Community Copilot

Key learnings:

• Building personal relationships with early customers is super helpful. Once they feel comfortable with you they're more likely to give honest feedback. If you're honest and vulnerable they will be rooting for you.

• If you can, listen to their feature requests and ship some of the quick wins rapidly. This will show your commitment to the relationship, and you'll get some new features out of it too.

• Embed yourself where your customers are. In our case they're running Slack communities. So I joined a load of Slack communities.

--

Community Copilot is a toolkit for community managers like me. It combines analytics with functional tools like bulk mail-merge DMs and emails, and a member CRM. It currently integrates with Slack.

To find other Slack community managers, I joined a bunch of Slack communities. Most of them were pretty quiet, but I found one that seemed lively. I noted that its community managers were proactive and friendly, so I mentioned I was working on Community Copilot.

One of them was interested, and said she was already using another similar platform but our pricing seemed better (i.e. cheaper).

I got on a call with her to demo it. She liked what she saw, and suggested a few additional features. I was eager to please so I churned out the features within the next few days.

After 10 days of back-and-forth - her pointing out bugs, us fixing them, her suggesting features, us implementing them - she told me she'd got approval to pay for it!

And that was that. Our first paid customer, paying $49 a month. A small but mighty milestone.

My next task is to find more community managers like her.

We've been working on Community Copilot for a few months now while I've been using it to help manage my own community.

Meanwhile, we've been collecting waiting list signups on our landing page, but beyond that hadn't really done much validation beyond asking a few people we knew whether they thought it was a good idea.

So, in an attempt to validate it further, in January we offered some lifetime pre-order deals, just to test the water. We were super happy to get 4 pre-orders at $99 each... a steal for them because we're hoping to charge at least $50 a month, but a good validator for us.

This week we finally got to a point where we felt ready to launch it to these initial customers.

That probably means we're launching way too late.

I'm definitely guilty of building in some features which may or may not be necessary.

We're looking forward to getting feedback on the product from our first 'real' customers.