Community Matters- in conversation with Aditya Ahluwaliya
Hello and welcome back to our second in the series Community Matters. We have with us today Aditya Ahluwaliya who looks after the growth and product at Skillenza. He has been an active investor in crypto since the past 9 months, and along with it, he has also built a community of 7000+ cryptocurrency investors. This community being the most active community today, has its presence in over 99 countries while also having upto 85% people active at any given time across 6 channels. The company is called Cryptocurrency Trading Geeks. Let’s probe more into knowing Aditya’s journey of being a community builder!
I’ve known you for more than an year now. I’ve always known you as the product guy, if anyone needs help building their product strategies or growth strategies, Adi is your go to go guy. Then how come a product builder is building a community now?
So there’s a story behind that, I tried my hand at building products. Came up with 4 products, screwed two of them and made two slightly good products. Then I came to Bangalore, started investing in cryptocurrency. I realised crypto is all about learning and investing. But people don’t want to spend a lot of time learning, they want to earn quick. The plan was to build a product around it, probably my own Blockchain. But what I understood was in order to build something that you want people to use, you need to build a community around it first. So last year October, we were building the community around a product. While building the community, what we realised was that you don’t need a product. There were a couple of reasons for this.
I ended up teaching people how to invest in cryptocurrency and what I saw was people wanted to understand fundamentally what is happening, they want to invest and not trade. They have doubts, they want to remove their fear and learn and they need somebody to fall back on. So talking to the people basically inspired me to work on my community.
Here is the link to the interview’s video- http://bit.ly/vlogP1EP2
Here is the link to the podcast- http://bit.ly/CFKPodP1EP2
You were building products and then you shifted to community, what tactics did you use to bring your early customers to the community?
So Cryptocurrency is a very high demanding field, everyone wants to know about it. Facebook is an amazing platform for connecting with the world. The first thought was let’s go to people at their homes itself and talk to them instead of them having to come to us. So I created a group rather than a page on Facebook, because it has a gang reach. There are pros and cons to being in a group. The pro is you have 100% visibility of earlier posts and access to everybody’s timeline.
But the question is who is this “everybody” and how do you differentiate who or what is substantial. So what we did was we put the name as Cryptocurrency Trading Signals- Bitcoin and Altcoins and searched for people specific to this field instead of inviting my friends. Because inviting my friends would have spoiled the purpose entailing with the group. And the first invitations to be sent for your group should be to the people who want to talk, not just silently observe and listen. Because the latter won’t help your brand grow. So we played a bit on the SEO, we did not invite friends, but active people who wanted to talk passionately about this. We took it really really slow. We started with just 600 members in the first month, next month there were 3000, and right now the number’s at 10,000. That’s what happens when you take it slow.
The second thing we focused on was great content. There has to be amazing free-flowing conversations. My variety factor of products is 2. There are people who don’t invite anybody and there are people who invite 80 people. I have 106 people from the Valley, invited by this one person Mr. Nipun Gupta who’s now the moderator of the group. So that’s what happens when you get passionate people together in a space which they like. So right now, it’s not just a Facebook group, but a safe happy space for like-minded people where they can ideate, share and go back feeling content.
What are the tools you’ve been using other than Facebook to grow your community?
The one thing I’ve missed out on is learning how to code, because I believe people who can code are Gods. But I had to take things into my own hands and in the last 3 years I have perfected the easy tools. I used very basic tools to grow. The first one was Facebook, of course. Facebook allows you to ask three questions before a member joins the group. What will happen if people don’t follow the rules of the group? And they knew they’ll be banned. Next is we have a weekly newsletter, would you want to subscribe. I get 10 emails our of every 50 people that join the group. So I’m getting a free email list.
The third problem I faced was people never read the pinned instruction post. Now I have a telegram group and I know people want to join telegram groups. So I put a link of the telegram group in my pinned post and asked the third question that if you want to join the group, read through the pinned post.
I used to spend about 6 hours everyday continuously for 7 months researching what will happen in the market today. I realised I needed to automate this process. So I used a tool called IFTTT and an Answers Builder to automate my answers and link it to my telegram groups. And today, each of them has got a 1000 members. So I not only automated my research, I made a product out of it which people use today. I have 3 channels now, a fundamental news channel on telegram, best feeds from Reddit, Medium, Twitter, a trading analysis channel on telegram, I have a Facebook Group, I’ve just opened a publication on Medium where the members of the community are contributing articles, I’ve just opened a channel on Youtube channel where people contribute content videos, and we have an offline brand.
The point is that if you want to do something, tech is not a barrier, it was always the people who believed in you, the community. That’s how you use fundamentals tools for growth. So people rely on design and communication and not technical enrichment. You need to give them that.
