Interesting post, Tom! I've used Yonder as a case study for community building in my own start-up, thanks for providing such a great example : ). I'd love to ask a few questions:
1. You alluded to the fact that the founder had tasked you with building a community. This is a common trend with tech products learning from the success of Notion and Figma for lead gen purposes. However, to my knowledge, few companies actually have the patience to execute the community marketing strategy - how did you manage expectations on the timeline for this?
2. Regarding engagement, did you ever do anything to push people up the commitment curve?
3. Often in these groups feedback and suggestions are super useful. But getting buy-in from the product and tech-teams for a feature request with a few Slack reacts can be challenging, did you have to gather more evidence for developing the product roadmap, if so, how?
1. We got it wrong early on, and then had another crack at it. We realised that without a product there's not much to talk about. Being early on at Yonder meant I could instil within the team the importance of speaking with customers. I was always reminding the team of how lucky we were to have customers who wanted us to succeed and it really didn't take much for engineers, designers and the rest of the team to start engaging with them.
2. Nah. Just focused on keeping the content as valuable as possible.
3. Community input is just part of the feedback we get on product building. We've always been clear that we'll build what's best for the most amount of customers and not just the few in our community. For instance, we get asked to improved our budgeting features a lot, but we've always been clear that it's not a priority because we don't think we can do it as well as a Monzo/Emma. Doesn't stop them asking though and we try to make sure they feel heard.
Interesting post, Tom! I've used Yonder as a case study for community building in my own start-up, thanks for providing such a great example : ). I'd love to ask a few questions:
1. You alluded to the fact that the founder had tasked you with building a community. This is a common trend with tech products learning from the success of Notion and Figma for lead gen purposes. However, to my knowledge, few companies actually have the patience to execute the community marketing strategy - how did you manage expectations on the timeline for this?
2. Regarding engagement, did you ever do anything to push people up the commitment curve?
3. Often in these groups feedback and suggestions are super useful. But getting buy-in from the product and tech-teams for a feature request with a few Slack reacts can be challenging, did you have to gather more evidence for developing the product roadmap, if so, how?
4. What you got against Discord haha?
Hey Talvin. Glad this has been helpful!
1. We got it wrong early on, and then had another crack at it. We realised that without a product there's not much to talk about. Being early on at Yonder meant I could instil within the team the importance of speaking with customers. I was always reminding the team of how lucky we were to have customers who wanted us to succeed and it really didn't take much for engineers, designers and the rest of the team to start engaging with them.
2. Nah. Just focused on keeping the content as valuable as possible.
3. Community input is just part of the feedback we get on product building. We've always been clear that we'll build what's best for the most amount of customers and not just the few in our community. For instance, we get asked to improved our budgeting features a lot, but we've always been clear that it's not a priority because we don't think we can do it as well as a Monzo/Emma. Doesn't stop them asking though and we try to make sure they feel heard.