I just built a community. Here's why. ??

"James — We already have MySpace. Why do we need another community? ??♂?"

Look, I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't influenced by Adam Schoenfeld and Camille Trent in the latest PeerSignal.org report, where they said that 'fast-growth B2B SaaS companies invest more in?a community?than their?peers.' ??

...I know that correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, but I still saw several reasons why an Aampe community made sense.

Here's why we did it, how we did it, and some of the benefits we were pleasantly surprised by.

Why did we decide to build a community?

There were several reasons, really. Here are four of them:

1. We were having the same conversations over and over again, which was taking too much time and killing our efficiency.

Every time we onboarded a new customer, we had to send over the same batch of videos, and then the customers would respond with the same batch of questions to which we had to respond with the same batch of answers.

(...also, people just weren't using our start-up docs and resources. I think this had a lot to do with the fact that they were static. It was hard to refresh and update them, and if anyone had any questions, they had to come back to us to ask them.)

2. We had too much material spread over too many places

• Want that video? Check our YouTube Channel!
• Looking for that case study? Check out our blog!
• Need the start-up/best practices docs? Check out our learning site!

??♂? We needed a way to make these all searchable and accessible in a single place.

3. We wanted to streamline key communications

When we were launching new product features or wanted feedback, I had to cut a dozen or so emails and phone calls to get my key customers' thoughts and opinions.

Aside from that process being inefficient, it was also a pain in the butt to collect and merge all of the results.

We also missed out on all the juicy crosstalk between customers that would help us make better product decisions.

With everyone siloed, we had to aggregate and make internal judgment calls ourselves that may or may not have been correct.

4. Our customers are awesome.

Not to sound overly sappy, but our customers our some of our best salespeople and have driven some of our most awesome innovations. The ability to let them talk amongst themselves and contribute was top of my list.

We're still small enough that our community is manageable and highly engaged.

I seriously hope we can keep this "early adopter" feeling as we grow.

The nuts and bolts of how we built the community —

I built it on Discourse . It took 20mins or less. ??♂?

Here's how we structured it:

It's somewhat self-explanatory, but all of the start-up docs are in 'Tips, Tricks, and How-Tos,' the New Features are in 'New Feature Announcements/Requests,' and the 'Aampe-Related Questions' category is for...well...Aampe-Related Questions.

(...ok, I guess it's really, really self-explanatory. ??)

We also added an 'Ask a Data Scientist' section where our more technical customers can have direct access to our data science team to ask the more difficult questions around attribution, how our recommender system works, or various other technical topics about banded algorithms, random forests, and Bayesian distributions...whatever the heck those are. ??

The platform

We chose Discourse because we liked the structure of Discourse better than Slack (which is more "Conversations-based" and would require us to pay per user), and while Discord is free, we really didn't think the UI was that friendly.

Fine, I'll say it: I'm way too much of a Gen Xer for Discord. ?? (Seriously though, I fricken' hate the Discord UI.)

The only thing that sucks about Discourse is the cost. You could do it for free if you host it yourself, but at this point, we just don't have the bandwidth. ??♂?

If you have any questions about the process of setting one of these up, just LMK. It wasn't hard. ??

The benefits of community: What we discovered

Again, we hoped that housing all of this info in one place would help us increase our user interaction and reduce the number of redundant messages and requests we had to send, and I think that's going to happen.

Here were some other benefits I didn't realize until I actually started building the forum:

1. The search function

If you look for something on the forum (like "datasets" for example), it brings up all kinds of stuff...not just learning docs:

2. The weekly newsletter ??

Looking to drive more engagement? The forum sends a weekly update newsletter with new posts and topics to any of your members who don't visit in the last week.

This is a great touchpoint, and since it's automated, it will send regardless if you're actually working or if you're really just sneaking in 9 holes. ???♀??

3. It's a sales feature

"We'll also give you access to our community which houses all of our start-up docs, and you can also connect with other Aampe users."

At Aampe, we're not just building a product, we're creating a whole new mentality and way of doing things for CRM and Lifecycle marketers, and it's really hard to do this one by one.

Building a community and giving our users a feeling of belonging and ownership allows us to build momentum behind our cause more efficiently.

Yeah, I think we'll keep it.

Overall, we're early in the process, so I don't have a bunch of statistics to throw at you. But so far, anecdotally, it's already been a success in early customer communications.

In general, I'm hoping that we start to get some good questions, requests, and feedback because I really treasure each and every interaction with our customers and prospects.

So, do you have any community-building experience or tips and tricks?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions!

#Growth #Marketing #Community

(BTW, I'd share a link, but the community is not yet public. That comes with the next tier of pricing and I'm still on the cheap plan. ??)