Where did you get the inspiration for building a community from?
There were two things that inspired me greatly here. There were 2 questions that I wasn’t able to answer even after all the work that I had done so far.
1. What is the extent to which I can use my brain, what is the power I had as an individual. I always felt held back due to my lack of technical knowledge.
2. Where am I headed in life- do I want to become a CEO, or work in a startup, etc.
Cryptocurrency Trading helped me get an answer for both these questions. It has taught me to go deep in life. I wasn’t so before. But when you’re in cryptocurrency market, you have to really think, you just can’t skim off the top, gather some info, and make a leap. That’s a huge lesson I’ve applied to all aspects of my life now. I also use my brain a lot more than I used to before. And that gives me the kick in life. It’s a very exciting feeling for me when I get up in the morning which was earlier missing.
The second thing I’ve gained is the idea of Financial investing. It’s a beautiful feeling when your money starts working for you. While you’re sleeping or partying, your money is still working for you. I realised the idea was never to become the CEO or open a startup or work in a huge MNC. But to earn a decent amount of money, live comfortably, to be able to give time to the more important aspects of my life like my health, my relationships and that can’t be achieved by going to work daily. So, I want to teach people around me how to invest in cryptocurrency intelligently for free, this is my primary inspiration.
What are the future plans for you at this stage?
I don’t know if there’s product building involved. Right now the primal focus is on building the community. We have diversified on 6 platforms as of yet, and I’ve understood that every channel caters to a specific need. People who need more realtime information or more insightful content will not be satisfied with a Facebook group.
So for each person to flourish in their own ways, they need a specific means. Right now, we’re focusing on growing the community keeping intact the quality of people, the quality of discussions and the ability to maintain its scale. Like Facebook has banned any kind of cryptocurrency ads. So the only way to reach the masses if you want to tell them about your crypto startup is through us. So we’re trying to understand how to enable that engagement with the community in a beautiful way. We’re still trying to figure out a state where the brand is happy, I am happy and the people are happy too.
What are the community growth drivers?
The number of comments you get. The quality of comments that you get on your posts is more important than the post itself. Your posts need to jolt the substantial people awake to write a meaningful comment on it.
The second metric is number of active members. How to bring the people actively engaged in our forums yet dormant as of now, to that level of comfort for them to get active.
The third metric is how many people are people in my team. Everyday we get about 70–80 invites and they’re sent out by active members of our group. And I love to see that.
What about the ROI of your company?
ROI for me for the last two months was how many people can we safely handle through the cryptocrash. This was one of the worst crashes in the past 2 months. People were petrified when the Bitcoin fell from 20,000 to straight 6000 because they bought it when it was at the top. How do you maintain emotions, how do you convince them not to sell it low, because they bought it so high, how do you convince them that it’ll rise again, how to handle them through this crypto crisis was the biggest satisfaction level ROI that we achieved.
In the next two months, the ROI would be what is the scale that we can achieve and what is the money that we can earn. Because for sustainability of the community it is essential. Compensating people working arduously with you is essential. So the next ROI is what are the resources that we can get together to build a sustainable environment.
Finally, I want you to give a shout-out to those who have helped your community become what it is today.
I am not the main guy here. It’s the community. Everything in a community is because of the people in it. So the first shout-out would be to the most active community members- Ray, Vishesh, Vipul, Joseph, and the relatively new ones- Anurag, Ishan, Rishi, Nipun, along with my close friend Kushagra. These are the people who have helped build the community one day at a time. And they are solely responsible for the heights that we further reach. Thank you for making me enjoy my life and I hope you guys are enjoying your too because of the community.
I’d want you to quickly give top 5 tips for building a community that you can share with our viewers here.
- Start on standard familiar platforms, don’t start building your own websites.
- Get the right set of early users. Don’t get your friends into the business.
- Listen to the feedback, respect it too.
- Focus on building great conversations. Keep your people engaged.
- Figure out what drives those great conversations in your community.
Last thing is, why do you think building brand community is important?
When you head out to change the world, you don’t change it by building products. In fact, you do it by getting people together. Uptil now it was easy to sell through ads or by creating a demand. But today, the users are more aware, they seek deeper meaningful relationships, even with their brands. I can confidently say that in the next 10 years, companies won’t have a marketing department or a CMO but a Chief Community Officer who would help build community with your users, thus enabling you to provide them with far better services/products and you can earn far more money. The easiest way of ensuring success when you have an idea is to work on its community.
A warm hug to Aditya Ahluwalia for giving us such insightful answers into the world of community and his unique sense of business. We wish him all the best in his endeavours ahead, and it’s our promise to our audience members that we’ll garner more such amazing, inspiring stories from India’s brightest minds working towards bringing the world closer, one community at a time.
