, they might need an extra direct line to us in case something comes up – which is another reason we started the Slack channel. It is also a means for them to try out beta features. After all, these types of people make the perfect use case. They know what to expect from beta software, and they have used Framer enough to understand how to navigate it if something is off. They also know how to apply features in creative ways that we may not think about ourselves.

​Can you talk a bit about how you involve these folks in the product development process?

This has gotten much better after we launched Framer Web last May. At present, if we want to test anything, we make a pull request to Framer and it will generate a "Deploy Preview Link" for that specific change. We can then send out a link and say "This is what will go live if everything is good. Can you play around and see how it works?" It doesn't require any overhead. We send them a link and they log in as normal – everything is tied up. That's how we get our feedback. Since a lot of the moderators and Framer Creators are active members of our community whom we know well, it's natural to get them to lend us a hand testing things out. In most cases, they are willing to help. And that allows us to identify bugs early on.

​It's great that everyone in the company is engaged in the community effort. I suppose this commitment throughout the company and the growth is a consequence of having started with a community mindset from the start? 

That's a really good point. We've seen it since day one – and I think a lot of other companies do as well – that someone who is a proponent, who loves your company and helps your product, is going to play a significant role in the growth and overall success of the company. We realize this and try to make it easier for people to help others use Framer. For that, we have written a lot of team-based materials, such as the Framer Team Handbook or the Train Your Team materials. These resources walk you through how to become a champion and how to get a particular tool you enjoy into the rest of your company. After all, depending on your level and seniority in the company, making big changes to the workflow and the tool stack becomes hard unless you have a solid case behind it as to why the change should be made. Therefore, providing these materials, as well as working with the community, having them involved, and giving them the answers, is something we invest in a lot.

Are you making any proactive efforts to grow the community itself? Or does that lean more on the growth of the product itself and the community being part of the user's adoption journey?

I think it's the latter— a lot of the growth is organic. But as our product grows and people get deeper into it, it becomes evident that we have a community. So while we're not marketing it, we mention it often and use it as our official "meeting place."

You can still write on our support hub - that goes into Intercom. But when an issue is more discussion-based, we link it to Discord. For instance, we have an examples page where you can find different examples in Framer. Instead of linking people to our Intercom – and thus increasing the probability that they will get the same questions repeatedly – they can ask about it in our Discord community. This allows other people to help and let us identify if something needs to be fixed. 

​Are there certain things you try to do to spark conversations or help people engage?

That's something we're looking into at the moment. It is also another reason we switched to Discord: it comes with many built-in metrics for engagement and response rate, which give us an idea of how people work in the community from the second they become a member. Consequently, this helps us figure out ways to get them more engaged.

Both the Framer team and our moderators play an essential role in engagement. People become more engaged when there are fruitful discussions around their questions that lead to an answer. We can't answer everything all the time. But we do our best – across the CS team, Framer, and our moderators – to get everything sorted out.

Small things, common to Discord communities, also help. For instance, adding a welcome window so a newcomer is greeted with the rules and a breakdown of what they can in this server, making it clear what the next steps are. Or else a channel for people to say hi and chat. We currently have our channels organized by topics: prototyping help, smart components, TV prototyping, etc., and we can easily add, delete, or move them around.

That said, we still want to improve our Discord community, and a lot of the engagement initiatives we have planned revolve around building out bots. When you hit send after typing a question, we would like a bot to read your question and suggest articles or conversations. I think that would help to keep people engaged, get more visibility on what they are looking for. Another thing we're experimenting with at the moment is how to use Discord rolls to our advantage, namely letting people assign the roles that they want so they can be notified on features and releases they are interested in. It would be a way of building your Framer profile around what you're interested in and what you want to see.

​The Framer community itself seems really product-oriented. Have you thought about expanding it, making it a broader interest-based community around product design, for example?

We thought about this before, and we have some plans for the future. I think that when we were starting, we wanted to make sure the transition from Facebook over to Discord went smoothly. But we do want to expand. In that case, we would first focus on the development side, though. We have a production animation library, Framer Motion, and I think we'd start to get more development talks in there.

That's one of the best things about running and working with a community: you get the chance to experiment a lot to see what works and what doesn't.

We have thought about getting engagement from the UX side of things as well; building it out in more than just a Framer community. We haven't moved forward with that just yet. I think it's going to be a slow transition, experimenting with a few things and seeing how it goes. That's one of the best things about running and working with a community: you get the chance to experiment a lot to see what works and what doesn't. After all, one thing might work for one sort of community – but it may not work for yours. 

​What's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who's building out an early community around a software start-up?

Find where your users are. What I mean by this, is that it will be a lot easier to create something for them based on where they are instead of trying to get them to switch to a new place. I think this was one of the downfalls with Spectrum: there weren't many people there. And that was another reason why we chose Facebook when we first started Framer. Seven years ago, everybody was on Facebook all the time, so it was easy to keep the engagement. We also had a built-in distribution in there, so when we posted something new at Framer, people would get a notification on Facebook, which would bring them right back. That helped a lot.

​Have you got a favorite tool to help you run your community?

I think it is just Discord. I like how you can assign roles, focus on the organization of the channel, work with the users on your server. That makes it easy to manage.

​Was there a particular article, book, or podcast that helped you in the journey of building a community?

I can't think of any off the top of my head. I find that the best way of running a community is just in them. I'm currently a part of 16 different Discord communities on various topics, from music to tech and design. Learning from the experience I'm getting as a user in other communities – what I like, what makes sense – has helped me a lot.

What else should people keep an eye out for at Framer?

We released some new features a month ago called Smart Components. They completely changed the game when it comes to designing interactive experiences. At Framer, we believe that design should be interactive by default. One of our mottos is "Pictures are great for postcards, but buttons are meant to be clicked." In many ways, that philosophy will inform the direction of our product in 2021.

The way people are building things is about to change, and that's where we're placing a lot of our bets. Other tools on the market give you the ability to create something – not build it. You can design the way something should look – not the way it should behave. This is related to Framer's "background mission" of teaching every designer to code. With the new Smart Components, we're shifting the way you design components and variants, which differs from Figma or Sketch. It's about teaching designers how to think in the way that something gets built – not just the way it should look. We're making Framer a tool for people to build products.

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Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Welcome community enthusiasts! 👋 A few weeks back we had the opportunity to chat Erik Martin, Chief Community Officer at Teal.

Erik explains how the Teal community started, how it changes the career space, what their community stack looks like, how they keep people engaged, and shares his view on moderation, amongst others! 🔥

Enjoy, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

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About Teal and Erik

Teal is a digital platform that provides tools, insights, and community support for professionals working in the tech industry to grow their careers with confidence.

Erik is a community management expert who has led teams at Nike, Reddit, Depop, Airtime, & WeWork. Erik was the longtime General Manager at reddit and the company’s 5th employee. He’s been named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time Magazine. In a profile, The Washington Post said; "It can’t be understated how poorly Martin fits the start-up culture stereotypes: the extravagance, the arrogance. He’s not overtly extroverted or introverted; he’s a quietish, funny, normal dude." The more reason for us to ask him to hop on a call and share some of his experiences around building community at Teal. Let’s dive in!

How was Teal founded and was being community-oriented always top of mind for Teal as a company? 

Nowadays, whether asking employees or companies, it's pretty clear that the number one thing people seek is career growth. And that's why Teal was founded: to help individuals find fulfilling jobs and succeed in them. Simultaneously, it can be tricky moving from one job, industry, or discipline to another. Teal definitely started with community in mind and with the idea that we can all help each other out as we navigate the interesting and unpredictable journey that is one's career.

​How big is the community now?

Teal is less than two years old, so it's still pretty small. Our community has several thousand people, mainly from the tech industry. We focus on people looking to change industries, feel stuck at work, or begin a new job and want to make sure they get off to a great start.

Community feels like a great way to approach career development. How did community building start to interest you personally?

I started my career in the independent film and entertainment world, mainly doing production and marketing for niche projects that didn't have huge budgets. When you're marketing a project like that, community is the place you go. If you're marketing a documentary, a Korean thriller, or a French horror film, for instance, you go to places where people who are into those sort of things interact. So I got into film communities, forums, and niche sites that had a community around these specific genres. That was the most exciting part of my job. 

Then Reddit came around as an opportunity for me. I was fascinated as a user. Eventually, I got involved with them and became the first community manager there in 2008. I got exposed to so many different types of communities and learned so much working there that I became obsessed with community ever since. 

Why did you decide to go to a start-up like Teal after working at bigger companies like WeWork and Reddit?

The key reason was that the founder of Teal, Dave Fano, and I worked together at WeWork. I enjoyed working with him, and when he told me about Teal – a platform for people to talk about these big, life-changing decisions we make in our careers – it made a lot of sense to me.

When establishing something new, I think you almost have to do it with community. You have to build it with the users because they're going to help you figure out what works, what doesn't, and what's needed.

I was also excited because this is a new area in the career space. Most career space entities are built with an employer-first model in mind because they have the money. Whereas Teal is for the individuals, the employees, the workers. And when establishing something new, I think you almost have to do it with community. You have to build it with the users because they're going to help you figure out what works, what doesn't, and what's needed. So being able to build something with that community at Teal was exciting. But it's also necessary, given it is such a new type of thing.

​I love the mindset of putting the users first. When and how did the actual community initiative at Teal start?

Around the time we started Teal, WeWork (where Dave Fano and I had worked) was having massive lay-offs. We knew many amazing, talented people who got laid off because of things outside of their control. So we created a Slack channel to help them out and provide a space where they could stay connected and help each other navigate through that. Interestingly, that took off. Then it started to grow organically: people who got laid off at other companies got invited in, and the first Teal community began to take shape. It wasn't intentional in the sense of being a plan all along.

What do the current initiatives around community look like? What kind of programs do you have in place?

We do a lot of challenges. It could be a challenge focused on career growth or one specifically around understanding the types of start-ups. These are usually 20-30-day challenges with discreet tasks each day and a community around them. If it's something on improving your About section on LinkedIn, for instance, community comes in handy to get feedback, have details explained, and see how others do it. 

We also have different sub-communities around disciplines (e.g. marketing, customer support sales, etc.) and communities around live events – both small, instructional meetings or larger, networking-type events. However, the majority of community interactions happen around specific job opportunities. For instance, if someone wants to move from the legal field to the project management field, they may want to talk to other people who do that job.  

​Do people usually stick around when they find a job?

Yes. That's the most exciting part. Sure, some get busy and don't have that much time. But a lot of people stick around. Considering that the community helped them when facing important career decisions, they often want to give back somehow. Or they might be hiring for their team and want to utilize the community.

I also think people understand the long-term value of having a community that's outside of their current employer. We even have people who started a new job and, although it was not exactly what they were hoping it would be, they feel more confident and better equipped to stick to their values. They also know that they have this community to support them if it doesn't work out. I think having that support network is really valuable.

​What does your community stack look like?

Right now, we have a Slack space. That tends to be more conversational, more along the lines of "Hey, I saw this job posted on Twitter." It's also where people usually introduce themselves; this is what I'm into, this is what I can help with, this is what I'm looking for. 

We're also using Circle long-form knowledge-sharing forum. There it's more about discussions in specific industries or around certain aspects of the job search. And then we also use Zoom for a lot of live events.

As far as tools around those platforms, we use Commsor as the CRM behind our Slack space. We also have a few Slack bots enabled to help with housekeeping and use Zapier integrations both in Slack and Circle to make managing things a bit easier.

​What do you do to keep community members engaged?

Most of it is sharing content, comments, and questions that we know people are dealing with. As such, we always consider the subgroups and regions where these apply. For instance, we may create a virtual event for people in New York or LA or have a conversation in the sub-community for people interested in marketing. We have also been doing round-tables, where we will have several of our members on Zoom sharing their thoughts on a specific topic. These discussions then live on some other parts of our community Slack. 

​To which extent do you have to spark engagement and interaction? Do community members also start new conversations?

We do end up sparking a lot of the conversations. That's is usually done through the multi-day challenges, getting people aligned around specific steps. Our ambassadors/moderators also help with stimulating interaction. They are members of different sub-communities who are also experts in those fields, so they know what type of questions are on people's minds.

But I would say that the best conversations are those sparked by our members. Just talking about the things they've been struggling with, noticed, or solved. Sometimes it can be as simple as sharing the recording of an event they attended which they deem helpful to the community.

I can imagine that you also interact with a lot of people in the community. How do you use those insights and feed them back into the product?

Many members of our product team are in our community, and all members of our team are feeding that request for feedback regularly. We also carry out more extensive feedback sessions – such as virtual dinners with members – where we present them with a prototype, get their input, and share it with the rest of the Teal team. We try to get as much feedback as we can and make sure these come from different groups in our community. 

​On the Teal website there are some clear statements that the Teal community is a trusted place and inclusive community. In this context, what is your view on moderation? And how does that compare to your time at Reddit?

Our community values at Teal are almost the same as our company values. First and foremost, we try to be transparent. Teal is both a free and a paid community. However, given the number of paid members, it tends to be a more professional community. There's a big difference compared to when I was at Reddit. I think we were a bit less conscious about the issues that would arise. The size of Reddit is simply much larger than the Teal community. The size of the community has a significant influence on the complexity of ensuring such values. 

Even though the tactics for creating the best community space are different, the ideas are the same. You want people to know what's expected. You want them to know what to do in the community, how to help.

When it comes to moderation, I think that even though the tactics for creating the best community space are different, the ideas are the same. You want people to know what's expected. You want them to know what to do in the community, how to help. I often think the greatest strength of Reddit is also its greatest weakness. Anyone can create a community, which means that they can, to an extent, run it the way they see fit. But in the end, it's a different type of space.

One thing I learned at Reddit is how all of these different sub-Reddits structured their interactions, guidelines, and rules. There was such a wide range of rules and ways to enforce them. Nowadays, I'm a believer in intentional moderation and setting the container, so to speak, in terms of the type of interaction we want to see.

​What kind of trends have you been spotting in the community building field, and what do you expect to see in the coming years?

The gradual development in technology has made it a lot easier for customers, members, users to talk to each other. To me, that is the key difference between community versus an audience or brand approach: members talking to each other. At the same time, many people have experienced communities throughout their entire lives, so they inherently know the power of communities in the online virtual sense. In the start-up and tech space, I think people now start to realize the benefits of building something collaboratively with their audience. After all, having space for users to talk to each other directly impacts improving marketing, product, or the cost of technical support, for instance. 

​Have you got any advice for people who are building out an early community around a software start-up?

There's plenty of amazing resources out there these days that didn't exist when I was getting started. Whether it's a newsletter, a Community Club, or people talking about stuff on Twitter, Discord, or Club House – there is a community management industry. Many of these people learned what works and what doesn't; they have valuable insights and are happy to share.

My advice for those who are getting started is to connect with other community professionals who have been doing this for a while. Read their posts in newsletters, watch their videos, learn from them.

My advice for those who are getting started is to connect with other community professionals who have been doing this for a while. Read their posts in newsletters, watch their videos, learn from them. No one has all the answers. But hopefully, someone can point you in the right direction. Other than that, be curious about your users and the people whose problems you're trying to solve.

Do you think that every software start-up should create a community?

In general, there are two main types of community where it would make sense to build with users. One would be when you're making something for an existing community, a niche category, or a subgenre to something. For example, if you realize there's not a good app for people who play pickleball.

The other situation would be trying to create a new movement around something, starting a community around something central to what you're doing. In the latter scenario, I think it'd be hard to do it without community. Then again, I'm biased because I believe community is always important. But you can be successful in some areas without focusing so much on community.

​How do you get inspired to do your work? Do you have any blogs, books, or podcasts to recommend?

I'm a big history fan. I read a lot of history from around the turn of the 19th century. That period fascinates me because it's long enough ago to be different, but it's recent enough for me to picture what it was like. That's a source of inspiration for me. I follow a lot of different community members on Twitter and LinkedIn, and I try to be in other communities – whether it's professional or just for fun. I'm constantly seeing interesting initiatives and events and wondering how/if to implement them at Teal. 

I also try to take cues from offline community professionals and organizers. Some people have been working on community in spaces for hundreds of years, and though much of what they've done differs in scale and speed from the online world, the basics are pretty much the same.

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Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Welcome community enthusiasts! 👋 We chatted with Daniel Phiri a while ago. Daniel is a DevRel at Strapi.

Daniel shares how they turn members into advocates, what tools they use for their community efforts, why they moved from Slack to Discourse, how community and the product team stay connected, and a lot more!

Let’s dive in, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

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About Strapi and Daniel

Strapi is the leading open-source Headless Content Management System (CMS). It gives developers the freedom to use their favorite tools and frameworks while allowing editors to easily manage their content and distribute it anywhere.

Daniel is based in Lusaka, Zambia. He started working in developer relations roughly two years ago. As a student community leader, he noticed a lot of people doing developer relations at the events he used to attend. He started connecting with them. Two years later he got involved in the field himself. He started his career at Hasura, moved to PubNub for some time, and did a bit of freelancing in between. Now, Daniel is key in the DevRel and community efforts at Strapi. 

Why does Strapi put effort into community building? How did that start?

The company got started by three students who, at the time, were attending the same college. It began with a Reddit post. With time, people started coming on to the project until the initiative slowly grew into something that many people wanted. Growth comes from awareness, adoption, and use. So, in a way, community has been behind a lot of what has made Strapi what it is today. As soon as I joined the company, I could tell that this constant urge for feedback and the will to iterate and provide the best possible solution for our community and users was a big part of the DNA. 

