Click below if you’re interested in joining 🙃

Apply to Membership

Four tips on how to create sustainable business impact through community ✏️

A summary of yesterday’s event with Nicole Saunders from Zendesk, summarized by Anna Santiago, a core contributor to the Community Hacked community.

1. 🌀 Integrate the community into all aspects of the business

   • To ensure alignment with business goals, community professionals should actively engage with leadership, understand company objectives, and strategize how the community can contribute

   • Collaborate with colleagues from different departments, seek clarification on unfamiliar terms, and invest in professional development to enhance business acumen amongst the community team

2. 🚀 Measure and communicate community impact

   • Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect the unique value of the community, such as unique users served, revenue attribution (where possible), and even page views

   • Align measurement practices with existing frameworks in the company to provide consistent metrics

   • Highlight the impact of the community on revenue and customer success to raise awareness among executives

3. 🔄 Elevate the role of community in product feedback and ensure you close with loop with your customers

   • Enable product managers to engage effectively with the community by providing guidance, highlighting active threads, and developing streamlined processes for integrating community insights into product workflows

   • Close the loop with customers by acknowledging their feedback and providing updates on how their input is considered.

4. 🌈 Encourage cross-functional collaboration and prioritize customer needs

   • Provide training and guidelines to ensure appropriate community engagement from other functions of the business. Encourage them to focus on problem-solving and building relationships within the community

   • Prioritize understanding customer needs and communicate how their feedback is being addressed, even if specific requests may not align with long-term strategies

Register for our next event ✅

Join us on June 21st to learn more about how community can help drive product excellence, including:

• ​Streamlining the feedback process to help inform product development

• ​Contribution to the ideation and development of new product features

• ​Facilitating better understanding of market trends and customer needs

• ​Finding beta testers and getting early user experience insights

• ​Driving customer loyalty and retention

Register Now

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Morgan Wood

• Head of Community at Hivebrite

• Purpose of your community: Empower Hivebrite Customers to build thriving community with Hivebrite platform

• Favourite engagement tactic: Themed discussions and live events!

• Open to connecting with: Customer community builders and anyone building with Hivebrite ➡️ Connect with me on LinkedIn

Click below if you’re interested in joining 🙃

Apply to Membership

Register for our next events ✅

June 1st - Zendesk

Register Now

June 21st - Productboard

Register Now

Tips on onboarding new members from our event with Meta ✏️

Onboarding can be tough, but it doesn't have to be. Simplify it, and think through what you're trying to accomplish with your onboarding protocol.

Here's their step by step process 👇

1. Find 'aha' - define the point in your community where a new member achieves the value they joined for

2. Plan milestones - reverse engineer what needs to happen from the new member being accepted, to 'aha'

3. Make content - put together written materials and videos that guide new members from milestone to milestone towards aha

4. Set calls - get personal. Don't be afraid of facetime. Communities are meant to be personal, so set calls and give your new members being onboarded a personal touch with a welcome call

5. Study up on your cohorts - learn from the data!

What would you add? Let us know in the comments, and make sure to follow Community Hacked!

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Mariana Suchodolski

• Content & Community at Bonfire

• Purpose of your community: At Bonfire we’re helping creators and communities use digital assets like NFTs and social tokens to connect and engage with their fans.

  Crypto can get a bad reputation but we’re just trying to find more equitable ways for creators monetize and build community. If you consider that musicians get about 0.003 cents per stream on Spotify or that social media platforms can just demonetize content for no good reason, then it stands to reason that there must be a better way to go about creative pursuits.

• Favourite engagement tactic: Much like what we’re doing here, I love showcasing what creators are working on and letting them take the spotlight. We do this across our newsletter, twitter, blog and our actual showcase.

• Open to connecting with: All of y’all. Everyone can teach you something. And there’s always something you can offer in return :) ➡️ Connect with me on LinkedIn & Follow me on Twitter

Click below if you’re interested in joining 🙃

Apply to Membership

Four tips on how to combine community with your product-led growth strategy ✏️

To see the full transcript and recording of this and all other Community Hacked events, join our Membership.

1. Transitioning from users to community:

   • Recognise and track any organic conversations happening around the product on social media.

   • Create a community forum to draw users in and provide them with a dedicated space to connect and collaborate.

2. Evolving community programs over time:

   • Monitor community needs through one-on-one conversations, focus groups, and surveys to identify areas for improvement and expansion.

   • Tailor community programs to specific user segments based on metrics and objectives. Continuously iterate.

   • Only add new programs if there is a demonstrated need based on user feedback and company objectives.

3. Empowering brand advocates and ambassadors:

   • Identify potential advocates based on product expertise and enthusiasm.

   • Provide resources, support, and incentives to encourage advocacy.

   • Leverage gamification and exclusive access to motivate and reward advocates for their efforts.

4. Tracking and measuring community engagement and ROI:

   • Work with data analysts if possible to leverage analytics platforms to collect and aggregate data on both engagement and product usage.

   • Monitor data regularly to identify trends and areas for improvement.

   • Use quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate the value of community-building efforts to stakeholders.

