Image source @ Visual China
The latest outlet in the technology venture capital circle can often be seen from the employment positions of various companies, in the past two years, many companies have begun to increase the position of Chief Community Officer, searching on the LinkedIn will find that there are more than 170,000 users who have this position, and there are more and more job advertisements for this position on major job search websites, and even many companies have said that they have no longer set up a Chief Marketing Officer Officer), the chief community officer will take its place, and companies such as Twitter, Twitch, Amazon, and Microsoft are also recruiting community talent.
图源：Chief Community Officer on LinkedIn
The significance of the community to customer acquisition and user retention is not new, but the epidemic has put the community back on the altar, and people's efforts to join the community in order to alleviate loneliness and depression have also achieved many explosive companies, Clubhouse launched a few months after the launch of the early 2021 to achieve nearly 1 million monthly app downloads, Discord at the end of 2020 monthly active users reached 150 million, in half a year to achieve 200% growth.
When digital advertising first appeared, multiple channels are the situation of less monks and more meat, a brand can quickly occupy market share and user cognition, now paid advertising is rising, more and more companies rely more on organic growth, more and more hope to become popular through viral marketing, an important indicator of viral marketing is K factor (K Factor):
K factor = infection rate (number of times each user invites friends) * conversion rate (proportion of users who successfully convert each invitation)
K Factor once again stressed that if it wants to truly achieve this virus transmission miracle that is as difficult as Bigfoot Savage, one must have a strong user base, and the other is to have a product that this group loves enough to achieve snowball accumulation, and the community, which connects users with a common belief, has become a new growth belief.
01. The spark of community is on fire
The value of the community is unquestionable, but just like any situation that the outlet will face, many companies are still "learning one by one", do not know how to tap the true value of the community, and need a lot of help in community building, management and analysis, Commsor is such a company that provides community management and analysis services.
Founded in 2019, Commsor can help companies build and manage communities, and analyze, user interaction and expansion to have a real impact on growth, it consults the core business of Software Services can analyze the investment in the community for sales, support costs or the company's brand recognition can bring what kind of returns, insights can be directly used for the company's strategic development, such as Commsor can give." Many engineers from Google are using your company's services, so it's better to send an invitation to Google to start a business solution" is a suggestion that both helps the company's revenue growth and enables it to build a community from the bottom up.
Image source: Commsor dashboard
Commsor's philosophy is that communities don't necessarily serve capital gains quickly, but they do deliver benefits over the long term, surveys show that users who use Commsor are 2.5 times more likely to start sales conversations, and the average value of contracts is 38% higher, commsor has also launched learning and community resources such as C School and Community Club to help novices grasp the code of operation of the community.
Commsor has acquired two startups: Meetsy, which focuses on private networks within the community, and Port.dev, which provides tools for developers and the open source community. Meetsy's matching system helps Commsor achieve its ultimate goal of growing and measuring community effectiveness by allowing users to accurately filter industries and scopes, helping employees, alumni, and venture capital companies within the company to match and form strong communities.
Image source: Meetsy
Commsor, whose current clients include Notion, Invision, Spendesk, Gong, Teal and others, completed a $16 million Series A round led by Felicis Ventures and Seven Seven Six at a valuation of $450 million last February, followed by a $50 million Series B round led by Atomico in March, Felicis, Slack Fund, 776 and 150 angel investors, including Codecademy's Zach Sims, MURAL's Mariano Suarez-Battan and Webflow's Vlad Magdalin, participated.
Commsor is just one example of a community service company, and there are not many tricks for companies that serve the community
图源：Market map of community tools-Commsor
In analyzing social data, there are software such as Chainfuel that provides analysis of Telegram group and user interaction data
Image source: Chainfuel telegram group analytics
In terms of video conferencing and events, there is not only Zoom, but also Hopin, which has completed a $1 billion financing, to provide a deeper interactive experience platform, allowing users from all over the world to quickly form a community of common interests and connections with video, events, games, matching and other functions
Image source: Hopin user engagement
In terms of social monetization, there are well-known Patreon and emerging software such as MemorySpace and Memory that set up a variety of content such as users' videos, podcasts and courses into membership-based paid content, allowing content creators to make money and build a strong audience community
Image source: Patreon sample pages
Lunchclub, which has invested in both Coachue and Lightspeed Venture Partners, has completed $28.8 million in funding so far, whether it is to socialize with peers, find co-founders to start a business in the future, or find investors for their own business, Lunchclub wants to be a bridge.
