What We Learned in 2022
An re-posted summary from our December 2022 newsletter
Lolita Taub (Ganas Ventures) - When you decide that you want to start a community, always ask yourself these questions:
Why do I want to build a space for a community?
What missions/values will my community bring together?
Who is the target persona for my community?
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 🙃