Register for our next event ✅

Join us on June 1st to learn more about how to create sustainable business impact through community, including:

• ​Developing business acumen as a community professional

• ​Designing and running community programs that connect and support customers, whilst also driving:

  • ​Brand Awareness

  • ​Content Marketing

  • ​Customer Retention and Expansion

  • ​Customer Advocacy

  • ​Product Development

Register Now

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Margaux Miller

• Director of Community, Global at Toptal

• Purpose of your community: Toptal's global community is a place where top talent find a sense of belonging, showcase and share knowledge, and develop their skills (our team's goal is engagement and retention of our talent community members).

• Favourite engagement tactic: When engaging online communities, well formatted posts with clear calls to actions are key. If you use Slack, my hot tip is 100% to use Block Kit for posts with buttons! (It is free and your posts look professional and stand out from others.)

• Open to connecting with: I would love to connect with fellow Community leaders to discuss strategy planning, ROI, and creative ideas too. Let's make all communities thrive! ➡️ Connect with me on LinkedIn

Apply to Membership

Three tips on listening to, empowering and measuring your community ✏️

From our recent event with Emily Lakin, Head of Creator Community at Patreon

1. Listen to your community to understand their needs and challenges to build the foundation of your community

• Experiment and iterate: start small, test your program with a small group, gather feedback, and iterate your program based on continued feedback as it grows.

• At Patreon, when talking with creators, Emily discovered that they wanted help with running and growing their creative businesses, so the team built an eight-week accelerator program that covered topics like finances, productivity, and marketing

• They also conducted a survey and found that 80% of our community works alone, so they created a community-led program that brought creators together to connect and share knowledge: the Accountability Club (A. Club)

2. Empower your community leaders and advocates by supporting them, which will enable your community to grow more organically

• Provide resources such as guides, conversation starters, email templates, and a private discussion channel. Hold monthly meetings to share updates and preview new features and products.

• At Patreon, they vetted potential A. Club hosts to assess their motivation, volunteer experience, and community organizing skills to ensure alignment. Chosen hosts were then provided with resources such as guides, conversation starters, best practices, email templates, and support through private channels and regular check-ins.

3. Share data and stories internally and externally to show your community’s impact

• Understand what metrics matter most to your business leaders and your customers, and share those regularly in a structured manner

• At Patreon, they measure and share details on reach, conversion, resonance and impact

  • Reach: A Club launches, event registrations and more

  • Conversion: % of registrants continually engaging in clubs and events and more.

  • Resonance: NPS score and how disappointed they’d be if the program no longer existed

  • Impact: Income growth and trajectory of active participants

Register for our next event ✅

Join us on May 3rd to learn more about the role of community in product-led growth, including:

• ​Creating a cohesive community vision

• ​Establishing a strong community infrastructure

• ​Deciding on and managing impactful community programs

• ​Developing, tracking and acting upon the right metrics

• ​Recruiting the right people for your team

• ​Advocating for community inside and outside the company

Register Now

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Hannah Rafter

• Global Community Manager @ Uizard

• Purpose of your community: The Uizard Community was created to encourage those creating apps and websites to grow their skill sets, share knowledge and feel inspired by others' prototyping journeys.

• Favourite engagement tactic: Get to know who in your community has great knowledge/experience on certain topics. When a member asks a question, reach out to your go-to knowledge experts and encourage them to help out and answer. It makes everyone involved feel great!

• Open to connecting with: Looking to connect with anyone who runs global/diverse communities for Saas companies! ➡️ Connect with me on LinkedIn

We are building a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders. Since going full-time a week ago I have been focusing on evolving each aspect of Community Hacked to ensure that we are producing high-quality educational content across the board. This new Substack newsletter is part of that.

If you have any feedback or ideas for us, please just respond to this email.

If you like this post, please share it and help us empower community people across the world to develop the knowledge and networks they need to drive business success through community 🙏

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Three tips on how to make community integral to your company ✏️

From our recent event with Jayvee Nava, former VP Community at Peloton

1. Building trust and relationship with members from day one is important for scaling a community

• Responding to upset or dissatisfied members directly can turn them into brand advocates down the line

• Identifying common questions and turning them into blog posts or FAQs can reduce repetitive interactions and show people you are listening

• Encouraging community members to help each other out can reduce the workload on community managers

• Modelling desired behaviour yourself can encourage members to copy you in order to support others and help scale the community

2. Educate management as clearly as possible about the value of your community work to the wider company

• One effective way to do this is to figure out what type of reporting or information the heads of teams (e.g. Product, Customer Support, Sales, Marketing) are looking for and tailor your work accordingly to obtain/create that with community

• Build partnerships with those teams to ensure they get what they need from your community is key to demonstrating the value of your work to your manager

• When meeting with your management, come prepared with detail on the processes you have created for each team and data demonstrating the value of your work

3. Leverage community feedback to drive product development

• To make community integral to your company, involve them in product development by collecting feedback

• Share a monthly report with the product team that consolidates community feedback from various sources

• Tag feedback to specific features to make it easier for the product team to process

• Communicate back to community members about how their feedback is being factored into the product roadmap to make these passionate members feel recognised and to strengthen their connection with the brand

• Be sure to beta test new features with all types of community members, so as not to bias the results by only sharing with these passionate community members

Register for our next event ✅

Emily’s role focuses on executing strategies that bring life- and career-changing peer-to-peer learning, connection, and collaboration to creators at scale. Under her leadership, the Community Team was just awarded "Best Creator Community" at the 2023 CMX Community Industry Awards.