Image source: Lunchclub
Existing social companies focusing on the community are also continuing to put the community on the public screen, such as the neighborhood private social app Nextdoor, which is valued at more than $4 billion, has added many new features this year, such as new users joining will announce to other users, users can tag other users under various posts and see the content that each other is concerned about, the system will also suggest "neighbors you may know", etc. Nextdoor has currently covered 40,000 communities in the United States, each community has at least 10 active users. This move takes the goal of creating a friendly and vibrant neighborhood community that is connected online and offline.
图源：Nextdoor new feature
Reddit also launched its first feature update in two years this year, the "Discover" feature, which provides users with recommended content tailored to their interests, a move that also draws on feedback from users who want to better explore their personal interests, with new features that allow users to join their favorite communities faster and make it easier to organize a list of communities they follow.
Image source: Reddit
Community is not only a buzzword between businesses and users, but also an important strategy for investing, contrary Capital's $20 million and $75 million funds are dedicated to community-oriented investments, such as high-potential student entrepreneurs, Contrary has 350 students from colleges and universities across the United States, 45% of whom are women and 65% are non-white.
Last year, Contrary launched Contrary Talent, which currently has hundreds of top engineers and designers from technology companies to coach and support technology talents who want to set up their own companies in the future, and such community relationships give it a considerable advantage in the competition with other investors, and can find out and start a dialogue with startups that want to invest earlier through community connections.
Lolita Taub, which has been deeply involved in the community for many years, launched its own venture capital firm Ganas Ventures this year, dedicated to investing in community-focused companies in North America and Latin America through the power of the venture capital community, with plans to invest about $100,000 in 75 pre-seed and seed-stage startups.
She believes that the future go-to-community strategy will replace the go-to-market strategy, and that community-focused companies will use this snowball of growth to achieve rapid growth, and these companies have in common:
1. The user recognizes himself as a member of the community;
2. Members have a shared space to communicate and create value for each other;
3. Community power can achieve the flywheel effect in marketing, and companies such as Airbnb, Reddit, MongoDB, Atlassian, Quora, Glossier, and Patreon have demonstrated such benefits.
图源：Airbnb community driven approach
02、 The existence of the community is only for the sake of wool?
The power of the community is like a spark, but people have to question whether its ultimate purpose is only to "shear" from the user, and such an attitude is too utilitarian?
Building a community is like building blocks that require investment of time and effort and careful decisions about how to continue each step, and many companies have chosen shortcuts in order to obtain the terminal benefits of the community, such as Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2006, not only entering the video streaming field, but also gaining a community on YouTube that actively uses this platform to share, upload and comment on interaction; Spotify acquired Anchor in 2019. And in March this year, Epic Games acquired Bandcamp, a music platform that provides markets and audiences for independent music artists, although many people are confused, but one certain idea is that Epic Games wants to provide creators with a more open and fair income channel, which is the best thing about Bandcamp, a platform that makes independent music, which is a very profit-friendly platform for musicians. It also means that Epic Games wants to move closer to the atmosphere of this creator community through Bandcamp.
Source: Bandcamp for artists
But often, the community "Jiangshan" that is not hard-earned by itself often has problems, such as the community of the acquired company cannot appreciate the value of the parent company's products and therefore cannot become the main audience of the community it expects, or the community users find themselves throwing feedback and suggestions on the products like stones thrown into the sea, and they are just an ordinary user who loses the sense of community participation and thus loses loyalty, so how should the company use and develop its own community? TechCrunch's Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm give two interesting examples in the podcast.
One is the esports platform Juked.gg, which was officially launched in 2020 as a hub for esports news, and received $800,000 in funding from 500 Startups in 2020 and $1.5 million in 2021 led by Public, with investments from Twitch COO Kevin Lin and former Discord's CMO Eros Resmini.
