Product communities: why and when | Ep. 161

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:28)

And then I would see some folks try to do the same with software, and I've tried to do it myself too. However, it's not always so great as it might seem. There's like a ton of issues and mistaken assumptions people make when they start a community.

First of all, most of the time, it's absolute crickets. There's months of planning that go into spinning up a community. Launch the community.

No one's in there.

[Dillon] (0:38 - 1:00)

Anyway, what's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (1:00 - 1:01)

What's going on, baby?

[Dillon] (1:02 - 1:09)

And we've got Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi? Welcome.

That was my Bruce Buffer. I'm trying to get better at that.

[JP] (1:13 - 1:15)

Oh, Bruce Buffer?

[Dillon] (1:15 - 1:16)

Is that his name?

[JP] (1:16 - 1:20)

Is that his name? Michael Buffer? Dave?

No.

[Dillon] (1:22 - 1:28)

It's his brother, Steve. Luigi Buffer? Oh, yeah.

Come on.

[JP] (1:28 - 1:32)

Come on now. Come on. Come on.

And I am your host.

[Dillon] (1:33 - 1:40)

My name is Dillon Young. Rob, you got something for us today? It's just the three of us.

[Rob] (1:40 - 1:47)

Yeah, I think I do. I think I do. I think I do.

I've been thinking about this a lot. A word that has come up a lot in our conversations.

[JP] (1:49 - 1:50)

Fill in the blank.

[Rob] (1:51 - 1:54)

We're going to talk about community.

[JP] (1:57 - 1:58)

Merry Christmas.

[Rob] (2:01 - 2:24)

We're going to talk about community, customer community. Because this is an area that I see some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed folks in the CS world going on LinkedIn and saying, what if we just spin up a community? Like customers can just self-serve and everything will be fine.

And we don't even need a CS team. It's a brilliant scaled CS strategy. And I'm here to scare some folks away from this strategy.

[Dillon] (2:25 - 2:26)

Burn it down. Burn it down.

[Rob] (2:26 - 2:34)

At least give some forewarnings for anybody looking to go down this path. Have you guys been part of any of these customer communities before?

[JP] (2:39 - 2:39)

Yes.

[Rob] (2:40 - 2:54)

Yeah? Like in working for a software product? Have you been?

No. See, this is point number one. This is point number one.

You've probably been invited to communities. I have. I have.

[Dillon] (2:55 - 3:38)

Here's one for you. Yeah, go ahead. Whoop does a pretty good job of this.

So it's software. There's a piece of hardware included, but you pay for the software. The hardware is actually free, technically.

And so it's a B2C motion entirely, but it's fitness. And so that's sort of like engenders itself to community better than a frigging expense tracking application or something. So I think the first thing I would say, and then I'll let you go off is it's got to be something that people actually give a shit about and want to engage with others about.

That's a good point.

[Rob] (3:38 - 6:18)

It's a good point. Yeah, look, where I've been seeing this come up recently is folks talking about scaled customer success strategies. And they're thinking that they can like, they ask themselves, can we move a segment of our customer base into a low touch model where we throw them in a community together?

They answer each other's questions. And when it works, it can work decently well. Like I've seen Salesforce communities, HubSpot communities, stuff like that emerge organically, which is interesting.

I'm sure there's some Reddit threads out there. People talking about best practices, future sponsor Reddit. And I say this based on the fact that like in my last job, we spun up about 250 different communities.

They were slightly different. They were for professional associations. So like associations of salespeople or plumbers or nurses or dentists or whatever.

But professional associations, they are communities, basically. So we used to spin up the online communities. And then I would see some folks try to do the same with software.

And I've tried to do it myself too. However, it's not always so great as it might seem. There's like a ton of issues and mistaken assumptions people make when they start a community.

First of all, most of the time, it's absolute crickets. There's months of planning that go into spinning up a community, launch the community. No one's in there.

Nobody wants to be the first mover inside of a community. So what do you do about that? You actually have to have a whole community champion strategy where you like have to get people bought in on being like product zealots in the community who are going to be in there not only like to spark up conversations, but then also to moderate.

And that's the other thing is like after the crickets phase, it's so likely that things go off the rails where like negative feedback gets amplified. And your customers will groupthink and bandwagon against you. And I've seen customers turn because they're like, oh, we need this feature.

And we saw everybody in the community is also demanding this feature, having no recognition of where that sits in our product roadmap. And they get upset about that. And then I've also seen like that the quality of feedback that happens in a community is not quite as good as a really well-defined feature request that involves like really deep user discovery.

So product teams don't always find that feedback valuable. I don't want to sound like a total skeptic here. Like I said, there are strategies around this, but I'll pause there with my vitriol and get some quick thoughts before I share some best practices that I've seen.

[JP] (6:20 - 6:38)

I'll go quick. So the one time I can think about where I really used a community, it was actually one time it was Reddit, but it was also like, I think it was Discord. I think it was Discord.

[Dillon] (6:39 - 6:45)

But you used a community about Discord or you used the software Discord?

[JP] (6:45 - 8:34)

I used the software Discord for something. So even though I'm not necessarily like a big streamer Discord, like go for that, there's definitely been times where let's say like I'm playing a game that is, and like maybe it's fun, but there's a lot of like, it's very deep. There's a lot of customization.

There's a lot of things in there. So it's not quite as obvious. And so I'm trying to do certain things.

This community provides me a place to come and ask questions. And there's people who have figured out some things already. Now, of course, like if the game itself has some sort of like documents that were out there, maybe that would be fine, but they don't really have the resources nor the passion for people to do this.

