How to build a community around your startup

By Vinnie Lauria, managing partner of Golden Gate Ventures

My number one goal is to help the community. Do that, and everything else will fall into place. Once you have a tight community they’ll do all of the work: they can be your best marketers and your community leaders. The key is getting them engaged.

The first step is to recognize that the community is a group of people. Seems straightforward but it’s a common oversight. A community doesn’t exist without people, so the basis of developing online communities is building relationships.

Firstly, a community needs an organizer. People need to know that there is someone leading it. With Lefora, a startup I co-founded that lets users easily create online forums, we did this by enabling community roles.

This requires an automatic way to detect experts (which can be determined by activity or group endorsements), then a way to promote those people and give them attention. For example, we’d recognize whoever created a thread and include their picture at the top of the page (pictures are really important). When you recognize their contribution, members become more attached to the forum and will be more active on the threads.

We also worked really hard to get our users emotionally connected to the forum. We invested in a large library of cartoon avatars, so even if people didn’t want to upload a picture, they had over 60 avatars they could choose from to depict their personality. You may not want to upload a selfie, but your surfer avatar can still represent you in all your grumpy volcano glory:

Most importantly, we adopted the customer development model. At the beginning of Lefora’s development, we put out a very basic site with a separate brand. We even got our forum administrators on there and bought Google ads for it. We were then able to collect feedback from those forum admins, and learned that people were looking for something more basic, with straightforward ways of just starting threads and getting questions answered.

Most of our features on Lefora came from people saying we didn’t have a particular functionality, so we’d add it. We put features in as people asked for it, and took them out when people didn’t use them.

So put yourself out there. It’s definitely a great idea to be at communities where your user base hangs out, listen for what they want and the problems they’re currently having, and convert them to the dark side … your side.

Building communities is a lot of work, and there are always a million things you could be doing. So it’s important to figure out how to manage your time.

You need to develop processes to automate as much as you can, not forgetting to keep it personal and targeted. At Lefora, for example, we developed automated welcome emails but broke them up into 3 main campaigns, targeting members categorized according to their activity. Another important thing to keep in mind is that the email should be short, sweet and actionable. You can use links on the email to cut down the amount of content in the email itself, which also lets you keep track of what they want to know more about.

Finally, use stats to see what’s working, there’s a huge difference between working on something productive or wasting your time and energy on unimportant features. Time management is something we all struggle with. You just have to identify what activities are adding the most value to your communities.

If the stats show people aren’t coming in from that thread you’ve been seeding content into, then you know not to waste your time and to change your approach. You can’t be everywhere at once, and you can’t keep trying to cover all your bases, so stats are a great way to prioritise.