How Community is the New Marketing

3 min readDec 2, 2016

Ever read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries?

It teaches us that Organic Strategy is to be patient and grow naturally through connections. In simpler terms, Unlike paid advertising it allows you to create a solid foundation and grow organically.

· It doesn’t rely on paid placement or sponsorship

· It implicitly suggests people to take action

· People share the information with no monetary benefit in mind

At HelloMeets we had with us Hemkesh, a middle-school boy back then, who took us by surprise by referring HelloMeets to many of his friends. It started with an Arduino event where he got in touch with us and slowly over a year we noticed that young minds were equally interested in our events. He attended 13 of our events and always ensured to bring a friend along!

It is this loyalty of his that made me give him a special mention in this blog.

Not only this, but in a Web-designing competition held at his school, Ramjas, RK Puram he suggested that the website page for HelloMeets should be the topic. Very well, I must admit. This act displayed a generous amount of Brand Loyalty and spread word about HelloMeets among 40 students who participated in the competition. What better and organic way can be there to get 40 new people know about your work.

Here are some of the HelloMeets website screenshots from the competition:

According to Forbes, we must look at the three E’s:

1. Engage –Engage with your audience well. Don’t just hear but listen to what they are telling you. We engage with our community through various offline and online groups.

2. Equip — Equip them with your services, your products or whatever is the reason for your existence in the market. Give them reasons to talk about you.

3. Empower — Empower them by telling them how they matter to you and enable them to find a way to tell compelling stories to prospective customers through your platform. Give them the power to provide you feedback to help you make a better product.

Like At HelloMeets many of our members have turned into community builders and speakers and are paying back to the community through their offline sessions & blogs.

Some of them are here:

Few tips for Beginners to Blogging by Devika Das

Zero Budget Marketing for Startups by Ridhima Kapoor

How to be a Self taught Designer by multiple designers from our community

Importance of User Research by Anushree Sharma

HelloHackers by Saurav Tomar