This article is worth at least 10M to entrepreneur ecosystems

This post is worth at least 10M to entrepreneur ecosystems.

I've been a member of several entrepreneur communities and ecosystems in the past years, and there are several reasons?they are missing millions of euros & dollars by not connecting their networks in smarter ways.

Here are some examples:

A Swiss network and accelerator only enable their members to meet on face to face gatherings. There's no digital hub or community for them, so all the knowledge is in the leader's head who knows everyone. But the rest of the members only?meet some of the other attendants to the events, and if these events are just one presenter and then mingle, if there is no facilitation or speed dating... you might get to know only the next person to your right.?

A French community has a hub and thriving online community but there's no way for the members to invest in each other's businesses so there's no incentive to help other entrepreneurs in the long run.

Coaches are hired, trained but underpaid, so they move to better opportunities on a regular basis.?

An European community of entrepreneurs has the same issue as the Swiss accelerator: several whatsapp groups, great face to face events, but no digital hub where the members can search, learn from what other members of the network are building, see what job opportunities they have, or what are their toughest challenges today.?

These are just three examples, I'm pretty sure you can replicate these missed opportunities?to each European country and their entrepreneur communities.?

Here's what they are missing and how to enable all their members to help one another and get faster and better results for everyone and their economies.?

The missed opportunities and their solutions.

1. Missed opportunity:?Members and founders in between jobs or searching for a new challenge waste a lot of time.??Some founders in the network shift roles (they leave their positions, move countries, are looking for new opportunities in a different role). They are highly skilled, have?amazing experience and talent (otherwise you wouldn't have invited them in the first place), but they need to spend a lot of time searching for a new opportunity in the network via one on one calls.?

While they do that, they are not helping other founders and entrepreneurs in the community as much as they could.

Solution:?Build an Online Hub that can be easily built with a?tool such as Mighty Networks or Workplace by Facebook. It enables each member of the community to have a personal profile, a short bio, some links to their company, an area to post One offer and One ask to the network. You can find this in AngelList, but it's membership is too broad and not specific to your community. You don't have the trust that you have built with members of your network.?It's not just slack channels or WhatsApp groups, these have a function, but these tools won't achieve the potential of the online Hub. In the Hub you'd have a Search that enables the former founders, chiefs of staff, and people who have time on their hands to search for new opportunities and create new connections to projects that meet their values and interests. They might be able to provide solutions to founders who are desperately looking for a contact, talent, or a marketing challenge.?

Examples of how Hubs like AngelList work: The current CEO of Factmata reached out to the former CEO via AngelList, he started as a Chief of Staff and is now the CEO.?

In one of these entrepreneur communities; there are at least 3 amazing?former?founders and innovators currently looking for a new challenge. Not your regular job seeker, they all have impressive track records, a large entrepreneurial?network, and still have no clear overview of all the opportunities where they could contribute in this specific community of entrepreneurs.

Members could also mention their capacity to support other members in the Hub: "I’m available 20% for the next months if you need support on these areas of expertise..."

2. Missed opportunity: Knowledge not being found at the right time.?There's literally?hundreds of years of experience and expertise in the network, trusted providers, new tech using AI, smart marketing with deep learning solutions such as?https://www.tinyclues.com?... but the members won't know it unless you make that knowledge findable via the Hub, with a Q&A section, that ideally has AI, and enables to find the best expert in the network, sends him/her an email with the new question, and you get the response within 24h. The current alternative is to send an email to the network manager who knows everyone, but you don't want to take all of his time.

In the Hub you could host links to blog posts, solutions that answers some of the founders most valuable questions like:?

How do you cold email VCs??https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/mark-cuban-investment-cold-email-factmata-fake-news-startup-dhruv-ghuleti.html

How do you scale your support in multiple languages??https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6877149943769968640/

etc..

Solution:?Build the hub, curate the knowledge that is being built with your members via tags, enable the Search, invite members to fill in their profile, make your hub learn from their linkedin profiles and online activities, and if you want to go even deeper: use tinyclues to follow your network members and offer them solutions from within your community as they use their normal search engines.?

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3. Missed opportunity: Not enabling your members to invest in each other's companies.??You have a great diversity of members, but you lack human resources to help new entrepreneurs build and scale their startups, you can hire coaches but if you can't pay them well they will move on, as I've done in the past.?

Solution: Give your coaches, members, mentors and community managers a stake in the game, enable them to invest/give them equity in the companies that are being mentored. This encourages all the members, coaches, mentors & community managers to invest in each company of the community as if it was theirs. When a company or entrepreneur succeeds, the whole community shares the success.?

?4. Missed opportunity: Most women led companies only get 1% of VC funding, while women are over half of the world's population, they?know their market needs better than us men.

Solution:?Create more opportunities for women led companies or with a high representation of women to get funding. Seriously.?

Why is this post worth at least 10M??Each of the companies in your network has the potential to become highly profitable, but the longer it takes to find the best people, the right connections that open new markets, the more money is being burnt.?

The companies in your network could have already found smarter solutions from other trusted community members, found amazing?colleagues, made millions in the past months, but many of them probably haven't because they have not been connected to the right people at the right time. Face to face events are highly valuable to build trust, but once trust is built, you can leverage it in smarter and faster ways with online communities.?

The WEF has understood this and they have an online Hub for their members, subdivided into specific communities each with its own?community Head and Community Lead,?plus the?strategic intelligence?tool that let's members?explore and make sense of the connections between different economies, industries and global issues. You don't need to build a strategic intelligence tool, the WEF has done it already, but you can certainly better connect your members with one another.

All of this value won't come just from having the online Hub or enabling members to invest in each other's companies. You'll obviously need to continue to nurture your community and hub, to organise?face to face and online events, to activate specific sub-communities, send a newsletter, welcome newcomers, you'll need to do community management to ensure the members are active and get support when needed. If you want to go deeper, there's a great book called?Startup Communities?by Brad Feld, it has many more examples of community curation activities.?Here's a short video with him on that topic.

Over the next weeks I'll reach out to some of the exiting communities I’m a member of, and offer to help them build their hubs, or rethink their membership/mentors benefits to ensure long term engagement from all their members.

Before we create such a Hub, we’ll ask community members about their needs, via a survey and interviews. So we don’t assume what matters to them today and that our community and hub respond to their real needs as they evolve over time.

When was the last time you surveyed your community members??

Then I’ll be spending some of my free time building a new entrepreneurial community with members of existing communities, because we see these missed opportunities and we want to build something that can reach the full potential of our time, energy and resources.?

If you'd like me to help you build your Online Hub for your entrepreneurial community, reach out. I'll be glad to help.?I've spent the past 8 years designing and building the ICRC internal and partner communities, we have nearly 5000 active members daily.

What other missed opportunities do you see in the entrepreneurial communities you are a member of? What are the best entrepreneur communities you are a member of?

Let us know in the comments and help us reach new levels for our communities.?