How We Built a User Community for Our Product
User Communities Make Products Better and help them grow
User generated content is a great way to grow your product. You can only do so much by yourself. When your users start helping you to make your product better, the value created can turn into a snowball. Some recent examples of this are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Airbnb. Medium is another product that is built on user content and seems to be growing like a snowball.
You can use the power of user generated content even if your product is nothing like any of these products. You just need to find a way to get your users to create value for other users. It is always something unique. You can not just take an idea from another product and plant into your product.
We found a unique way to get our community involved 2 years ago. And, it has probably doubled the value of our product for our users.
Our product is a web based software to create online forms. We started letting our users share their forms with other users.
The results were amazing. Here is a small infographic we just made to celebrate 5,000th form shared.
People shared 5,000 forms with other users and these forms were used 640,000 times to create new forms.
The idea to let our users share forms with each other was not an obvious one.
You should think hard to find a way to create a community for your product. You can not just take ideas from other products. It has to be something unique that is specific to your product.
The execution was also not a piece of cake. You need to be the one to jumpstart things. We spent months to create the first 500 forms. What you do first to start a community is very important. Don’t just throw something out there and assume users will start participating.
You need to create the initial content and you need to make sure that the quality is very high. If you set the bar too low, others will follow suit. That’s why we made sure that the first 500 forms we created were high quality. We made sure that forms looked great and they were useful for the verticals they were designed for. Even if nobody shared their own work, it was still a good addition to our product.
Here is the good part. Once people start getting value from the community some users will start participating. People love giving back. Even when 1% of users are generating content and 99% is consuming, you have a sustainable and growing content machine that creates value for your product and for your users every day.