​Join our event with Emily on March 20th:

Register Now

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Alyson Stemas

• Community Leader @ Founders Circle Capital (📣 new role alert - joining 20th March! 📣)

• Purpose of your community: A private leadership community for growth stage executives that builds a “personal board of directors” around you. Among a trusted set of peers, you give and get insights, ideas, support & answers

• Favourite engagement tactic: Asynchronous low lift icebreaker type questions (ex tea v coffee?). It gets people typing/engaging. From new community members to the seasoned ones, a lot of joy can come from a meaningless thread on personal preferences

• Open to connecting with: The community is interested in connecting with CHROs and CFOs of Series B or later companies with >$20M in annual revenue. I’d love to connect with community leaders of other VCs, folks who have an in house community platform, and those creating community along executive leaders ➡️ Connect with me on LinkedIn

In yesterday's event we learned from ​Nisha Baxi, Director of Community at Gong, a multi-billion-dollar software company that helps over 2,000 large companies to better understand their customers, improve their data-driven decision-making and increase their revenue.

During the event, Nisha taught us all about about how to develop community programs that improve customer retention. See a short summary of what we covered below 🌟

• To ensure their work is critical, customer community managers should work closely with product, sales and marketing teams and focus on the A ('Acquisition') and P ('Product') aspects of the SPACES model

• Nisha works as part of the Customer Success function at Gong, where the north star metric is net dollar retention (NDR), which is a measure of how much your annual recurring revenue or monthly recurring revenue (MRR) has grown or shrunk over time by factoring in customer expansion as well as negative churn and downgrades

• 'Retention' is actually a lagging indicator, influenced by leading indicators, with product adoption being the universally agreed-upon leading indicator

• To identify effective community programs for customer retention, focus on how they help with product adoption and encourage more usage of the product

• Building a culture of experimentation is critical when trying to identify the best community programs

• When experimenting with different programs, avoid big bets and focus on the fastest path to success by being open to collaboration and being outcome-driven

• Engage with customers in your community and understand their pain points, then use deductive reasoning to create and modify experiments

• It is crucial to start with a hypothesis based on data, then track experiments, gather data points and measure the success of different methods

• The responsibility of prioritizing which product features to build/improve lies with the product team and they gather feedback from various sources including the community

• Don't just extract information from your community, create a place for them to organically share ideas and insights and review and share those internally

• To gather valuable feedback, focus on depth and test hypotheses through experimental approaches

• Build trust with the community by thanking and tagging members when their feedback is turned into a feature and inform Customer Success Managers (CSMs)

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Anna Santiago

• Community @ Unreasonable Group

• Purpose of your community: Unreasonable Collective exists because solving the world’s most pressing challenges is not only a moral imperative but also a unique financial opportunity. We pool both capital and knowledge from our values-aligned community to co-invest in world-class global technology ventures that are uniquely positioned to successfully change the world for the better.

• Favourite engagement tactic: Trust is built over time. Maintaining a regular cadence of opportunities for you to connect with members and members to connect with one another builds familiarity and creates a sense of belonging.

• Open to connecting with:  

  • Potential investors who are focused on supporting growth-stage ventures in the climate tech space

  • Potential collaborators who may be interested in speaking to a community of values-aligned investors on industry trends

  • ➕ Connect with me on LinkedIn

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

In yesterday's event we learned from ​Ashley Gallman Williams, who leads Host Community engagement and connection at Airbnb, building a thriving global community of hospitality entrepreneurs who are committed to fostering belonging.

During the event, Ashley taught us all about the structure and creative techniques that they use to help their community members thrive. See a short summary of what we covered below 🌟

• What it means to 'lead the Airbnb host community globally': Optimising the supply side (hosts) while injecting humanity into the process. The host community is the face of Airbnb in the real world and faces real-world challenges, so connection is important for them

• This community is made up of 1k community-driven hosts in 84 countries who are part of chapters called 'Host Clubs'. Chapters enable them to gather their fellow hosts online and offline, and engage the communities where they host

• The structure of the community team includes a central team, plus a field team of community engagement managers in 20+ countries. There are three sub-teams: rewards and recognition, host voice and feedback, and community connection. 

• These sub-teams work together to help hosts progress through the community journey from host to super host, to host club leader, then host advisory board member. The host advisory board has 30 members who are involved in supporting Airbnb with product development.

• Airbnb has a decentralised approach to testing and expanding creative engagement programs, with engagement managers encouraged to trial local-level experimentation and then share any successes and learnings with their peers and managers.

• Sharing successful engagement tactics internally is done through weekly meetings, office hours, a Slack channel, and community toolkits sent to leaders. An advanced analytics team also measures the impact of projects.

• When it comes to enabling knowledge-sharing between local Host Club leaders, this is facilitated through leader-to-leader meetups, Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, and community toolkits.

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Andra Nuta

• Startup Program Manager @ Aiven

• Purpose of your community: Our community exists to bring early stage tech founders together and empower them to grow their business by offering free access to our technology, knowledge and support.