​This modus operandi is probably also responsible for the power the product has today. As such, how much attention do you put into community building at the moment?

Being open-source, we're also naturally inclined to be transparent since there are so many people who might be affected by changes. We have a team solely dedicated to serving the community – the User Success Team.

everyone at Strapi is community-facing. The developers, myself, the user success team, and the marketing team, even the founders, have regular community interactions.

But, as I mentioned, the community is at the core of the company. So, to an extent, everyone at Strapi is community-facing. The developers, myself, the user success team, and the marketing team, even the founders, have regular community interactions. It's all community-driven. All in all, we're putting in a lot of effort, you could say. It's really in the company's DNA.

​What community programs do you have in place?

I'll pick one that I found very interesting and came from the resourcefulness of the community itself. It's the Write For The Community Program, which we almost rebranded as the Craft For The Community Program.

This initiative or program got started because we saw a lot of community members writing articles about Strapi. It made sense to centralize it, to create a structure in curation and contribution for different Strapi-related topics, and publish everything under a single program on our blog. Whenever someone solves a problem with Strapi or provides a particularly unique solution, they feel compelled to share that somehow. This program enables and facilitates sharing.

How do you stimulate people to grow from a user to someone who provides content for you? In other words, how do you turn people into advocates?

That transition happens gradually and by giving gentle nudges at the right time. We try to gamify some elements as well, which I guess is one of the various ways you can gently nudge people.

The root for stimulation sprouts from organic conversations – just reaching out to different people.

Based on my interactions with community members, this people-to-advocate transition happens somewhat randomly. We'd be talking about a technical or logistical issue, and I'd ask if they would like to document, share, or write about what we had been discussing. The root for stimulation sprouts from these organic conversations – just reaching out to different people. Other times, someone may ask a question in the help channel, to which one of the members gives a detailed response. When that happens, I might ask if they can go deeper into the subject in a blog post. There are various roots to engagement and interaction. And incentivizing every alternative makes more people want to do it.

we brought this program to incentivize those who have gone above and beyond for the Strapi community, basically helping them and acknowledging their efforts publicly and clearly.

A good example is our Writer's Program. Since we compensate writers for their work and give them resources to improve their skills, more people want to be a part of it. Recently, we have also put together the Strapi Community Stars Program. We noticed many people worldwide speaking at meet-ups or hosting meet-ups under the Strapi name or helping others in forums and community spaces. They are passionate and knowledgeable about Strapi – and that is precisely the kind of activity you want to encourage in a community. That's where you find the value of community: people talking to each other, sharing solutions. So we brought this program to incentivize those who have gone above and beyond for the Strapi community, basically helping them and acknowledging their efforts publicly and clearly.

Those with a "community star status" can partake in office hours with Strapi employees. These work as mentoring sessions, trying to find ways of helping them grow not only as developers but as individuals.

We also give them free enterprise licenses for the enterprise version of Strapi, and they get access to features in Strapi before anyone else. The first batch of community stars came in last November. Soon we'll be looking for our next batch. We're iterating on the feedback and trying to make the program better as we're moving forward with it.

​I suppose it takes time before someone becomes a community star. How do you keep track of the people who might be the next community stars? Do you administer engagement?

It's mostly done by the eye, based on interactions. I don't have a precise overview of community activity – I guess that's the goal. I do use Orbit quite a bit. I think it's an interesting tool to give an overview of the community members in different spaces. 

Sometimes, all people need is knowledge and awareness of how to do something.

Another thing we've been looking at is using the stars program as an accelerator for someone's community activity. The idea is to have people come into the program, learn, grow, become more active contributors in the Strapi community, and get access to other stars who already have in-depth knowledge. We have many resources on how people can contribute to an open-source project in non-code ways, and we have shared that with our members. Sometimes, all people need is knowledge and awareness of how to do something.

​Being an open-source project, the main codebase for Strapi is on GitHub. Do you get many contributions, or is the work done mainly through the internal team?

Most of the development, feature-wise, is done by the product team. The majority of contributions we get are bug fixes and documentation. And, of course, the non-code contributions like articles and meet-ups. Some members have taken the initiative to start their own events. But since we also have a program for global meet-ups – which was a massive thing in the pre-COVID world – they eventually reach out. Currently, we're seeing that members are hosting meet-ups in a virtual format in the Czech Republic, Thailand, London, and The Netherlands.

We don't do a ton of specific things to entice people to contribute, apart from the one-on-one engagement I touched upon earlier. It usually emerges from one-on-one engagements. Interestingly, most requests are unprovoked. A lot of people just come and say "Hey, I want to do this or that for Strapi." It can be anything from organizing a meet-up in their hometown, writing an article, speaking at a conference, etc.

​What tools do you currently use for your community efforts? And how do you use them?

Slack has been the primary tool of interaction. However, we're planning on migrating soon. For a while, we used GitHub Discussions for RFCs (Requests for Comments), bugs, and issues. Then we moved that to Discourse, which is our main community-led support forum at present. We have about 13 thousand members on Slack, and having to pay for the premium version is pricey and undoable. But the biggest problem was that whenever we answered questions on Slack, it would not be searchable or indexed by Google – and Discourse gives us that.

Of course, we use GitHub, as we're open-source. The project is based there. We also have an RFC repository where we discuss significant changes to the project.

For product feedback and requests, we use Productboard. It's a place where members can upvote different features. We mainly use Notion and Orbit to document and keep track of stuff internally.

Are both Slack and Discourse support-oriented, or do people use them differently?

Discourse is more support-oriented. During this migration phase, Slack also remains support-oriented. We try to remind people to ask everything on Discourse. But since Slack was the first platform of interaction, most community members find it easier to post questions there. Besides support, we have several groups and channels for non-support interactions. There are also spaces for different categories of contributors and community members.

​With 13 thousand members on Slack, how do you keep up with all the questions?

The one dealing with that is mostly my teammate Derrick, our solutions engineer. He used to be a community member, one of the more active ones who would be very quick in responding. Now he's part of the team. He's fantastic at what he does, very responsive in answering questions and directing people to the forum. We also have help from many community star members, mainly Sonny in Romania, Matty in the Netherlands, and Bobby in Nashville. They are very active on the support side of Slack and Discourse. 

​Did you apply any unique integrations or 'hacks' for Slack or any of the other tools that you're using?

Mostly bots that help with welcoming people and giving instructions when someone joins a channel in Slack. Next to that, a couple of Typeforms. Given that we still make a lot of announcements on Slack, we also have a Discourse-Slack bot. Whenever we release something, we put it up on Discourse, and then the bot sends it over to Slack. It becomes a bi-directional conversation: when someone comments on Discourse, it also shows on the Slack channel. So no one misses out on that announcement. We have also integrated Twitter and GitHub into Slack to track different activities and repositories in a specific channel. 

​How do you make sure that people stay engaged and keep coming back to the community?

This is not necessarily the most significant challenge I face, but it's something I've been thinking about quite a lot. Consistency is important. Having set days when you do certain activities helps people know when to expect things. For instance, for the writer's program, I send out a weekly message (every Tuesday at 11 am) updating everyone on what's going on. It helps because then people know when to expect specific engagements. Still, I feel there's only so far you can go with making sure people come back. Community members are humans. A lot is happening in their lives, and sometimes texting or sending a message in a Slack channel is not a priority. And there's nothing you can do about that.

​Do you try to create inspiring content for the community, or is it primarily centered around educating people about the product?

It's a mix of both. To use the aforementioned writer's program as an example, a lot of the content that goes out with the weekly message is community crowd-sourced. We have a repository where people can request a specific type of content, and anyone can write about it. We put the ideas out there, and someone eventually takes care of creating content around it. This ends up being an excellent way to attract people to use the product and join the community.

You must come across a lot of feedback on how the product could be improved. How do you make sure there's a connection between what the community says and what the product team does?

This always requires a bit of effort, and I know there's room for improvement on my part. Whenever there's feedback, I try to pass it on as quickly as possible. I have a Notion page that I try and keep updated. But I often use the Slack feature in the company Slack and send myself a reminder. A lot of the feedback is also dealt with in casual conversations with the product team when I let them know that there's a possible issue here or there. We also have a community feedback channel. So whenever I hear anything from a member, I paste it there, tag them, and let the conversation run its course.

Once we address the feedback, we always try to follow up with the members that mentioned it.

Once we address the feedback, we always try to follow up with the members that mentioned it. One of my teammates is responsible for this. It goes back to the Productboard portal that I talked about earlier, as that is also a place where we collect a lot of feedback. At the same time, our product marketing manager is really proactive in her approach. There's a constant stream of communication with those who give feedback or send requests.

​Do you do anything to monitor the experience of developers when they start using Strapi?

At the moment, no. But I do have some visibility on what that might look like. It's something at the back of my mind, especially since a lot of the content is tailored towards newcomers. As a DevRel, knowing the product can be treacherous. You can get lost in a bubble where the things you do to help those who aren't well-versed with the product come off as gatekeeping. So you have to be mindful of the words you use and how you explain things. I try to get out of that bubble. Whenever I create something, I avoid making it too complicated. Unless, of course, I'm trying to solve something for a specific type of user who is of intermediate or advanced knowledge on the topic.

As a monitoring tool, we do use Amplitude. It provides excellent insight into how people interact with the product. It shows what people do and where they drop off in the product use cycle.

What is the most underrated or overlooked activity that a company could do to enhance the developer experience?

I think optimizing the getting-started experience. For some reason, a lot of people get this wrong. They try to become too flashy right at the outset to make people see the value in the product. Perhaps they feel like "complicated" means the problem is worth solving. Sometimes a really basic approach to a getting-started can go a long way. If you can make it as low-barrier as possible from the get-go, it would improve your developer experience. 

Based on how you build community and engage with members, do you think some principles also apply to non-developer communities?

I think the reasoning behind how and why communities are built – developer or non-developer – is pretty much the same. I would take the same approach in terms of making sure everyone feels welcome. It's important that the community members are there for the right reason and that you are also engaging them for the right reasons.

In a community, I don't think anyone wants content being thrown at them. Community comes from two-way communication

I believe it's important to differentiate between an audience and a community. An audience entails you putting stuff out there and people listening to you. In a community, I don't think anyone wants content being thrown at them. Community comes from two-way communication – not just between your members and you but your members and themselves. 

​Do you have any advice for people starting a new community or are in the early stages of building a community around their start-up?

Focus on the problem you're solving with your product/service and build around that, I would say. By doing that, you establish a direct link with your community. Consequently, your community helps you grow because you're solving their problems. Transparency, consistency, and intention in interacting with your community can go a long way. I think that's the most robust foundation for building any community. 

At the same time, highlighting your community's work and efforts – even outside of the product – is something many people forget. It doesn't necessarily make sense when you think about it at first. But it's essential to be able to tell the stories in a way that inspires other people.

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Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Heeyyy there! 👋

The new Curated is here. I figured it would be interesting to focus on audio-based platforms and communities for this issue.

Discord—where voice is a major mode of communication—has been around for a bit (and Microsoft wants to buy them for good reasons), Clubhouse is all the rage these days, and Twitter came with Spaces. Greg Isenberg also shared his perspective on audio social networks becoming more and more popular from 2021 onwards.

Time to dive in, and learn a little more about the potential but also the challenges voice-based platforms and communities bring. It’s an interesting topic to think about for your own community. Enjoy! 🤩

🧐 Question of the week

Are you already leveraging these audio-based platforms for your community efforts?

Feel free to drop them in the comment section 👇 or hit reply.

Leave a comment

🖐 Favorite Five

In every one of these bi-weekly issues, we’ll highlight 5 awesome pieces of content. Mostly great reads, videos, podcast episodes, tools, a Tweet, or a person to follow on Twitter.

📖 Favorite Read(s)

The Future of Social Audio

5 min read – Covers an overview of the rapidly growing social audio market, the precise startups, business models, the new potential categories within ‘Social Audio’, and some brief market predictions.

Voice-based Communities and Why It’s So Hard To Moderate Them

6 min read – This article is a result of a study on Discord users that covers the ways community rules are broken in voice, and the many tactics and challenges of moderating real-time voice channels.

🎧 Favorite Podcast Episode(s)

How Clubhouse is Affecting Community w/ UiPath

17 min episode – Beth McIntyre from CMX and Bevy, chats with Diana Morgan, the Community Manager at UiPath. Diana has been in the community space for a while, and has seen the evolution of many community and digital connection platforms. In this episode, she talks about Clubhouse, the audio-only platform. They discuss how the use of real time events can enhance community engagement, and how something like Clubhouse could change how we interact with online communities.

📽 Favorite Vid(s)

How to Start a Clubhouse Room and Moderate Like a Pro

15 min video – As I pointed Clubhouse out earlier, I figured this would be a fun and helpful one if you’re new to Clubhouse and want to experiment with it for your own community. It’s a super practical one, with some etiquette, tips & tricks for starting and properly moderating an engaging Clubhouse room.

🐦 Twitter

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Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Welcome community enthusiasts! 👋 Today we have a very special interview for you with Brittni Cocchiara, Sr. Community Marketing Manager at one of my favorite tools and businesses out there: Webflow.

Brittni explains how she got into the field, how Webflow’s community started and what it entails today, how they’re working with their community ambassadors and how they’re rewarding them, how they moderate such a huge community, and a lot more! 🔥

Enjoy, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

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About Webflow and Brittni

Webflow empowers designers to build professional, custom websites in a completely visual canvas with no code. Webflow was founded in 2013 and recently raised a 140M round to expand on their mission. With their community of roughly 75,000 people, it’s an interesting case to see how they’ve approached community building so far, and how they’re approaching it today.

Brittni took on the role of Senior Community Manager at Webflow last year. Obviously, this is somewhat different from a lot of other stories we’ve done on the Build With Users Interview series. Webflow isn’t in its earliest days anymore and the community has grown fast to a jaw-dropping scale. Let’s kick off with how she actually ended up on this career path.

​Tell us a bit about your background. How did you start your career in community management?

I started my tech career working for small start-ups as a customer success/support manager. When I chatted with customers, it didn't feel like I was at a help desk to me. I had everyday, casual conversations to help people out. I was good at it, and I thought that was what I would do for the rest of my life. 

Then Miro invited me to help build out their customer success team. However, they didn't have a definite plan for me; I was assisting the product team with customer research and doing all sorts of other things. I began feeling like I was floating around and wasn't growing in any of it, which frustrated me. At the same time, while conducting interviews, I noticed that customers were tired of being talked at by the company, they wanted to talk to other customers about their experiences with the product. In a way, I also wanted them to talk to each other. I've always known that the word of mouth type of marketing is the best. So I started wondering how to work with this. 

I ended up going to the CMO and the CEO, saying that I needed to leave. I told them that I wanted to focus my career more on community building. Against all my expectations, they offered me to do that for Miro instead. When I got to dive into community building, I quickly realized I knew nothing, and that starting a community wasn't just about starting a Slack group. But with time, I figured it out. 

Nowadays, I thank Miro for helping me to find that passion, for giving me a chance to explore. Talking to other community managers, I understand it's a tough job. But it's also really rewarding when you get it right.

​Stumbling upon a community role through a different experience seems to be a common thread. What makes you feel you want to keep doing this? Is it the fact that you connect people?

Yes, that's what I love and enjoy. I can help facilitate relationships, bring people together who wouldn't necessarily meet. They share one common theme – they use this product, or they believe in the vision. And I can help them connect. Plus, I get to meet cool people every day. I feel like people trust me because I'm not trying to sell anything. They feel like I'm more genuine because I'm just here to make connections.

For instance, looking back at Miro, I recall a group of people that met at an in-person virtual event we did and ended up starting a company together.

At Webflow, people are often teaming up to build a website or even create agencies. Hearing how a piece of software is changing someone's life or enabling them to quit their job and start their own thing is fantastic. Eventually, I help Webflow do more in terms of community, so more people achieve such outcomes. The fact that I can do more of this and I get to hear those stories every single day makes it so fulfilling. 

​When you joined Webflow, was there already a community set up?

I joined in September last year, and there was already a well-established community. I think they brought me in because the community was growing so quickly and they needed help scaling and driving deeper engagement across multiple platforms. It has exploded over the past year. 

There are now global meetups, newsletters, Slack workspaces, Clubhouses, a Facebook group, a forum, as well as several event series and budding ecosystem communities, like Webflow Experts. There's so much love in the Webflow community that we wanted to grow with it. So I came in to help scale these programs and initiatives.

​Did Webflow have this community-led perspective when they started? Was it something deliberate, or did the community part surge naturally because people were fond of the technology?

Some of it came organically. There was always something happening on Facebook, and people were already meeting.

We set up our forum up deliberately. When Webflow started, they didn't have a customer support team, and they were trying to find a way to connect with their customers affordably. They figured this was an easy way to do it as a small enterprise. 

Can you give an overview of what the Webflow community entails? How do you bring value to the community and let people connect?

We let people connect via the forum. The forum is pretty much support-oriented. The Facebook group and now Clubhouses are more focused on engagement. There is a little bit of support, but it's primarily an opportunity for members to show off what they have done. 

Furthermore, we have the Webflow Showcase as part of the product, where people can display their templates and sites and comment on each other's work; that's a big part of our community. 

In our events community, we have been doing many virtual events and were doing in-person meetings before the pandemic. 

We also have our community leaders/ambassador program. They are the ones who help moderate our forum and who create events to start 'chapters' (local communities) all over the world. 

