Communities Build Success
More so than the Product Itself
To begin, I am in no way advocating the design of sub-standard products. We should always be striving to achieve greatness in our work and dreaming of the next big thing. Having a worthy product is one thing, leveraging the power of people is another.
Whilst the title doesn’t hold true for all websites — or startup/company/whatever — you only have to look around at some of the most popular things we use today to see it currently holds a lot of weight.
Social Media
This one is a no-brainer; of course Social Media sites need communities to be successful. A natural progression of the internet that was bound to happen, all it needed was mass adoption.
Friendster, Classmates & Friends Reunited launch between 1995 and 2002. A few of the earliest Social Media sites to gain traction.
August 2003 MySpace launches. 5 months later, Facebook launches. I won’t bore you with this, we all know what happened. MySpace dominated Social Media until around 2007, at which point Facebook stole the crown and hasn’t taken it off since.
What’s interesting is the approaches both websites took to build their community.
MySpace offered public signups right out of the gate and also used personal connections to boost its users.
eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to breathe life into MySpace, and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites.[1]
Seems like a great idea right? It worked. That is, for a short amount of time.
Facebook, on the other hand, opted for an entirely different path. Starting small and only allowing certain people to sign up. Mark Zuckerberg’s high school were the first to be invited, with all US high schools being incorporated by the end of 2005. Come September 2006, anyone in the world over the age of 13 was able to register.
Intentionally shutting users out appears to be counter-productive, but actually the opposite occurs. People start talking and it quickly becomes a recognised name before even launching. I remember hearing of Facebook before it came out.
What happened to Friendster and the like? Most still operate, although with a mere fraction of Facebooks userbase. Friendster and Facebook had largely the same functionality, with Friendster beating Zuckerberg to it by 2 years, so why aren’t we all using Friendester now? Because they didn’t have that “buzz” around them that made people want to sign up. People want in simply because they aren’t.
In my opinion, had Google held out with G+ being semi-private for longer, it would’ve been more of a success.
Dribbble, a social media site where designers post shots of their work, thrives using the invite-only system. Each Dribbble user is randomly allocated small amounts of invites to send out, with an emphasis on only inviting quality designers. Forrst, a similar site in concept, employs open registration, and whilst Forrst is still a useful site, Dribbble is where the top designers are and ultimately where the “respect” is.
Using the invite-only system, Dribbble has created an aura of quality that stems throughout the community.
Games
Sharing videos, whether it be a Let’s Play, easter egg or highlights reel, is fast becoming the most valuable source of acquiring users within the gaming industry.
The sheer amount of games I have purchased entirely based on YouTube videos is astounding. Just glancing through my Steam collection, I’d confidently estimate at least 75% of my games have been bought immediately after watching a few YouTube videos.
Subreddits possess a similar power over me. If a game has an active and ultimately nice, welcoming subreddit, that can influence me too. I’m currently subscribed to 8 video game subreddits for games I don’t even own because of how fun they are. I’ll more than likely end up buying a few of them, namely 7 Days to Die.
Minecraft is a fantastic example of how the community can sky-rocket games. Don’t get me wrong, Minecraft itself is creative, innovative and totally deserving of it’s status, but it could never have reached the success it has without the backing and support from it’s userbase. I’d go as far as saying, Minecraft wouldn’t have even been heard of should the YouTube community not have existed.
World of Warcraft, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Dark Souls and more recently, Kerbal Space Program, are other notable games with budding communities. Not only are they discussing every aspect of the game, but creating mass amounts of top quality content for others, usually for free.
On the flip side, there are numerous games — and even entire genres — that I avoid like the plague due to hostile populaces.
Call of Duty. Once known for it’s innovation within the multiplayer FPS scene, is now notorious for being played almost exclusively by whiny, little, pre-pubescent brats. Call of Duty is a fading star. Unashamedly releasing nigh on identical games every single year is the main reason Call of Duty will fall from grace, but the 10 year olds sure haven’t helped.
CoD4: Modern Warfare and Team Fortress 2 were released within a month of each other late 2007. I suppose it’s all down to how one defines success, but I feel Team Fortress 2 — and ultimately Valve — have won the fight. Sure the CoD series has made more money, as they proceeded to churn out 6 more games. Meanwhile, Valve nurtured their egg, encouraging it along the way. Valve just aren’t as greedy as Activision, pure and simple. And the fans love them for it, repaying them by buying as many hats as humanly possible.
For the majority of it’s life, Team Fortress 2 has been pretty cheap. It was — along with The Orange Box — consistently on sale for as low as $3-4/£2-3. They created new content in the form of maps, weapons and game modes to keep the community growing, and most importantly playing. All said content is free. June 2011, Valve announced TF2 would become free to play entirely.
As above, Activision released a total of 7 CoD games including Modern Warfare from 2007, pricing them at $60/£40. They also pumped out around 3 sets of new maps each year charging an extra $16/£10 for each set. Corporate decisions like this jaded the community and has slowly turned many gamers against Activision entirely.