Although the growth rate was very fast in the early stage, but soon encountered a bottleneck, Ben Goldhaber, ceo and founder with many years of experience in the esports industry, chose to ask users directly, "What kind of service do you want?" Many responses said that although platforms such as Twitter and Reddit can chat about esports but can't have in-depth conversations, it is very difficult to pay attention to a hot topic, and these platforms often have difficulty creating a harmonious community environment, and users are vulnerable to harassment and internet violence.
图源：Juked on Reddit
Combined with these feedback, Juked launched a re-edition of the app this year to focus more on creating a harmonious e-sports social environment, retaining the aggregation news function, allowing users to build their own files and use voting and other functions to deeply participate in e-sports topic discussions, and also cooperated with a number of non-profit organizations to cultivate an equal and open community atmosphere, and recruited many senior e-sports fans for internal testing in the early stage, which is "from the user, for the people". The platform was quickly squeezed into the top few of the social app download charts.
Image source: Juked.gg
The other is Robinhood competitors, positioned as "social investment" software Public, and Robinhood gamification and addictive play is different, Public emphasizes its own social attributes, more friendly to investment white, in the app users can pay attention to friends or investment experts or celebrities to view their investment choices and strategies, you can also disclose their investment decisions, the app in addition to account management also has a more like social media interface
Image source: Public.com Community
Public, which now has millions of users, has previously completed multiple rounds of funding led by Accel and Greycroft, which currently raises more than $300 million, with investments from stars such as professional skateboarder Tony Hawk and Chainsmokers' Alex Pall. Its ultimate goal is to create an investment community with an educational nature, and live discussions on the stock market and investment decisions will be held every week, after all, for investment whites, the education and advice provided by the community can better show the value of the product, so that users can progress with others, users also appreciate this democratized investment community with crowdfunding opinions, no need to pay users will voluntarily join and continue to interact, it carries the community attributes that help users achieve their own growth and can perfectly complete snowball growth.
Image source: Public Live
03. Who should have a community?
The community's wealth password is difficult to understand, but after all, the outlet will make people fomo, large and small companies have begun to engage in community, in fact, this is not the ideal state, Commsor founder and CEO Mac Reddin said, "just like social media and LinkedIn, not every company needs it, if you can't figure out why you need a community, why users want to join, then what is the use of it?" Commsor has also used this philosophy to turn away many potential customers, including companies whose products and services are not ready or have a community that will not make sense in the long run.
The Lolita Taub mentioned above also provides checklist suggestions for companies that want to work in the direction of the community, and each company needs to figure out what answers to these questions before they can do a lot of social work:
Why?
Why do you need community? Will the community itself be your product or will it play an important role in product development and company growth?
What the?
What creeds or values are the communities you form together?
who?
Who is the primary audience for your community? What kind of common benefits will they get from the community, and what kind of common pain points will they have?
Where is it?
Where will your main social communication front be? Will it be Slack? Facebook groups? Or WhatsApp?
图源：Lolita Taub on community
Taub also recommends understanding the benefits of the community at the early stage of the layout of the community, judging whether the community activity has brought a positive impact on the acceleration of the marketing funnel, product acceptance, product performance improvement, customer acquisition cost reduction, and creating a moat for product difference, etc., like calculating other business indicators to calculate CROI (Community return on investment), which is also the core technology of the above-mentioned Commsor software.
However, when we take our eyes off the revenue, the community finally falls on the heart, users can always know whether a company's credo and actions are sincere, many users actually do not care about being "wool", provided that you are sincere enough to believe that your product is enough to unite a group of people, and this group of people can really push the product forward forever.
Sources：
1.You can’t buy a community, so make it worth it （TechCrunch)
2.Commsor wants to scale community beyond capitalism（TechCrunch)
3.What to Know Before You Start Investing With Public, One of Robinhood’s Biggest Competitors （time.com)
4.Lolita Taub on Launching Her ‘Community-Driven’ Fund on AngelList （AngelList Ventures)
5.Nextdoor strengthens neighborhood connections with new product strategy and features to build an active valued community (Nextdoor)
6.The Community Playbook Cheat Sheet (The Community Fund Medium)