Community Matters — In Conversation with Maneck Debara & Siddartha Verma
Hello and welcome back to our third episode in the Community Matters series. In 2018, we interviewed Maneck Debara [Regional Head of Community at 91springboard] and Siddartha Verma [Community Manager at 91springboard Bangalore]. They both have immense experience of building a community, handling a team of community managers and growing a brand through meaningful conversations and activities.
About 91springboard: 91springboard is a community-focused coworking space where every business challenge of a company is solved within the community. They run the largest fleet of community managers in India and believe that the community would be the biggest asset and differentiator in future of workspace.
Part 1 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9taxa5Cqt58&t=358s
What is the definition of community for you?
Siddartha: A community is like a bunch of people if you look closely every individual is contrastingly unique, like an atom. And once such two people meet, they form something meaningful and that’s what a community for me, two atoms meeting and forming a stable molecule.
Maneck: I feel there are different types of communities. One could be a community of a society where we grew up together, made friends and did things which lasted for a long time and others would be business-oriented, it’s indeed different, where we are trying to get innovators to come together of different fields and create something even much better. according to me, that’s what a community is.
How come you landed to be a community manager?
Maneck: It was the year 2015 and I just finished my MBA from Dubai. I was heading back to India as I didn’t want to look for a job over there. I wanted something exciting, something creative and of course, getting into marketing was my primary milestone.
But, when I came here, someone told me about a coworking space that I can join and I said ‘Okay, let me explore it’.
I came down in 91 & gave my interview here. I loved the vibe because they already had a community and where I met a couple of people who were really candid in their outlook. The energy present over there felt resonating and different from all the offices that I’ve been to before, I knew that I had to be here. And that’s how I started my journey.
Siddartha: I was in college, building communities, however, I never knew this term ‘community’. After finishing college, I joined an incubator called “Startup Village” which was running in my home place. As I was a startup enthusiast, I started working as an intern with them for some time, where I was engaging with a lot of different people, different startups.
And, that’s when the idea of building our own startup enrooted in me. In the beginning, I tried to manage and understand along with my office work, but it wasn’t working. so we decided to go to Bangalore, that’s where everything is happening. To win the game you need to be in one. I was again looking for roles like partnerships, marketing because that’s what I did back in college. Meanwhile, one of my friends who worked as an intern with 91 Springboard told me about this opening. I skimmed the job description for the community manager and bingo! that was an exact replica of my desired designation.
With all these, I applied and the entire process took around two months. And finally, I’ve joined here as a community manager.
How does your typical day look like being a community manager at 91?
Siddartha: As soon as I come to the office, I start with my emails to avoid piling up so I can have enough time for other things. I prepare my to-do list for the day. It comprises people to meet, prioritizing, and solving issues that are tedious over email. Hereafter, the second half of my day spent in reading about “what is actually happening in and around the community” and then try to solve what are the problems listed in the first half.
And later, roughly around, one to four o’clock I take a short respite and go out, play table tennis has some chatter with people. Like everyone else, my conversations also differ from people to people I meet. Sometimes it’s heavy and serious, business-related or political other times it's casual. I guess that’s what makes our mundane life bit lively.
Maneck: My day is pretty interesting. I come to work and check my mails and all of that. Fist two hours are for mails, myself and interview that we have on that day. The interesting part of my day is I really like to meet new peoples and one thing I hate about the day that I’ve got around 400 to 500 emails every day which is really irritating. The interesting part is coming to the office, brainstorming with the people, trying to understand what their startup is doing, how we can help them out. The major part of being in the community you have to solve the problems that these startups are facing. While these guys (Community Manager of 91) are my on-ground point of contact to figure out what’s going wrong. I also look at the external ecosystem as we are partnered with VentureCity, HeadStart and try to maintain the ecosystem, which helps to solve the problems within our hubs with the outside resource. So, my day goes typically figuring out problems, try to solve them.
What are your strategies and guidelines for managing the in-hub community and the community of community managers?
Siddartha: At 91-Springboard, we don’t have guidelines but the crucial part of building community starts right from day one. On the very first day, we call all our members for the first-day talk, to set up the basic expectations. We make sure that the process goes very smoothly then we tell them that this is a self-help community and everyone is equal.
