What Is Behind Building A VC Community
Since the very first day of daphni, community building has always been at the heart of our strategy. What we call daphnipolis is our solution to solve some of the biggest issues VCs are facing: lack of scalability (remember, VC is a service industry), scarcity of time and information, the need for better sourcing and qualification, and the lack of customer centricity.
I will share here these 4 key takeaways we got by building and managing a community of 300 entrepreneurs, executives, academics and creatives (check the book).
1. Breaking news: BtoB is not BtoC
One of the main strategic decision we took for the daphni brand was to build a “BtoB Lifestyle” brand, inspired by the best BtoC brands. When all the financial brands make every effort to look serious, strong and durable, we decided to be flashy, but real. We were inspired by Gaudi and Tarentino, not the most classic and sober icons, but in their own way classy and timeless. And it worked! We managed to create a strong identity and to get the attention, trust and involvement of the people we pitched.
Yet when it comes to community management we realized that we were creating a more classic BtoB business. Building a community of a diverse group of individuals and being able to give them the value add they are looking for, means that we need to know each and every one of them personally. We need to be able to predict what they want, like, dislike, and to be able to engage in conversation about their business challenges.
Of course, we also need to gather the community for face-to-face events every semester. This is totally different from managing a mass of cheese naan lovers! It takes time, not just the newest features. Empathy and not just growth hacking.
2. Values and…money
Build da city for good. Among our 5 core values, we chose this one to be displayed outside of our office walls, visible from the street level.
The best way to build a community is to work on strong inspirational values, to communicate them and to nurture the sense of belonging of the community thanks to repeated references to these values. But that’s not everything. VCs and their clients, both LPs and entrepreneurs, are also here to make money, which we don’t want to consider as a value in itself, but it is an undeniable part of the equation. The articulation of these diverse motives and the taboo we have in France about money (largely reinforced by a very strict regulation on the communication of financial performance) makes it sometimes difficult to talk to both the heart and the “homo economicus”.
3. More responsive than active
We have noticed that the majority of experts of our community are more responsive than active. When we ask for their experience and insight, whether it is on a market or tech, they always take some time to answer us or to meet the entrepreneurs, which is great! But we are also working hard on changing their behavior from passive to active to increase conversation and information sharing. It is a long road before succeeding to create new reflexes but we are optimistic (user base increases with more and more engagement). After hearing what our community needed to be more active, we focused on giving them a better fit with our product. We needed to give them a better sense of belonging, and to push their curiousness to discover new trends. That is why we developed an app in order to have access to daphni’s platform at any time, anywhere. We also know areas of interest of our members so that we can push personally the projects we believe they would like. And as mentioned before, events are a crucial part of engaging and activating our community.
4. VC is still supposed to be a communication hub
As a consequence of the previous points, VCs are still widely supposed to initiate and organize communication among the community. We built an amazing digital platform with an online directory, we are about to launch an app with direct messages but we are sure that we will have to keep opening new threads and topics to get access to the collective intelligence of our great community. Habits take time to change, even with state of the art digital products, content and a of physical events.
A VC community is all about industrializing craftsmanship, and this is what we like. So let’s go back to work, more motivated than ever, with these 4 rules as our compass, and an active community of entrepreneurs, executives, academics and creatives.
