Introduction

A community refers to a group of people with similar interests and needs. A growing community signifies that the startup’s products or services are being more widely accepted by people, and is on the pathway towards mass adoption in the future. 

Communities play a crucial role in brand recognition. A product or service with a supporting ecosystem reduces barriers to adoption. Competing products will have a hard time creating such an advantage. Moreover, community driven companies reduce users’ affinity towards switching to alternatives, thereby creating significant monetary benefits for the business.

Definition of Community Moat

Community transcends a simple sense of belonging. It is a framework for creating value in the context of business. A community can be understood simply by comparing it to an audience.

To establish an audience, one must assist others. To develop a community, one must assist people in aiding one another.

This approach is in stark contrast to the business strategies we’ve been witnessing in the historical context. In general, corporations create all the value for consumers. However, Community-driven enterprises create opportunities for customers to produce mutual value.

Building a community around the firm is one of the most cost-effective ways to generate interest in the firm’s product. If the firm takes the right steps to grow its community, it can aid the firm throughout the company’s life cycle. A community encourages buyers to feel more connected to the business and the things that the firm sells.

Creating a buzz around a product can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. In the past, this buzz was generated using a combination of videos, websites, influencer reviews, and extensive advertising across numerous marketing channels. The community bypasses all these channels and reaches a highly connected and relevant audience without incurring those fees, hence increasing the product’s likelihood of success. 

In general, there are two primary varieties of communities created by businesses, i.e. Communities of Product and Communities of Practice. Both of them are discussed below: 

• Communities of Product

They are built specifically around products. This provides a location for consumers to ask questions about the product, exchange lessons learned, contribute content, services, or anything else of value to the platform, and remain in touch with the business. Some of the prominent examples in this category include Twilio Champions, HubSpot User Groups, Notion Community and many more.

• Communities of Practice

These are built around the objective of studying a field. Such communities try to encompass all individuals within a role or industry, resulting in a community much broader than the product. Then, it is the responsibility of the community manager or sales team to engage members on the product’s use cases and, when applicable, to directly contact prospective buyers. The Community Club (for community managers powered by the community tooling business Commsor), Hack The Box (for cybersecurity aficionados), and Bravado are a few examples (for sales professionals).

Community Moat : Examples worth following

The note-taking application Evernote is a wonderful example of a Community Moat. Their vibrant community invites customers to connect directly with employees, create wish lists for future versions, and discover what goes on behind the scenes. With a potent blend of communication, access to other customers, brand openness, and numerous chances for the co-creation of content, the community generates Evernote evangelists and makes it more difficult for competitors to get a foothold.

Codecademy is another startup that has found out how to leverage a community to promote its business strategy. Since its founding nine years ago, more than fifty million people have taken one of the company’s courses. The secret to Codecademy’s success has been its capacity to link learners who contribute to the catalogue and collaborate to develop their skills, in addition to its extensive library of interactive instructional content. Users of Codecademy Pro (the company’s commercial product) get access to a Slack community where they can network, share best practices, and attend events with industry leaders and their peers. More experienced students assist less experienced students. This rich learning environment creates a network effect in the business model of a company that may not have had one intrinsically.

Aligning community to business objectives

Before committing time and money in creating a community, it is essential to understand the business’s objectives. It directly reflects the reason why a business should develop a community.

There are six purposes that can be pursued by a community.

1. Support: Create spaces for customers to answer questions and solve problems for each other. Example: Autodesk’s support community
2. Product: Create spaces for customers to share product feedback and ideas with each other and also with the company’s team. Example: Atlassian’s feedback section
3. Acquisition: Build programs that help the firm to grow its pipeline and customer base. Example: Branch’s Mobile Growth community
4. Contribution: Enable members to contribute content, services, or something else of value to a platform created by the firm. Example: Notion’s Template Gallery
5. Engagement: Connect customers to each other around their common interests in order to increase customer retention. Example: Culture Amp’s Culture First
6. Success: Enable customers to teach each other how to better use a product and be more successful in their careers. Example: Salesforce’s Trailblazer program

Each objective comes with a different set of metrics that are going to be discussed in the next section.

Metrics Related to Community Moat

There is no single indicator that can define a community’s health. KPIs will vary based on the nature of the business and the intended audience. However, a general list of metrics that are useful for assessing community health is shared below:

Events both digital and in-person:

• No. of events
• No. of new event attendees
• No. of return attendees
• Rate of churned attendees (Percentage of people who only attended one event)
• The average number of attendees per event over time

Online communities:

• No. of community members on Slack, Discord, etc.
• Percentage of monthly active members
• No. of new members sign-up
• No. of posts added in the community by employees and non-employee
• No. of comments created in reaction to the community posts
• Percentage of comments from new community members by cohort
• No. of members leaving the community

Open source communities:

• No. of pull requests by non-employees (product usage)
• No. of non-employee contributors
• Percentage of code contributed by non-employees

Social communities:

• No. of followers
• The growth rate of followers month-over-month
• No. of retweets by month
• No. of at mentions by month
• The average number of likes and comments per post

Other KPIs:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• No. of community ambassadors

All the metrics that we have discussed here are considered in a broader context. Businesses should use them interchangeably according to their business needs. 

Conclusion

The future of business will be more open, connected, and interactive in nature. Communities will alter how we interact with brands, goods, and other individuals. While there is no silver bullet for developing a community, success is achieved by monitoring a concise, focused set of criteria and making adjustments based on these criterias on a frequent basis. This is an evolving process in which the firm’s cross-functional team should repeatedly inquire about the observed results and generate hypotheses for driving improvements. Startups should also look for opportunities to create community driven launch strategies and create a loyal fan base even before the launch of their products or services. This can be one of the best ways to create an advantage that will sustain in the long term, creating a recurring benefit compared to their competitors.