Founder Ryan Hoover couldn’t do it alone would personally email founders with advice and connect them with other founders, creating a tight-knit group. Not something that would eventually drive millions of visitors a month. Product Hunt feels obvious today, but 15 years ago the idea that people would hang out on a site upvoting and discussing new startup products and inventions probably seemed…nerdy. I guess I’m not the only one going through this. “We would host these like these little happy hours and they would leave these events and say ‘Gosh, like I feel a little less alone. They started with a meetup series and grew into a conference that now hosts many thousands of this market, which all started with a little human connection. So we could never build a big company if the job itself didn’t grow.” So they began building community. “Our business was building software for those people. But back in 2013, “there were literally a whopping 1000 people in the profession worldwide”, according to CEO Nick Mehta. Today, Gainsight serves 20,000+ customer success professionals out of a market of 300,000. And job boards give them a centralized place to see their options and feel optimistic about the industry. Forums and chat channels allow them to get instant feedback on their work. There are many times I questioned if I was on a dead-end path.Ĭommunity is the most effective way to create a support network for these members of your newfound category. Take it from me: I’ve been in the community industry since it was maybe 50 people worldwide, and seen the majority of my original cohort move into other roles. And all of this can drive loneliness and despair in your early category adopters. There’s not much content to tell you how to do your job or if you’re doing it right. You’re often the only person at your company with the title or responsibilities. 2) Preventing Category DespairĪs exciting as a new category can be, it can also be lonely. Only a community-driven meetup program, for example, can regularly reach 15 cities with only one community program manager. You writing on your blog about a category feels far less legitimate than dozens of community members doing the same.Īnd empowering your community to go represent the category far and wide gives you scale you cannot normally reach as a small category creator. Putting like-minded people in a room together to discuss their category is a surefire way to get them hyped up and excited to contribute to the ecosystem.Ĭommunity can also be a great way to get these early category adopters to collaborate to create content, events, best practices, etc that help promote and legitimize your category. It’s much easier to get excited in a group than alone. These strengths neatly address two needs for getting traction for your new category: 1) Creating and Building Excitement The three strengths of community are scale, passion, and perspective. This is why community is an essential ingredient for category creators. With this comes the risk that nobody buys in and that there’s not enough activity to sustain your business and the category. You’re inventing a category from, essentially, nothing. The challenge, then, is that category creation involves creation. It can help your business stand out in the crowded software market by avoiding the crowded paths, it can help you create rabid evangelists for whom you’re the first company to truly see them, and it can help you access new budget instead of fighting to get a company to switch software providers. Category creation is one of the highest risk/reward plays in business.
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