Why The Best Startups Create Powerful Communities
Building a product is the easy part. Growing a community of passionate people around it is truly much harder. Having a core group of users who join you on the startup journey through the highs and lows is what motivates the team to keep going.
Airbnb, Yelp, and Quora are a few companies that espouse this passion. Each of their users is working towards bettering the product or service for millions of other people. When people rent their places out on Airbnb, they know that this will have a rippling effect. It will set forth a chain of actions encouraging others to do the same. Collectively, the community can change the sharing economy on a global scale. When people write quality reviews on Yelp or provide insightful answers on Quora, they are adding value to the system and believe that others would do the same for them. This goes far beyond the notion of crowdsourcing.
These users have to be driven by a vision and invested in the same mission as the startup.
They must believe that this company will change the future and improve their own lives. Many times, these products aren’t perfect when they first get released. However, if the technology solves an actual need or pain point, users are willing to rally around the startup and help make it better.
In our case, we found a way to build a community when fireflies.ai transformed from a small project to help make our own lives easier into a larger initiative with a thousand of our users turning into contributors. We initially built a personal assistant to help us stay on top of our conversations. We then made Fireflies an autonomous A.I. that keeps track of what we said in our conversations and auto-generates tasks out of important messages. It works quietly in the background while making my life easier and more organized.
When we first started, our Natural Language Processing Algorithms were relatively premature. People were willing to tolerate the faulty suggestions and bugs because Fireflies was already starting to make a small difference in their lives. This was possible because our first users really resonated with the problem we were solving. Fellow entrepreneurs and busy colleagues were inundated with communication channels. The personal assistant made sure they were taking action on things that might have slipped through the cracks.
I was pleasantly surprised by the initial interest. This motivated me to personally reach out to every one of our first 300 users. I would talk to them about what they expected from Fireflies and what aspects of their lives they wanted to streamline. Talking to each person and sparking that initial connection was what allowed us to become a community. They felt invested in the product, regularly sending feedback and suggestions. We hadn’t built anything before that received this sort of passionate response. It was possible because our early users realized we were just like them and that we shared similar pain points around productivity.
These users saw how much work we were putting in around the clock and they themselves asked if there was anything they could do to help make the product better.
This act of kindness allowed us to build simple systems into our product so that our users could train Fireflies. Though we are only a few weeks old, our users are categorizing thousands of tasks and are essentially teaching Fireflies to better recognize actions from conversational messages.
The willingness to help further reinforces the need for Fireflies. It also helps our community grow organically because people are passionate and proud to be a part of the larger mission. When they tell their peers, they explain how Fireflies gets smarter as the community grows.
Hence, we stopped thinking about Fireflies as just some software tool or the packaging of cool tech like NLP and Machine Learning. It was time to look beyond at the larger picture.
Instead, we are motivated by the people that are shaping our platform and the community of users that has formed around our product.
I believe that this is the fundamental building block to building something people care about and something that they actually want to use everyday.
