Define Ventures X Instagram: Building Empowered Communities is the New Fundamental in Healthcare
Community Building: Empowerment is the New Fundamental in Healthcare
A cross-collaboration between two tech entrepreneurs on how to build community around consumers and how up-skilling in community building is digital health’s newest fundamental.
Ashley Yuki is the Co-Head of Product at Instagram and was previously in product management at Meta (formerly known as Facebook) where she was key to turning Facebook-owned Instagram into an industry-leading platform.
Liana Douillet Guzman is the CEO of Folx Health, which provides health and wellness for LGBTQ+ folks. Prior to Folx she was Chief Marketing Officer at Skillshare, an online learning community for creatives. Before Skillshare Liana was COO at Blockchain.com, the most trusted and fastest growing crypto company, where its crypto wallet empowers individuals and businesses to buy, sell, and swap crypto in minutes.
What is community building? How do you define it?
LDG: Rather than thinking of it as community building which can often feel transactional and inauthentic, I prefer to think of it as community empowerment that centers the needs of the community rather than your own. Doing so also requires building clarity not only around who you serve and what you’re solving for them but, importantly, who you don’t serve. People are often afraid to create that structure because they don’t want to turn anyone away but if you try to be everything to everyone, you are very likely nothing to anyone. So, first and foremost, you need to identify what your values are, what you stand for, and why you exist. Be crystal clear about your focus so people can see themselves in it and find their way to you if that is in line with who they are and what they want and need.
— Liana Douillet Guzman, CEO Folx Health
AY: At Instagram, the first hire that the founders made was not a designer or an engineer — the two founders had those skills — but the very first hire was a Head of Community. Platforms and social networks are just spaces — containers — for people to come together. The most important and interesting thing is what fills that space: that’s the community. This is important because the community is what really shapes the space, while the medium helps set parameters and incentivize certain behaviors.
Community building at its essence is helping to seed a space with intentionality that serves a group of people. It’s defined by a set of shared values. Building community requires being intentional about how you see that shared space: the shared culture and norms. This is critical to establish early on because it defines the entire space as it scales.
Why is community building in healthcare important?
LDG: Authenticity of voice is important when trust is imperative, as it is in healthcare. Too often, particularly in communities with shared health challenges, and especially with vulnerable or under-represented communities, people don’t take the time to empower and build communities. Entrepreneurs think about starting a new business or launching a new product and go right to the thing they’re going to launch without focusing on the principles that define their community and what they stand for. This happens under the guise of speed, e.g. “we need to get to market faster; we don’t have time to start talking about the soft and fuzzy stuff.”
But that approach inevitably costs you cycles once you’re out in the world — the old saying that “there is never enough time to do it right but always enough time to do it twice.” Without that clarity of principle for a given community, you end up making hard decisions messier and more time intensive but when you define community from the outset and clearly define who you are and what you stand for, it allows you to make hard decisions much more easily.
Imagine for a moment different communities who share common problems and issues around their health: access, treatment, prevention, literacy, the list goes on. We see this with different identities: mothers who are navigating the peripartum experience, caregivers who are supporting loved ones with neurodegenerative or cardiovascular disease, or people navigating anxiety disorders. One of the challenges with healthcare issues is that people‘s identities are broader than their health challenges.
This is where authenticity of voice in community empowerment is so important: transactional or superficial narratives lead to breakage and distrust, undermining the engagement that is required to empower people with meaningful solutions to a shared set of problems.
LDG: At Folx Health for example, we are here for the LGBTQIA community and they come first. Prospective partnerships need to be aligned with our core values because we are crystal clear in who we serve. It makes what could be hard decisions in transactional moments much easier.
Begin with the problem and then find the solution
AY: Don’t be a solution in search of a problem: instead find a problem that’s worth solving and then figure out the right solution to it. At Instagram we talk about the core tenets of good product principles and building good products. Good product development requires leading with the problem statement. Our most fundamental human nature is to create connection: there are a lot of communities that exist out there that may have trouble connecting or maybe cannot find each other. If you create a clearly defined space that’s clear on its purpose, you can draw the relevant people together. Start with clarity on the specific problem you want to solve, and for what audience. If you start there, you’ll have much more conviction on the decisions you’re making. You can better seed the community with the right shared experiences and norms for the space, because you’ll know who you’re building for.
