Building a real-life community
Building a community around an app or product is currently regarded as one of the most important things for a startup to be successful. And rightly so — a vibrant community can be extremely valuable, acting as a sustainable driver of growth or constant feedback loop, to give a couple of examples of its uses.
As a result, many startups are committed to building an online community around their product. However, only a few are dedicated to connecting that community offline as well. Product Hunt, Airbnb, Startup Weekend and Instagram (with Insta-meets) are a few leading examples that are succeeding at both.
However, many of these communities are designed to be purely online. Peach, a new app which launched a few weeks ago has a sleek design, great on-boarding experience, and fun elements like emojis — but I don’t imagine I’ll meet any of my ‘friends’ from Peach offline. Many users use fake names (some seem to have stolen the username of someone famous), some are brands, and most users are just posting random animated GIFs. It’s fun to use, but I don’t imagine this will lead to many real-life encounters or life-long connections.
Even Facebook. How many of your 100s of ‘friends’ do you actually see in real-life anymore? It is a strange yet likely fact that you will never see many of your Facebook friends ever again — apart from on your ‘Newsfeed’. It’s quite sad in a way.
At the other end of the spectrum, some products and apps have the sole purpose of connecting people in real life, but have no community. Take Tinder for example: the very nature of this app makes it impossible to build a connected community of users. Though having said that… a dating app where you rate other users and share stories with the community could be amusing — and could save a lot of awkward dates!?
Party with a Local’s global community
At Party with a Local, we’re really excited about building a community that connects people both online and offline — on our app and in real life. After all, although we are an app, the whole point is to translate these virtual interactions into real life experiences.
As our online community continues to grow, so do our offline interactions.
Over the past few months, we have begun doing more to encourage real life meet ups. As well as our awesome users meeting up individually, we have also started organising more regular ‘Thirsty Thursday’ events in some cities around the world, including Amsterdam, Lisbon, Lille, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Take a look at the pictures below for a glimpse at some of our offline meet ups!
•Amsterdam•
•Lille•
•Lisbon•
- São Paulo•
- Rio de Janeiro•
The best thing? These real-life meet ups are truly community driven. All we do here at the PwaL HQ is identify those Super Locals who are keen to organise these events and help with the logistics and marketing. The rest is up to them. This kind of organic community activity is the best way to create a solid, sustainable and genuine community of users that can keep on growing.
We recently ran a competition where we asked users to their best Party with a Local stories. If you’d like to read the winning story you can find it here, on our blog.
If you’re interested in joining this community, check out Party with a Local, available to download for free on the App Store and Google Play. Or, to see more of our awesome community, check out our Facebook and Instagram.