What Happens to Communities at Scale
Keeping your values as you grow
On a recent community manager panel, I received a question that I thought warranted a more detailed response. The question was whether all community-based companies, as they grow, eventually shed their community values out of business necessity. My answer was twofold. 1) The “why” of community gets harder and harder as you grow, 2) as communities scales they don’t go away — they eventually become your brand. Let’s dive in to take a closer look.
To understand what community-based means, let’s take a look at a few experiences that I’ve had at Lyft. In the early days every new driver who joined our platform was personally interviewed by our cofounders. We also had employees host events for our drivers on a regular basis. As we have grown that is obviously no longer the case because it isn’t scalable, but that deep sense of caring about our drivers and passengers hasn’t gone away. It has just taken on a new form. This is what we are talking about when we ask whether community must eventually go away as a business grows. PS, don’t worry. It doesn’t.
Let’s go back to the response I gave in the community manager panel. I said 1) the why of community gets harder and harder as you grow, 2) as community grows and scales it doesn’t go away — it eventually become brand.
The why gets harder:
Early on in a company, community is a key business advantage. When you are a small company and only have a few number of users, community is what keeps those early adopters sticking around and believing in what you’re doing. We absolutely saw this at Lyft. When there were only a few drivers, we put all of them into a private Facebook group alongside our employees, and held weekly meet ups for them. This high touch interaction got people personally invested in our mission, when the mission only involved tens or hundreds of people at the time.
If your business begins to take off, and your user base grows, then the need to build this tight of a community gets prioritized alongside things like your marketing spend and new product features. In short, people will ask why we should prioritize building community and they will use the same rigor and data analysis that the product team uses to implement a new feature or the marketing team uses to the new span. And they should use this same rigor. After all, time is the most precious resource for a company. This is precisely why they “why” gets harder to answer.
What you need to do is go back to the drawing board and come up with ways that community does drive business. Not community for the sake of community. Here are a few quick examples of where that has succeeded:
If you get this right, then you’ll be able to stand up and fight for your community and prioritize it alongside other key business initiatives. The why will then be a lot easier.
How community becomes brand
When you boil it down, community is ultimately a sense of belonging. As we like to say at Lyft, it makes the world feel a little bit smaller again. Early on at your company, the way that you make people feel that sense of belonging is by high touch interactions with your users. However, if you talk to any community-based company that has scaled, they will tell you that high touch interactions are not a scalable way of building community. The question becomes, if these companies are no longer using high touch interactions, but they are still community-based companies, then what new tactics are they using? The answer is that they are relying on their brand.
A great example is Airbnb. I recently sat down with Douglas Atkin, Airbnb’s head of global community, and his team (left) to talk about how community changes at scale. Airbnb is known for being one of the best examples of how to continue community even through hyper growth, and yet they employee very few high touch interactions with their hosts or guests. Instead, they rely on their brand. When you visit their website and watch the scrolling videos on the homepage, or you read the incredible testimonials, you feel that you are immediately part of their community, even though Airbnb has not personally reached out to you.
If you’re at a community-based company, it can be tough to move away from the high touch interactions. You have probably built personal relationships with every one of your first users, and now you can no longer do that. The good news is that your community can live on and be bigger than just your personal connections. If you can anticipate the road ahead, you’ll also avoid a few potholes.
