@erictwillis has done an amazing job building the Maker Hunt community which I have been fortunate to be part of. By association with that group, I've seen how he has connected with a number of significant 'community driven' startups. I'm sure this book will have some really valuable content and I look forward to checking it out!
Congrats, @erictwillis! I'll definitely be backing on Kickstarter. Question: How challenging has the interview process been? Have you found it easy or difficult to get makers to participate?
@mignano That part has been relatively easy as I've developed a lot of great relationships with makers. I had already interviewed some of them for the Maker Hunt AMAs so that made it much easier to just go a bit deeper. For anyone who is interested, the Maker Hunt AMAs are here: https://medium.com/@makerhunt
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Backer number 35! Wohoo! Congrats, @erictwillis! Definitely excited for this book. Community driven startups are the future fosho! would love to learn from the master and help out in anyway I can, Sensei Eric . ^_^
@erictwillis Generally communities are made up of a small number of contributors and a large number of consumers. Have you seen any cool ways that startups try to increase the number of contributors within their community?
@realjeffregan Hello Jeff. I haven't seen a lot of "cool" tactics. I think the most successful community managers just pay attention and manually pull people in. However, I do like how Quibb does it. They have a cool "ask for a comment" feature where you can ask someone to comment on an article. Whenever my engagement level drops, I get one of those notifications from @sandimac and immediately jump in with a response. It's a great way to keep the engagement level high. That doesn't necessarily answer your question, but engagement level is just as important as volume in a sense that you need to both nail that and reduce churn to truly grow a community.
Backed! Eric is an amazing resource for and supporter of makers in the MakerHunt community. This is going to be good.
Q: Who would benefit most from reading a book like this?
@jonarcher Thanks, Jonathan. If you're responsible for building or maintaining a community, you would want this book as you'll get insights as to why some communities became wildly successful and why some failed. You'll want this book if you're a maker/product manager that needs to consider how to best leverage online communities to launch and get to product/market fit. If you are someone who is interested in how online communities are changing the way products are launched and distributed (probably anyone working at a startup), I think you'll learn some valuable frameworks, best practices, and market insights that could help you become better equipped to dealing with this changing world.
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Good luck with the book! I also hope you'll share some thoughts on how great communities get built. It's an important lesson for community activists globally, as well as for the "startups for startups" everywhere. Thank you for your work and dedication!
@rossomakha Hello Masha. Yes. There will be a section dedicated to this. I've talked to a lot of people to determine the topics that should be discussed. One of the most consistent requests was about that very thing: People wanted to know the intimate details about the very early stages of successfully launched/scaled communities. So I'll be providing details about how some great community managers/founders found those first users and what they did to retain them and also maintain a healthy community as it grew.
@rossomakha@erictwillis I want to +1 the comment about community activists. How to organize online is a broadly applicable topic. Aggregating and organizing people for startup growth is one use, doing it for activism is another.
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