• Favourite engagement tactic: Know your members and try to add value with every interaction. I believe that personal touch points go a long way, so I try to interact with each community member in a meaningful way on a regular basis. I’m lucky that my community is still relatively small and I can spend time getting to know my members and sharing useful resources with each of them.

• Open to connecting with: People running startup programs at other tech companies. 

  • ➕ Connect with me on LinkedIn

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

Lolita Taub (Ganas Ventures) - When you decide that you want to start a community, always ask yourself these questions:

1. Why do I want to build a space for a community?

2. What missions/values will my community bring together?

3. Who is the target persona for my community?

4. Where will my community come together?

Kyle Hagge (Morning Brew) - Don’t automate humanity: take time to meet new members 1-1. The trust you build with them lays the foundation for scale in the future.

Chris Snyder (Shopify) - When looking for a new community platform, always prioritise analytics capabilities as a key feature. Data should inform as many of the decisions you make as possible.

Sharath Kuruganty (Product Hunt/Threado) - As your community starts to grow, doing things that don’t scale will become more challenging. Events are the most effective way to begin to scale your community whilst maintaining the values and intimacy that your members hold dear.

Jordan Scott (Airtable) - Try not to over-architect your community. Use data to figure out where people are spending the most time and prioritise creating high quality dedicated spaces for what people need the most.

Erica Kuhl (Salesforce/EKC) - Ensure you continually talk to different parts of the business (e.g. support, product, marketing etc.) and explain/review why community is important to their function.

Holly Firestone (Venafi) - When you are looking to sell the value of community internally, Holly’s ‘Community Centre of Excellence’ model is very helpful (read more here)

Rosie Sherry (Rosieland) - A community is never really in its full form, it is constantly growing and evolving as a living organism. Changing to this mindset gives you a different approach to your job.

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Richard Hoffman

• Growth + Community @ Sylva

• Purpose of your community: To support other community-builders operating and nurturing niche online communities. We partner with independent community leaders by acquiring their communities and helping them grow to their full potential.

• Favourite engagement tactic: Direct outreach to a member who is particularly well-suited to help solve a problem being faced. It builds community with community, instead of for, and it highlights member contributions, making others feel inspired to contribute!

• Open to connecting with: Folks who are hyper-focused on testing and learning new ways to acquire more community members. I'd love to hear what's worked best in terms of:

  • Messaging the value of community (benefits vs features and stats, etc)

  • What sort of interesting learnings they've garnered on community-channel fit

  • What types and cadences of email flows they're using

  • How any referral programs are structured

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

In yesterday's event we learned from Holly Firestone, who, before Venafi, was Senior Director of Community at Salesforce and Global Community Lead at Atlassian. In other words, Holly knows a thing or two about Enterprise Communities 🙃.

​From her extensive experience, Holly is a strong believer that community should be an integral part of business strategy; that it’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. When executed correctly, community has the power to deliver ROI across the business, from product, to sales & marketing, to customer success.

During the event, Holly taught us all about communicating the value of Community to Leadership, so check out our summary below for a great summary playbook 🌟

Quick summary

• Community is everybody's responsibility in a business and making sure that everybody knows that is one thing, but making sure that they are truly invested in it is another.

• Think of community as a product. You really cannot just go out and launch a community if you don't even understand what you're building.

• Best thing to start is gathering information before coming in and making assumptions

• Talk to people in the community - where are their pain points? What are they excited about?

• Talk to people in each function of your business and leaders on the exec team - ask what are you trying to do? What are your goals? What are your challenges?

• After you do your listening tour you can come back and think about the ways that community can bring value to those teams

• The second step is thinking about how to communicate that value. How will you show them the value that community brings to them, whether in the short term or the long term. You need to paint that picture for them, so they see what that growth curve looks like and what the timelines are for each milestone

• For example, break the curve down for them and explain each milestone and each goal. For example: once we hit that goal, then we're going to move forward to phase two of the plan, which is focusing on X and Y in that quarter. Those will impact Z, etc.

• When you are looking to sell the value of community internally, Holly’s ‘Community Centre of Excellence’ model is very helpful (see the picture below)

• When looking at the model, you should think of ‘community’ in two buckets of metrics

• The first bucket is the community health metrics. You can't even begin to look at the things on the centre of excellence model until those are taken care of: Are people joining? Are they coming back? How long are they staying in the community? All of those pieces that make a community healthy and thriving

• The second bucket are the ROI metrics across each function. Once you have reached a critical mass, you can start looking at these other functions too

• Start by looking at your top level company goals, then figure out how community plays a role in helping those. Then break down the top level goals into the different areas of each function that are contribute and prioritise the most related ROI metrics for each

• It's not just about tying it directly to dollars and sales, though. For example, if product feedback is critical, then community is a great place to collect that in a scalable and thoughtful way through sessions or beta testing opportunities with incentives

• Finally, when speaking to C-suite/Leadership you've got to get really tight on your communication to that team, and keep them as focused as possible. So be careful not to put anything on your ROI list that there isn't a way to measure

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Kevin Newsum

• Head of Community @ Triple Whale

• Purpose of your community: To help ecommerce brands and agencies scale and solve common business challenges

• Favourite engagement tactic: I've been hosting Community Hangout virtual meetups where we bring in an expert, get to know each other, and learn together

• Open to connecting with: Anyone with an innovative programmatic approach to engagement over time; connect with me here

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

In yesterday's event we learned from Erica Kuhl, who, as VP of Community for Salesforce, saw the company grow from 176 to 49,000 employees. During that time she had to build everything from scratch including the strategy, programs, and ROI metrics. In short, she knows her stuff!

