Can a tech company truly build a community?
Groove’s 7 principles to early stage startup community building
In the past few years, “community” seems to be the buzz word everyone can’t stop talking about when it comes to business.
This word gets thrown around (and misused) a lot, so let’s start with defining it:
People who come together over what they care about. Whether starting a run crew, helping online streamers connect with fans, or sparking a movement of K-12 teachers, the secret to getting people together is the same: build your community with people, not for them.
Many businesses talk about their community when really they mean “audience”: the group of people you’re broadcasting to. True community takes on a life of its own and allows people to build something together, and more importantly, build relationships and conversations beyond one to one communication with just your brand.
At Groove, we’re excited to be building a community of people accomplishing great things in short, deep focus work sessions. We’re also an app. And we’re also a for-profit company raising investment.
That confluence of community, tech and investment may raise some eyebrows, and I don’t blame you. Often, the goal of a community can start to clash with the goal of investors or the business, depending on how the business was built.
That’s why it’s been important for us to prioritize community in every decision from the beginning, and why I want to share our approach, to be of use for others who also believe community and profit don’t need to be mutually exclusive.
Groove’s 7 principles to early stage startup community building:
1. Acknowledge the tension between venture-backed businesses and community-building
Let’s start with the core problem: To build great communities, you need to be organic and true to your mission, and true to supporting the community and fostering collaboration. You can’t accelerate that process too much; an authentic community usually requires time to build social structures, bonds and norms.
This is at tension with the most exciting prospect for any investor or building any venture-backed company, which is how quickly you can grow and how much momentum there is.
Being aware of that tension is the foundation, allowing you to see and properly prioritize the multiple sides to your decision-making and not only get caught up in growth to meet investor expectations.
2. Embrace the shift in focus to community-building in venture capital
Venture capital is a large field; there are investors who believe in rapid growth above all, but there are also investors who believe that community creates defensibility for a company.
The old way of doing things is to build software then to find the community. The new way is to start with the community and then build the software.
- Greg Eisenberg, CEO of Late Checkout and Reddit Advisor
A strong community:
- Creates ongoing engagement
- Heavily reduces marketing costs
- Is infrastructure for a great company
There was a time (and still is) where your product can be built around paid marketing. Then there was a shift to viral organic marketing. How does your product sell itself to the people around it? The new zeitgeist is how does the community of users drive the growth of the company and create a company that’s sustainably engaging?
Within the venture ecosystem, there’s a commitment by certain investors to put community at the heart of what people are doing and what companies are building. Focus on that investor niche when fundraising.
3. A good community makes good business sense
There’s nothing better than a super engaged community. It delivers value on so many fronts:
- People are prepared to pay more for the product
- They stick around longer
- They get more value from the experience
- They help you develop the product
It becomes a collaborative partnership between the users and the team — that’s what people buy into, but it’s also the thing that scares them. Scaling that in authentic and intimate ways is difficult.
I’m interested in aligning our motivations and our values with those of our users. At this point in time, Groove is free, but it will be a subscription-based model in the future. A subscription was always the obvious model — people pay for the value they get from the product and the community. Ad revenue models misalign intentions and create challenges when it comes to the user — they incentivize exploiting the user in lots of ways, as we’re seeing now with a lot of companies like Facebook.
Whereas when you create a product that delivers sufficient value, you’re meeting important needs, then charging for it. It’s a healthier way to relate to someone because it’s an equitable value exchange between the customer and the company.
4. Figure out product market fit, then grow
Since we’re a young company (still in beta!), we keep our burn rate (the rate at which a company is spending its venture capital before making a profit) very low; we’re not trying to spend lots of money right now.
Before we have product market fit — not just a great product, but a product and a community that can scale in a way that’s great for everyone using the product — we are not jumping on the hamster wheel of typical investment and growth. You jump on the hamster wheel once you get to product market fit. If you start to run too quickly, too soon, you don’t have enough time to foster the foundations.
At some point, we’re going to focus on growth — we’re motivated to deliver the Groove experience one day at scale to millions of people — but right now, with focus elsewhere, we’re intentionally managing investor expectations. We’re building community at the right pace, organically, rather than accelerating it too much at the beginning. We want to make sure we’re bringing people in in a way that’s going to be nourishing for them. Whether there’s two thousand or two million people using the product, they still get a similar quality of experience.
5. A Head of Community should be an early hire
We brought on Taylor Harrington as our Head of Community and first full-time hire.
Community is so central to what we’re doing, that even though most of our mindset and focus right now as an organization is in product, it’s really key that we figure out how to approach and sustain our community.
From when there were just 10 users to when there were 100 to now, when there are a few hundred in beta, we want to take those learnings from the frontline and turn them directly into features within the product. It was key to hire someone that lives and breathes the community, because it allowed us to work with someone who is completely focused on what’s going on in the community, bring that back into the product, and be a core voice. It was critical to have someone there on almost day one to help shape how we think about the product.
6. Say no when you need to
Pitching investors is a large part of what I do, but I’m also making sure I’m pitching the right investors.
If someone doesn’t understand community, they’re never going to be a great partner to build community with. If they want to accelerate growth too rapidly, then it can become impossible.
One red flag for me is if they want to exploit the idea of “community,” or think it’s just a superficial relationship with our customers, as opposed to building deep embedded relationships between our users and ourselves. Community is about allowing the individual to feel safe, and have space at the core of their experience to shape. They can’t be exploited in that position or it’s a huge mistrust.
Another red flag is if someone wants us to build Groove as an enterprise product now, without having developed the core community features and functionality and how it operates, skipping over figuring out how we bring people together in healthy ways.
7. Building the product with the community can still mean protecting your brand
In principle, we want to listen to the community as much as possible, but there are different layers to the community, from their usage level to their working styles to the main benefit they’re getting from the product. There will always be ongoing structures to support dialogue between community and the product.
When listening to the community, the key is how you listen to the community. We are constantly gathering user research, listening and trying to come up with solutions. We’ve created ways for them to share this in real time, whether in a Slack feedback channel, DMs on Slack, or post-Groove conversations during the regroup. We’re not always listening to exactly what’s proposed in terms of “Here’s the solution you should build,” but instead more interested in hearing the need or problem that underlies that, and finding the best solution and prioritizing it. We’re really listening, and community members feel like they’re a part of building this buy seeing ideas they or fellow Groovers suggested coming to life.
What are your principles to community-building?
This is our approach at this moment in time, but we’re always learning, growing and looking to others for advice and inspiration. It’s important for us to build Groove in public and be transparent about it, so we can all learn from each other. If you have advice on how you’re building community in an early stage startup, please let me know in the comments! I’d love to chat.
Groove is an app hosting short, deep focus work sessions powered by a supportive community that helps you craft a more satisfying, fulfilled day. Apply to try our Groove beta to accomplish great things (and have fun while doing it)!