Lately, I've been working on building an ambassadors-only community. This is essentially a sub-community of all the community leaders and ambassadors to connect. Because before I came in, they were almost siloed away from each other. If all of them are doing the same thing, it makes sense that we enable them to talk and help each other. This 'sub-community' is essential for properly maintaining and growing our community of end-users and Webflow enthusiasts.

​Are there any specific resources that you are developing with ambassadors to bring value to the community? 

I'm focused a lot on content creation, working with ambassadors to create templates, slides, articles, posts, etc. Many of these ambassadors aren't just doing it for the love of Webflow; they're also trying to build a personal brand. 

By working with these ambassadors, we are getting a constant stream of relevant content from our actual users. That helps us as Webflow for marketing purposes while we raise the names of the creators

By working with these ambassadors, we are getting a constant stream of relevant content from our actual users. That helps us as Webflow for marketing purposes while we raise the names of the creators. That's what brings a lot of value to the community: sharing and gaining knowledge, empowering people to focus on what they are passionate about, and helping them build their personal brand.

​You mentioned using Clubhouse, Facebook, and you run the forum on Discourse. What are the pros and cons of these tools/platforms?

There are good things and bad things for all of them. When you have a Facebook community, there's not much wiggle room - you have to work within the structure of Facebook. At present, I'm the only official community manager in a 75-thousand plus community, and though I try to be in all places at once, Facebook doesn't make that easy for me. Then again, most people check their Facebook every day. So it's easy to get the word out, and people can connect throughout the day. 

Discourse is great. But if you're not super tech-savvy, it can be hard to navigate the platform as a community manager. There's a lack of metrics, in my opinion, in particular engagement metrics. 

People and companies outside of the community often want to know how many people are on the platform – what we refer to as "vanity metrics." But what does that tell you?! Discourse gives you monthly and daily active users from which you can gauge "stickiness," but I want to go deeper. I want to know who those "sticky users" are. I want to know how often they are creating sites on Webflow. If I were to get that kind of information, I would have to do more developer-type work, and we don't have the resources to do that currently. These platforms offer many options, but if you don't have the resources, you're stuck. And that's unfortunate.

The other part is that even if there's a better alternative out there for us, we have 37 thousand people already on it. So it would be quite the challenge to move them over.

​Have you figured out a way to get that overview of your members and how engaged they are?

Not yet. I know how to do it but it involves others in the company as we’d need to go through our data warehouse. That’s a different story and quite the challenge. I know of new platforms and tools to help the community, but it's always a tricky conversation to have. Because even though the concept of community is not brand new, it still is relative to other business pillars. It’s always a matter of showing the impact and getting the resources you need.

Often people think that creating community is as simple as starting a Facebook group or opening a Slack channel. So explaining the ins-and-outs, making the motifs come across, can be challenging.

Often people think that creating community is as simple as starting a Facebook group or opening a Slack channel. So explaining the ins-and-outs, making the motifs come across, can be challenging. But now, with the pandemic, I see a surge in community. People are starting to listen.

​How do people find out about the community? How do you make sure it keeps growing?

A lot of our growth is word of mouth. I've asked people how they found us, and most say someone mentioned it, and once they Google it, usually our forum pops up. With Facebook, it's the same thing: A tells B they are in this group, having this conversation, and B wants to check what's happening. 

For events, we moved from Meetup.com to Bevy. We're struggling a bit because Bevy doesn't have things like name recognition or SEO. So our chapter leaders are having to put more effort into promoting their events, and we help them out via our social media accounts. 

We also have a monthly newsletter in which we outline what's going on in the community, share templates, discussions from Facebook, and the forum - trying to keep everything together. That has about 11 thousand subscribers. We also promote our community landing page on all of our YouTube videos. Our university videos get a lot of views, and even that little plug below the videos causes an uptick. Soon, we will be getting exclusive community swag to encourage people to wear stuff, which will probably help people to talk about the Webflow community. 

​Moderating at such a scale is probably quite challenging. How do you keep the community lively and upbeat?

Because I'm the only one, it isn't straightforward. But if I make sure the community leaders – the ones that are moderating, leading things in the community – are happy, content, and feel like I'm on their side, they'll carry that over. For example, if we notice something in the forums that is not pleasant, I don't go in and tell them to stop it. Especially since sometimes it's a valid concern. But I make sure the community leaders know that I'm listening, that there are people at Webflow who are listening. In the end, if we're championing them, they're championing us – and that's how we keep it positive. 

I think that should be every community manager's long-term goal: to empower the community to run itself.

At our scale, it's me mostly leading and overseeing and enabling the community leaders to do more operational work. My main goal as a community manager is to scale and automate myself out of work. I think that would be my definition of success in this role. For example, if I can shape things so that the community writes the content for the newsletter we send out, it's one less thing I have to do. I'm not trying to offload everything. But if it's a community newsletter, why don't we have the community write it? If it's their forum, why don't we have them answering the questions and creating content? I shouldn't be the one doing it; I'm not a Webflow user. But I'm here to help facilitate the process, make them feel like they're running it. I think that should be every community manager's long-term goal: to empower the community to run itself.

You mention that members raise valid concerns on the forum. Are such situations primarily product-related?

Yes. Communities just want transparency regarding decisions made by the company they support. For example, when the community puts something on their wish-list, they are not asking to have it shipped right away. But they would still appreciate some insight into why we're making certain decisions and prioritize other things first. However, sometimes the company is so busy that I have to bring them back in and remind them that they need to communicate their plans to the rest of the community.

​Speaking of which, how's that connection between users and Webflow? Do you involve the community in improving the product?

We're trying to figure out how to keep improving on that level of transparency, and everyone is partaking in these conversations. After all, it's a customer-first company. We're going to be implementing a community business review to feed the community insights into what all departments are doing. Not just for product and engineering, but for all the teams at Webflow who are working to serve them.

Aside from this, we do have some things in place already to work directly with the community. Today,  it's mostly early access programs, monthly syncs with Webflow teammates, a Slack instance for community leaders, and community events, most notably our virtual World Tour we launched in 2020, and our annual flagship event, No Code Conf, in November. 

​What have you been doing to reward community members such as ambassadors?

There are 90 plus ambassadors right now, and we're hoping to grow that by a hundred percent by the end of the third quarter. That's my task. We're currently revamping our program to try to offer them more. Swag is not enough. We need to highlight what they're doing, both inside and outside of Webflow. If they are writing a book, we want to highlight that and celebrate with them. I'm looking at ways to scale this type of delight system, as it has been a great perk for them.

I lead the community with a lot of empathy. After all, I wouldn't have a job if we didn't have these people. And part of my job is to help Webflow remember that every single day.

Another thing is including them in conversations with others at Webflow. Even if they're able to have a five-minute conversation with the CEO, they are appreciative. I'm also constantly open to chat with members who aren't ambassadors or leaders. I want to hear from them, find out what they want and what they feel, even if there are things at Webflow that aren't working for them. I lead the community with a lot of empathy. After all, I wouldn't have a job if we didn't have these people. And part of my job is to help Webflow remember that every single day. In our Slack channel, I'm always pointing out what members did. Because we can be so into building the product that some of us at Webflow need to keep reminding everyone we're doing it for the community. So I try to share these real human stories to keep fostering that understanding.

​One piece of advice that you would give to anyone who is building out the early community around a software startup?

It takes time. Don't be discouraged by the lack of growth that you see. Another thing I wish I had learned at the time is to take care of myself. Community managers are taking care of everything and everybody in a way. But you can't help others if you're not taking care of yourself. You find that for many community managers that work with startup companies, everything is go-go-go, build-build-build. You get in that mindset and forget that sometimes you need to take a break or ask for help. You need to give yourself credit and space.

​Have you got any favorite community management books or podcasts?

The first community book that I've ever read was Get Together. I have a book called Boundaries by Henry Cloud. That book isn't about community management, but I'm very into mental health and setting boundaries for myself, which I think is very relevant for any community manager. 

Overall, I'm not much of a reader, and my podcasts are not so community-related. Instead, I lean on other community managers. When I started, I went to Linkedin and found community people running communities I admired and asked them for 30 minutes of their time. I just wanted to talk, to learn from them. That has been better for me than any book or podcast. That's where I found my tribe; the people who, whether I'm having a low day or high day, keep cheering me on. Community managers are usually willing to speak to you, and they will connect you to others. So be open, ask.

​Have you any favorite tools that help you run your community?

For events, Bevy has been a lifesaver. Meet-Up is excellent, but you get many people who sign up and don't show up. I remember doing this Meet-Up in Amsterdam when I was running all of Miro's events, and no one showed up. That was hard, traveling from Texas to Amsterdam, finding no one showed. So especially when scaling such programs and giving chapter leaders the ability to create their own events, Bevy has been a lifesaver.

​Is there anything specific that you'd like to promote that you want us to share?

I think just the Webflow community and website. I'm not the type of person to toot my own horn. I feel like my work at Webflow is an accurate reflection of me. So the Webflow community's success, or even of what's happening at Miro, is me building my brand. I'm super proud of everything that I've touched.

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Next week we plan to have another cool interview for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Hey friends! We’re back with a new selection of great community content. This edition covers 3 functions of developer relations, community moderation, and the future of community. Enjoy! ✌️

🤔 Question of the week

Communities are poppin’ up everywhere 🌱! What are your most cherished communities today (and why)?

Feel free to drop them in the comment section 👇.

Leave a comment

✋ Favorite five

📖 Favorite Read(s)

The DevRel Path To Success: Awareness, Enablement, Engagement

5 min read - In this article, Mary Thengvall talks about the 3 primary functions of developer relations: Awareness, Enablement, & Engagement, and which DevRel teams these functions typically fall into.

Community and Marketing have a natural overlap

5 min read - The folks over at Uncommunity organized an AMA with Krystal Wu, Social Community Manager at HubSpot. She shares her thoughts on how implementing community tactics can humanize your brand, grow your customer base, generate valuable product feedback, and builds authentic relationships.

Moderating Virtual Events

5 min read - Providing opportunities for like-minded people to gather is amazing, but doing it online is a whole different ball game. In this quick read, Charley Mann shares some practical lessons to help you navigate online moderation and presentation in the tech world.

🎧 Favorite Podcast Episode(s)

Creating Kinder Gaming Communities with Victoria Tran of Among Us

40 min episode - Marsha Druker from Create Community chats with Victoria Tran, Community Director at Among Us, a game played by millions of people around the world. Gaming communities have gained a reputation as being unwelcome and toxic environment for the average player. Victoria and Marsha take a deep dive into moderation challenges, creating social values, and how we can create more sustainable and kinder online communities.

The Future of Community-Led Companies w/ Alexis Ohanian

50 min episode – The folks over at The Community Club had a long conversation chat with Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit about the future of community-led. He shares his thoughts on why he thinks that more than 50% of publicly traded companies will have a Chief Community Officer within 5 years from now.

Hey community friends! 👋 It’s been a while but we have a new interview for you. We chatted with Tanay Pant a while ago. Tanay is Head of Developer Relations at n8n.

Tanay shares how responsiveness goes a long way in turning users into fans, how they think ‘value first’, how they decided on Discourse over Slack, and how important transparency is. And these are just a few random highlights of our chat.

There’s much more to discover 🕵️‍♂️ Let’s dive in, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

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About n8n and Tanay

n8n is a free and open workflow automation tool that makes it easy for anyone to design their workflow visually. It currently offers integrations for syncing data between 150+ apps, with the possibility of creating custom integrations. Launched on Product Hunt by its founder Jan Oberhauser, it managed to become the number 1 product of the week in October 2019. Since then, both the community and the team behind n8n have been growing at a rapid pace. Their GitHub repository already received over 12k stars and currently lists more than 125 contributors, underlining that n8n is truly built together with users.

Tanay Pant is the Head of Developer Relations at n8n. As a book author, podcast host, conference speaker, developer, and tech enthusiast, he knows a lot about how to engage with a tech-oriented community. Being listed as a contributor to the Firefox web browser by the Mozilla Foundation means that he is no stranger to making contributions to software either.

When did n8n start working on community building, and why?

Community building began right at the start of n8n when our founder put the project up on GitHub, intending to create a kind of collaborative aura around it. Besides getting people excited, putting effort into the community gives us valuable insights. It's in our best interest to make things easier for the community, because who better than our users to tell us what needs to be improved? We also wanted to create a space where people can talk about automation, share ideas, and inspire each other.

​How much effort do you put into community building at this point? Is it mostly you working on it?

For the most part, community building is essentially a function of DevRel – but in our case, it's a holistic effort. If you look at even a subsection of our community, such as the forum, you'll find that members of the DevRel team are very engaged. But so is our founder and CEO, as well as members of our engineering team. This collective approach helps a lot in community building. 

It also helps in how we respond to requests by community members. When people request new things in the community and others upvote them, we try to act fast.

The community member was so impressed and happy that he posted about it everywhere.

Somebody commented on one of our releases back in December, mentioning they would like an integration for a particular service. We call these 'nodes.' It's the core of n8n, as these nodes allow creating your workflow with all sorts of third-party tools. In response, our team member Ricardo managed to cater for it within a day. The community member was so impressed and happy that he posted about it everywhere.

This is an excellent way for us to turn users into fans. It's always our ultimate goal for community members to turn into advocates. But to make that happen, we need to take a step beyond community building. We must assess if it is only about the community giving us reach or if we are providing value. And a big part of what we do in terms of delivering value comes down to taking their requests, making sure things are prioritized correctly, answering questions within a reasonable time-frame, and helping them with different education-adjacent topics like video tutorials, docs, and so on.

​Do you have any formalized programs to turn people into advocates?

We only started proper advocacy from mid-April last year, building on this framework of awareness, enablement, and adoption. I have seen DevRel teams zero in on outreach and focus on speaking at conferences, which can be great to get the word out about the product and attract people. People who discover about the community that way, then come back to find elements missing on the enablement side of things. There is a lack of resources and proper documentation, which makes them drop out of the community. I think that's a tough challenge to have. It's way harder to get someone back who has already dropped out than to have someone stick around from the start.

It's way harder to get someone back who has already dropped out than to have someone stick around from the start.

Therefore, over the past year, we have been focusing a lot on enablement: on bringing our documentation to a state stable enough to answer questions. We have also been working on our Medium publication. In the last ninety days, we have had more than twenty-three thousand minutes read. It's great to see communities utilizing these resources. Now that these frameworks are in place and there's a foundation for people to educate themselves, we're going to start focusing more on awareness.

​So the focus so far has been mostly on education and adoption as opposed to more awareness-related programs?

Exactly. Unless it's a big team, I think awareness should be carefully balanced with education or enablement. Because the moment the community starts seeing you as a salesperson who has an ulterior motive behind helping, it changes the interactions and the value that comes out of it.

Before we produce something on Twitter, we always think, "are followers going to gain value from this?" otherwise, we don't post it.

Social media is a good example. A lot of people/brands spend a lot of time on social media. And that makes sense depending on what stage they are in and what their purpose is. Being a small team, we run a Twitter account - but we don't put effort into following other accounts. We thought about that once since several other brands do it. Then we defaulted to the question, "What value does that bring to the community?" And we didn't have an answer for that. So we decided against it. Before we produce something on Twitter, we always think, "are followers going to gain value from this?" otherwise, we don't post it. I don't think we have ever posted something like, "Hey, sign up to n8n cloud!". We don't do that kind of traditional marketing. At least not at this stage.

One way you make people more engaged and turn them into advocates is by listening to their requests and acting upon them rather quickly. Do you have other examples along these lines?

Building based upon requests is something we do only when the same thing gets upvoted frequently. Other than that, we talk to the community members about what they are doing. We share many stories on how we are using n8n, which is a good way for people to learn the different facets of the product. 

Something else we do is interviewing community members on their approach to how they're using n8n. Since there are so many different ways to use our tool, the stories are very inspiring. And that helps with engaging community members as well.

​Can you give us an overview of the community initiatives and the tools you use?

We haven't had a lot of very specific community initiatives. We'll be focussing more on this at the start of this quarter. One of the things we did was participate in MLH (Major League Hacking) - a program for students striving to get into the engineering world and lock internships with companies who have source code on GitHub, so they can build up a profile there. That was a great experience.

You're using Discourse as a space for your community. Do you have other channels as well?

It's mainly the Discourse forum for now. I believe communication platforms like Slack can be interesting to use as a community tool, but we chose Discourse because Slack lacks a lot in moderation. It's essential to take care of the community team, so they don't get bombarded with messages and requests. 

Having a forum makes it easier since members can find answers through questions that were already answered. A lot of questions tend to be recurring. There are new things as well, but more often than not, we can reference one of the threads to address someone's doubt, question, or anything else. That's why we stick to Discourse for now.

We haven't heavily customized it either. We have added a few things for the moderation purpose, but other than that, it's pretty much as is. We have been looking at using Discourse in slightly different ways compared to how most companies use it for their community. Recently, for example, we added a show-and-tell category where people can display the projects that they have been building with n8n. 

That helps diversify the Discourse beyond just Q&A, and it's rewarding when community members we have been interacting with for a while start answering questions from other members. In the future, that could be a great metric for measuring success. 

​Is there anything else you have tried to do to keep people engaged? Do you have ways to stimulate responses? Any gamification?

We're planning to work on that soon. But I think it's essential to do that wisely. I've been part of a couple of communities, and I think people often overuse these. Sometimes you would end up getting ten notifications per day from a community, and if that's the case, I'm going to unsubscribe. People already have full inboxes. Still, we've been thinking about different ways to do that.