During the event, Erica taught us all about the fundamentals of developing an engaged customer community, so check out our summary below for a great summary playbook 🌟

Quick summary

• If your community strategy is not aligning to the business goals, you won't survive.

• So as you're starting to plan the community strategy, you need to be thinking about the business goals that the community is aligned to. As the community builder, you may need to coach and guide them, but be aware that your questions to them must be specific. For example, ask: are they looking to focus on customer acquisition or retention? what are their OKRs across each function like sales, support, success, product etc.? Once you have these answers, everything you build into your strategy should then ladder up to those biggest business goals. That's the way executives speak, so that's the way you should speak

• If you are a startup thinking about building community, don't wait. Start nurturing your potential community right now by bringing them into some of those early-stage conversations and supporting and them, because then your community strategy is just gonna be a lot easier as you go.

• When it comes to segmenting personas and creating a community curve, don't take on too much too early. Pick the one or two segments and focus on making those initial personas wildly successful. There's so much that goes into building community when it comes to rallying your company, creating content, creating programming, picking the right tool. If you're having to build that across a giant matrix of different personas then it's very hard to get momentum

• When planning a soft launch, keep it to tight (15-100 people max) and keep it to friendlies (e.g. customer with high NPS scores). Give them a pre-kickoff to show them what soft launch means to you, what you need from them, and then you give them a prompt literally every single week, as well as some incentives where possible.

• In terms of nurturing asynchronous community energy, try and give any synchronous community activity (e.g. live events) a call-to-action to the asynchronous community. For example, during an event if interviewee is not gonna get all the questions answered, you say "she's gonna be in the community for the next two days, responding to your questions”. So you hook everything together so it feels like a cohesive strategy both offline and online.

• As your community grows, ensure you continually talk to the different parts of the business (e.g. customer support, product, marketing, sales or success) and explain/review why community is important to their function. This means that whenever you need to prove your value, or ask for budget for a new initiative, you will have supporters.

• During a downturn, the middle of the funnel becomes the most important thing to a company. Budgets are tight for all companies, so you have to keep customers/members super happy. So, if there is one particular objective you should be focusing on to prove the value of community, it's customer retention. 

Meet a Community Hacked member 👋

• Joel Primack (He/Him/His)

• Social & Community Specialist at Lattice

• Purpose of your community: Resources for Humans (RfH) is Lattice’s global HR community and was created to help HR/People Ops professionals connect, share advice, and ask questions in a safe space.

• Favourite engagement tactic: Create a code of conduct, enforce your code of conduct, thank members for reporting violations of it, & remind the community of your code of conduct to create that safe space where members truly feel comfortable sharing with their peers.

• Open to connecting with: Community professionals who have built and scaled community meetup/user groups (15+ in their program) and those who excel in showing ROI for their community programs. Always fun to see how peers do these 2 things!

• Check out Joel’s podcast, The Community-Led Growth Show featuring rockstar community builders, wicked marketers, & dynamic growth leaders for 1:1 chats on community. Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or YouTube

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

On Thursday we spoke to ​Jordan Scott, who is the Head of Community at Airtable, a product used by more than 300,000 organizations, and with a community now over 46,000 people strong!

During the interview, Jordan told us all about:

• How the team and community structure has evolved over time

• The objectives they use when designing community interactions

• The biggest pain points and opportunities they’ve experienced

• How their community team collaborates with the rest of the business

• How they nurture community engagement and reward top community members

• Their approaches to metric-tracking and attributing business impact

• The importance of community in customer retention and business growth

• The core items she would advise startups to focus on as they begin building their communities

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

On Thursday we hosted Lolita Taub, who talked to us all about why community matters, how to set up and run communities efficiently, how to communicate community ROI to leadership and investors, and the power of community-led companies.

Lolita is the Founder and General Partner at Ganas Ventures, where she invests in pre-seed and seed community-driven companies in the US and Latin America and aims to create generational wealth in community.

Overall, Lolita has 15 years working within the Silicon Valley ecosystem, has made 90+ investments as an angel investor, was previously a VC at both Backstage Capital and The Community Fund and is Co-Founder of the LaaS community which brings along a community of over 70k+ founders, funders, and ecosystem friends.

🙌 Check out our summary of the event below! 🙌

      Hey Lolita! Looks like you enjoyed hanging out with us; you're welcome back anytime! 🤩  

The power of community-led companies

Communities don’t need to be paid, but for community-led companies, business is at the core. When a company is community-driven it has to come back to driving revenue through the community.

The way that Ganas defines community-driven companies:

1. Customers identify as being part of a community

2. There is a space for that customer community

3. They kick off the marketing/sales flywheel

Often this looks like a product community at pre-seed, where customers are meeting other customers who are on the same journey as them and facing the same challenges, and where your product is at the core of how they are solving those common challenges.

