How To Build A Passionate Community Around Your Startup

You can’t experience culture by watching TV, or reading books, for that matter, on a different country. You can only experience it through living it yourself. The same approach one must take in order to understand and build a community for the startup — be it a mobile application, a marketplace, or anything in between.

When 500px started back in 2009, we treated community as a whole. It was an English-speaking white-male dominated community, just like the team itself was at the time. There were no cultural, linguistic, or any other differences — we would treat it as a single organism.

When our company hit an infliction point in early 2011, we noticed that it was separate clusters that were lighting up on the map—for example, one week it would be Germany, adding, perhaps, up to 15% to the overall userbase in just a week, or Indonesia, adding another 10% during a week after. This meant that for a few weeks most comments on the site were in German, Bahasa Indonesia, or, at a later point, in Chinese.

This is when it hit me: community we are building is not one thing. The community we have is actually made of nooks and clusters, that are combination of interests, languages, geographies. And while sometimes it might be intersecting between each other, it’s often not.

Your community can and will have other micro-communities within itself. Embrace that.

So if what you are building is relying on community as a core differentiator, you got to treat it as one. You have to go local: build connections on the ground, constantly be in contact with local leaders, and understand the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.

Being sensitive to the culture, and being respectful can help avoid some obvious and not-so-obvious mistakes. For example, earlier this year we have sent a survey to Chinese photographers using Google Docs. An obvious mistake to a Chinese national, since they won’t be even able to access Google while in China, but an often forgotten fact for someone who lives and breathes Google Docs here in Canada. Or the fact that we initially communicated with our Japanese photographers in English, despite the fact that just 1–2% of Japanese population speaks or understands English.

Being acutely aware of culture is only possible through a combination of three key ingredients:

1. Diversity in your company
2. Active daily contact with all major members of your community
3. Extensive travel and being open to living like a local

Me connecting with locals in Tokyo, Japan

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