Hi! I've posted a couple of comments before but just wanted to introduce myself here. I founded professional event guide The Fetch (http://thefetch) and through that process noticed it was hard to discover great freelance community professionals (vetting voice/tone and scoping deliverables is hard. Then, agencies are overpriced, and full-timers have costly overheads).
So, my co-founder and I created CloudPeeps in January this year as a marketplace to connect businesses with remote community builders. We smashed all our beta goals, have a growing list of customers and are now starting to build out the main product. We're lucky to count Joel Gascoigne from Buffer and Ligaya Tichy (led community at Yelp and Airbnb) as our advisors.
Happy to answer any questions!
@rrhoover Funny you mentioned @DavidSpinks – just left a meeting with him in NY. :)
So, I touched on a little about the evolution – I think it's a big problem companies are facing now. Markets are noisy, there's new products/services launching every day (as Product Hunt showcases) and what cuts through is building a meaningful long-term community around them.
60% of people we profiled believe building a community is highly important for their business but right now it can be time consuming and expensive. Some people use social media tools (and bots!) for audience growth but community is about real people interacting with real people (like our experienced CloudPeeps!).
So, Shala and I got really excited about offering a curated and trustworthy marketplace experience for community professionals, and just did it.
I see The Fetch as a complementary community channel to CloudPeeps. Like how Behance has 99u or the fellow Australian-startup story of how 99designs grew out of the Sitepoint community.
Best of all, The Fetch is a paying customer of CloudPeeps and Shala joked that I'm such a perfectionist when it comes to community (since that's my background across the US and Australia) that if we could please me, we could please anyone. My peep Shannon is amazing and doing a much better job of building The Fetch's community that I was!
So excited to share that I have joined CloudPeeps as the Chief Content Officer! Can't wait to get to know this community even better! http://blog.cloudpeeps.com/welco...
Congrats on the traction @KateKendall and @ShalaBurroughs! I'm curious what your plans are with the Fetch and how you came to the decision to start something new.
(cc @DavidSpinks, one of the most knowledgable dudes on community)
Huge fan of what cloudpeeps is doing. Definitely filling a need for a lot of companies who want to start investing in community but don't have a budget for a FT person. I think the challenge will be to keep the quality of the CM's they provide and the strategy high but they're off to a really good start.
Thanks David!
Salaries for full-time CMs can often be quite conservative so we've had some incredible and highly experienced CMs joining CloudPeeps to take home more. We're even finding that working on CloudPeeps could offer a higher earning potential long-term. (Plus they can travel and not live in major cities!) This (along with great customer brands/communities) will be a good attractor to keep the quality up!
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