A lot of the development and nurturing of this is not scalable to begin with, but that is where the value comes from. Community is a great moat precisely because it is really hard to build. For that reason, you should always do it organically and properly.

Community is a great moat precisely because it is really hard to build. For that reason, you should always do it organically and properly.

Key principles to consider when starting and running a community

All top communities have a clear vision, mission and values. For example, Ganas Ventures’s vision is to change the face of venture capital. Their mission is to create generational wealth by investing in the best founders in community. Their values are to be transparent, be community-driven, be self-starters and be kind.

When you decide that you want to start a community, you should always ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why do you want to build a space for a community?

2. What missions/values will your community bring together?

3. Who is your target persona for your community?

4. Where will your community come together?

If you are just a small team, or maybe trying to build and run it yourself, then you should automate the things that are not human, like repetitive manual processes. Using no-code for this is the best way: Airtable, Zapier, Softr, Google Apps etc.

However, connection and belonging are such critical elements determining the success of a community. So if you are strapped for time and resources then you need to think about ways you can brings lots of people together in one place at once, like events where you also split attendees out into smaller peer groups.

Tips for effectively measuring and proving the value of your community

Whenever attempting this with leadership or with investors, you must always tie the proposed value of your community back to the company's goals and make it as tangible as possible. The best way to do that is by using the CROI framework.

• C = Community

• R = Revenue. How are community members lowering the CAC?

• O = Operations. How does community help with customer retention and employee recruitment?

• I = Insight. What unique insights are coming from the community?

Here is a great tweet from Lolita sharing more on this.

At the end of the event, everyone jumped into their usual peer groups, carefully curated by us and split out into groups of between 5 and 8 depending on the stage and industry of their community...

Here's our peer group for community-builders in venture capital 👋

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

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Last week we were delighted to host Sharath Kuruganty. Sharath has a track record of building and scaling hugely successful online communities by solving people's problems at community-first startups like Product Hunt, and On Deck. His approach is simple: always take action with an intention to add value to others.

We had so many attendees tell us that they wanted the event to just keep going as they had so many takeaways. Well, so did we! Perhaps we will have to do a round two!

Check out our summary of some of the top tactics below!

Top tactics on how to transform your audience into a thriving community

1. Intention is critical

Before starting a community, it is critical to think deeply about why you want to start it

Too many think of community-building as a growth hack, but community is actually a by-product of value created by bringing people together around a core set of shared values

2. Have a servant leadership mindset

Once you have defined why you want to build your community and who it is for, it is important to focus on bringing those people together and creating value for them first, rather than being too outcome-oriented with your objectives.

3. Do things that don’t scale

Starting a community is all about relationship-building. There is no place for being transactional.

Try to understand the people you are trying to serve deeply, and do everything you can to help them achieve their objectives. This might sound like it will require a lot of ‘activation energy’, and that’s because it does

4. Look out for the major sign of validation

As the people you are supporting start to see the value from being a part of your community they will start bringing other people in without your involvement. This validation proves that the value you are providing and the values are promoting are proving to be effective.

5. Use events to encourage sustained growth

As your community starts to grow, doing things that don’t scale will become more challenging. Events are the most effective way to begin to scale your community whilst maintaining the values and intimacy that your members hold dear.

Good examples are ritualistic townhall events and fireside chats, which are particularly good for sustaining that community intimacy without having a 1-1 chat with every audience member.

The best next step from here is to create a playbook and incentivise your own members to run events for each other - communities are many-to-many organisms after all!

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

On Friday 25th March 2022, we celebrated a milestone at Community Hacked - We hosted our 10th episode with a special guest, Chris Snyder, Community Lead at Shopify Spaces.

The Shopify community is more than a forum. It is a place to connect with brands and makers, partners, and commerce shakers. With over 900k members, the community heavily relied on its in-person events division, Shopify Spaces, to scale intimacy and build engagement.

During the pandemic, Chris Snyder, Community Lead at Shopify Spaces, was challenged to transition the offline community online and get it fully integrated into the overall ecosystem.

Here are our favourite audience questions and key takeaways from Chris’s journey into building a thriving online community.

If you wish to watch the recording, you can do so here.

Top questions our community members asked Chris:

Q. How did you migrate from the offline world to the online world?

Before the pandemic, there were a lot of in-person events, workshops, happy hours etc where the Shopify community would socialise. We would put the attendees in a Slack group and that was it.

But after the pandemic, we became more intentional in growing the Slack community. We created guidelines - who & what would be the qualifications for those who wanted to join.

For content, in the beginning it was all about simple “good morning” posts. Then we started growing with blog posts, live videos, looking into active users, comments and eventually monitoring all of it: content, cadence, type of program, time of day.

Q. How did you trigger peer to peer engagement as opposed to community team ‘broadcasting’ to community members?

We refrained from posting at the community, because that doesn’t stimulate engagement peer-to-peer.

When we noticed people engaging in the community, we reached out to them for short conversations. After that, we nurtured mentors and leaders in the community who started channels, hosted events by themselves.

Once members see it’s ok to organically contribute to a conversation, it opens the door for them to join in as well.

