Iterative approach to community building

It has been ~5 months since we kickstarted our community?Community Champs?- a dedicated space for world-class community leaders to connect with each other, share best practices and learn from peers.

Here’s a quick snapshot of our community summary from our Threado dashboard:

Building a tight-knit community (of community builders) is hard, probably one of the hardest things to do. We’ve tried to keep our approach simple - have infinite patience while iterating on initiatives to discover what adds value. Here are three learnings from our journey:

Have a community-first DNA

Couldn't have been said any better! There is a lot of material on how in the early stages, a startup is driven by Founder-led sales. What is not talked about often is the importance to have this founder-led mindset in building a community, if community helps unlock value for your customers. To be able to empower community builders, we need to have this DNA within us to be able to understand our customers’ needs and truly add value.

A couple of the things that have helped us build this culture internally:

1. A strong focus on adding immense value beyond our product

• Connecting with and learning from community builders on a weekly basis, content initiatives, micro-SaaS tools or drops, curated resources, events and collaborations.
• Supporting other community initiatives such as Community Hacked and Rosie La

2. Growing and adding value to our own community.

• We dog-food our own product for our community as well. Our roadmap helps us add value to our customers’ community as well as ours.

Get to know your members

Sharath, Supriya, Shalini, and I spend time every week having 1-on-1 chats with our community members and community builders along with Abhishek, KP and other members of the team joining in on a regular basis. The 1-on-1s range from having agenda-less discussions to getting feedback on our initiatives to sharing our roadmap.

We also recently had our first monthly community meetup. It was a great way for our community members to connect with each other and for us to interact with them. Every interaction - either a 1-on-1 or a meetup is a step towards engineering serendipity. We lead with curiosity to understand how we can help, let things unfold and learn from the experience.

Experiment with different ways to add value

Sharath, Maithreye and team have been trying out a bunch of initiatives and we are learning with each one what’s working and what’s not. Taking in the feedback and improving in the next iteration:

• Curated weekly newsletter about all things community. We are into our 88th edition this week and send it out to 6,000+ community builders.
• AMAs with iconic community leaders exclusively on our Slack Community. These have some of the best community nuggets in them.?Here’s a preview from one of our AMAs.
• Threado Community Hour - a live QnA and peer networking format with some of the best in the community industry
• Sharath and I have been experimenting with Twitter spaces on a fortnightly basis. We have one scheduled for tomorrow.
• Community Decoded - a podcast powered by Threado where Sharath hosts a community leader and dives into their community-building journey. We have our first podcast with David Spinks coming out later this week.

There are some amazing initiatives planned ahead - both for our community and our product. There will be wins and there will be losses but if we keep showing up, making things happen, learning from these experiences and iterating on adding value, we know it will all come together.

If you’ve gotten here, and you are wondering…

Here's the link to join it: Community Champs Slack Community. See you there! ??

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