LDG: So often in healthcare as an industry we focus on launching a product, versus helping people solve an issue. It is important to begin with and know your purpose. At Folx, for example, we know that our purpose is helping the LGBTQIA+ community access transparency, reliability, and agency in their health care experience and expertise in their health and wellness experience. Ultimate community empowerment for us is making sure that this purpose informs every single thing we do.
Building from the bottom up
LDG: Once you have those foundational paradigms and parameters, then within there’s a lot of movement, and I think the biggest mistake you can make when trying to build community is over-engineering it. You create the basics, but then you let the community build itself. Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are great examples of places where people’s experiences on those platforms are vastly different based on the communities that they belong to.
The power of these platforms is that people within their realm can make it what they want it to be and build the connections that make the most sense to them.
The magic happens when you create enough structure to have clarity of voice and purpose, but you create enough agility to allow for real authentic development of culture versus an attempt at telling people what they should be doing in a particular space.
— Liana Douillet Guzman, CEO, Folx Health
Considerations for hiring community builders
LDG: Not all businesses need to center community but if community is central to your business, it’s imperative that you hire great talent in-house and lean into their expertise. Those early hires need to embody and reflect and community you’re trying to build so that you can fast track the authentic connection that will drive growth. The best community builders are responsive to what they’re seeing in the community and can work cross-functionally to build the space and infrastructure to allow the community to grow organically.
At Folx Health, we ensured that the early team was deeply embedded in the community we wanted to serve and we brought them on early enough for them to help us inform the product. When we ultimately went to market, that approach helped to ensure that we were solving an issue that was informed by the community.
As you get bigger, it’s likely that future hires won’t be as deeply embedded in the community but those early hires will have been able to inform the early culture and build the frameworks to allow you to make sure that you’re infusing that empathy, understanding, and deep interest in hearing from and having a direct connection with the community through your whole employee base.
Too often in healthcare there are solutions in search of a problem. When empowering community builders, people naturally saw themselves in what we were launching and felt seen, heard and valued which naturally lends itself to connection and ultimately engagement.
— Liana Douillet Guzman, CEO, Folx Health
AY: It is critical that when building for any given community that you work to co-create the space together. Chances are more often than not if you’re building a platform, the community you’re looking to empower already exists even though it may not be activated and empowered to its full potential. Look for leaders that are already emerging in the audience you aim to serve. You can find a brain trust of folks who are invested in the community you aim to serve, and you should enlist them to share feedback with you and help you evolve the platform. At Instagram, we have formalized groups of community members for the audiences we serve. Their partnership is a crucial part of making sure we are building the right experiences and understanding the most important problems.
If you are trying to help people who struggle to manage their diabetes, or who identify with certain health conditions like heart failure, remember that you’re empowering an existing community and helping facilitate something that they already want to do: be healthy. As you’re exploring that problem, you can pretty quickly identify who the thought leaders are that already have organic leadership within a given community. You partner with them and have the council you’re working with get their input to co-create the space.
— Ashley Yuki, Co-Head of Product, Instagram
AY: At Instagram we make decisions for the space that take specific communities into mind. For example, for many communities, it’s important to be visual-first: encouraging a visual form of community building. It allows you to break down language and geographic barriers; you can communicate a lot visually that you can’t with words.
How do you initially reach the community you’re trying to serve?
AY: I started at Instagram by building our paid ads business; it would surprise some people to consider how paid ads can be thoughtfully used to build and reach communities in need. The great thing about the world of paid advertising today — and this might surprise some people — is that you can target the people you are trying to help .You start with a clear problem statement: the thing that’s worth going out and making better in the world. If you have that clarity upstream, then you’ll probably have some clarity on who the types of people are that might want what you have to offer. You can tailor parameters based off of shared interests, demographics, and location.