We have already started implementing a system via our newsletter and Twitter that helps us feature that month's contributions, acknowledge community members who have created something incredibly cool, or have spent time answering other people's questions. That helps acknowledge our members and give them credit for what they've done.

​You also have the product's source publicly available on GitHub where members of the community can contribute. How is that working for you?

n8n is on Github as a fair-code model. One of our focuses has been to build guides that enable people to create their own 'nodes', so we speed up the process of letting people design their workflows with whatever integration possible. 

Although this is always open to people, we barely actively touched this part of advocacy last year. We wanted to fix the "blank canvas problem" in our product first, which is essentially somebody coming into our tool and wondering where to go from there or what to automate first. 

As this is somewhat resolved, we are now focussing more on making contributions easier. The node contribution guide (we call different integrations "nodes"), for instance, isn't very easy. At least not for somebody relatively new in this area. We're now focussing on making that part more accessible, and that's going to involve different assets, starting with documentation. Once that is set, we can build on top of it with live streams, workshops, and articles. 

We currently have a contribution guide that outlines some of the basics, but it is somewhat disconnected. I think introducing a more organized version would be helpful there.

You're about to improve the parts around contribution guidelines to make it easier for people to contribute. Have you been doing anything to stimulate a contributive behavior so far or does it happen organically?

A lot of people are contributing organically. We did a few things, but nothing major. We touched up the contribution guidelines because there had been common issues in the contributions, which affected the time it took to review them. I think that's a crucial aspect when handling community contributions.

Thinking back to my first-ever contribution to a project on GitHub, someone commented on the pull request I sent within an hour. I made the change, and it got merged within half a day. I remember thinking, "wow, I contributed something that now exists on their website." Yet if they had taken a month to reply and another to merge, I would have dropped out, which would have been bad for both parties. 

I believe that how you handle contributions impacts the community and the product; it touches each contributor. That's why we've been improving the guidelines on GitHub itself. Things like making sure a PNG icon is compressed to 60x60, so community members don't need to make too many changes. Getting too many comments on your first contribution can be intimidating, so we want to avoid that by making improvements to the guidelines. People can then take it into account right away. That said, sometimes, if the changes are too extensive or too small to communicate back to someone, we take it in, make the changes ourselves and merge it in.

​I imagine the core of the product needs improving sometimes. What does the process of getting such insights from the community and feeding that into the product look like?

We are currently a team of two working on the DevRel side of things. One of our team members is focused on the community forum, answering questions. When I was doing a bit of that in December, I realized there were trends in questions – I would often answer the same thing three times. If that's a matter of the core product requiring a significant change, we need to document those cases to evaluate and eventually improve on it. We mostly use JIRA or Notion for that. If it's the case of a small fix that can improve things by huge dimensions, we try to escalate these requests quickly. Either way, it gets communicated into the backlog.

The team is also involved in doing user onboarding sessions, which also gets us some valuable insights. We are tapping into different areas: into the community, into conversations with people building with n8n, and integrations from other companies. Tapping into these diverse ecosystems helps us capture a lot of the sentiment, the things people would like to see from us. That informs the product backlog, as well as what we need to add or improve in terms of content or documentation.

​Do you have any advice for people who want to start an early community around their startup?

I'd say it's essential to be transparent with the community about what your aim is as a company; to share your vision with them. By nature, volunteering is something you do in your free time, and volunteering in a community requires effort from contributors. I think it's super important to let them know about the direction you're taking and the things you value. 

it's important to keep the internal mission and values coherent with what we showcase externally.

I've been a part of many different communities, and I appreciate having transparency over what's going on, so I'm sure other community members also appreciate that. Plus, it avoids potential disappointments in the future when people end up having a completely different opinion compared to what you're planning for the community. I think it's important to keep the internal mission and values coherent with what we showcase externally.

Another thing is that a lot of people get DevRel experience at middle-stage or larger-stage companies. Often these experiences don't translate one-on-one to smaller companies. That's essential to consider when anyone is transitioning into a DevRel tool for a smaller company. You have to be careful about how you approach problems since your experience might not always be relevant. It's vital in terms of communicating community values, how fast you should build out the team, and a lot of other things.

​How do you get inspiration for your work?

For developer relations, I like the newsletter called Developer Avocados. And then there's DevRel Weekly by Mary Thengvall, which is great. I'm working on a podcast myself as well, called Technically True. In this second season of it, we're going to talk a lot about communities. We're planning on interviewing founders and people looking to build communities around their product. But also people going into companies without any DevRel structures to see how they can go about doing that. 

Where can people find out more about you and n8n?

You can find me on Twitter. Also, have a look at our website or check out our community if you're interested.

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Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool newsletter for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Community enthusiasts, we’re back! 👋 This time, we’re sharing Austin Kodra’s story with you, the Head of Content & Community at Fritz AI. We’ve seen lots of stories of people who seem to have figured out the foundational parts of building and growing a community. Most are already at a certain scale, running into different challenges.

For earlier stage startups, the challenge is about finding product- and community-market fit. That’s hard. I think this conversation with Austin gives you a peek into such a journey and how they deal with it in terms of building community.

Austin shares how they’re transitioning in terms of the persona they target, how they keep things transparent while making the transition (building trust in the community), and shares some advice about thinking through whether a community-first approach is right for your startup 💎

Let’s dive in, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

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About Fritz AI and Austin

Fritz AI is a machine learning platform for iOS, Android, and SnapML in Lens Studio. They offer their model development Studio to train custom solutions or jump right in with pre-trained models and projects. They raised their second round of Seed funding last year and are currently zooming in on Snapchat Lens Creators to focus their business around.

As Fritz is still in their early startup days and the team is relatively small, Austin is running community efforts as well as working on the general product & content marketing parts of the business. Their journey of exploring and potentially tailoring more to the Lens Creator audience makes for an exciting story, as this heavily impacts the community efforts.

When did Fritz decide to focus on community building, and how did it start out?

When I came on board a few years ago, I was fortunate that there was a dedicated section to community on the roadmap. The idea was to start off writing our own content and initiate some other lightweight initiatives and then recruit people to write inside our community.

The idea was to eventually develop a shared, global space in which we could host events, with the ultimate goal of having our own conference series on mobile machine learning. In other words, becoming the authority and using the community to attract people to this new technology space. It was a foundational approach: test the market, help it grow, and build relationships. Then down the road, entice folks to write content for us, advocate for our product, and do their own events with their communities. Some of these ideas have materialized, so they met with our initial conceptualization. 

What was the reason to put Community on the roadmap in the first place? To educate what was essentially a new market?

We thought, "Which type of marketing will be the most effective". As a company, we have a firm root in inbound marketing. And though that is not new anymore, that overall concept proved to be an effective way to approach developer audiences, who are especially hard to market to. We understood it took more of a community-centric approach to get developers interested in the type of technology we’re working on.

So we decided to invest in building a community and content resources. We transposed a marketing budget that would usually go to paid campaigns to remunerate our contributors and expand the content ecosystem, considering that these assets consequently help the community. 

How many people are working in the community team at the moment?

On the Fritz Heartbeat side, it's a content manager and me. She's a fantastic editor and writer, also from a non-tech background, so we tend to bring a more creative, flexible, and relationship-based perspective into the company.

On the contributor side, we've had between five to ten people writing semi-consistently for us. But, like in any community, it's a mix. You have your watchers who tune in when they have something to share. Then you have those who are consistently there for you. It's a wide range of people.

In terms of community initiatives, what have you been doing to bring value to members?

This has been challenging due to the technological space we've traditionally targeted. We serve mobile developers, but we also cover machine learning, which is an entirely different discipline. So one of the main difficulties has been to identify the right people interested in that intersection. Or trying to get each disparate group interested in the intersection of the two technologies. Some folks come into our community after reading a comprehensive machine learning article - but they have no interest in the mobile development side. And yet, the product we are selling is for mobile development specifically. That's why we struggled when running AMAs on Slack, office-hour lunch-and-learns, or even when trying to incorporate our newsletter into the community to share resources. 

I think that's a persona issue. So we no longer want to invest in pushing toward mobile plus machine learning intersections. Because holding a webinar on general machine learning, for example, takes a lot of our team's time, and yet we're not getting the audience any closer to the aspect we want them to start exploring.

We've done webinars and more co-marketing to focus on that community; a more tight-knit community who really need and want that education because they are designers or graphic artists or 3D artists—not machine learning engineers.

We have recently started working with Snapchat Lens Creators, and that has been more successful. Lens Studio, the tool that they use to build Augmented Reality Lenses such as face filters, has a component that allows them to bring in machine learning models from the outside world. We thought this was a perfect opportunity for us: it's a mobile platform and there's a lot of similarities in technology. Since we began targeting this new, more defined persona, the advance has been easier. We've done webinars and more co-marketing to focus on that community; a more tight-knit community who really need and want that education because they are designers or graphic artists or 3D artists—not machine learning engineers.

Communities tend to have these repeating activities that people can depend on and come back to. Is there anything like that in place for either one of those audiences? 

Not yet. We're in the early stages of developing a more focused community program—like an ambassador program—and that's the direction we're starting to aim for when we have something more focused around the Snapchat ecosystem instead of the other personas.

We have tried the weekly office hours, weekly AMAs, and a few other things for the other personas we used to focus on more heavily. People would get excited about this new technology, experiment with it, play around with some open source stuff, but then realize that it's not going anywhere unless they invest money, time, and business resources. Building consistency around these personas was difficult since no one was adopting the technology for the long term. 

Now we're shifting into a stage where I think we might see more success. It's really because this new persona is more defined. They engage well with video content, tutorials, live events; they like to chat and get together.

Now we're shifting into a stage where I think we might see more success. It's really because this new persona is more defined. They engage well with video content, tutorials, live events; they like to chat and get together. And though we want to tap into that, we are still in the process of planning. We're identifying these folks, talking to them, and seeing what they would want out of it so that we can play into it with repeating activities that get people together.

What sort of path do you see - perhaps more directed at this new persona - to move people from getting acquainted with who you are towards being an ambassador in the community?

There are some clear contributions this new persona can make. There are ways for them to build machine learning models without code, for instance, and we can support them in that. In such a new technological area, everyone needs some kind of support; hence, a big part of our pitch has revolved around offering that incentive.

One of the pros of this persona is that, because machine learning is new to most of them, some folks are eager to add us and our resources to their tool-set, as it can help them become an Official Lens Creator. 

The fact that they are striving to reach this official status from Snapchat allows for hero-making, which is something we have tried to focus on a lot.

The fact that they are striving to reach this official status from Snapchat allows for hero-making, which is something we have tried to focus on a lot. By leveraging our relationship with Snapchat, we can help these up-and-coming creators explore AI technology. They, in turn, can share what they are learning with the community. And there begins a feedback loop that renders us as an authority on these other technological areas.

Though we're still figuring out the details, the general hope we have for this new idea is to incentivize and re-adjust how we're investing in community.

What tools are in your current community stack? And what are the pros and cons you find with those tools?

One of my tasks for this week is to refresh my content dashboards in Google Sheets. We use a straightforward set of Google Analytics and Google Sheets for measuring our success. Google Sheets includes our marketing and content budget and content breakdown, all of which are manually updated. We use Slack for the general community space and HubSpot for set parts of our community. We use MailChimp for our newsletters, but for more direct, personal mail, we use HubSpot. 

We're not too deep in the weeds yet on specific metrics for our community, as it's a new technological space, and we're adjusting the people we cater to. As a first step in facilitating these Lens Creators, we're mainly interested in understanding what chunk of our content should go towards this persona to bring value first.

How does the community help you on the product side? Is there a collaboration between learning from the people you interact with and then translating that into insight for the product team to make better decisions?

Although our Slack group is limited in terms of engagement, which is a result of not having nailed our target audience fully, it has introduced us to a couple of really dedicated community members. I've had several product feedback chats about the workflow of the product. We have ideas on how we want these interactions to go but they haven't yet reached the scale we were hoping for.

We've tried to be responsive in all aspects, particularly in product support and how diligently we're thinking about communicating this shift we're about to make towards the Lens Creators. I think that has built trust across our community. 

For now, there's just the general idea that when there's product feedback, we jump on our internal company's Slack and discuss it almost immediately. I believe we have done a good job of identifying and creating a process to handle product improvements based on that feedback so far. We've tried to be responsive in all aspects, particularly in product support and how diligently we're thinking about communicating this shift we're about to make towards the Lens Creators. I think that has built trust across our community. 

One piece of advice you'd give to anyone building out a community around a software startup?

One thing I wish I had done better is to understand the longer-term purpose of the community earlier. It sat on our roadmap, but I didn't engage with those questions enough, even as the community manager. If you're building a community, whether it's talking to your co-founder (if it's a new startup) or to your head of marketing, you need to be addressing purpose questions like "Why are we doing this?" consistently.

It's also important to imagine what the alternatives might be. Compare it to a paid strategy, project what it's going to be three or five years down the road even if you're not sure. Essentially, trying to figure out what the ideal path might be so you can start from a place that combines your identity as a community-first organization with your business. The earlier you form that identity, and the more connected to the business roadmap you make it, the better. 

Sometimes engineering and product-related topics take precedence in an early startup. As a community manager, you should make sure these are brought up in meetings and communicate them fairly.  

Another thing is keeping the Community in front of mind - or at least a part of the discussion internally all the time. Sometimes engineering and product-related topics take precedence in an early startup. As a community manager, you should make sure these are brought up in meetings and communicate them fairly.  

How do you get inspiration for your work?

I had a couple of good mentors. Rebecca Corliss, the VP at VergeSense, has been great. She understands the ins and outs of a lot of different parts of marketing. In terms of community, Paige Bailey from TensorFlow has been a good example of how to do hero-making or support the community through social media. If you're doing developer relations and community, exploring DevRel Twitter can introduce you to many amazing people.

How can people find out more about you?

Going through our blog, Heartbeat is the best way. That's how you'll be introduced to what we do, what kinds of things we publish. From there, you can find our are product, look at the range of contributors and how we think about content organization, and see how things change and evolve.

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Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool newsletter for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Heeyyy there! 👋

Curated #4 is here! In this issue, we decided to center some content around the topic of measuring community success. It’s not so trivial and we’ve seen a lot of community managers struggle with it in general. So, we bundled up some cool things for you to check out.

Besides some fun content, we’re also doing a little experiment with a LIVE Build With Users interview next week that you can join! We’ll just do our regular casual call to ask some questions, but you’ll have a chance to chime in and ask yours too! 🤩

See our awesome guest below 👇

🧐 Question of the week

What is your current approach to measuring community success?

There are different takes and people working on this. I’d love to learn more about how you currently approach this. Reply to this email or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

📣 A little announcement – Next week Feb 16, we’re doing a little experiment with a LIVE Build With Users interview on Twitch with Erik Martin, Chief Community Officer at Teal. Besides our casual chat where we’re asking questions, you can ask yours too! (some will end up in the written piece for this newsletter — credits included)

Learn more about this event

🖐 Favorite Five

In every one of these bi-weekly issues, we’ll highlight at least one cool read, video, podcast episode, tool, and person to follow on Twitter. You’ll find some mixed resources with an emphasis on KPIs & Metrics: measuring community success for this issue.

📖 Favorite Read(s)

Why 'Feeling Metrics'​ are Just as Important as Engagement Metrics

15 min read – Four additional things every CX professional needs to measure against to understand not just the true success of their Community, but the entirety of a customer's experience.

How To Measure Success in DevRel Between Companies and Communities

9 min read – Running a community is hard work and keeping community members happy is a big part of it. This article takes the discipline of Developer Relations and covers how DevRel is essential to company survival, the importance of DevRel to developer communities, how community members can help out, and a couple of things more.

📽 Favorite Vid(s)

Amplify Your Impact: Defining, Instrumenting, and Tracking Community KPI Metrics

55 min video – Whether you manage a thriving community or plan to get one off the ground, it's important to understand, articulate, and share the impact of your community. Chris Anderson — Community at Guru, shares a framework you can use to define your KPI metrics and map them to organizational outcome goals. He shares tips on implementation, getting buy-in and engagement from key stakeholders, tracking and analyzing your metrics, and how to leverage KPI data to maximize your community's impact.

🎧 Favorite Podcast Episode(s)

a16z Podcast: Measuring & Managing Community Orgs, Developer Relations and Beyond

33 min episode – We know community is important — whether for developer relations for your platform or just other types of communities — but how do we measure the success of community initiatives and even artifacts (like events or swag), given how indirect so much of it is? How do we know we’re measuring the right things, and is there one key metric for measuring the health of a community?

When it comes to developer relations specifically, where should DevRel sit in an organization (product, sales, engineering)? How do you reconcile developer as customer vs. developer as community member? And what’s the difference between evangelism and advocacy?

Amir Shevat — former VP of Product and Developer Experience at Twitch and former Director of Developer Relations at Slack — drew on his experiences to share insights and answers to these questions. It’s followed by a Q&A with Mikeal Rogers, who works on Community Operations at Protocol Labs, and was formerly Community Manager of the Node.js foundation.

🛠 Favorite Tool(s)

Airtable Community CRM – The Orbit model translated into an Airtable template that functions as your community CRM. It’s a free alternative and something we recently started trying in a much more lightweight twist for Build With Users. We’re having lots of conversations with different people behind the scenes besides the interviews we do and are exploring things that are beyond just this newsletter.

🐦 Follow on Twitter

Danielle Maveal, @daniellexo – Danielle is all about community. She worked on community at Etsy, Airbnb, and Barkbox. She’s also doing some gatherings for community folks, in case you’re interested.