Q. How do you scale a community without losing engagement?

Before you scale, think of value over quantity. Is growing and scaling going to help your community or is it going to create distraction and noise?

A great strategy to scale is to go deep first and then go wide. Focus on creating a small community with a culture that you are happy with. Then you can start thinking of ways to replicate that.

Q. What was your decision making process of creating content?

We used a calendar format, in terms of managing the flow with other content, having a mix of different content in different contexts to ensure we were speaking to members of all backgrounds. 

The team builds the calendar together and they look at it holistically to find balance, but even with all this you always have observe and adapt based on the community’s reaction to your content

Q. If you were starting a community from 0 - what approach would you take?

• What’s the intent of this community

• What are we prepared to invest? Time, resources, platform, team, content?

• What results do you want to have that go back to the business? How will the community help the business?

Q. What should people look for on a community platform?

Analytics! Think about what are the important metrics and analytics you value in your community before choosing a platform.

Also go back to the ‘why’ of your community and consider whether the functionality of the platforms you are looking at will cater for those needs: e.g. forum type, live stream, DMs.

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

Last Friday, we hosted the one and only Rosie Sherry at Community Hacked for an AMA!

Rosie Sherry started her journey in 2007 when she founded The Software Testing Club which evolved into The Ministry of Testing. She turned it into a profitable business and an engaged community of 25k+ members.

​After a decade of experience building as a founder, she recruited a new CEO. She left to pursue her passion as a community leader to help grow some of the industry’s most well-known community brands: Indie Hackers and Orbit.

​Now Rosie is back as a queen of Rosieland, where she’s on the mission to empower the next generation of community builders and share everything she has learned.

Here are some of our favourite nuggets of wisdom that Rosie shared on building, growing and managing communities, but if you want to watch the whole recording you can do so here.

Top 5 questions our community members asked Rosie:

Q. What are the biggest changes you have seen in the role of community manager in your 15 years of experience?

Looking back to 2007 when she started discovering community, there were occasional roles at startups for ‘community manager’. The roles were more of a tactical nature then but now the approach is typically much more aligned with and sometimes core to a growth company’s strategy. We are also seeing more specialized roles pop up like community operations, community growth and community design

Q. What is the key difference between ‘Growth Hacking’ and growing community from your perspective?

There is a difference between what a community needs and what a product needs. People come to a community to share, contribute and transform themselves and others. They don’t want to be sold to or bombarded with sales or marketing emails. So you cannot have the same tactics as a growth hacker. 

There is a change of mindset as the goal is to help the members of your community grow, so you have to really listen to, empathize with and understand your members.

Q. How do you scale a community without losing engagement?

Before you scale, think of value over quantity. Is growing and scaling going to help your community or is it going to create distraction and noise?

A great strategy to scale is to go deep first and then go wide. Focus on creating a small community with a culture that you are happy with. Then you can start thinking of ways to replicate that.

Q. What processes do you think are the most important to set a community team up for success when scaling

Every community is different. Process that works for one may not work for another. So keep experimenting. Look out for what hits with the people. Those are your opportunities.

As you grow, you must have the mindset that a community is never really in its full form, it is constantly growing and evolving as a living organism. Changing to this mindset gives you a different approach to your job.

Q. What should you automate and what should you keep doing manually? Or, how should you make a balance between manual tasks and automations?

Automation can kill the vibe. Too much noise and too many 'member benefits' can kill the vibe. Only automate what becomes boring and repetitive. Keeping other things manual enables you to really observe and act upon nuanced patterns you start noticing in your community in a quicker and more effective way.

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

On Friday, Kyle Hagge shared how he helped Morning Brew turn their massive audience of 5M+ into an engaged community as their Community Lead.

With more than 5 million subscribers across all their media assets, Morning Brew is one of the world's fastest-growing business media brands.

Last year, for the first time ever, their brand new community and events team launched cohort-based career and skill accelerators to empower the next generation of business leaders.

Every attendee’s notepads were overflowing as Kyle dove into the details of this 0-1 transformation.

Check out our summary of some of the top tactics below!

🚀 Top tactics on how to transform your audience into a thriving community:

➡️ Have a plan and not enough time

It has been said that for things to happen you need two things: a plan and not quite enough time. Morning Brew gave themselves <4 months to build the entire new Accelerator format, onboard and then start the first cohort. 

“We created a much better program by creating it and putting people through it than we would have just thinking and planning by ourselves”.

➡️ Focus on benefits, not features

Make sure you understand your ideal members well enough that you know what they want out of your community. When you start to promote your community to them, focus on articulating the way in which they will directly benefit from it (like the amazing people they will meet), and how it will solve their problems instead of just talking about its abstract features (like your new matchmaking tool).

➡️ Don’t automate humanity

Kyle understood that customers of their first cohort were taking a risk with them by joining and paying for something brand new, so he created a short personalised video on his iphone for every new joiner welcoming them into the Program. Although it took a lot of time, it engendered a huge amount of trust that really helped him get their first cohort community off the ground.

