Hi 👋 Welcome to my daily blog series. In this series, I want to share my journey of learning how to build a product, a team, and a business. My current mission is to help content creators design online courses and foster communities around their brands. In order to arrive at this mission today, I have been working on building an education startup in Vietnam called MỞ over the past three years. I am excited to take you on a learning journey with me!
Today’s blog centers around a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: How can I build a strong community around my business?
Building a community around your business is a powerful way to foster loyalty, drive engagement, and create lasting relationships with your customers. The reason MỞ became a reality was thanks to a community of readers from my co-founder’s blog and his mom’s community in the early days of our startup journey.
Community is not only an important element of our course design but also a powerful factor we can leverage to grow our business.
Recently, I have been tasked with developing a plan to create an alumni community for our course Writing On The Net. In this blog post, I will take you through my journey of thinking and planning strategies to build a community of Internet writers.
Research Existing Principles 🧐
Before jumping into executing and testing, I first ask myself what community means, what makes a successful community, and more importantly what makes a successful community means in the context of our course and our business.
Then, I look up thought leaders in the industry who have been building community for a long time.
I found David Spinks who cofounded CMX, the annual conference and community of over 20,000 community professionals, and hosted a podcast called Masters of Community where he interviewed the world’s top community builders and experts.
I want to learn what his principles behind community building are. With this goal in mind, I found an article he wrote recently called “The 11 Pillars of My Community Philosophy”.
These are what I called mental models, or ways of thinking, about building communities that David has built through years of experience. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I learn from the way David thinks and develop hypotheses based on these principles that I want to test, experiment, evaluate, and develop my own mental models so that I can use them in similar problems in the future.
I often start with one or two thought leaders and study their content in depth which will eventually lead me to other thought leaders or other types of content that will be useful for my context.
After I have researched a few thought leaders and their principles to dig deeper as I build, I will go to the next step…
Create a Project Plan ✍️
Next, I want to outline a project management plan to tackle this task.
The project management plan always starts with…
1. Define Purpose and Goals 🎯
I ask myself these questions:
What is the purpose of this alumni community? How is the purpose of this new product feature related to the overall vision of the course Writing On The Net and the business?
What are the values of this community? How are they tied to the values of our business?
What are the project goals? How will we measure the progress?
Answering these questions will help me have a direction for our project which I can then get other people on board. After identifying the project’s purpose and goals, then I will…
2. Define Key Features and Functionality 🔥
I always start with customers’ needs and expectations. I will conduct user research and gather feedback from current students to understand what they want and expect from a long-term community. Do they want accountability in writing, more content to learn, collaboration, or networking opportunities?
After talking to the customers, I will combine these insights with the principles above to develop hypotheses of the core features of the community.
For example, one of the key features of our community can be a monthly virtual coffee chat between community members where they are paired with another member to check in with one another about their writing process and share their wins and struggles.
This feature comes from a hypothesis that a big community doesn’t solve loneliness but strong relationships do, thus we optimize for more 1-1 events rather than a big group.
The important part of defining these key features is that they need to be grounded in hypotheses and where these hypotheses come from.
After defining key features and functionality, I will go to the next step which is…
3. Design & Development 🛠
In this step, I will think about the design process of each of the features to build this community. As a project manager, I will think about who the necessary stakeholders are and work with each stakeholder to figure out how much time the design and development of each feature would take.
For each stakeholder working on each feature, I will make sure that everyone practices these things as they work:
What is the design hypothesis?
Why do we have this design hypothesis?
What have we been observing? What do the data from our users tell us?
Is our hypothesis true? Why or why not?
Then, the following step will be…
4. Design Measurement & Optimization Process 📝
After designing and developing the features of our product, it’s important that we create a plan to:
Regularly monitor and analyze key metrics such as engagement rates, membership growth, and course enrollment rates.
Use analytics tools and user feedback to gain insights into user behavior, preferences, and satisfaction levels.
Utilize the data to optimize the community experience, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance the community's success.
And last but not least…
5. Create a Marketing Plan 🎤
Product development and marketing have to go side by side. What is the story we are telling? Who should join this community? What benefits will they have?
After having a marketing plan, we will invite existing students to join us and try out. We will also communicate with future students to get them excited about this feature.
I am currently caring out this workflow and will update you on the progress of executing these strategies in a few weeks.
Cheers 🍻
Thank u for writing this!
wow i feel honored to be in a community with this much thinking goes into it