Excited about Build With Users? share some ❤️ on Twitter

Cheers,

Gino, Frank, Steven, Lennart

Hey community friends! 👋 Hope you’re excited for the next Build With Users Interview! This time, we chatted with Mac Reddin, co-founder and CEO at Commsor and Community Club. Because, what’s better than getting some take-aways from someone who’s working on a company + community that is all about community building, right?

I’m sorry if this is getting too meta 👀

Anyway, Mac shares how they started, how they used Slack as their online community space and why they now run a Forem as well, and how they deal with keeping parts of the community invite-based. He also sheds a light on the essence of growing your community, and has a unique book recommendation for you! 💎

Let’s dive in, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

📣 A little announcement – Next week Feb 9, we’re doing a Build With Users Jam again: a small-size virtual meetup for DevRels & Community Managers.

This time, it’s aimed at those of you serving a developer audience & community. The theme is: Measuring Developer Experience. Check this RSVP page for more details

About Commsor and Mac

Commsor define themselves as the community operating system. They help community managers consolidate community data and enable them to unlock insights, measure impact, and build a community-led company.

Mac is the co-founder and CEO of Commsor and runs Community Club as an important part of that. Community Club is a highly active community for community builders.

Before jumping into this adventure, Mac founded and exited a gaming community called The Chunk. Afterwards, he made it his mission to provide the tools, resources and education needed for other community builders.

At what stage of the company did you start an online community and why?

We were initially building a platform to help connect independent communities with companies through various forms of sponsorships and partnerships. When that wasn't going as well as we'd liked, we decided to start a newsletter as a way of exploring the broader community space.

Shortly after, we added a Slack group to that so we'd have a place to connect and interact with our target audience as we explored new product opportunities in the community space. You could really see this as our foundation. We started with the people first and then discovered our new product direction based on many interactions we had.

What platform(s) do you use to run your online community? What are the pros and cons?

We used to solely run on Slack for our online space but have launched a new space on Forem recently. We have a weekly newsletter on Mailchimp and a fairly active presence on Twitter in addition to those two. 

Most people that have been familiar with our Community Club community for a longer period now know that we started with this Slack group. It grew quite rapidly to around 1k+ members. Along the way we realized we needed to approach things a bit differently and considered using Forem.

We added Forem into the mix for a few reasons. One important reason is that we wanted a space for longer form, searchable content that could be discovered and shared publicly. Slack has its advantages, but one big disadvantage is that's not indexable and doesn't easily allow for this long-form content right in the context of where the community lives.

We also found that some people were more interested in consuming content but weren't keen to participate in the Slack community. Although it's an active Slack community, there is always a majority of the people observing and consuming the content shared. We felt a place like we have today with Forem would better facilitate that.

The biggest pro of all is that Slack has a very low barrier to entry for the right target audience due to its prevalence in many workplaces

There are far too many pros and cons to list for running a community on Slack. The biggest pro of all is that Slack has a very low barrier to entry for the right target audience due to its prevalence in many workplaces. That doesn't hold true for any community. It depends on your target audience. But for us, serving community builders, that's generally already a platform they use for work-related communication.

At the same time, it isn't built for communities and lacks many of the essential community management tools you'd expect from a purpose-built platform. There are ways to combat those. We have shared a thing or two about this in a recent session on building highly-engaged Slack communities – find a full break-down of that session with tips on running a Slack community in John Saddington’s newsletter

Just one thing that's lacking, for example, is a way to onboard members into the community. There isn't any way to set this up within Slack itself. If you're still small, this could be a full manual effort to ensure you have proper onboarding for every new person joining. Later on, you'll have to come up with something that helps you do this in a way that’s a bit more scaleable. GreetBot is an ok way to set welcoming messages in public channels for your Slack community. 

To have a personal welcoming DM, you could use Slack's workflow builder.

How do people find out about the community? How do you make sure it keeps growing?

The best way to make sure a community keeps growing is to focus on making the current members love the community. There is no better way to power community growth than positive word of mouth, and the best way to create this is to make people feel welcome. 

The best way to make sure a community keeps growing is to focus on making the current members love the community.

Give them a safe space, build trust and authenticity. You can't fake those things, and they take a lot of time to build up naturally. That said, we do intentionally use our channels as flywheels to grow each other - Twitter and our newsletter both act as great discovery points for new potential members to learn about the community. 

We've mostly focused on doing one channel well at a time. We figured out the cadence and consistency that worked for our newsletter before we started investing more in Twitter as a channel. We don't plan to try and figure out LinkedIn until we've got Twitter running smoothly.

It's all about providing consistent value, giving people a reason to care about your Slack, Twitter, newsletter, or whatever else it might be.

Do you keep the community open or invite-based? If the latter, how do you qualify people that want to join?

Both. The Slack community has always been invite-only (with open applications), but our new Forem platform is completely open for anyone to join and participate in. 

For Slack, we try to limit it to actual community builders, professional or indie, to ensure that a feeling of trust and authenticity is maintained. Our Forem allows us to reach a broader 'community-curious' audience.

Forem is also better positioned to scale to more users, while Slack communities can sometimes have adverse network effects if they get too large.

How do you keep your community lively and positive?

Lead by example. We wanted to create a welcoming environment for new members. In the early days, we made sure to welcome every new member personally and throw a ton of emojis on their introduction messages. 

As the community has grown, members have taken it upon themselves to do that as well. This welcoming atmosphere happens without our team having to be directly involved these days, which is fantastic.

At the start of a community, you will be the one doing a lot of the heavy lifting and setting the example of how you'd like members to act and behave.

It's also an important part to emphasize. At the start of a community, you will be the one doing a lot of the heavy lifting and setting the example of how you'd like members to act and behave. If things go well and your community grows, others tend to replicate that behavior.

Keeping a community lively and cheerful is sometimes about the intangible vs tangible - it's less about the things you do, and more about how you make community members feel: trusted, welcomed, heard.

How did engagement change when you grew from the first couple of dozen members to over 2000 members? Any challenges anyone can learn from?

I always like to say that growing a community is like growing an apple tree. In the beginning, you have to constantly water, nurture, and watch over the community. As it grows, it's able to take care of itself, so your job shifts more to maintaining and providing the space for the community. 

Starting a community always has that 'chicken or egg' problem to start, so you have to do much more of the engagement heavy lifting upfront.

Starting a community always has that 'chicken or egg' problem to start, so you have to do much more of the engagement heavy lifting upfront.

Because we've always been extremely intentional, even when the community was 25 people, we haven't run into many real "challenges" as we've scaled up. It is worth mentioning that our community is a community of community builders, so there is a higher degree of understanding that might not exist when your members are a different audience.

How do you involve your community in improving your product?

We use our own product to run our community, so it acts as both a place to gather feedback from customers and potential customers and test new things ourselves.

In addition to generally just keeping a finger on the pulse of what community managers are struggling with, we also maintain a private channel for our customers and actively solicit their input and feedback as we continue to build the product. 

One piece of advice you would give to anyone that is building out an early community around a software startup:

Don't commit the cardinal sin of community metrics - obsessing over the number of members. Focus on building relationships and the reason people want to gather around your product, startup, and community. Later on, you can think more about how to measure things. For starters, avoid focusing on this.

Your favorite tool that helps you better run your community, if any?

Besides Commsor (no bias here), we've been big fans of Toucan for our casual community get-togethers. It provides a better experience for virtual social meetups than the more work-focused Zoom type apps.

Your favorite article or book as a community enthusiast?

There are so many good books about community building that I could recommend. I would recommend one that isn't often considered a community book: "Connected, how your friends' friends' friends' affect everything you feel, think and do", by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. 

While it isn't specifically about community, many of the underlying concepts about human nature can be directly related to community building basics.

Anything specific you want to promote or plug?

The Community Club! You have to join if you're interested or involved in community building - https://www.community.club/

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Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool newsletter for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Heeyyy there! 👋

We’re back with a Curated! We’re mixing up the long-form interviews, like this latest one with June from Zeplin, with these shorter form curated issues.

I know quite a few of you we talked to like the newsletter, and more specifically the interviews we started with. We sometimes get amazing messages, like this one from Uma:

That’s really what makes us tick! 💙 Thanks, Uma! If you appreciate the content, feel free to let us know. It keeps us going. Every once in a while, we do a shout out to show our appreciation! 🙏

But… we’re also eager to get thoughts on what other formats and subjects you’d like to see more of. So, the question of the week:

🧐 Question of the week

What topics do you want us to create more content around? Would you like to see other formats?

That’s actually two questions. I hope you don’t mind 👀 Please reply to this email or leave a comment 👇

Leave a comment

🖐 Favorite Five

In every one of these bi-weekly issues, we’ll highlight at least one cool read, video, podcast episode, tool, and person to follow on Twitter. You’ll find some mixed resources with an emphasis on content creation & flywheels for this issue.

📖 Favorite Read(s)

How to Use an Online Community as a Content Marketing Pipeline

7 min read – Noele Flowers talks about how you can harness the power of a brand community as your company’s most trusted content marketing pipeline. Using communities this way is an incredibly powerful way to show the value of community to other teams. If you can start to use your community as a content pipeline, you’ll become a sought-after internal resource for coworkers who create content, elevate the quality of discussions in your community, and reward your best community members.

Content Strategy for DevRel Teams: A Primer

9 min read – Stephanie Morillo wrote this post to educate DevRel teams on the absolute basics of content strategy and identify ways that DevRel teams can use content to help their audiences without having to start from scratch.

How I do Twitter for Indie Hackers

9 min read – Rosie Sherry shares how she approached Twitter as a channel for Indie Hackers based on the existing community. It covers some elements of the flywheel effect she wrote another great post about (paid article – but worth it)

📽 Favorite Vid(s)

This talk is focused more on Developer Relations and developer communities. But the concept of seeing communities differently – not as funnels – is universally applicable. Even to those of you that are in different communities settings.

Josh is the founder of the Orbit model (which we really like) and explains why communities aren’t funnels while he introduces his framework called the Orbit model.

🎧 Favorite Podcast Episode(s)

Scaling Content using the Power of Community w/ Atlassian

16 min episode – Bridget Sauer who is the Senior Content & Customer Programs Manager at Atlassian is interviewed by Beth McIntyre. They talk about User Generated Content. Bridget speaks about the UGC programs she’s created, the strategies she has implemented, and how these programs meet both Atlassian’s business goals and their user’s needs. She briefly touches upon the flywheel principle as well.

🛠 Favorite Tool(s)

Loom – This isn’t an underdog we’re highlighting, but it’s great and I wanted to share it with you anyway. Just in case you aren’t familiar yet. It came up in our recent Build With Users Jam (a fancy word for our virtual meetup) as one of the most popular tools as well.

Especially when you’re in the world of community, this adds that human element to communicate things to your members. For one of our own products we’ve built (Shipright), we actually used this to update people on product changes every now and then.

Some ideas for you:

• Use it to provide an overview of your community and its resources for new community members – thanks Tristan for this one! 🙌

• Ask a ‘question of the week’ in video style

• Let someone share a product update in video style to your members – Chris from Unstack is doing that (see this interview we did on how they run their Slack community as a no code startup)
  

🐦 Favorite on Twitter

For our friends that love the content we’re putting out: we’d be grateful if you’d share some ❤️ on Twitter

Cheers,

Gino, Frank, Steven, Lennart

Hey Friends! 👋 Today, we’re sharing a peek into June’s life as a Developer Evangelist at Zeplin. We’ve been intrigued by ‘DevRels’ lately, as they’re often responsible for establishing a community or at least building deep relations specifically with the developer audience.

In this interview; June shares the multiple platforms they use to connect with the community, how he thinks about (virtual) meetups, how they create content with power users, how he feels about the role of chatbots within support communities, and more!

Let’s dive in, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

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About Zeplin and June

Zeplin is a simple collaboration tool for designers and developers. It's a better way to share, organize, and collaborate on designs built explicitly with developers in mind. They were founded in 2014 and went through Y Combinator, and are now well over 4 million users. The exciting part is that they're this bridge between designers and developers, making it interesting to talk about in terms of community building.

June Cho is a Developer Evangelist at Zeplin and started his journey in a similar role at Microsoft a couple of years ago. Starting at Zepling was a whole different experience. He's the first person in this role and is building out the team.

At what stage of the company did you start an online community, and why?

I came in at year 4 of the company. So before that, everything in the company had been designer and developers, just as our target audience. The team went through Y Combinator, raised a seed round, and became profitable. And I think there was this realization that we needed the next step to keep growing the company. At that point, it was all self-service. There was no sales, no success team, basically not a lot next to designers and engineers.

To get to the next level in terms of the people using Zeplin, they needed several other disciplines. That started with getting someone responsible for Sales and Success first and making sure some dedicated Support was in place. A little later, they expanded in hiring someone – me – to start working on evangelism and advocacy to spread out the word and get our audience connected.

What platform(s) do you use to connect with these audiences of designers and developers and build a community?

We're serving our people over the channels they typically already use. We have a Facebook Group, Spectrum, use Twitter, and use Medium for our content publication. Our focus isn't on just one digital platform. I'd count all of these channels as part of our community.

A channel like Spectrum is mostly used for two things currently: people sharing what's wrong or what else they need or would like to see. We're there to support the community and help them out, but it's less of a place where people genuinely connect or where we bring additional value. I see Spectrum and also our Facebook Group more so as a support community than anything else.

I think a big one where people truly connect is meetups. Obviously, the pandemic has changed a lot, and that's why I think a lot of other ways to bring value are essential. But personally, as a developer, I love hackathons. Working on a project over the weekend, eating pizza, and drinking Mountain Dew is just a fantastic way to connect with like-minded people.

The question is how to scale such activities. When do you hit that stage where you can and want to expand that to other places in the world. I think we're still very early on that.

As meetups are a big one for you, how do you look at the virtual equivalents? Have you tried anything?

I was very skeptical about virtual conferences at first. The main concern I had was: how do you know if someone's paying attention? They're at home, behind their webcam, and they probably have other things going on at the same time.

We then decided to try to join an existing initiative. It was a conference called Clarity back in September that we sponsored. As a part of this, they organized meetup slots that were about an hour long. I was quite skeptical as I figured that you also have these meetup slots with physical conferences, but it's incentivized a little bit by connecting over some food and drinks. 

In that setting, I think part of the success must come from being flexible and able to improvise based on how people are engaging.

In the end, it turned out unexpectedly well. I made sure I brought some excellent content but also made sure I had quite some interactive parts to keep people engaged, including a little game at the end. Over 50 people joined, and all had their cameras on, which was something else I was concerned with. In that setting, I think part of the success must come from being flexible and able to improvise based on how people are engaging.

Zeplin is a platform for both designers and developers; how do you take this into account for the community strategy? 

I think for the online spaces we offer, it serves both quite well. I would say those outlets are more reactive and passive. That's more so because spaces like Spectrum, or our Facebook Group, function more as a support community. When it comes to bringing content, we do think about this.

In the form of meetups, there are ways to do something that interests both groups. That hackathon example I mentioned earlier is a great one. For more specific meetups or talks focused on the particular designer or developer audience, I tailor it to the audience. I come from a developer background myself, so I have that language where I can talk to developers and make things more developer-centric. For designer conferences, things are more design-focused. It's about creating content that captivates the audience and resonates.

The most significant measure of success for me is when there's almost no one looking at their phone or laptop. If they do, I know where I need to improve.

To know if I succeed at that, I tend to look at what people are doing when I give a talk. The most significant measure of success for me is when there's almost no one looking at their phone or laptop. If they do, I know where I need to improve.

Do you distinguish different levels of community members in terms of how engaged they are? Do you interact differently with people that lean towards power users?

I think that within any company and product, there's a spectrum of members or fans. From superstars to people that just got to know you exist. In terms of captivating the people that lean towards superfans, I tend to look at what they're doing themselves. If the content they produce or things they do are great, I'll always try to collaborate with them. Think of a webinar together, or a blog post, or something else that's more creative. 

Aside from that, I think those superstars will always come back. There's no special treatment needed, in my opinion. It's similar to a restaurant. Some regulars will always visit. But then the problem with the restaurant is: how do you fill your seats between Monday and Thursday? Or, in our case: how do you get all the others on board? I think that's where the concentration needs to be. I want to focus on the people who don't really understand or use us a lot and eventually convert them over to become superstars. 

How do people find out about the community? How do you make sure it keeps growing?

There are two things I'm looking into as we're looking to grow the number of developers and designers we connect with.

Sparking meetups where people can come together and have a great time is one where people genuinely connect, and that will help us grow our community through word-of-mouth even more.

One is really about figuring out the meetups & conferences part we discussed earlier. I think conferences are effective in terms of awareness. Sparking meetups where people can come together and have a great time is one where people genuinely connect, and that will help us grow our community through word-of-mouth even more. We do that through small gestures as well – like sending some notes of appreciation to certain users.

I think collaborating with the fans we already have is a great way to expose our community and brand to new people while bringing value to that audience

The other part is creating content that has a certain stickiness level. If you look at the top design tools out there, like Figma and InVision, they're creating video content that you could look towards, and that inspires a designer audience. It's not just about a product; it's about excellent content on what the design space is all about. They bring in other talent and resources to kind of showcase those stories, which is powerful. As I mentioned, I think collaborating with the fans we already have is a great way to expose our community and brand to new people while bringing value to that audience. I think it's the most effective way to grow our community.

How do you involve your community in improving your product?