For example, You might be the CEO of 200 member communities and your product is going great or you might be a college student, expecting this place to give something to you. Both of you deserve the same respect and equally valued as a community member since the values they are bringing to this place are different and we acknowledge both of them at the same level. We set this up, they need to get their own things properly done. It’s a straight business-focused area, this is what we define, don’t come here for the time pass. As people come, we make sure they are involved in the different business conversations because that’s the ultimate outcome which they are expecting from this space. The most emphasizing thing is that it’s a serious business place, come to 91 and talk about the business with us. We can help, we as a Community Manager don’t solve 90% of the problems but we do try to connect you to the right people in the community, it’s a community of 500 members in this space and 80% of the problem solved within the community. From building a product to hiring an employee can be solved within the community.
Outside people don’t realize this until they come here. They spend myriad man-hours to the searching solution of a problem but here things move swiftly and logically, that’s what you need.
You can see the pattern, whatever happens in the hub a likewise pattern followed within community managers. We do something in our hub and on the weekly call, we tell them details of what’s happening and that’s learning for another hub. We pick up only those things which are working out and we try to implement them everywhere.
Maneck: It’s a different ball game. As we have 30 community managers in Bangalore itself. Our community managers have the autonomy to ideate and come up over what they want to do and the idea is telling them “why” they are doing the job rather than just doing for the cheque. “WHY” is really important and when I came here I’ve figured out my “why”. I wanted to figure out how the startup ecosystem work because I didn’t know anything about it. Whatever, I learnt was with 300 odd peoples at my hub at that time, when I was a community manager. The same thing I used with them also, where I’ve guidelines like weekly calls, events etc. The autonomy lies with them (community manager), they have to think and ideate, they have to come up with brilliant ideas. They have to figure out what they like and how can they integrate with the community.
So, we are experimenting 6 different things at 6 different hubs in 6 different communities at the end of the week we have 6 different learnings and that’s what helps us grow. I feel the reason that we are moving little faster is that our learning is so fast and we like to make more mistake to understand what’s wrong and what’s right. We try to push them to do and that’s actually very important.
Do you document your learnings anywhere?
Maneck: Yes, we do MOM for each meeting. If we have any event then maintaining the report. We look at what are the positives, what are the challenges and what are the changes you think then we send this out to 6 different community mangers and team after that they say we can change this and let me try this. After all this, at the end of the month, we have like 3 iterations of the same thing. We document it and we have a zonal database. We put the database in it and it’s transparent to everyone.
Siddartha: It’s not like that we are only connected online although we are connected offline to each other very well, they just seek out for help.
Maneck: One thing that we do is community huddles for our community managers, all the community managers meet up one night, we order pizza, discuss problems. We make buddies between community managers. Why don’t one help others quit smoking etc? We tell them he or she is your buddy and you need to help him or her to quit smoking. So, you are creating a community within the community managers. They can use the multiplier effect and make use of it.
What are the things you look in a community manager and why there are like seven interviews to hire a community manager at 91?
Maneck: We don’t do interviews, we want to see if we can spend time talking to a person. We want to understand “how the person is”. the most important aspect of a community person is to be open about “how he is”,
Is he open to making conversations? Now while taking interviews I look for a simple case, suppose I got stuck with that guy at the airport for the whole night. Will, I am able to spend time with him? Will, I have that conversation with him? Therefore, our interviews are not based on “hows your maths”, “What’s your degree”. It’s more of what are the things you do in your free time, What are the interests that you have, What are the things that you’ll bring on the table? Those are the conversation with seven people who want to know you and will be working with you very closely till you are here. And, that’s how we do our interview process, where people think it’s an interview, for us it’s a conversation where I’m getting to know you and you are getting to know me.
Siddartha: One more thing I’ll add to this. It helps is validating that person as our company has a very strong culture and to see if he/she is a cultural fit and should be able to work with colleagues and the founder of the company. So, that’s how our structure of the conversation is, it’s from the guy who is going to work with you to the founder of the company. Every candidate will be interviewed by the founder at the end. This helps us to find those ‘cultural fits’. For these 200 hundred peoples, how much they weird, how much different they are but when it comes to the cultural value of the company they have to stand like similar.
Maneck: Yes, we look at the people who are aligned with our cultural values. Culture is the first thing that we look at and there is nothing else we look at. So the seven interviews, it felt too much to me as well at that time. What I realized is, it gives the person, who is being interviewed a chance to decide that he wants to work here or not. He might after sometime say that, hey maybe I’m not culturally aligned or maybe I don’t like the energy within this place because everyone is not a community person. Basically, the seven conversations that you have will help you to realize that do you really want to be here, would you really want to be a part of our culture. They should be happy at the end of the day for a healthy work environment.Because there be we’ll be 200 people and even if a single person coming unhappy, ten people surrounding him will be unhappy. Therefore It’s very important to be happy for him and to all.
