How to build a great community, according to one of Instagram’s first employees

(L-R) Kai Elmer Sotto and Bailey Richardson, two of the three co-founders of People & Company / Photo credit: Bailey Richardson

When Bailey Richardson joined Instagram as head of community in 2012, her team was working out of a small room in California. She was one of the original 13 employees at the company and handled the app’s community strategy and events like InstaMeets.

Later that year, Facebook acquired the app, and two years after that, Richardson resigned. She and some of her colleagues believed that the intimacy, artistry, and other factors that made the app what it was in its early days had been lost.

But she never got over her love for community building. “I’m hooked,” she says. “However I can do more of this work and supercharge [companies and users] by connecting them is what I want to do.”

She’s now a partner at People & Company, an organization that helps companies build communities.

At a fireside chat during Singapore-based venture capital firm Wavemaker Partner’s annual startup showcase, Richardson talked about what it takes to build your own community.

The true meaning of a community

The word “community” has become a synonym and euphemism for a company’s user base, contends Richardson. But for her, a community refers to a group of people who really care about a platform – and they go above and beyond to show it.

“We called them hand-raisers,” she explains. “People that were like ‘I want to show up at an InstaMeet, I want to participate in a hashtag project.’”

After being acquired, Instagram ended up with a new chief marketing officer, who instructed Richardson and her team to figure out just how many hand-raisers the app had. At the time, Instagram had approximately 15 million users, estimates Richardson. After their calculations, the team found out that they had “thousands of people” in their community.

She recalls feeling that the number wasn’t very significant compared to the actual number of users they had. But the CMO’s reaction surprised her.

“He said, ‘It’s amazing that we have thousands of people in almost every country in the world who are hosting events for Instagram, who are sharing their content, and speaking to the press for us,” she says.

In the beginning, Instagram fans were so enthusiastic that people were making art out of their logos, knitting scarves, and visiting the office. “That enthusiasm meant that people were telling each other about it,” she says. “And there was a lot of energy, vitality, and urgency around using this tool.”

For her, community is like “compound interest” and has parallels with user retention. Instead of thinking about growing your users or increasing marketing and advertising spend to attract more people, it’s about doing more with the people who use your product.

Think about Airbnb, for example. While it has user-acquisition activities like letting people send referral codes to friends, it also prioritizes the hosts already on its platform. The company holds meetups, they protect their hosts through Host Guarantee, which insures them from property damage, and they also have training resources in their community center.

Authentic community building versus profits

Solving a real need