So we have our Spectrum and Facebook Group, where we're getting a lot of input in terms of things that might be broken or requests that people have. We do have other channels like Intercom, where this is coming in as well. I would say allowing people to easily share their issues, wishes, and needs is step one. The more challenging part is: we currently have about four channels where we're receiving this. It makes it hard for us to be responsive in all of these places. Limiting the channels or, in general, making us more responsive is something I think we need to improve further.

Before you even talk about product changes or involving people in potential beta tests, they first-and-foremost need to feel like their voice is getting heard

Before you even talk about product changes or involving people in potential beta tests, they first-and-foremost need to feel like their voice is getting heard. That starts with being responsive to the initial line of communication. When that's going great, people tend to already feel better about the product. When they feel better about the product, people are more inclined to do beta testing for new features or be more actively involved in improving the product.

So for us, that's a part of the process we're trying to improve first. We're looking into potentially solving this through a chatbot, as that will answer someone instantly. 

Many community managers emphasize the importance of human interaction. How do you feel about using chatbots to answer some of your members' questions?

Personally speaking, as a developer, I find that amazing. It depends on where and how you use it. For us, channels like Spectrum serve more so as a support community. A lot of questions are about a very particular problem or challenge. And it's rare that such a question happens once. A lot of times, similar questions get asked over time. If you look at the internal process of answering those questions, this often means looking at a similar situation and more or less copy and pasting a similar answer. For us, that responsiveness is a challenge, as I mentioned earlier, and at the same time, there is quite some repetitiveness to it. I think it's fantastic to use a chatbot purely for that part, given that you can answer such specific questions quite well or refer to the right information that's already out there 99% of the time. Instead of people having to wait for hours or days, they get that value instantly.

In terms of the human element, I think it's important to apply a solution like a chatbot in the right places with the right expectations.

In terms of the human element, I think it's important to apply a solution like a chatbot in the right places with the right expectations. So if something is clearly a support-oriented outlet, I think this solution is acceptable. When you know something is a much more open-ended question about, let's say, our company's philosophy, I agree you want to have that answered by a real person. It depends on the context.

Our community's human element should especially show in the other activities, not on particular support-oriented questions, in my opinion. So, that's where meetups play a significant role, for example. Or these interactive experiences with other fans of our brand to share an exciting story. It's all about the expectations people have, given the place, interaction, and context.

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Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool newsletter for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Hi community friends! 👋 We’re back again with another awesome interview. This time we had the opportunity to talk to Romaric Philogène, co-founder and CEO at Qovery.

Romaric shares how they first used the input of many experienced developers to determine what to build, how they find and recruit ambassadors for their community, how open-sourcing part of their product benefits both the community and the company, and a lot more! 🚀

Let’s dive in, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

P.S. The Build With Users Jam is back next week for the first event in 2021! 🔥 It's a small-size online meetup for dev advocates & community managers where we help each other to become more effective in building our user communities and driving adoption. This time it’s all about Content Planning & Prioritization. Check this RSVP page to learn more!

About Qovery and Romaric

While the possibilities of cloud platforms continue to increase, so does the complexity of utilizing it to its full potential. Qovery aims to be the simplest way to deploy your full-stack applications to the cloud. Starting out during the Techstars accelerator program in 2019, the team launched their first version in January 2020. Since then both the community and the product have grown rapidly, which resulted in raising a $1M pre-seed round with some well-known angel investors.

Romaric Philogène is co-founder and CEO of Qovery. He is an entrepreneur with an engineering background and has worked at several companies before starting his own startup. He likes to connect with other people and share experiences. That’s why he is involved with the community building aspect of the company. In addition, he enjoys teaching computer science classes online.

At what stage of the company did you start an online community and why?

We’ve been running a community ever since the beginning of Qovery. It’s really part of our DNA, both for the company and the founders. Before we started Qovery, we created one of the biggest motorbiker communities in Europe with approximately 85,000 members. So we already knew how much value a community can bring to the product and to its members.

Our goal is to provide the best developer experience possible. And to get to that level, we needed to have their feedback right from the start.

For Qovery in particular we want to involve our target audience, the developers, as much as possible. We encourage them to participate in the community and also contribute to the product. Our goal is to provide the best developer experience possible. And to get to that level, we needed to have their feedback right from the start. That’s why we’ve been actively reaching out to developers all the time, even before there actually was a product.

In the very early days of Qovery, we participated in the Techstars accelerator program in Paris. This is an intensive three-month program, during which startups are mentored and are given access to an extensive network of partners, investors, and alumni. We took advantage of this opportunity to talk to a lot of experienced developers before we started building anything. This helped us to really understand how they’re working and learn more about the challenges they encounter in their daily work.

Once we were certain that we had a good grasp of the underlying issues that we wanted to solve, we started building the product. It only took us about a month to build the minimum viable product (MVP). This time was spent fully on development, because we had already collected enough feedback beforehand.

After that month of building the product, we launched it in January 2020. Our community consisted of about 50 developers at the time, all using our product. They were the people whom we talked to earlier on. By working closely with them and getting them involved in the challenges we were facing, they became part of our journey as well.

What platform(s) do you use to run your online community? What are the pros and cons?

We started our community in Slack, because many people are already familiar with that. However, we quickly realized that it had some significant drawbacks for us. Slack was never built with communities in mind, which is noticeable in several ways. For instance, it became too complex to manage for us. We also didn’t like switching between our internal Slack workspace and the community workspace all the time. Furthermore, the restricted message history is also annoying, as questions and answers get lost over time. This can be solved by upgrading to a paid account of course, but with Slack’s pricing model that’s not really viable for large-scale communities.

We feel that voice chat helps us to create a good and personal connection with community members. This is vital for successfully collaborating with the community and getting honest feedback on the product.

That’s why we switched to Discord. Unlike Slack, it was built with communities in mind from the get-go. What we also really like are the voice chat capabilities. We feel that voice chat helps us to create a good and personal connection with community members. This is vital for successfully collaborating with the community and getting honest feedback on the product.

How do people find out about the community? How do you make sure it keeps growing?

In the beginning we were really looking for a certain type of developer to join our community. We wanted these first members to become ambassadors for Qovery.

People who maintain a more active online presence than most developers […] are often enthusiastic and passionate about technologies they come across and feel a natural urge to share their experience with others. They are ideal community members, as they spark conversations and help you spread the word about the product through word-of-mouth, articles, and podcasts.

In order to find them, we looked at people who maintained a more active online presence than most developers. For example, on Twitter or YouTube, or via blogs. We also got in touch with people who are organizing developer events or talk in public at those events. These people are often enthusiastic and passionate about technologies they come across and feel a natural urge to share their experience with others. They are ideal community members, as they spark conversations and help you spread the word about the product through word-of-mouth, articles, and podcasts. In fact, we even hired someone who ran their own YouTube channel with 30k subscribers. By sharing their experiences with their own audience, they’re still bringing in new community members to this day.

Lately we’ve also been experimenting with cross-community resource creation. Such collaborations can be mutually beneficial to both communities. For example, we could create a resource explaining how to deploy your application via Qovery by filling in a form in Typeform. This is interesting to both communities, because it demonstrates new possibilities for both products. Hopefully this will encourage users of the other product to also try out your own and vice versa.

How do you keep your community lively and positive?

Especially when a community is still in an early phase, it’s up to you to keep the discussion going. That’s why we’re actively participating in conversations and going for the extra mile, even when the questions are only partially related to our product. For example, we assist people in choosing the right database for their application. That shows our users that we care about them and that we’re really trying to involve them in the product.

We also share many resources with our community in the form of guides, tutorials, and articles. And we’re sharing news and product updates with them as well of course. We plan to go further and organize online and offline events too.

How did engagement change when you grew from the first 50 members, to more than 600 members? Any challenges anyone can learn from?

Not that much actually, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to keep engaging with everyone in the community as much as I’d like to. As a co-founder and CEO, I sadly can’t spend all my time talking to community members. I often have about 15-25 calls per week now, so it’s pretty busy. That’s why we’re currently hiring a developer advocate to assist me with community engagement. One piece of advice that I would give to anyone considering to hire a developer advocate would be to start looking for one early on. It’s quite difficult to find such a person, as it requires a rather unique combination of technical skills and communication skills.

You recently open-sourced a part of your product. Can you explain why you did that and how it impacts your community?

We did that for two reasons actually. First of all, we’re building our product on top of various open-source software projects. Without those projects, Qovery probably wouldn’t exist. Therefore, we felt that we had to give back to the open-source community in some way. Open-sourcing a part of our application is one way to do that. We also introduced a special tier for open-source projects, so they can use our full product for free. This is important, because many of these projects are being run with limited resources.

The other reason for open-sourcing is to gain the trust of our customers. As a startup, we haven’t built a name for ourselves yet. However, in order for our product to work we require access to the customer’s account at a cloud provider like AWS. That’s a pretty big step for companies, as they are probably hosting other applications or sensitive data there as well. By enabling them to review our source code, they can see that we’re not doing anything weird with their account.

What’s interesting in terms of community is that we can also leverage the community around the programming language in which our software was written.

What’s interesting in terms of community is that we can also leverage the community around the programming language in which our software was written. Many applications for application deployment in the cloud nowadays were written in the Go programming language. Mostly because some widely used projects also use Go, such as Docker and Kubernetes. However, we decided to write our software in Rust, which is a fairly new programming language that is quickly gaining ground. There aren’t that many programs written in Rust that deal with application deployment yet, but there is no reason why the language wouldn’t be suitable for that purpose. So our product is also interesting to them, as we demonstrate how the language can be applied to other domains as well.

How do you keep power users engaged? Do you give them special benefits? Or how do you make sure that they start writing about you?

We have goodies, haha 😜 That’s a good start for building a personal relationship with them. But the essential part is that we spend a lot of time with them and try to be as easily available to them as possible. To that extent we have a private voice chat channel in Discord between those users and our team.

I strongly believe that spending one-on-one time with power users is key in forging a strong relationship.

I strongly believe that spending one-on-one time with power users is key in forging a strong relationship. That’s also how we approached the community building with the motorbiking community. I went out for a ride every weekend on my motorcycle. Together with existing community members and also with new people. And I noticed how much they appreciated the fact that I took the time to get to know them and spend time with them. That translated into a lot of goodwill and word-of-mouth, helping the community to grow.

The downside to this approach is obviously that it doesn’t scale well. It’s not really possible to automate the process, as human interaction is very important. That’s also why we’re looking to hire a developer advocate, who can assist me with this.

How do you involve your community in improving your product?

Again, I firmly believe that it should be easy for people to reach out to us and provide their feedback. It's our job to make this process very simple for our users.

As a user, I shouldn’t be bothered with the tools you’re using to manage your product. I just give you my input, and it’s up to you to decide what to do with it and how to document it.

Sometimes when I provide feedback for other tools, I’m told to submit that in the form of a GitHub or JIRA ticket instead. I hate it when that happens. As a user, I shouldn’t be bothered with the tools you’re using to manage your product. I just give you my input, and it’s up to you to decide what to do with it and how to document it.

That’s why we have a support channel in Discord and also an Intercom chat bubble on our website. When we receive feedback there, we’ll make sure that it ends up in the right place. We also have a public roadmap and voting board, where people can also submit feedback if they want.

By the way, Intercom is a perfect companion tool that I recommend. It’s much more than just chat, as it also functions as a CRM for SaaS products.

One piece of advice you would give to anyone that is building out an early community around a software startup:

Be sure you love what you’re doing, because you must be involved at a 1000%. Don’t expect to have someone else doing your job right from the start. You must love what you’re doing and not give up. Your community needs your attention, and you have to enjoy it.

Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool newsletter for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet. Also, be sure to check out our RSVP page for the Build With Users Jam next week!

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Heyyy there! 👋

The new Curated is here! It’s a short one, as we might delight you with another great piece of content later this week 👀. Maybe you’ve already read last week’s interview with Bailey Richardson. It’s especially useful for those considering starting a community. We’ve seen quite a few of our readers are in this orientation phase.

That’s why this Curated will be themed around that topic too. Also, we’d love to hear about your specific struggles. So let’s kick off with the question of the week 😉 👇

🧐 Question of the week

What is your biggest struggle starting a community?

Leave a comment

🖐 Favorite Five

In every one of these bi-weekly issues, we’ll highlight at least one cool read, video, podcast episode, tool, and person to follow on Twitter. You’ll find some mixed resources with an emphasis on starting a community for this issue.

📖 Favorite Read(s)

Turn Your Customers into Your Community

8 min read – This is something to read for anyone that needs to convince anyone in their team or org to buy into community building. It highlights its importance and has great examples of LEGO, Twitch, TEDx, and Porsche in it.

How to build an online community – why I’m all in on Circle

44 min read (44?! 🤯 Yes, that’s not a typo) – This one covers a lot! Although it’s partly about a particular tool in the title, there are more important parts to the read. Jay Clouse explains what community is, how to look at analog vs digital communities, why you should build an online community, what makes a community successful, tools, and a few other general things that are helpful for our friends early in the journey.

📽 Favorite Vid(s)

This is a practical run-through on how Mike Williams, founder of Everything Marketplaces uses Slack for his paid community. He shares how he configured things specifically to his community, how he operates it, and shares some tips & insights to make sure his members get a lot of value out of the community.

🎧 Favorite Podcast Episode(s)

How to skyrocket your community to the moon with method

~40 min episode – A conversation between Alexandre Durand-Chabert – CEO of Airparty, and Patrick Woods – CEO of Orbit about the rise of seeing ‘community as a moat’, and why the developer world is more mature than other verticals in terms of community building. It covers the topic of community KPIs and outputs as well. Patrick also shares a bit on the Orbit model to measure community efforts.

🛠 Favorite Tool(s)

Rosieland: modern community building course – We’re cheating a bit here. It isn’t software but probably even more valuable if you’re early in the process. We’ve learned a lot from Rosie Sherry’s content, and this course Rosie provides seems really helpful when you’re starting from scratch, or you’re looking to re-ignite an existing community.

🐦 Favorite on Twitter

For our friends that love the content we’re putting out: we’d be grateful if you’d share some ❤️ on Twitter

Cheers,

Gino, Frank, Steven, Lennart

Hey friends! 👋 We’re kicking the new year off with an amazing guest! 🍾

Steven got Bailey Richardson on a call to talk about community building. As we noticed some of you are early in the journey, we zoomed in on what to consider when starting a community.

Bailey ran community for Instagram as one of the first employees and has done a tremendous amount of work in the field of community building ever since.

You might recognize her from the Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’, or as co-author of the well-received and highly recommended book ‘Get Together: How to build a community with your people’. Currently, Bailey runs People & Company, an organization that helps individuals and organizations remove the ambiguity around community building in a digital world.

Bailey shares what to think about when you’re considering starting a community, the first things to do when you decided to go for it, common mistakes that are often made when starting out, a great example community to learn from, and a bunch more!

Enjoy, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

You have a unique story on what motivated you to focus on community building. Can you explain how your background led you into this career?

My mom and brother have both been prominent figures in my life. My mom was one of the first female pilots for United Airlines, and there have been many people that responded indignantly when I told them about it. She also faced a lot of resistance from coworkers in her job. My brother just struggled in school and developed differently from others. Seeing very vividly from up close how such differences prevented them from being welcomed in different situations really shaped my perspectives.

That’s why what happened when I was working at Instagram amazed me. I started there at the beginning of 2012, and there was this culture of ‘InstaMeets’. InstaMeets were meetups where Instagram users just came together to take pictures. It had such a diverse set of people hosting them and a diverse group of people joining the meetups. 

I remember one in San Francisco in 2014, seeing a guy who happened to be working for Coca Cola drive up. He had spent the night refilling soda machines, was still in his uniform, and just joined this InstaMeet with college students and tech designers. It was a mingling of so many different people. It was clear to me that every single one of them was so welcoming. Everyone was invited; everyone could participate. It was very different from how I saw my brother and mother were treated when I was younger. It seemed to me that there was a better way of being with other people. So I’m really interested in how we can create more benevolent communities like that.

Which community around a product really inspires you and you think we can learn from?

Although not a software startup, one I’ve always looked at is the Rapha Cycling Club. They started the company when the world of cycling was growing and expanding, especially in the UK in the early 2000s. They focused on the people that really cared about the clothes you would wear when cycling, the more design-forward person. 

Pretty early in their growth as a company, they started a cycling club where you would pay for a yearly membership. You get a free coffee at a clubhouse and a little stem cap for your bike with your member number and your city’s logo on it. You get a jersey and a hat, and you get access to an app that’s private. In that app, there are rides that are organized by local, serious riders for anyone to join. 

You could then go to your local Rapha coffee shop, get your free coffee, and then meet other people who are also Rapha enthusiasts in that area who love cycling, and you can go on a ride together. 

They do every element of this exceptionally well. There’s synergy with the business goals: people pay for the club – which for them is a profitable investment itself. It also brings Rapha close to their core consumer, which is really important for brand and marketing companies in general. If you look at companies like Nike and Adidas, they’re just spending so much money researching their target audiences and trying to access them. 

Rapha has put them right next to all of their employees. They have this app that has all of the people and the data they shared. They have easy access to people that are their retained customers. These customers have a high lifetime value, and they continuously get a pulse on them.

They also executed very well on the design and communication parts. The way they write, the way the CEO talks, and the way they launch things are awe-inspiring. To me, they’re the best in class. They start with this passion for biking and brought it to life for people, which has all of these downstream effects.

Many software startups we talk to consider building a community. Most realize it’s a serious investment. When should or shouldn’t they start to build a community?

