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EIA2017Italy - Anastasia Ashman - How Meaningful Community Can Grow Your Revenues
The document discusses how businesses can build meaningful communities that generate revenue. It states that community is built on shared experiences and interests between members. An engaged community is linked to higher revenues, with 64% of engaged communities reporting over 16% revenue influence. The document advises that community should come before revenue, and provides tips on growing community organically by leveraging early adopters and their motivations. It also cites Product Hunt as an example of growing from 40,000 to 400,000 users through community engagement.
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EIA2017Italy - Anastasia Ashman - How Meaningful Community Can Grow Your Revenues
- 1. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman How Meaningful Community Can Grow Your Revenues
- 2. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Community is connection THINGS YOU DO HOW YOU IDENTIFY YOUR INTERESTS SHARED EXPERIENCES
- 3. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Ways your customer community can generate revenue for you… TARGETED RESPONSES REPURCHASES BUY IN GREATER QUANTITIES HELP OTHER BUYERS FIND YOU
- 4. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman 94% TRUST PEOPLE OVER ADS 2.5x MORE LIKELY TO BUY 25% FASTER DECISION 27% LESS DISCOUNTING 12% FEWER LOST DEALS Source: SiriusDecisions, thanks to Niti Agrawal of Stage 4 Solutions #1 influence: word of mouth
- 5. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman
- 6. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman
- 7. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Community comes first …revenue comes second.
- 8. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Engaged online communities linked to higher revenue influence Source: DNN Software REPORTED ENGAGED COMMUNITIES 64% 26% REPORTED REVENUE INFLUENCE 16% OR MORE 15% OR LESS
- 9. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman How do you grow community? CAN YOU GET IT TO SCALE ITSELF?
- 10. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman How did Product Hunt build their community from the first 100 users to 400K members? Read more: How We Leveraged Community to Grow Product Hunt from 40,000 to 400,000 Users in 4 Months http://cmxhub.com/product-hunt-erik-torenberg-community/
- 11. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Find why your first users are invested — deliver on their motivations PRODUCT HUNT USERS Product enthusiasts Founders & Makers Investors Journalists
- 12. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Make deep connections that don’t scale …then keep building your product & taking care of your community.
- 13. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Today is REVENUE MODEL DAY
- 15. Anastasia Ashman Topaz VenturesLLC, San Francisco @anastasiaashman Thank you!EUROPEAN INNOVATION ACADEMY ALL THE EIA STUDENTS, LECTURERS, MENTORS, & STAFF ANNI SINIJARV ALAR KOLK HEDI KRONSTROM AJDA MUSTAFOVA TORDO PAMELA DAY BURC SAHINOGLU
- 16. What’s the keyingredient to meaningful revenue-producing community? — RIGHT NOW — Tweet your answer to me! @anastasiaashman #EIA2017Turin
Editor's Notes
- #2 what is community around your product or service? how can you build community for your purposes as a startup entrepreneur?
- #3 What’s community? You know this already. It’s a group of people drawn together and connected by the things you do or want to do, how you identify yourself, what you’re interested in, and other shared experiences. As an entrepreneur, the community you can help build around your product or service can improve your offering — AND grow revenues. You can get insight into your product. Customers and prospects can also interact with each other as part of the community to provide recommendations, training and even support — that can replace your own efforts and staff. It can help you save on marketing costs.
- #4 Your customer community is your most powerful resource for growing your business.. You can probably imagine some of the ways. Targeted responses (like through your email newsletter offers or through your social media alerts, since they already are interested and primed to buy. When customers keep coming back to spend time with you, they can become repeat customers. And when they share their positive stories about their experience with you and your brand, they can help other buyers find you, and help them decide to buy. Customers are stepping up and guiding other customers.
- #5 People don’t trust brands they trust people. #1 influence on a purchase is another customer’s word of mouth. That means people talking to other people about your product or service. the.(94% of buyers trust it over ads), 2.5x more likely to purchase, 25% faster, 27% need less discounting to buy, 12% fewer lost deals
- #6 As you’ll see in this presentation, the stronger the community engagement around your product or service, the more your community members influence the company’s revenue. But you cannot rush this!
- #7 The people that gather around your product or service? You are not going to milk them for money! You will not be shooting fish in a barrel. That’s creepy and you yourself would not stay in a place where you are being sold to all the time. In fact the community that gathers around your product or service does need to contribute financially to your business. They don;t even need to be an actual customer. The relationship between community and revenue is often INDIRECT.
- #8 Community comes first — and revenue comes second. Don’t put the cart in front of the horse! A community that’s going to generate business for you needs your long-term involvement and strategy. People are attracted to community for their own needs. If you foster that, they can help generate business for you.
- #9 Remember the reasons people come together? When you provide that, or don’t interfere with value they’re creating among themselves, the stronger the community engagement, the more the members influence the company’s revenue. 64% of online communities that influence 16% or more of revenue report strong engagement 26% reporting strong engagement see 15% or less influence on revenue. But, you can’t leverage your customer community to increase revenue and grow your business unless you first have an active customer community.
- #10 So how do you grow a community, by providing value to your earliest users in a way that grows your userbase? Ideally, these would be features right inside your product. Can you give your first users special privileges, and make them feel like thought leaders? Can you help them distinguish themselves in the community? Can you encourage them to share the community with their own networks? This is what Product Hunt did to both hone their product and get their community to grow on its own. Community is the foundation of their success.
- #11 You’re going to be working with Product Hunt for your product launch. It’s a curated list of the best new products every day. Here’s what they did. You can read more details at that link.
- #12 They focused on WHY their first users were so invested in the product. They learned they had 4 kinds of users with their own motivations. Some just wanted to see great products being built. Others wanted exposure to investors and other founders. Investors wanted to fund the next great companies. Journalists wanted to cover startups, investments, trends, etc. and break news. They thought very hard about how their product could provide such a serious value add that each of those types of users had to share it as a representation of themselves. Founders were the most likely because they could share their own product. But all the user types could respond to being positioned as thoughtleaders, (PH gave them tools to make their own collections which then they’d want to share) and assigned early adopters user numbers for status. All the users appreciated the special privileges they got like features to post and comment. It made them feel like cocurators of the site. They also asked their users to share, and helped them connect to each other online and in person.
- #13 And PH earned loyalty by doing unscaleable favors for each type of early user by hand, giving founders feedback, making investor introductions, giving journalists scoops. You won’t be able to keep doing this, of course, Now it’s about keeping at it. ProductHunt and many other startups whose success is based on community would tell you to keep building the product keep asking your community to share, giving your users credit and allowing them to take on leadership responsibilities. The revenue opportunities will follow.
- #14 Everything I just told you said take your time building community, don’t rush to monetize. But in this program you’re working with tight deadlines. SO, think about how engaging a community, a flash community, even, can lead to 1,000 users, customers or subscribers. Remember the tactics that Product Hunt used to deliver value to each user, by doing things that don’t scale. It’s my hunch that is the way you will get to 1,000 users. By doing things that don’t scale, and tapping into the motivations of the people you target with your revenue model.
- #17 Share with me what you think. Do it right now! It can be something you just learned today — or from your own experience or your own thinking. Use the program’s hashtag!