Screw your “Slack chat” thinking
I started Focus Asia — community to connect entrepreneurs, makers & do-ers in Asia last year. Right now we are 470+, somewhere around 260 members I set up a pay wall.
There were 2 solid reasons behind it.
Reason #1: Community grew too quickly and that’s a good problem to have but in our case newcomers were random people, often signing up to every possible Slack channel out there and not related to what is our community about. Those are members we don’t want.
Some of these people were just curious and after sign-in never came back. There were also others with hidden agendas, who would try to fool around: scraping off all the emails or spamming without common sense.
It took me a while to clean-up (read: disable) these accounts. I had 2 follow ups through DM’s with every person who seemed not-active and one final direct email explaining that I will be disabling their account within a week if I don’t get any signs of life from them. This whole procedure alone cost me around 12 hours or 1000USD (my “minimum hourly wage” for 12 hours of my work). It wasn’t worth it.
Reason #2: I see bigger picture of building it that goes beyond running a Slack chat/group/you name it. Not just I want to bring great minds, do-ers, and tinkerers together. I want to create a knowledgable & supportive community, an ecosystem with purpose of serving our members and followers out there.
This all cost me a lot of time, energy and focus to maintain, grow & build new tools around it. Money from memberships keeps the lights on and help me to keep going. Here a sincere, big THANK YOU here to everyone who join and believe our mission — without you I won’t get that far.
Putting up paywall addressed it all & turned out to work very well.
It helped keep community healthier, protect it’s members, saved me a lot of time & money down the road and enabled me to continue growing it without taking on external money.
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But there is something interesting I have noticed by doing so. I discovered how some people percieve Slack communities and very likely any other communities out there that supposed to be “free to join”.
And this is the reason why I am writing this.
Let me share with you reactions of some of the people who tried to join us coming from Slack-related websites and stumbled upon a paywall (something they did not expect despite the fact we clearly state it on our site). These are their responses to the question I sent in email, asking what stopped them from joining:
In general — people expected to join “for free” because other Slack communities out there don’t charge money and for them it’s just a Slack chat.
Takeaway #1: Communicate better value proposition why one should join
Takeaway #2: Stop relying on Slack-related websites.
Takeaway #3: Write this post
But no matter what, some people still don’t get one simple thing:
It’s not just a Slack chat. It’s a community. A space full of real people and conversations. Place where you can expand your networks, build new relationships, exchange informations, find customers and business opportunities and get help, hire and get job.
Similar like any other real life event or conference you attend (and you will be charged an entry fee for obvious reasons) same applies for online community.
Because it really doesnt matter whether you join a Slack, FB group or forum. It’s just a tech stack behind. At Focus Asia, initially we went with Slack for 3 reasons: live-chat capabilities, more private space & hype around it. In fact we could go with whatever made sense to us but on the end it doesn’t really matter.
What matters are people.
Nothing else makes me more happy than hearing some of the great things that happening inside: people finding jobs, building connections & finding partners, getting discounts to their favourite events and access to awesome tools or simply meeting someone up for a coffee in another country.
And because of this I will continue growing it.
The Community. Not a “Slack chat”.
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