I think it’s essential to look at the goals you’re trying to accomplish. You should figure out; what is it that we’re going to pay for our organization to have the capacity and resources to do? What will be hard to scale through our HQ team? And then: who do we need as partners to do it?

I’m more interested in what I would call “scaled partnerships,” where you create a little template that a lot of passionate people could grab and participate in for you because they have the energy to do it.

The old perspective here is that partnerships are these big one-off things with a big company or a celebrity. I’m more interested in what I would call “scaled partnerships,” where you create a little template that a lot of passionate people could grab and participate in for you because they have the energy to do it. For example, Rapha Cycling Clubs have done this with their ride leaders- “the people who make the Rapha Cycling Club work all over the world.” There are over 200 active ride leaders and each has received training from Rapha in group management, route planning and risk avoidance to lead rides for the RCC all around the world.

In preparing a scaled partnerships strategy like this, it’s important to be self-aware. Do you have the company culture to pull off collaborating with others at scale? I formerly worked with a startup where the founder was very detail-oriented, quite introverted, and without putting it in a negative context: quite controlling. It was what was needed for his type of business. I find that many people who have that mindset find it hard, however, to allow for collaboration and enable other people to execute parts of their vision. 

Instead of giving people a perfect cake, you need to hand out the recipe and the ingredients for them to go make that cake for you.

If you want to do things through a community, you have to be ok with letting go of control. Instead of giving people a perfect cake, you need to hand out the recipe and the ingredients for them to go make that cake for you.

For people that don’t have a community yet but are interested in the idea of starting one, what would be one thing they should do first?

Get a piece of paper and try to write down your vision around who this community is for. What kind of experiences, background, or skills do they bring? 

And then the second step would be identifying: why would these people want a community? What is it that they get out of it? Is it skill development? Or fun? Is it emotional support? Why would they want to connect to other human beings? 

That’s more of an intellectual exercise, but it’s essential because you have to have a vision as a leader of a community. If you aren’t cognitively clear on who the group of people is and what they’re coming together for, it’s almost like you don’t have a product. 

When you know who is in your community and why they’d want to connect, the planning and executing become easier, decisions like what to do together, in what format, and so on.

When you know who is in your community and why they’d want to connect, the planning and executing become easier, decisions like what to do together, in what format, and so on. These are the more design-related parts that are more creative but must be rooted against a core vision. 

What common mistakes do you see happening with people that just started out a community around a business?

One of the most common mistakes I see on the business side is the inheritance from old school marketing: the fact that you should do something different every month. 

People just tend to throw spaghetti on the wall with programming—events or editorial. They do a bunch of different things week to week when what they need is the equivalent of a Sunday mass for a community.

People just tend to throw spaghetti on the wall with programming—events or editorial. They do a bunch of different things week to week when what they need is the equivalent of a Sunday mass for a community. You need your consistent activity so that when someone is in the community, they know how to plug in. They can join a thread somewhere every Friday morning or show up at a particular day and time and not feel out of place. 

Remember: The goal is not flashy marketing. It’s about getting the people who care closer to you and closer to each other. It’s about that kind of gradual growth and incremental momentum-building.

We have an acronym to guide people in their thinking on this called PPR at People & Company. PPR stands for Purposeful, Participatory, and Repeatable. And when we look at the community activities that happen online or offline that someone is hosting, the question we ask is: can you add more PPR to this? Is it participatory? Are you repeating it? Does it relate to who is in your community and why they’re in it? 

At Instagram, for example, we saw our community strategy as an investment in inspiration and education. We wanted to feature users and feature content that gave new people ideas around what to share on the platform. Why? We knew if the content were good, the experience would be good and people would find value in the product. So our job was to supercharge that with various ongoing programs. 

One that we used to run was the Weekend Hashtag Projects, which we adopted from Tumblr. 

We would take a hashtag we saw someone using in the community—something someone came up with that spread a bit organically—we would then put it out to the broader community through our editorial channels and share a certain challenge for the weekend, encouraging people to create their own photo with this theme and hashtag. Our team would then review and engage with hundreds of thousands of submissions over the weekend, and every Monday we would feature 12 of our favorite pictures for millions of our readers to see.

That was a thing we did every Friday and every Monday for 5+ years. People knew it was going to happen. There was this central drumbeat for people to show up and participate.

What do you expect to see in the coming years when we’re talking about communities around businesses?

The thing that’s on my mind and is not that different from what I seem to see many people talking about: compensation. We see this with Substack and Patreon and how even something like Twitch is experimenting with tips and earning opportunities for creators. 

So far, a relatively small amount of individuals with big audiences have been able to make a living off of building online communities around their work. But there’s a vast amount of people who are really good at something and have a very loyal audience around them that might never even make it into mass culture or thread into a seamless business model.

I think many people are trying to build tools so that people below an ‘elite tier’ can fund the work they currently do as active service for a community of people, and I’m excited about that.

For too long, the reward structure has looked like a pyramid, where only a few people get all of the money and can survive doing this.

For too long, the reward structure has looked like a pyramid, where only a few people get all of the money and can survive doing this.

Community is quite the rage these days. What makes you most excited in terms of new tooling or things coming up?

I’m mostly excited by platforms where people are getting paid directly. I’ve been working with the Substack team a bit, and I think they’re kind of at the front of that. Twitch is also moving interestingly around this. I am also interested in how companies are giving their users ownership in their platforms through blockchain. 

I also think we’re on the edge of continual disruption in social media and methods for communities to connect, communicate, share resources. I’ve had many people reach out to me last year about building alternative spaces. People have known for a long time that I worked at Instagram, and I’ve been doing other things for a while now, but I’ve heard from many more builders of new spaces this last year than years prior. It seems to me there’s more energy for creating new social spaces than a few years ago. There’s still a lot of room for playfulness and innovation. TikTok is an excellent example of it. As the world changes, our tools should change as well.

Amidst all that change, what are your plans personally and for People & Company in the coming years?

I care about two things: learning and helping. When it comes to learning, I never want to think I’m an expert. There’s always so much to learn about the tools out there and what is motivating people to connect. I always want to go close to practitioners of community building who I think are interesting. We use our podcast to do that. I’m just trying to be a good writer, learner, synthesizer, and I hope that I get to keep doing that for a long time.

As more and more people know that community-building is essential, I think they also lack a clear sense of what is and isn’t a community and well as how to go about building one. 

The other side is helping people. As more and more people know that community-building is essential, I think they also lack a clear sense of what is and isn’t a community and well as how to go about building one. 

I find it rewarding to help people access that clarity. That’s what we’ve been working on for a while now with People & Company. We’ve developed a lot of tools, exercises, and resources along the way that allows groups of people to find that clarity. 

But this is something we must all keep pushing further and further. Currently, there are a lot of people speaking in different directions about how to build communities. We’re all trying to pin down its meaning and the process that goes into building a community because it’s changing for human beings in a huge seismic way. If you had asked someone what ‘community’ means 20 years ago, they would say that community is their town or their church community. It’s completely different from today and the way you and I think about it. 

So this moment of divergence makes intellectual sense. But it feels a little worry-some to me that the conversation is so big without having a solid foundation. There’s a lack of power when we’re not specific, and so I hope we can come together to establish a root definition and methodology from which to ground the conversation. Hopefully, P&C can play a helpful, grounding role in that process.

Something else you want to share or plug from your side?

The way we learn and teach people is really through writing. In the coming year, we’re planning to do less aggregate writing and podcasting, but apply more rigor to what we do publish. If anyone is looking to learn about the space: that’s on our Substack and podcast. 

This year we’re also putting a lot into coaching people; building relationships with people we want to help with this and think are interesting to work with. We’re helping individuals ranging from founders to VPs of Community. We also do this for teams, so later-stage startups exploring a community investment, for example. For us, it’s all about finding people we enjoy helping, so if anyone feels that’s for them, we’d love to hear from them.

Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool newsletter for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Gino, Frank, Steven, Lennart

…We’re also finding a lot of amazing content as we’re navigating through everything in the world of community ourselves.

That’s why we’ll start playing around with a brief bi-weekly mail in a different format that shares some of these things. Let us know how you like it as we go! (comment on an issue, or follow & Tweet us)

This very first one happens to have a bit of a theme. Recently, we started to dive deeper into developer communities. There are a ton of things to learn from them, and a lot of relevant topics for developer advocates and community managers in the space of developer and low-code / no-code. One of them: user documentation.

We organized a Jam (virtual meetup) on the topic this week, and you'll find something about this and related curated content in the Favorite Five section👇 Enjoy!

Hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t yet) and get a heads-up on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

For our returning friends that love the content we’re putting out: we’d be grateful if you’d share some ❤️ on Twitter or share Build With Users with friends & colleagues!

🙋‍♂️ Build With Users Jam on User Documentation

Last Tuesday we ran an informal virtual meetup discussing the topic of user and developer documentation as a way to make community members and (potential) users of your platform more successful. It was a great one! 🎉

When you write anything that is going the be read by many people and is meant to bring across an idea (eg. a book), you will probably not write it out once and send it to a publisher.

That's because you know that your initial write up isn't perfect. Instead, you will probably share it with proofreaders, ask for feedback, and make revisions until you feel confident to publish it.

Interestingly enough, many software teams have similar ambitions but write and publish documentation in one go 🤯. Obviously, a book can't be revised after publishing. But online documentation can. Nevertheless, a lot of documentation is published once and doesn't receive much attention afterward.

And that is, if there is proper documentation at all because that can be a real challenge too. Keeping up can be extremely hard when new features or iterations are shipped often as the platform and community grow.

However, if you want some portion of your customer base to adopt your product/service independently and in a self-service manner, you need to take documentation seriously.

Especially, when your target customer is a developer. In that case, documentation = product, and thus part of the developer experience (DX).

We chatted about this topic and its challenges with a few of our readers and people interested in the topic. A big thanks to Angela, Femke, James, Julie, Katelyn, Romy, and Romaric for joining the Jam! ❤️

Here are just 3 very practical tips shared in this Jam to help you keep documentation on-points for the folks that are into this topic:

• Use notifications in Slack to sync between development and customer-facing teams. It keeps everyone up-to-date about newly added or updated features. This transparency contributes to keeping documentation up-to-date.

• Use search queries entered by your users in your documentation tool to pinpoint missing or insufficient documentation.

• Do user onboarding sessions to see what people are struggling with and which questions they’re asking. Use these as input for your docs. Good tip, Angela! 

🖐 Favorite Five

In every one of these bi-weekly issues, we’ll highlight at least one cool read, video, podcast episode, tool, and person to follow on Twitter. You’ll find some mixed resources with an emphasis on User Documentation for this issue.

📖 Favorite Read(s)

Deflect support, impactful open-source goal

3 min read – Most founders don’t realize that contributors and users are also the best people to write documentation, explain how to use the product, and provide actionable feedback on how to make it better. The article explains how to leverage this to minimize the need for support.

Principles for Developer Documentation

6 min read – Writing documentation for software developers can be hard. Most of the time, your reader has a keen sense of what they want to get done and an impatience to get started. Follow some simple principles to put your documentation on the right track.

📽 Favorite Vid(s)

As a developer advocate, you’re demonstrating much more than just how to use your product, framework, or service. You’re modeling “how to be a developer” as well. In this talk, you’ll learn five things you can do to model good documentation practice for your fans

🎧 Favorite Podcast Episode(s)

All Things Communities with Jacob Peters

~40 min episode – A great episode about touching upon a lot of things related to community building in general: what makes a great community, the difference between a community and a network, how to get a community off the ground, phases of communities and how to scale them, how companies can build community, how to think about monetization of a community.

🛠 Favorite Tool(s)

MeetButter – We have tried MeetButter for an interactive team session, combined with Miro for some remote whiteboarding. A great pair of tools for interactive workshops, we think!

🐦 Follow on Twitter

🧐 Question of the week

How much attention do you pay to documentation if you also happen to work on developer relations and what’s your biggest struggle we can help you with?

Leave a comment

Cheers & Happy Holidays 🎄,

Gino, Frank, Steven, Lennart

Hi there! 👋 Today we’d like to share with you an interview with Marina Perminova, the Online Community Manager over at Miro.

Marina explains how Miro’s community got started and how she got to run it. She shares their methodology for involving the community when it comes to shaping the product, delivering support, and how it aids the creation of marketing assets.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

For our returning friends that love the content we’re putting out: we’d be grateful if you’d share some ❤️ on Twitter or share Build With Users with friends & colleagues! 🙏 This helps us to keep doing what we’re doing and bring you even more value in the future :)

P.S. We’re also doing another little Build With Users Jam (just an informal virtual meet-up) next week on User Documentation. Check this RSVP page to learn more!

About Miro and Marina

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboarding platform that enables distributed teams to work together effectively. Applications range from brainstorming with digital sticky notes, to planning and managing full agile workflows. It’s a fast-growing company that is obviously thriving even more due to the whole COVID situation. They raised a significant amount of funding this year and have more than 10 million users all over the world.

Marina is Online Community Manager at Miro. She started out as a Customer Support Representative but was so passionate about helping people and showed such an amazing level of empathy, that she got the responsibility to lead the community efforts.

At what stage of the company did you start an online community and why?

We’ve been thinking about building the community for quite some time. Most obviously after our rebranding from RealtimeBoard to Miro in March, 2019. We really wanted to empower our users, our customers, our partners, and ourselves to do incredible things, learn from each other, and be even more successful with Miro.

Around that rebranding period, we also started to plan the Distributed 2019 event, our annual virtual conference on visual collaboration and remote work, and we gathered the participants in a separate Slack workspace. It was meant for introductions, announcements, and some early discussions before the event. This catalyzed our efforts of bringing people together a bit.

Aside from the marketing side of our company, we realized that bringing our users together from a support perspective could be really beneficial. During my work as a support agent, we realized it would be great to talk to more people to understand their use cases and also create a safe place for them where they could share use cases and help each other out. For the company that meant a potential way to scale our support efforts a bit better.

We eventually united as both marketing and support to start this bigger initiative of building the community. We started researching and comparing online community platforms that we could use.

I had my own realizations on creating a space for our users to share their experiences, but to be honest, I didn’t even know it was called ‘community’

In that process, my manager also saw my passion for people, that’s why they handed me the responsibility to get it off the ground. I had my own realizations on creating a space for our users to share their experiences, but to be honest, I didn’t even know it was called ‘community’ :) It eventually opened a whole new world to me.

So, Miro online community was publicly launched in March, 2020, and I really enjoy building the Miro community, talking to customers, creating this space for them. It’s great to be sort of in-between customers and the business, representing the voice of the community.

What platform(s) do you use to run your online community? What are the pros and cons?

We briefly used Slack as a way to bring people together for Distributed 2019, but then started researching for more dedicated online community platforms with a robust set of tools.

We eventually decided to go with InSided. We had a lot of different requirements coming from different stakeholders internally, and we eventually went for InSided because they could cover most of them. They have quite a simple and intuitive interface, it’s very much customizable to unique community needs and branding, and covers some fundamental parts like moderation tools, gamification, SSO, and integrations that we wanted to have with Zendesk, Salesforce, and Zapier.

I don’t see major cons at this point. Just a note – sometimes HTML/CSS skills are required to customize something – it may be a drawback for less tech-savvy people.

How do people find out about the community? How do you make sure it keeps growing?

A decent part is organic. Because of the nature of our product and how you can apply it, people are looking for solutions, best practices, different use cases, or inspiration from others.

Of course, we do put effort into bringing the community to the attention of people through a lot of channels. We promote it through the product itself in the special guide on the board that points users to all the resources we have. It’s also promoted on our website, help center, and through our newsletters and social channels.

How do you keep your community lively and positive?

First things first - we should understand what content our community members actually want or need. And one of the best ways to go about that is by simply asking them :) Just ask what they find most engaging or interesting, what they prefer to do in the community, and what their vision on the perfect online community is. So, community discussions, surveys, polls, or interviews can do the trick.

Sometimes, other Miro employees throw in a question or spark a discussion. But what I found out is that most members love a great discussion topic initiated by other community members. Not just a question, but something where people share their own experience, and then end it with an open question to the whole community.

For me, it’s really important to see and understand what things really engage our members, and then make sure these interactions are highlighted in the right places and invite others to join the conversation.

I then flag great community content for the marketing team, so we can potentially repurpose it for customer stories, case studies, or other marketing efforts outside of the community.

I keep track of those successful threads. If this thread has a lot of use cases and a lot of people are sharing their experiences I then flag such promising community content for the marketing team, so we can potentially repurpose it for customer stories, case studies, or other marketing efforts outside of the community.

The product team might discover new pains or needs from our customer base, which I then sometimes use to pose a question in the community to learn from it and drive engagement at the same time.

It also comes from really knowing the product. I’m an avid user myself and have a tight relation with product development. The product team might discover new pains or needs from our customer base, which I then sometimes use to pose a question in the community to learn from it and drive engagement at the same time. That tends to work quite well.

As for the atmosphere in the community, it is mainly positive. People are welcoming and easily approachable. We call our online community a safe space for all Miro users, and from the very beginning, we have the Community Guidelines and expect members to adhere to them.

I think the general success of our community is thanks to the product dimension. If people love the product, they tend to be active in the community, and they want to give back. And then having the chance to be close to the people that created the product they love, is really special and enough of an incentive. No matter how great we would do from a community perspective, if people wouldn’t like the product at all, I guess there would be no chance for us getting such loyal community members.

How do you involve your community in improving your product?

