How to build a Community that loves you

Pedro Andrade

Published in

The Startup

8 min readMay 28, 2018

Craft Wallet turns 2 years old this year and what has kept us going is, without a doubt, our Community.

Craft Wallet’s Community
Group of amazing people who own a Craft Wallet or share an interest for the brand.

They are the ones who believed in us when no one did, who kept giving feedback, who supported us in two successful crowdfunding campaigns and showed their Craft Wallets to their friends every time they had a chance. They kept this company alive.

For those that don’t know us, Craft Wallet is a direct-to-consumer premium wallet brand. Our wallets are beautifully designed to be minimal and versatile, yet with a price tag that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. We make our wallets in our factory in Portugal and give a lifetime warranty to our products

We were students when we founded Craft Wallet and we didn’t really know what we were doing. Soon we realised that if we wanted to build a great product, we couldn’t do it alone. Amazing products are often those that solve common problems in simple and addictive ways. Seldom are they finished after a first try. To become market-fit, products need to be tested and re-tested until they can do what they’re supposed to. This is why building a community is so important if you’re an early-stage startup. You need a small group of early adopters who love your company, trust you and are willing to go through a shitstorm of bad UX, just to give you their opinion on how you can improve your product. If you do a good job, they’ll pay to repeat the experience, hoping you’ve been listening to their feedback.

But how can you do it?

In Craft Wallet, we built our Community in 6 steps.

1. Find your early-adopters

An early-adopter is a very special person. As the name says, they’re the first to adopt a product. They love to have it before anyone else and, if possible, a special edition that only them will ever have access to, hoping it’ll be something they can boast about in the future.

Your early-adopters will give you constant feedback, talk about you to their friends while expecting a not so amazing experience using your product. They know it’s too early for you to have it all figured it out.

Your future early-adopters tend to share some interests and traits. Identify those and it’ll be much easier for you to know where to find them. Communities like Reddit, Product Hunt or crowdfunding platforms (Indiegogo, Kickstarter) are a great place to start looking for the individuals who’ll become your first early-adopters.

2. Don’t forget to give

Businesses establish relationships with their clients. For a relationship to work, both sides have to give an equivalent amount of value to each other. This is how a normal relationship works. You can apply this rule in friendships, love, work, nature, everything you think of. It’s balance in value delivery that keeps a relationship healthy. Taking this into account, I need you to answer me a question:

How can you keep the relationship between you and your early-adopters healthy?

They are risking their money and time to invest in your product. Meanwhile, they’re probably not having an amazing experience with your product, since it’s in its early stages of development. This leaves us with a problem in value delivering:

How can we deliver enough value to at least establish a balance between what the user is giving us and what we’re giving to him?

The answer is in compensating the user with an experience he’ll remember in everything that’s not product related. If you can’t deliver an amazing product right at the beginning, deliver amazing customer care. Treat your customers like the kings they are. Show them that you care about their pains. Don’t be afraid of being brutally honest about what’s happening in the company (by being transparent you’ll earn their trust). Recognize the fact that you are where you are thanks to their help. Let them feel ownership, even if they don’t own any equity. Make them feel like they’re not wasting time and money investing in you and your product. Let them realize they’re earning emotional value by taking part in this adventure with you. If you can create emotional ownership in a customer you’ve already earned a fan for life.

3. Amazing Customer Care is your best marketing tool

If you look inside most companies today, you’ll notice that normally there’s a Marketing Department and a Customer Service Department. They’re managed separately and, perhaps, answer to different people. But why?

In a world where “The Customer Experience” is said to be the “main” focus of many companies, why isn’t customer care part of the marketing efforts? A happy customer brings 3 new customers. An angry one takes 30 away. This is a no brainer. If people like how they’re treated they’ll come back and bring their friends. In the end, amazing customer care, that delivers an awesome experience, will bring you more new customers than any advertisement campaign paid by a company no one knows about.

Separating customer care and marketing may leave them with non-aligned goals and as your company starts growing, with communication problems. This can be avoided by making customer care part of your marketing strategy, coexisting in a harmonious symbiosis.

Never forget that today’s hyper-empowered customer knows how an amazing customer experience feels like by dealing with companies like Amazon, Netflix and Apple. They’ll compare your customer care with theirs because that’s what they’re used to. You need to nail customer service, even if you do nothing else right. We experienced this first hand in Craft Wallet. Our first wallets had several usability problems, but customers kept coming back because they loved the way they had been treated. This matters now more than ever.

4. Make sharing easy and rewarding

Andre Albuquerque, Head of Product at Uniplaces, once said the following:

From a product perspective, product love drives adoption, which drives retention, which drives people to love the product even more, and as a consequence bring more people into it. It compounds, therefore grows exponentially. And as your users “spread” the love, you don’t need to build it over and over again, your users do it for you.

Humans love to share what has been on their mind lately. If you’re able to wow your early-adopters the right way, they’ll have no problem in sharing with their friends how awesome your product is and how it has changed their lives. Make sharing easy and people will do it more often. Make it easy and rewarding and people will become addicted to it.

At Craft Wallet we made it happen by implementing a double-sided referral program everyone can join. Ambassadors share a special link with their friends who get a 10% discount in all Craft Wallet products and ambassadors get 10% of the total order their friends made in cash.

Easy: just share a link
Rewarding: you win money for every order your friends make through your link

If your customers love your product, they’ll probably want to become ambassadors. Keep reminding them how easy it is to become one. At Craft Wallet, we keep telling this in our website, social media, emails and packaging. You should do the same. Just don’t become annoying.

Note: Double-sided referral programs have the best conversion rates because everyone wins. Ambassadors are rewarded for their efforts and friends don’t feel used. If it makes sense for your business, build one. Today, thanks to apps like Referral Candy everyone can do it.

5. Know your audience

A mistake many make at the beginning is trying to build a huge community with people from all walks of life. Don’t try to sell your product to students, dads, stay-at-home-moms, elderly people and event managers at Fortune 500 at the same time. Diversity is important but FOCUS is even more.

When you’re starting, there are way too many people that look like they might be a market fit. Since it’s hard to choose, many entrepreneurs try to please everyone. This is the best way to please no one. If you want to make a strong impact on someone, build a product that solves their exact problem, not “everyone’s problem”.

There’s nothing that stalls growth as much as not knowing exactly who to target. The solution to this problem:

Start small, but with big ambitions. With time, you’ll be able to expand your target audience. To build a strong product you’ll need a solid community to support you throughout your journey. To feel like they’re part of a community, people need to feel that something special connects them with the other community members. That special thing is your product solving a specific problem. You won’t be able to build your community if no one feels their special problem is being solved. Conclusion:

Focus your initial efforts in one target audience. Time will make it bigger.

6. Love is the answer

Love ends with wars. It also keeps your business growing. Just keep giving it and your community will stay alive and sound. Stop giving it and they’ll change you for one of your competitors.

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Don’t hesitate in contacting me! Send an email pedro@craft-wallet.com and AMA. You can also connect with me on Messenger, Linkedin and Instagram.

About the author:

Pedro Andrade is a 22-year-old Portuguese entrepreneur. He has lived and worked in three continents and is one of the co-founders of Craft Wallet. He’s currently based in Lisbon, Portugal.