How did the Techstars Community Leader Academy impact me?

I am always a community builder. My first initiative at university was to establish a university student club focused on game development in the software sector. My close friend and I believed we were the first to raise awareness, and that others would follow suit. It works! We collaborate with other student clubs and stakeholders. Imagine we were 20 years old and sought out various sponsors for our friends' student club events in Cyprus. We found the money in various companies, all of which are in completely different fields. I'll never forget how one of our community's founding members received sponsorship from her hairdresser. We learned many things from our first initiatives at the school. Then I moved to another student club as club president. I can give two reasons for this. I really needed a change, and I wanted my close friend to be the chair of our first community. When I graduated from university, I had three years of community building and leadership experience.?

My first professional and business community-building experience came through the Tech Sales Turkey community. How did I get started? I enjoyed the writing every time, but I realized I was not writing any more. Business life, right? I especially started my career with a focus on learning new things and worked a lot, but I didn’t have time for writing. With Covid-19, like other people, I was looking for new things for my personal development and hobbies. And I remembered that I was good at writing. I wrote about many different topics before and worked as a volunteer editor on some tech and business things. So, I started a newsletter related to tech sales. The main thing was that sales were changing due to Covid-19 and technological advancements. I didn’t expect that, but many Turkish tech co-founders and sales and marketing people followed my newsletter and shared comments with me. In those days, I was also a member of RevGenius , the largest B2B sales community. I thought maybe I could do this for my newsletter followers. Let's get them together. First, I talked with my close friend working in this area. They encouraged me in this. And then I opened my Slack channel. After we organized many events online and face-to-face for almost 2 years,. And then last year, when I decided to come to Porto for my master, the community members were shocked. Even though the volunteers help me sometimes, every member of the community identified the community with me. My school and my work took up much of my day, so I really didn’t have time for community. Also, the lack of participation of volunteers and members was a challenge for me these days.?

After 8 months, I decided to close the Slack group and start a WhatsApp group from scratch. Why, I decided to. Slack was totally dead for my community members; engagement was too low. And new people were not coming easily. So, I started a new face for the community. The community name, rules, and many other things have changed. We started to include people working not only in sales but also in growth and marketing. I started to learn new things in these areas, and we became more accessible to more people. In the past few months, I organized 1 face-to-face meeting in Istanbul, and we met 4 times online. We started 1-1 matching with community members. We have new advantages for 5 technology perks for our members who are in sales and marketing. The engagement rate is higher than before.

I was not planning to grow our community, but after Techstars Community Leader Academy, I decided to make a big impact and start a new volunteer system. We talked about community issues for two days, and I realized that I am not alone. Now I believe more in the power of community, and I can say. Let's make it different!?