We involve our community members quite a lot! Within the community itself, we have an ideation section called Wish List. That’s the place where community members submit their ideas and upvote them. So everyone in the community has a chance to help make Miro better by sharing their ideas for product improvements.

Thus, we have a rating of top-voted features. I highlight those to the product team on a monthly basis. We use a benchmark now to determine whether an idea is popular. That threshold is currently set at 50+ votes. If those ideas align with Miro’s strategy and vision for the product, they may be added to the backlog – we don’t promise that though.

To fasten the process of sifting through ideas, we share guidelines on how to effectively submit an idea to the Wish List. We have special statuses for those ideas as well, so members stay informed. We just distinguish ‘ideas’ and ‘delivered’ currently, which at least shows the things we’ve shipped based on the community’s input.

The product team can browse the online community on their own to find feedback on the functionality we want to improve or update, and to find relevant users for research/interview/beta.

Also, we leverage the community to get feedback on our new features – there’s a connection between our changelog and a relevant community thread with the announcement. It allows us to understand if our users are happy with the update/release and fix minor issues that people report.

In any case, this wish list and the whole online community is one of the most valuable channels of product feedback.

One piece of advice you would give to anyone that is building out an early community around a software startup:

Good question! I’d say that if you want to start a community, you should definitely understand why you are doing this, what success looks like and what value it should bring to the company/business/product.

Your favorite tool that helps you better run your community, if any?

Apart from the platform we picked, I heavily use Miro (of course:)). With our public editing feature we can easily embed boards in the community threads and members can contribute. Additionally, I do brainstorming, planning, analytics, and almost all documentation in Miro.

Your favorite article or book as a community enthusiast?

I really like Get Together, a book by Bailey Richardson – it’s not particularly about online communities but in general about the ‘sense of belonging’ which is critical in whatever community you’re creating. It’s definitely one I revisit from time to time and that helps me navigate while we build out our community.

For newcomers in the community space, I’d recommend checking out the CMX blog, Feverbee blog, and Vanilla webinars.

Where can people find out more about you?

The easiest way to find me is through LinkedIn. I’m always happy to connect and exchange any experiences on this topic.

Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool interview for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Gino, Frank, Steven, Lennart

👋 Community friends! We’re back with an amazing interview. It’s hands-down one of the better ones. Great insights to be discovered! 💎

We’ve been able to chat with Noele Flowers, currently running community at Teachable – and soon joining our friends at Commsor.

Noele shares how she approached switching strategy & platforms with a 40k+ member base, how she created clear boundaries to keep support out of the community, how a community can become an engine for content marketing, and a lot more! 🚀

Let’s dive in, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

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About Noele and Teachable

Noele is a former music teacher turned community manager. She’s grown, trimmed, and revamped the Teachable community in the past 4 years and on the side provides consultancy to help others with their strategic plan to start or refresh their community. This year she started blogging, and her articles are amongst our favorites, being accessible & clear even when you’re new to community management.

Teachable is a platform used by over 100,000 online entrepreneurs to create and sell online courses. Part of their membership is to get access to the community, where people share their experience on building their courses and coaching businesses.

Can you explain how you got into community management and why you like it?

There’s not always a direct career path to becoming a community manager. It's definitely not something that I ever thought I would be doing. I actually started off my career as a public school teacher: I taught high school choir in Queens and did that for a couple of years before realizing: This is really not for me. Being a teacher is a lot of work and it can be a pretty stressful job—I have a lot of respect for people who do it. I realized this wasn’t the lifestyle I want, waking up early, feeling like I'm performing all day, and then getting home and having a ton more work to do.

So then I basically started looking for jobs in startups. I did not know much about startups at all but browsed AngelList and looked for entry-level jobs to help me get my foot in the door. That led me to Teachable. Because of my background in education, the company mission was compelling to me. The job itself just sounded like something that I could do, and it ended up being a really good fit. Over the four years that I've been there, I've definitely become more invested in the field overall.

At what stage of the company did you start an online community for Teachable and why?

When I started at Teachable, they already had a community with about 8–9 thousand people in it. Teachable was only a couple of years old at that point, so I started in a WeWork with maybe 25, or 30 other employees. They had started the community as a way to get all of their early members in one room and be able to ask questions around the product.

The community was very product-oriented at the start, like, “oh, we're launching this new feature, what do you think?”, which is great. On the downside, when you start a community that way but don't set up guidelines and program, it also can potentially lead to some unhealthy stuff. People got used to dropping bugs there even after we had a formal reporting process. Or when there was some downtime, it would definitely show up in the community, even when we had a status page. So that's what I took over and was hired for, to wrangle that situation which started with good intentions and just became harder to manage at scale, as communities will if you don't put some guardrails and strategy in place.

That community was actually on Facebook Groups. I grew that to about 40,000 people over my first two and a half years and then ended up redoing the whole community strategy and migrating the community over to Circle, which we now use.

Moving away from Facebook Groups with 40,000 members is a bold decision, what was the reasoning there?

There's a lot of reasons., but one of the most important ones is knowing who your members are. When you use Facebook, you don't know even basic information about the people that are in your group. So you don't know: Are they actually users? Are they people who were users six years ago, churned, and are now using a competitor? Are they someone in the entrepreneur space who wants to sell to our members? You just have tons of different people in there and it makes it really hard to create relevant content and to get people matched up to relevant other people.

You just have tons of different people in there and it makes it really hard to create relevant content and to get people matched up to relevant other people.

We really wanted to move to a place where we would be able to make a connection between someone's account on Teachable and their account in the community. Now, all of our community members are Teachable customers, it's a feature of your membership to get access to the community. That really lets us cater their experience in the community so that it's well-matched to what they're actually working on.

What did the platform shift do to your member base, and how do you grow it today?

Not all of the members that were in the Facebook Group moved over to the new platform, and that was by design. We did not want to migrate over our existing group and just replace and replicate it. Our entire launch plan for that was really like: “We built a new experience for you, when you're ready to join, join”. 

I actually think that's an important part of community building and it can be counter-intuitive; In startups, we have this mindset to grow as quickly as possible. But I think in communities that can actually undermine your mission.

I actually think that's an important part of community building and it can be counter-intuitive; In startups, we have this mindset to grow as quickly as possible. But I think in communities that can actually undermine your mission a little bit. To me, it was a good thing to let people join as they became interested to let us grow steadily as opposed to trying to get everyone from the Facebook Group over. 

That said, our community is not small, it’s in the thousands. There are plenty of touchpoints within our experience where people find out about the community. If they're a member of Teachable they get emails, letting them know about it. It’s also in the product.

With so many members, how do you stay responsive to support questions?

When we were in the Facebook Group, we definitely took a more support-oriented approach to community. In the earlier stages, it made sense for us to try to provide some technical support in the community. But as the company grew, our support team grew, our support function grew.  Then, when we switched over to Circle, we actually tried pretty hard to draw clear boundaries between Support and Community. 

The reason for that is that I think community isn't always the best place for support. I think when you have a community that's mainly being used for support, you'll tend to see either the same types of conversations happening over and over again, or you'll see conversations that are only relevant to the poster because they're account specific.

Within our group, we're really focused on trying to start conversations that are stemming from things that only our members know.

Within our group, we're really focused on trying to start conversations that are stemming from things that only our members know. Basically trying to inspire people to share their special genius in the community versus something that anyone could be talking about. All of the people in Teachable are entrepreneurs that have a business. They have all this incredible domain knowledge about their particular niche, but also about how they actually built their business. So that is what we think is most valuable for them to share with each other.

On the flip side of that, our business has live chat, too. That’s a better way for us to quickly respond to people's support questions.

There are obviously no cut and dry rules to this. There are definitely very successful support-oriented communities. It just really depends on what the opportunities are for your business. For us, we felt like we had a bigger opportunity for community than Support.

How do you keep your community lively and positive?

It happens over time and has actually been quite interesting for me. Our community is split out into three different groups. You're in a different community depending on where you are as an entrepreneur with Teachable. If you have just gotten started and haven't built a school or launched your business, you're in a separate space versus our creators who have an established business and it's their full-time job. It's been interesting because those communities have taken off at different speeds due to the particular cocktail of personalities that you have in either community. I’m the same community manager, it’s the same platform, I take a similar approach to each of the groups. But they all have their unique character. 

In the beginning, it's all about the conversations that I have one-on-one, figuring out who are these people, what do they know, what do they have to offer, why are they here? As you build up that knowledge, you become more able to tag people into relevant conversations

One of the things that I do is take a very relationship-first approach. In the beginning, it's all about the conversations that I have one-on-one, figuring out who are these people, what do they know, what do they have to offer, why are they here? As you build up that knowledge, you become more able to tag people into relevant conversations, or even tap someone on the shoulder and say: “Are you willing to start a conversation about some topics that you have expertise in?”

There are many other parts to it as well, like, content cadence. There are posts that I publish in the community pretty much every day. There are pieces, kind of more codified or high-value content that we give out in the community, that spark conversations. So there's different layers to how it happens.

You wrote about community as a content marketing pipeline. Can you elaborate on that and do you have any practical tips for community managers that want to start with that?

I actually worked on a content marketing team, which is why this is very top of mind for me. So the community is two things:

When it comes to content marketing, it's a really powerful sourcing tool. My colleagues might reach out to me and say: “Hey, I'm looking to do some writing about someone who has a membership business in the crafting space”. Then I would pull from the community and the relationships that I have there to make a connection.

The other side of it is just thinking about how community actually fits into the content packages that you do throughout the year. Your community already has all this content in it from people that are sharing their expertise, like strategies that they've used that have worked. I think that it was John from yen.io that said: “It's not just low hanging fruit, it's fruit that's already on the ground”. There's absolutely no reason that you shouldn't take those things, and turn it into something that you use in your content marketing. For instance, taking a little blurb from something someone said in the community, and designing it onto a carousel for social media. Or contacting the person to have an interview about it, or even just turning it into a blog post or a case study.

If we're releasing something big to our audience, we usually try to have a component of it that is special for just the community.

If we're releasing something big to our audience, we usually try to have a component of it that is special for just the community. For example, a big blog series on a particular topic we would release to the community early and get their feedback. Or we would bring in the person that was interviewed and do a webinar as a way to tighten the connection.

One piece of advice you would give to anyone that is building out an early community around a software startup

For people that are starting a community and don't have a community manager yet, my advice is to think about what the community program is going to look like in five years. Don't just think, “I need to get everybody in a chat room now so that I can fulfill the need that I have while building my product”. I think a lot of people that build software think that it'd be convenient if they can tap people on the shoulder to get their feedback. And that's absolutely true. But you can get yourself into a position where you actually alienate those early people if you don't make sure that the community experience stays good over time. So don't start without a strategy and think a few steps down the road. What's going to work at five people is not going to work at 100 people or 1000 people.

What advice do you have around showing the business impact of community to other stakeholders?

The first thing is that you can only get compelling information about how effective a community is if you have data on the members. That's why something like Facebook Groups can be so challenging.

It's all about making a hypothesis such as: “We think it's good if people use the community a lot, because people who use it stay customers for longer”, and then try to track that

You need to take a step back first. A lot of community managers measure for example how many posts there are in a day. If you're measuring something like that, and 30 people posted in the community today, that’s great, but then what? It's all about making a hypothesis such as: “We think it's good if people use the community a lot because people who use it stay customers for longer”, and then try to track that. If you can track your cohort of community members against non-community members, and suppose you can say they stay customers 10% longer, that's the metric people care about. They don't care that people are posting 30 times a day. But you can use that to inform yourself of course.

For any community managers that don't have that data yet: Don't be discouraged! It can take time for you to get that information—it took me years. Oftentimes it has to be custom-built. But try to focus on the impact on other teams if you can't focus on the business metric. So one thing for me at Teachable for instance is that all of our product managers are constantly trying to look for people to have user interviews with about different features and products that they're working on. If I can say I sourced 25 user interviews from the community this month and that their response rates were X percent higher than when the product managers were reaching out cold over email, then you've framed the impact as well by comparing workflows.

Your favorite article or book as a community enthusiast?

For me, the biggest things I learn are from talking to other community managers. I talked to people that work at other companies on the phone a lot, just to get a sense of what they’re doing and what's working for them. 

Beyond that, I really like Carter Gibson. He takes this really interesting kind of anthropological lens to community where he'll talk about the history of the field, where it comes from, why are we called Community Managers.

What are your plans for the future, personally and with the Teachable community?

This is obviously the biggest year for community I have ever experienced. It's like, all of a sudden, everyone's talking about it. It’s exciting to me personally to kind of play a role in by sharing my thoughts about what I've learned at Teachable and forming some of those best practices alongside a lot of really smart people. That’s exciting and not something I thought I would ever get to do. 

At Teachable, I am working on some parts of our onboarding experience, and the user experience of the community in general, before I’m actually moving on to join Commsor! (check Noele’s LinkedIn post if you’re looking for a new opportunity as a CM, as Teachable’s looking for someone to follow in Noele’s footsteps)

Where can people find out more about you?

You can read my blog at https://www.noeleflowers.com where I try to put out a post every couple of weeks. I also do some coaching for community builders and have a particular interest in founders that want to start a community but aren’t ready to have a full-time staff yet.

You can also find me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool interview for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Lennart, Gino, Frank

Hi everyone! 👋

Last week we shared some community engagement recipes with you – repeatable things that you can do to boost engagement within your community. We distilled this resource from our talks and interviews with several community builders. But naturally that wasn’t the only topic that we discussed. Another frequently mentioned subject was customer support. In this issue we’ll share some tips for managing customer support through chat-based communities.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

👥 Customer support via the community

Many of you also provide some form of customer support through the community. There are some clear advantages to be gained by doing so. It provides your users with an easy way to get in touch with you. Delivering support through chat or a forum also feels way more human than via support tickets. Not to mention that your other community members can chip in and help each other out, assisting your support team in the process.

However, the downside of providing support through communities, especially the ones that are chat-based, is that the tools often weren’t built for this purpose. This can cause issues, such as losing track of which questions have already been answered. The direct communication of chat-based communities can also mean that people feel entitled to get quick responses to their questions, leading to disappointment if they don’t receive it. Managing expectations is therefore very important. You should carefully consider the pros and cons of formally providing support via the community and communicate clearly what people can expect.

We’ve spoken to a number of people who have shared their approach to customer support. Such as Tuomas Artman, co-founder of Linear, who appointed a single person responsible for keeping track of unanswered questions and making sure they get answered in time. Or David Okuniev, co-founder of Typeform and VideoAsk, who made the decision to not provide support via their Slack community, but automatically direct people to the appropriate place instead.

Read their tips and the other ones we’ve collected here👇 They’re mainly focused on Slack-based communities, but there are also some more general tips there.

Show me the tips

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback!

🤩 Reads of the week

Deflect support, open-source community goal

3 min read – It can be incredibly difficult to successfully support any software product when the needs of your users surpass the resources you have to respond to them. This is especially true for open-source software. In this post by Tessa Kriesel, she explains how you can leverage your community to minimize the need for support.

Social media predictions for 2021

3 min read – With 2021 just around the corner, it’s a good time to think about where social media and communities are heading in the new year. In this post Greg Isenberg shares his thoughts with us on what to expect.

Activate your community to build better products and ignite adoption

4 min read – Another benefit of having a healthy community is that you can actively involve them in the building process of your product. Brian Oblinger explains how you can make this work in this post.

Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool interview for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Gino, Frank, Lennart

Hi everyone! 👋

We hope our readers from the US have had a happy Thanksgiving, despite the current situation. Today we’d like to share some recipes with you. No, they’re not recipes for stuffed turkey… 😅

They’re all about repeatable things that you can do to boost engagement within your community. We’ve written these recipes a while ago, but haven’t really given them much attention in our newsletter yet. To complement these recipes, we’ve also compiled a list of good reads on the same topic. We hope you’ll find them useful!

Enjoy, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button (if you haven’t) to follow along on the next issues! 👇

Subscribe now

🥘 Community engagement recipes

Throughout our conversations and interviews with people who are enthusiastic about community building, we’ve noticed that engagement is always a hot topic. Questions ranging from creating a welcoming atmosphere for newcomers to keeping members engaged were often discussed.

In our previous issues, we’ve had some great examples on how to do this from people like Emily Lonetto from VoiceFlow and Guillaume Moubeche from lemlist. However, it can be a little hard to sift through all the content there to find all the nuggets that will benefit your own community. Therefore we’ve created a single place where you can find all these tips 👇

Show me those recipes

Let us know what you think by replying to this email!

🤩 Reads of the week

More interesting reads on increasing community engagement.

How to build a highly-engaged community with Slack

5 min read – An excellent list of tips compiled by John Saddington. He extracted these from an hour-long session on this topic between Jacob Peters, co-founder of Commsor, and Tom Osman of Makerpad.

Onboarding new community members: some thoughts

7 min read – In this article Andy McIlwain, senior community manager at GoDaddy, explains his views on how to successfully onboard new community members. As a gamer, he approaches the subject by thinking about it in the context of gaming. According to his view, you’ll want your new members to go through multiple phases, so that they’ll ultimately level up to become a full-fledged community member.

Why do they keep coming back? Real-world community members speak on why they keep coming back

5 min read – You may have nailed your onboarding, but if people won’t come back you’ll never create a lively community. In this article by Blake Ethridge, he asked people what makes them come back to their communities. Some good insights on how to retain community members can be found here.

Thanks for reading this issue 🙏

Next week we plan to have another cool interview for you 💪, stay tuned, and subscribe if you didn’t yet.

✌️ Cheers,

Steven, Gino, Frank, Lennart