Communities and What Binds Them — Why We All Must Share More #SaaSBooMi

I’d like to think of myself as an ecosystem builder.

Founder, assistant vice-president, engagement manager, community platform evangelist… even though my titles have changed from time to time over the past 12 years, I’ve always found my passion for bolstering the tech community come front and center.

And over the years, I’ve come to realize that if I have to put my finger on one ingredient for a healthy, sustainable ecosystem, it’s sharing.

Sharing of knowledge. Ideas. Mistakes. Lessons. And everything in between.

Time and time again, I’ve witnessed communities get built or broken by the members’ ability (or lack thereof) to share their honest stories and mistakes with each other.

“The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labor, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right.”

- Donella Meadows

Sharing is a state of mind

To step forth and talk about your story, has got nothing to do with how much revenue your company makes, how many customers use your product, how complex the problem you’re trying to solve is, how long you’ve been in the industry, or even how many mistakes you’d made to get to where you are.

Every journey is unique. Every perspective is valuable. Every story is original.

Your current standpoint is the culmination of millions of experiences that nobody has gone through. That nobody can reproduce.

On the flip side, you’ll learn something new about your experiences every time you share them. You’ll get to step back and look at your story with different glasses. You’ll get to understand the various ways to solve the problems that you’d been dealing with. You’ll help yourself by helping others.

“Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.”

- Theodore Zeldin

Meaningful networking is a two-way street

I believe in the power of sharing honest lessons from the trenches. It is this belief that led to the inception of SaaSBooMi, to create a platform for conversations that serve as the tide that lifts all SaaS boats in Asia.

The conviction of the founding team to foster the SaaS ecosystem and nudge the present and future SaaSpreneurs forward is infectious. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been observing SaaS founders like Girish (Freshworks), Krish (Chargebee), Manav (Eka Software), Suresh (KiSSFLOW), Suresh Shankar (CrayonData), and Vinod Muthukrishnan (CloudCherry) spending a significant portion of their hours crafting and honing SaaSBooMi, when they could’ve focussed that time and effort on building their respective companies.

The team is committed to the notion that the only way forward is together. That every member of the community has the inherent obligation to dole out their lessons and to ensure that the other members don’t reinvent the wheel. That instead, they make new mistakes and discover new lessons in their journeys.

And that is the recipe for a thriving ecosystem.

And we need your help to sustain this endeavor.

Nudge yourself, overcome your inhibitions, and come forth and present your story.

Step into the virtuous cycle of sharing, teaching, learning, and growing.

Pay it forward to your SaaS community.