Engaging communities, Founder-Market Fit and Boxed Thinking
Early Employee Explorations #2
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Driving Engagement in a Community
I am actively involved in building a community of tech learners. So I was furiously doing research and consuming content on building communities and driving engagement with them. (I will share my notes about my journey to build an engaged community.) As I was browsing, my eyes fell on this twitter thread.
The key aspect of an engaged community is to provide consistent value to the community members. CONSISTENCY… That is the keyword. Building communities is a long and patient game. You have to be really patient and provide value to your community so that they keep coming back to you.
A few tips or guidelines for driving engagement in a community:
Get your first few members in the community selectively and build your content or event strategy around that. Give delight and value to them so that they become your ambassadors.
Post content regularly and have a clear engagement at the end of the content asking the members to interact and comment on the article. For example: `What do you think of this?`, `Agree or Disagree?`, `Share your thoughts and experiences around this`.
Find the hook for your community. What is it that the members are really excited about? Replicate the hook and that becomes the growth flywheel for the community.
A great FREE resource to learn the basics of community building and driving engagement which I really liked: Community Building. I am currently in the process of applying these principles to drive engagement. I will share an update on this soon.
Some of the great communities that I am part of, where I derive a great value:
Lenny’s Newsletter - Classic example of Come for the Content and Stay for the community. An excellent community for Product people.
Rosieland - Built Ministry of Testing and currently Head of Community at IndieHackers. Really great advice.
Visualize Value - Jack Butcher built an amazing community and really love his tweets and visualizations. (Reason I took a yearly subscription). Still in the exploration stages of this community. Will write more when I go deeper.
Founder-Market Fit
I knew about Product-Market-Channel-Model Fit. Reading quite a bit on Product-Market fit and will share the thoughts on this in a later article. But what caught my eye is a relatively new concept of Founder-Market Fit. Came across these wonderful articles on Founder-Market Fit and 4 signs of founder-market fit.
Taking ideas from these articles, my key takeaways are:
Founder-market fit is the `unfair` edge that they bring to the table due to their domain expertise or insights. What is the compelling insight which they have seen which make the proposed solution attractive to the problem? Example: Eric Yuan’s experience in Webex that inspired him to build Zoom.
The motivation of the founder. What is that story which pushed the founder to discover this problem and is willing to take the entrepreneurial plunge? Working on it even in the free time. It is now currently an obsession translated into excitement. Example: Product Hunt which helps startups get more traction.
Founder story or personality. Does the founder story resonate with the potential customer? Example: Mark zuckerberg’s story as a student resonating with student communities who adopted Facebook as early users.
This factor is more important in seed funding. For later funding, only execution and numbers matter.
If you wish to learn the startup concepts in an intuitive manner, here is a great resource to get started - Startup concepts.
Boxed Thinking
Found this interesting story through the Hacker News Digest. Original Link: Short Story for Engineers
A toothpaste factory had a problem: Due to the way the production line was set up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. To control the costs, quality assurance checks must be smartly distributed across the production line so that customers don’t get an empty box (and switch to a competitor out of frustration).
Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory gathered the top people in the company together. Since their own engineering department was already stretched too thin, they decided to hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem.
The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP (request for proposal), third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later a fantastic solution was delivered — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. The problem was solved by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box off the line, then press another button to re-start the line.
A short time later, the CEO decided to have a look at the ROI (return on investment) of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. There were very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That was some money well spent!” he said, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.
The number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. How could that be? It should have been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers indicated the statistics were indeed correct. The scales were NOT picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.
Perplexed, the CEO travelled down to the factory and walked up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before the scale, a $20 desk fan was blowing any empty boxes off the belt and into a bin. Puzzled, the CEO turned to one of the workers who stated, “Oh, that…One of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang!”
$8 million vs $20 Hmmm! Money well spent?
Key lesson: Frugal innovation is extremely important. An elegant solution could be hidden in a more economical strategy.