The Power of Community-Led Companies with Lolita Taub
An event summary from our September 2022 event with Lolita Taub
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:
Customers identify as being part of a community
There is a space for that customer community
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:
Why do you want to build a space for a community?
What missions/values will your community bring together?
Who is your target persona for your community?
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.
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