Numbers and Learnings from Building a Community after 6 weeks
The special thing about building a community is that you´re not actually building a community. You´re just providing a structure to make people interact in a better way who follow similar interests or try to reach similar goals.
That is what I´ve tried to do over the last weeks by redefining LetsSeeWhatWorks. And here is what I have learned so far.
This community structre that I am talking about already started at the beginning of 2014. That was the time when I started writing about my own experiences as an entrepreneur on my blog de.letsseewhatworks.com (in german). It did so because I was missing stories by entrepreneurs out there. I wanted to learn from others to avoid mistakes and to become a better entrepreneurs than I was. After not finding enough stories by others I decided to be a role model by writing about my own experiences. I wanted to give something first (that´s how I was raised).
However, just a week ago, I wrote that I´ve quit my “job as a blogger”. The reason is that LetsSeeWhatWorks has reached a new level. I don´t want to be the guy who is blogging on his blog anymore. I now want to be just one of many members in this community. This is what I always wanted, but I had to give something first.
The reasong why I´ve started to blog was a missing structure. I was missing a places to interact with other entrepreneurs. Yes, I had a lot of lunches. And yes, there are some facebook groups that I´ve joined and my “network” in the end, which are people that I could call for certain topics. But there was no “place” to go to each day to solve my challenges. And this is the problem that I´m trying to solve with LetsSeeWhatWorks.
From December 2014 until today
The first place that I´ve created was the ever existing german blog de.letsseewhatworks.com. But in the end it was just a blog. In march 2015 I´ve create a community based on buddypress, which was basically some kind of signup/forum area for my blog readers. Good idea, but bad execution
On July 31, I´ve then launched the new communty ob www.letsseewhatworks.com based on the SaaS platform amazers.com, which replaced the buddypress area on de.letsseewhatworks.com and enabled me to focus more on texts and stories in my blog. The good thing about platforms as a service is that they are developed and maintained by a team so I can just “use” it and focus on what it happening inside.
But having discussions and answering questions was not be enough. The blog worked well, but the process of making others share their stories did not. Wordpress had it´s limits, so I decided to look for another option for the blog. After some research and a good hint. I found that Medium.com was offering a new feature: Own domains. Check this post for further infos.
My first thought was: That was it! Everybody should have his/her own medium account and just write whatever they´re going write + their text will be also published within the LSWW reach and bring even more readers.
So having the blog based on wordpress, the LSWW publication on medium (blog.letsseewhatworks.com and en.letsseewhatworks.com), a third opportunity still is available: This community (www.letsseewhatworks.com) with a feature called “stories”. The big advantage is that it´s in the the center of the LSWW community where people have profiles, open discussions and can be contacted immediately. But I also see that Medium and Wordpress are offering much more options to create content. Also, Medium is a network for itself with obvious advantages. Not sure what the best option is… And again, I feel that the community (you) should decide.
Here´s the overview again. Let me know that you think as a comment:
Option 1: Guestpost on de.letsseewhatworks.com (Wordpress)
Option 2: Story on blog.letsseewhatworks.com or en.letsseewhatworks.com (Medium)
Option 3: Story on www.letsseewhatworks.com (Amazers) — where this story is written
Numbers
Enough said on platforms, let me share some numbers on what LetsSeeWhatWorks has achieved so far.
LetsSeeWhatWorks is a community made for entrepreneurs to learn from each other by sharing stories, opening discussions and providing help.
On average, more than 100 people signed up per week. To give you an even better picture, let me share some total statistics here:
We´re now 600 people in this community (deleted users not counted). About 100–200 of us are active on a daily basis.
347 posts and 552 comments and replies have been written until today.
There is a total of 1530 likes that we gave each other. So much love ;-)
We´ve written 433 Direct Messages so far, which is awesome!
Of course we´re far away from facebook and other big platforms, but I´m still proud. I´m proud that 600 people already understood how important it is to be part of this community. I´m proud that each discussion today receives 5–10 answers within a day. I´m proud that people approach me to say “thank you” for providing this platform.
That just feels great. But I don´t just want to say “great” . There is always a dark side of each business. In this case, growth really slowed down after 2 weeks of opening the doors. I think in the beginning everybody was just curious, but now it´s all about looking for value. People only come back when they feel some value in here. I even created a question to get some more answers on what everybody was missing in order to become a more active member on LSWW.
And I got some good answers. Most people said “no time”. And some few said the true reason “no value”. Because if there would be true value in here, every would have time for sure.
In my opinion, too many of us still have a different unterstanding of how a community (like this) works. Most of us are waiting for interesting topics to read or to jump on. Some even said that directly to me. But if nobody is contributing, this is going to be a dead place sooner or later.
On the other hand I bet that every entrepreneurs has daily challenges that we´re trying to solve day by day. But for some reason we are still too shy to post it here. Instead, we´re writing messages via email, facebook and linkedin in between a flood of information that is not relevant to us in terms of growing a business. I hate that also, because that knowledge from each 1-on-1 message is not available to others. Speaking for myself, I´ve given so many answers so often to different people (which is ok), but it would have gotten there faster by just logging in on LSWW and using the search bar.
It´s ok for me. It´s ok to be some kind of role model here and to keep writing about my own stuff. It´s ok for me to demonstrate the value of sharing experiences by writing my own stories. It´s ok for me to share my thoughts and stories without requesting feedback and getting paying customers.
The reason why this is ok is simple: I already see others adapting my approach. More and more members become active day by day and I love to see this community waking up. We´re on the right track. And I´m happy to be part of it.
I´m pretty confident that LSWW is becoming a source for entrepreneurs to be better and more successful business people. My mission is to make this value of this community more visible each day!
So thank you for beeing part of this community and listing to my thoughts on the development so far. As always, feedback welcome!
Not a member at LetsSeeWhatWorks.com? Signup here for free!
Cheers,
Christian (Follow me on Twitter)
Originally published at letsseewhatworks.com on September 10, 2015.