AY: Secondly, once you have the target audience, determine what is the then message you’re sending? Communicating how what you have to offer is uniquely valuable and making sure that your first outreach really delivers that.
“The great thing about digital platforms that have this kind of targeted kind of advertising capability is that people are already coming to them looking for community, inspiration, and connection. Over 90% of Instagram accounts follow a business. This tells us that people outside of ad activity are seeking to identify with brands that stand for something they relate to.”
— Ashley Yuki, Co-Head of Product, Instagram
There are many of these platforms out there that are a natural place to reach someone with your message. Over time, you translate that message into a clear call to action: what can you offer them? What can they do to deepen their relationship with you? That leads to very organic community empowerment.
The community as a natural feedback loop for your product roadmap
LDG: If you have real clarity of voice and purpose, then you’re not trying to convince people to join a community, you are giving them a space to build their own community. When done right, people see your ad and they think “this is great, this is what I’ve been looking for.” Once people are in your community, you’ll discover that there are ways that they want to connect and share that you hadn’t even thought of. This is why prioritizing responsiveness and the ability to quickly pivot the product to empower the community. So much innovation happens within these communities: you just have to be able to see it and armed to jump on it.
“Digital platforms like Instagram have been around for a long time and have in essence become search engines. If you’re a company trying to build a community, you can leverage that as a way to tap into your community to build the right partnerships and share information. It’s community-driven product rather than product-driven community.”
— Liana Douillet Guzman, CEO, Folx Health
How do you know if you’re empowering your community the right way?
AY: When community building and empowerment is done right, it feels like a conversation. Some of the best community and power brands are those where the brand is evolving through communication and open dialogue. We have the technology now to foster digital connection. Communities are talking — there is a space to listen and hear and find those those ideas. It’s our job to nurture the culture carriers in the space that we’re trying to support, to reinforce positive norms, and push creativity forward.
LDG: The Met Gala does this fantastically well. Instead of just serving up your Walmart line or your Netflix show, they work to build a relationship. They have a common set of values, they’ll even poke fun at themselves. It all comes back to that authenticity of voice. It’s an authenticity that allows for vulnerability which is the pathway to connection. That may mean you come out and say that you feel strongly about this thing, and you may lose a bunch of followers because of it, but that’s who you are. I’m a big fan of saying you need to go narrow to go wide. There are a million examples of this. Glennon Doyle came out as gay and knew she would lose some followers in the beginning, but her vulnerability ultimately led to explosive growth beyond what it had been before because of that authenticity of voice. You put a stake in the ground for your community and say “this is who we are.”
LDG: When I was at Skillshare, we had initially been an online learning platform for everybody. We decided to focus on creativity. By going narrow, we actually found that our growth significantly catapulted forward because it was clear what we were solving for. We figured out our superpower — which was not determined in a vacuum — we met with our members and figured out what they found most impactful. This allowed us to coalesce around our creativity. Once we landed on that, there were suddenly so many directions we could go.
At Folx Health, because we’re focused on one portion of the population, we can satisfy a lot of their needs. There’s been a shift to verticalization in healthcare and the LGBTQIA community is well-positioned to lead the charge. — Liana Douillet Guzman, CEO, Folx Health
When community is central to your business
LDG: There are full businesses that exist independent of community — and that is fine. However, if community is central to your business, then it is central to your business. You cannot outsource community: you have to put your money where your mouth is. You can bring in people to help you until you hire the right people; you should leverage other people’s expertise and advisory committees, e.g. build a thought leadership board. At the end of the day though, you cannot cut corners and try to build that community because it it is not a set and forget: communities are ever-breathing, ever-evolving. It is a constant process of learning-iterating-rolling out, repeat. You have to have people who have a deep understanding of and passion for your business, who are living it every single day and building that connection to your community.
“You can’t be everything to everyone and you can’t force community. The power of community is that it is self-created. It’s really just about empowering it.”
— Liana Douillet Guzman, CEO, Folx Health