Despite not knowing the sales figures from Valve regarding TF2's store purchases, it’s safe for one to assume that Activision has — at the moment — made considerably more money from the CoD series.
Making money is not the be-all-end-all of success, and it’s not like Valve haven’t made a bucket load of money. Team Fortress 2 is a more successful game than Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, or any other CoD game. Why? Because people still love, cherish, design things for and play TF2 to this day. I’d argue that TF2 is one of, if not the, most successful games of all time.
Which one — Activision or Valve — will be fondly remembered as one of greatest video game companies of it’s era?
Valve.
Valve have showed that you can make great games, build amazing communities and be filthy rich.
Cryptocurrency
If you haven’t heard of Bitcoin by now, you must have been living under a rock.
Cryptocurrencies as a whole, not just Bitcoin, have exploded in popularity and awareness over the past 6-12 months, consistently being tweeted or written about and regularly being featured on television news.
As always with novel ideas, there are a lot of imitators. Many cryptocoins have outright copied Litecoin’s Scrypt algorithm, tweaking a few settings.
What sets apart all of these nigh on identical coins? The userbase.
Unfortunately, the majority of coins communities are trying to get rich. Not that there is anything wrong with wanting be rich — we all do, right? — but it certainly hasn’t helped the growth and development of a lot of coins.
If all people do is buy into cryptocurrencies to turn a profit, the coins end up not being traded or used to purchase items. They just sit there, gathering dust, which in turn means fewer businesses will want to accept it.
Slightly off topic, October 28th, 2010 the doge meme is ‘created’. Slowly garnering attention, the doge meme shot to prominence, roughly around June/July 2013. You may have seen it.
Later in the year, Jackson Palmer, an Adobe Systems employee, joked about the idea of a Dogecoin. After receiving a positive response on Twitter, Jackson was encouraged to make it a reality. Teaming up with his programmer friend, Billy Markus, Dogecoin was born on the 8th of December, 2013.
Like many before it, Dogecoin was a modified version of Litecoin. Technically, there isn’t much difference between Dogecoin and the numerous other Litecoin clones out there, so how would Dogecoin set itself apart?
Being one of the main proponents of the Doge meme during it’s mid ‘13 rise, Reddit seemed like a perfect match for Dogecoin, and it was. They lapped it up, taking the coin under its wing and most importantly using it.
Redditors adopted the coin as a sort-of tipping currency. Someone posts a great link, tip them Doge. Someone helps you in the comments, tip them Doge. Want a small job doing? Pay in Doge. It’s so quick, easy and seamless to tip cryptocoins, it makes sense to use coins instead of cumbersome money/paypal transfers. Can you imagine trying to tip someone $0.10 through Paypal? It’d be ridiculous.
The reason Dogecoin seems to have taken the crown for Internet’s tipping currency, is because unlike too many other coins, the users are consistently using it and not sitting on the coins looking for personal gain. The community isn’t just using the coin though, they’re having a blast! Users are doing everything in the spirit of fun, jokes and positivity, aligning themselves with the original meme — even calling themselves Shibes after the Shiba Una dog breed.
Within the past couple of weeks, the Dogecoin community have funded the Jamaican bobsled team and Shiva Keshavan, an Indian luger, to send them to the Sochi Winter Olympics. The efforts were coordinated by the Dogecoin Foundation, which was created by the Dogecoin duo Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus. They explain it best themselves:
The Dogecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization created by the founders of Dogecoin for the purpose of spreading the use of the currency through goodwill and charitable endeavors. We also provide incentives for developers to work on projects that will enhance the experience of using the coin. — Dogecoin Foundation website
With the founders of Dogecoin being so charitable and generous, and the community funding people’s endeavours and worthy causes, there’s an heir of philanthropy and zeal that runs deep.
With the united effort of the community looking to have fun and help others, Dogecoin became the most traded cryptocurrency — beating out all other coins, including Bitcoin, combined. Now the coin sits pretty in 5th spot for largest Market Cap of all cryptocurrencies, along with the 3rd highest trade volume (past 24 hours), only behind Bitcoin and Litecoin.
This all happened within 5 weeks of the coin being launched.
To say we are watching history unfold with Dogecoin, is an understatement. It’s an absolute revolution in how we use the internet and will only get bigger, better and more integrated with the services we love. But is Dogecoin actually any better suited to internet tipping than say Feathercoin, Kittehcoin or Fedoracoin? Functionally, no. The overwhelming generosity and care from the userbase has differentiated it from it’s competit, nothing technical at all.
In a saturated market of imitators, Dogecoin has emerged victorious entirely due to the community support.
Closing
I’ll admit, the title ‘Communities Build Success — More so than the Product Itself’, is rather hyperbolic and somewhat provocative. All of the success stories I’ve written about are also fantastic products. But there are tons of fantastic products out there, you’re not the only one, and communities often end up being the defining force in a products success.