➡️ Community is many to many

You don’t have community until you have evolved into an environment where the predominant format of communication is many-to-many instead of one-to-many. Prioritise creating and articulating a reason that people should be coming together, then design a space around that where it is easy for people to interact with and support each other directly. When you see the type of member-to-member behaviour emerging that you want to see, make sure you reward it.

➡️ Act on Community feedback

The quality and quantity of feedback you get will diminish if you don’t take the time to show people you are taking it onboard. Kyle responded to every single piece of feedback that his community members had taken the time to write out. He would give clear examples of how and when each idea or improvement would be implemented and even if it couldn’t happen he would explain why. These responses delighted the members and led to further insights and even testimonials that got better and better with time.

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

Last week, we talked to Andrew Warner, the founder of Mixergy, where he has led 2000+ interviews with other successful founders. He recently took everything he learned from leading those conversations to create a playbook to leading interviews: Stop Asking Questions.

At our event, Andrew discussed tactics from his book and how they can help community builders lead high impact interviews in their communities. These can be extremely helpful when you conduct live Expert Sessions or Peer Group Meetings in your community.

But that’s not all – Andrew also had a cool story attached to each of the tactics he shared, including his first encounter with Tim Ferris. 

Check out our event recording to hear him tell his stories.

🚀 Top tactics for hosting high impact conversations in your community:

➡️ Why you should spend less time asking questions at interviews 

When you ask too many questions you exhaust the other person and come across as needy. You want to direct the guest and lead the interview with confidence instead.

➡️ How interviews can help you build your personal brand

When you interview people who your community admires, their good vibes will rub off on you. It not only gives you more credibility in your community, but can also help you land great guests in the future.

➡️ How to get high-profile guests

Look for “motivated moments” in a potential guest’s life - for example, moments when they have something to promote. Maybe they recently released a book that they want to promote or maybe they need to get their story out there to hire great people. In these moments, they are looking to reach an audience and you can capitalize on that.

➡️ How to cope with the imposter syndrome while preparing for an interview with a high-profile guest

Think about a specific person in your community who you can help through your questions. This gives you a higher purpose to latch onto that can help you overcome your fears.

➡️ How to get feedback from the community

Ask people their problems and goals in short forms - don’t ask your community to fill out long surveys. You can also extract insights more effectively through casual conversations, so set those up with smart people wherever possible

➡️ How to uncover interesting insights from the guests

Most of us are unfair when we talk to guests. We want them to be vulnerable with us but we aren’t vulnerable with them. Don't let them feel like they're the only ones being vulnerable. If the conversation is more balanced then they will be more likely to share more.

🔥 BONUS: Andrew's Rapid Fire Tactics

➡️  Look for the most shocking thing you can find and put it in the beginning. It makes the audience hooked from the beginning. Find it on their social media or simply search for them online.

➡️ Don’t make the guest feel sandbagged with the shocking question. Instead ask them if they are comfortable before the interview. Give them a reason why you want to ask this question - they’ll be more ready to say yes.

➡️  Ask guests what’s a win for you before the interview starts. If you don’t do this they will feel anxious or worried about it the whole time. If you do, they’ll feel relieved and cared for.

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

Hello Community Hackers! 

Last week, Ben Lang, Head of Community @ Notion, shared his secret behind the organic community growth, transforming thousands of passionate early users into brand ambassadors. 

Community Hacks

Watch the full interview or parts of it to learn Notion’s community growth tactics:

(timestamp 1:50) - How to get a job at your dream company. Ben shares his journey from being an eBay trader and part of the Israeli intelligence service to becoming Notion’s 11th employee.

(timestamp 7:00) - Reverse-engineering Notion’s hockey stick community growth and steps to get on that path.

(timestamp 12:00) - The art of building an ambassador program.

(timestamp 26:30) - Ben’s list of community marketing & evangelist tools from engagement and events, to analytics and swag.

(timestamp 29:30) - Notion’s KPI and why they are different depending on the program.

(timestamp 35:00) - If you’re experiencing a lack of engagement, don’t force it. Do this instead.

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

Hello Community Hackers!

Last week Allie Kerr, Head of Community @ NFX took us behind the scenes of the community operations of one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent early-stage venture firms.

If you missed the monthly event you can now watch it on-demand.

A few key takeaways:

Guild is Much More Than Community

At NFX, all portfolio companies are considered to be members for life. It is more than just work-related, you really have bonds that stand beyond your time as a portfolio founder and ultimately you give back, receive help and stay an asset to the community for a long time.

Choose Engagement Over Growth

Venture communities of portfolio companies are exclusive by nature. As a community leader, you need to focus more on building 1:1 deeper bonds with members and among them, focus less on overall growth.

Think Like A 5-Star Hotel Concierge

Tribal network effects are all about building loyalty and trust and supporting founders throughout their journeys. Whether it is hiring, setting up infrastructure, intros to legal counsels, or fundraising help - get the short-term goals upfront and track the progress through regular check-ins.

More community hacks:

Watch the full interview or parts of it to learn actionable steps for building an exclusive community NFX-style:

1. How to get busy founders to RSVP to virtual and in-person events (timestamp 17:30)

2. NFX step-by-step onboarding process (timestamp 9:00)

3. How to use tools to amplify knowledge sharing and community engagement (timestamp 35:05)

This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.

If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃

Apply to the Membership

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