Like one area I'm thinking about, I read this book called, let me rephrase, I read the beginning of a book called The Bazaar and the Cathedral. And they were talking about like open source. I read the prologue.

I got like a hundred pages in maybe, but they were talking about like how communities, like for example, Linux, the open source, like how this got together and all the things that you really needed to have for open source to work, including people in that community need to feel as if what they're doing is in fact important. I know that's so simple, but this is where I think I'm going when I'm thinking about why would you come to a community? Usually it's because there's something that you are not going to get from the instruction manual.

This thing is deep. You need something that's not in the instruction manual and you want to go to a place and you're ecstatic to find a place. But to your point, Rob, what do you do if you're one of the first people to go in and it's crickets?

[Dillon] (8:35 - 8:36)

It's not great.

[JP] (8:36 - 8:36)

Go ahead.

[Dillon] (8:38 - 9:07)

Games are an interesting thing because the sort of game you're describing, JP, is like it's fun to explore and discover. Nobody's doing that with Slack or with Salesforce, right? It's a different thing.

But I think the spirit is the same in that you've got to generate interest or passion or curiosity or something. It can't be nothing. But go ahead, Rob.

[Rob] (9:09 - 9:52)

No, no, no. I think you're right. One thing that's really valuable that you said, Dillon, before is there are certain subject matters that also lend to organic community development.

Like you mentioned fitness. I've seen like personal finance. That's an area as well.

A lot of these are like consumer domains. Most people aren't out there thinking, oh man, I really need a community of people who know my random bespoke software. And I've seen situations where you launch a community and they're like, could you imagine if you were a customer of 10, 15 different SaaS companies and they were all trying to invite you to their community?

You're like, I need another community. Like I need a screen door on a submarine. Like it's really not necessary.

[JP] (9:53 - 9:53)

A screen door on a submarine.

[Rob] (9:54 - 9:55)

Back to the future reference right there.

[JP] (9:55 - 9:56)

That's a good one.

-: 11:02

So some best practices, like I said, I don't want to be totally cynical. First is I generally recommend people at the community develop on its own before they start to launch one. So customers will start communities on their own when there's market demand.

They'll go on places like Facebook or Reddit or whatever, and they'll start talking. And you can also stoke the fire a little bit. If you want to just put something out there that's their companies, like Acme, SaaS company, you can start a community and just see if people organically join and start talking.

Most of the time they won't. At least it gives you some visibility in there. But the people that come in there, they are likely the people that you can then tap eventually as your community champions who can seed content, who can host round tables, who can moderate other content, who can promote advocacy opportunities too.

There's a lot of cool advocacy opportunities that can come in there as well, because you find some people who are true loyalists, groupies. But yeah, start slow if you're considering this strategy to do it.

[Dillon] (: 11:03

You mentioned something else, Rob, that I think is super important to call out. And I am going to be a vitriolic... You?

...mini right now. You said something about using it for scale, for the way we think of digital or tech touch customer success. And I think, I will say, it's just not the most efficient way to solve those problems.

Like most softwares are not so complicated that you need to outsource education to your customer base. Very few, in fact, are. I'm thinking like Workday, Salesforce, like ERPs of that variety that become so complex that the use cases are so varied that you need to employ your customer base to help you with it.

In most cases, particularly the folks that we're talking to for the most part, they're in 50-person companies, 300-person companies. Your product can write a one-page KBA when a new feature comes out, and it is not that hard for people to interpret. Think about that too, of what is the actual ultimate goal of your community?

Community, like you said, takes often like years for it to really take room. If you've got a problem you're trying to solve in the next 90 days, it's probably not community. Yeah, right.

[Rob] (: 12:35

And actually, that's another good best practice. If you do start a community, start it with a clearly defined charter of what it is, why it exists, or a purpose statement, or whatever you want to call it, and broadcast it at the top of the community. A lot of the community softwares that are out there, they'll give you room to pin a post at the top that all users will see their first time, or like an onboarding flow, where when people are welcomed to the community, they're guided through like, these are best practices about posting.

And also, by the way, here's why we exist.

[Dillon] (: 13:06

Yeah.

[Rob] (: 13:07

Yeah. There's a lot of best practices out there. It's been done quite well before, and I would just say it was the last thing.

If you are going to do it, expect one last rule of thumb. I was going to say a word that starts with frame and ends with work, but there's something, I'll leave this for the rest of the road, but there's something called the 99.1 rule, which is a general phenomenon that's been studied in online communities for the past, probably multiple decades at this point, which is that for every 100 people in a community, there are 90 that will be passively involved.

Nine will be moderately involved. One will be creating content. So 99.1, that's like the ratio. So don't expect that 100% of people will participate and don't consider it a failure either if you only have 1% of people creating new content, but it's a general school of thought that has helped me set my expectations. What a weird statistic for you to know.

[Dillon] (: 14:05

I mean, I know you did, one of your companies did this, but that's such a bizarre...

[JP] (: 14:10

This is his bag.

[Dillon] (: 14:11

Are you surprised?

[JP] (: 14:12

This is his bag.

[Dillon] (: 14:13

All right. Well, that's our time.

[JP] (: 14:14

I didn't mean to say it, but this is his bag.

[Dillon] (: 14:16

That's our time, boys. I love this topic. I think community is something we haven't talked enough about.

And that I think has real value, but in very specific situations. I'd love for, if anybody's listening, community experts out there that can, number one, fact check everything Rob just said. And number two, tell us about how you're doing all this.

Would love for you to come on. But for now, we got to say goodbye, boys. Peace.

[VO] (: 14:50

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.