Tech-Forward - Achieving Business Readiness For Copilot in Microsoft 365
EIA2016Nice - Anastasia Ashman. How Meaningful Community Can Grow Your
1. Anastasia Ashman
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, San Francisco
@anastasiaashman
How Meaningful Community
Can Grow Your Revenues
2. Anastasia Ashman
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, San Francisco
@anastasiaashman
Community is connection
THINGS YOU DO
HOW YOU IDENTIFY
YOUR INTERESTS
SHARED
EXPERIENCES
3. Anastasia Ashman
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, 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
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, 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
7. Anastasia Ashman
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, San Francisco
@anastasiaashman
Community comes first
…revenue comes second.
8. Anastasia Ashman
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, 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
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, San Francisco
@anastasiaashman
How do you grow community?
CAN YOU GET IT
TO SCALE
ITSELF?
10. Anastasia Ashman
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, 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
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, 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
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, San Francisco
@anastasiaashman
Make deep connections
that don’t scale
…then keep building
your product & taking
care of your community.
13. Anastasia Ashman
Family fund manager, Topaz Ventures LLC, San Francisco
@anastasiaashman
Thank you!
In ❤️ memory of Bunny,
my longtime assistant
EUROPEAN INNOVATION ACADEMY
ALL THE EIA STUDENTS, LECTURERS, MENTORS, & STAFF
ANNI SINIJARV
ALAR KOLK
KADI SINILO
MAHER HAKIM
HEDI KRONSTROM
ADINA FAIMAN
EGON SAKS
AJDA MUSTAFOVA TORDO
PAMELA DAY
BURC SAHINOGLU
UNIVERSITY NICE SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS
NICE COTE D’AZUR METROPOLIS
14. What’s the key ingredient to meaningful
revenue-producing community?
— RIGHT NOW —
Tweet your answer to me!
@anastasiaashman
#EIA2016Nice
Editor's Notes
what is community online?
how can you build community for your purposes as a startup entrepreneur?
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. Customers and prospects can interact with each other as part of the community to provide recommendations, training and even support — that can even replace your own efforts and staff.
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.
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
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!
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 will follow.
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!