Part 2 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N09HSrwi_Y&t=529s
How important was the role of the community to make 91springboard a successful co-working space?
Maneck: we ran a survey that showed that most people who joined are through referrals which indicate that the community is really important for us. Since the community is the next big thing and it’s disruptive, it helps innovate in a very larger space and we think it most important to us.
When we were operating small, it was one most important things and when we’ve grown bigger, more operational challenges have come but the community still remains our major focus as of now.
What are the metrics you consider and what is the ROI for you?
Maneck: We do something called Net Promoter Score (NPS), many big companies follow NPS. It tells you how your community is, how your infrastructure is? So, basically it covers from Community to Infrastructure. We use it very rigorously to take data and work on it for the next six months. So after every six months, we work on the problems that come from there and try to solve them.
Siddartha: So ROI is the return on investment. Here are the three types of investment we do within the company that is running the community, infrastructure and operations. So, the amount of ROI that comes from the community is very high as compares to others. So, we put only small efforts in the other two that is infrastructure and operations. Community is the part which helps us to create balances between three of them.
Maneck: Basically, what he is trying to say is “If your infrastructure is bad and community is great, they are not gonna complains us about anything”. We focused on building stronger communities, more value from there and at the end of the day we provide good infrastructure but that’s not our main focus. Our main focus is to provide larger communities, bigger communities for people to come and innovate and connect with new people, find your founders, friends, employees and future market.
How do you manage your burnout being a community manager?
Siddartha: There were cases like, you wake the next morning and you are saying I’m quitting. How much, people-person you are but after some time you really can’t do this. It’s the level if you talk about burn-out. I’m working every day and suddenly burn out starts creeping and you are able to solve 70% to 60% and the rest are just piled up every day. You start getting stressed as there are 200 people, you are the people’s person here, who is not able to solve the problems and now you start thinking to take a break from work. 91 have some culture for their employees where you can take 15 days’ holiday in a quarter and give a fresh start to your work.
Maneck: I feel that a community manager should have a routine, schedule and day to day agenda, it makes you more productive in day to day life and you can find your personal time. As you interact with so many peoples every day, at the end of you are really exhausted and you don’t wanna talk to anyone. You should make eating, reading, playing habits. When I was new to this, it was not easy for me as well. But now, these habits help me with a lot of work and it is good for my mental health. I started from a Comunity Manager and now I’m a Regional Head of Community at 91. This is something every CM should do. For me, the holidays are not wrong as it gives you boost and give some time to spend with your family, friends and relative.
How do you tell others like what is the work of a Community Manager? (17:48)
Siddartha: Generally these are asked by three sets of peoples. First is relatives, second is friends and the third one is grandparents. Grandparents are different from relatives, I’ll tell you why.
- Family (It’s a 15-minute process) — Where the first chapter is the introduction to startups, the second chapter is the introduction to co-working and the third chapter is how businesses run in coworking space and how you help it. Once this is done then they say finally you are doing consulting and I’m like “no”. After that, they give up.
- Friends (seniors, juniors and colleagues) — It takes only 6 minutes for them. I take them through the structure. So, it’s easy and once everything is done then they ask do you think now I can become a community manager? Then I tell them you cab be community manager but you need to do “XYZ”. The discussion is different but at least they understand the new space because I give them the example.
- Grandparents (easiest one) — My grandfather asked, what you do and what is the meaning of community manager? It’s like someone who is managing the Panchayat in your village who solves everyone’s problem and roam around. The same thing I do for businesses.
Why is the community so important for a brand?
Maneck:
· The future is going to be like this as people can choose who they want to work with, where they want to work etc. within the community.
· If they’ve any problem, they can ask within the community and get it done as the contribution is one ingredient of community.
· If you are running any co-working spaces then you need to collaborate in your community to maintain the engagement and contribution level.
· We’re moving forward, everything from artificial intelligence, virtual reality, everything is going to move in a much faster way. And that’s why communities are important because they will be having a group of people coming together and working on different ideas to execute it.
· You can work faster in a collaborative way.
Siddartha:
· You will be in under the guidance of some experienced people who can help you in some way or other.
· You can test your assumptions and you can test your product before launching them in public.
Warm hugs to Maneck and Siddartha for giving us such insightful answers into the world of community and their unique sense of business. We wish them all the best in their 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.
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