3 steps to build your early adopter community
To get the product market fit, you should value feedback from your early target users.
The best way possible to get feedback on your product is by building a community around your product/service.
Building a community also has a lot of other advantages since you can use your community to engage your audience in an active, non-intrusive prospect and customer conversation.
The community you build will also help you by reporting bugs and suggest improvements you can add to your product/service.
A community will also act as early testers for new functionalities that you may want to try on a small group before rolling them out to your full user base.
It is a lot of work to build an engaged community, but you will get rewards because communities drive innovation and trust.
They will be your beloved Guinea pigs.
Community grows loyalty. Your community will feel involved in your project.
Community maintains authenticity.
You should start building your own community now.
So this will be a guide on how to start making your own community for your business:
1. Choose the platform you want to build your community on
We went with Facebook groups because (almost) everyone is on facebook, and the onboarding will be easier if it’s on a familiar platform.
We also had slack in mind
Facebook groups also have really useful functionalities, like the one where you can invite people to join your group with an email!
2. Setup a description for your group.
The description is important because that’s the message users will see when joining the group. So give them a reminder of why they are seeing an invitation to your group and how they can contribute.
You should also “pin” the description post so it will stay on top of the group feed.
In our case we invited people who signed up via our landing page (ohmygeorge.com) so they already opted-in to be part of early beta testers so this helped us to get +100 members pretty easily and quickly.
3. Engage with your community by asking their opinions
This feature can also be used to ask your users direct questions and therefore build involvement with your community.
Share your work in progress:
4. Collect the benefits
Once you have a beloved community they will produce UGC (user generated content ) “sharing screenshots of our app in use”, another good starting point for more exchanges with your community and building loyalty.
Show them love
Don't forget to reward them!
Conclusion
Building a community is time-consuming in the early stages. You need to provide quality content and regular communication to keep them engaged, but the efforts will pay back as they are able to provide quality feedback for a better market fit validation and become brand advocates for your startup!
if you’re curious, don’t hesitate to give our app a try! We are building a financial trading game. Easy to play, hard to master. https://ohmygeorge.com/
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