The community approach to building and launching your own startup
The community approach to building and launching your own startup
Building and launching a startup can often come with a steep learning curve, especially if you’re new to the startup world. Communities are a great way to create a network that you can learn from to build, launch, and organically grow your startup. They're also helpful to understand what to build next and validate the idea at the same time as users and likely promoters of your product. After all, it’s no secret that word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool, and crowdsourcing has also proven to be one of the fastest ways to generate features and ideas.
It’s no surprise that there is a growing wave of startups that build and centre their business strategies around their communities, and it’s not just startups that are doing this too - large technology companies like Apple and Github have also built collaboration and support platforms to allow their communities to collaborate with them on their products!
We’ve touched on communities, but what are they?
Communities are groups of people who actively engage with your business, contribute to shared ideas, and play a bigger role in the creation of your product and startup than the audiences you market to. The community approach to building and launching a startup involves focusing the business on connections over transactions. Building a community first as a startup can help develop and launch your products, and build your brand in the process before the product has even been launched.
Communities can also contribute greatly to learning how to build and launch your startup. Compared to remembering 10% of what we read, we remember 70% of what we discuss with others, which is what makes collaboration and the community approach to developing your products and launching your startup so powerful just on how quickly you can absorb information, and build connections in the process.
Community and innovation go hand in hand!
A successful community requires a reason for people to come together, and then once they’ve come aboard, they need a reason to continue engaging. With continued engagement with your business and with each other, these interactions eventually give way to innovation.
Imagine you’ve invited a group of friends to a cooking class. Those that are interested will stick around, and then eventually get to know each other and start to share ideas by sharing new techniques and ingredients, in a way co-developing recipes together. It’s not a far fetched idea that fusion food started in this very way! In the same way that collaboration through community gave way to culinary innovation by melding diverse cultures, the community approach can drive innovation in your startup too.
How do I start?
Communities are formed through building relationships with each other, and relationships are built from having conversations and interactions, which is why it’s important to create a conversation platform. This can be as simple as a Facebook group, Telegram channel or Discord server where you can actively interact with your community. Don’t be afraid to start small, since communities are built over time - early communities can even be built over a couple of beers during happy hour.
Startup networks or bootcamps are also a good way to network with people in the same boat as you as a starting point for your community. They experience the same challenges, can help tackle problems that may not be unique to your startup, and even contribute to ideas that can give you a running start to launching your product and building your startup!