How Design Companies Build Communities
Community Building 101: research project
Morning from Kyiv!
🌟 First great news today: We launched our Research on Community Building on Product Hunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/how-design-companies-build-communities
🌟 Second great news: we managed to get Adobe and Abstract as our sponsors. Both companies are proving cool products for designers. So it's a perfect match.
It's big-name companies, so I'm feeling very exited!
Some time we launched How Design Companies Build Communities, a learning project on community building.
To keep it live we started looking for sponsors. 😅 Anyone working with sponsors knows that it's not that easy. Especially when your project is brand new...
After a short call, Supernova was interested in partnering with us. I was so excited! 🥰
And it's a good deal for both sides. Supernova takes mobile designs created in Sketch and transforms them into production interface code for iOS, Android, React Native and Flutter. While our How Design Companies Build Communities is focused right on designers and creative people. So it was a win-win partnership.
🤔 My lessons learned:
- working with sponsors in about relationship, a real call is much better than hundreds of emails
- having a clear proposal is a must. Sponsors need to understand what they are getting.
- expect a slow response time at the beginning
- cold emails and tweets do work
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What do you offer as part of the sponsorship? What do you feel sponsors are most interested in?
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We never run sponsorship before so it was our first attempt.
Offered:
- banner on the site
- quote
- promo from our side
I think the main benefit for sponsors was the relevant audience. As we keep the whole project very designers-oriented. Also, everyone to whom we showed site liked its design 🙈Probably, the site was selling itself as well.
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@rosiesherry honestly, I don't think that I'm the master of sales 😂So it definitely not my sales skills which convinced sponsors.
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Hey Lisa, Congratulations. Lovely designed site as well :)
Couple of questions:
- Do you're "supporters" (AppSpector, ProtoPie etc ...) pay you? If so how much?
- How much do you charge Supernova?
I notice you have 2.2k / mo on your Product Page so I'm not sure if this includes the new sponsor? And also, what is your monthly traffic?
I know these questions are a little "personal" so no worries if private! I have a sponsor on my own marketing site, so this would be really help for context!
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Congrats Lisa! 🙌
I'm following your progress from "Flawless App" on Techstars. Wish all the best with new products.I have a few questions for you, would love to hear your experience:
How to ask for money? Are you negotiate sponsor's price or do you propose your own?-
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I don't know if my approach was the best one but it works :)
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Answering your questions:
How to ask for money?
"hey, company! I have a cool project with XYZ for audience A, B, C. Would you consider adding your banners\sponsorship\promoting your service there? If yes, where to send the sponsorship proposal. " or "let's jump on a quick call, so I will tell you more".I preferred to send presentation with prices beforehand. On the call companies asked price by themselves but they knew it already. So it was organic and no surprising. When I told "sponsorship," no one asked for a free deal.
It was only one call, when a company wanted to partner. I was bloody direct: we're looking for sponsors.
Are you negotiate sponsor's price or do you propose your own?
I proposed my own. Price was equal for everyone. I mean, everyone received the same presentation and choose the best option for them. -
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wow!
@alexwawl, so cool you know about Techstars, that was a crazy and great experience. I miss that time a lot!
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congratulations!!
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thanks 🥳
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And if anyone has questions about working with sponsors - happy to answer!
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Great to hear about this! I've been nervous about approaching this question with potential sponsors, though we've had some interest. Mainly, re: how one I even begins to come up with a price? I really like your point about the word "sponsorship" in itself signaling that it's not free. That's a great start. I guess I'm worried about proposing a price that's way too high. We're in a very niche market (bacteriophage research and development), and there are a limited number of companies in the space, so we want to build good long term relationships with the ones out there in a position to sponsor (so I don't want to screw it up in the beginning!). Anyway, not necessarily looking for definitive answers, just wanted to join the conversation, say hello, and that your comment about this topic has helped me see that it's a bit of a tricky area to navigate for others too!
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Thanks Lisa for the lessons list, that's really helpful.
How does the partnership work, is it like sharing the revenue 50-50? Who brings the projects to work on?
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
hey to IndieHackers here!
For the last 4 years, I’ve been working with community building in design & development industry while building my tools and open-source projects.
My team used many community-building techniques by ourselves and learn from cool companies in our space — Sketch, InVision, Figma, Marvel.
I decided to put all my learnings into one research on How design companies build communities. In short, you can follow 8 steps to grow your community 👉
- Give the best learning opportunities for the community.
- Provide resources community might need
- Invite the community to contribute.
- Empower the community to build plugins & extensions
- Actively communicate with the community
- Get community offline
- Be proactive in existing communities
- Manage community efforts
https://flawlessapp.io/designcommunities
🎉 Now the research is live 🎉And I hope it will help other makers to make a viber online communities!
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So happy to answer any questions on community building 🥰
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Hi @LisaDziuba - I am building https://womenhustlers.com
What's your advise on the right platform to build my community? I don't want to be dependent on a single platform (like facebook - which may change policies at whim). What'd be your suggestion?
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According to our experience, we could never bring people to the platform which they only have to use only because of us. So we started using several platforms that our target users were using frequently anyway for their own purposes. This might be slack, telegram, Fb, Google group, etc. So I would recommend finding out what platforms your target audience is using and be prepared to manage a couple of them at the same time
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hey @Pritisha! I totally agree with @Jibla.
You are already working with your users generating content around their stories. In an ideal world, that would help to build a community around\on your site itself.
In reality, people need to change their behavior patterns and move their communication to a new place. That's bad.
So it's easier to use an existing online platform, where people spend time.
The bigger problem is finding Product MArket Fit, as in your case - a community is your core product.
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Got it. Thanks for taking out the time to answer @Jibla @LisaDziuba
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Hi Lisa,
That's a great piece of content. Can you please share your results in numbers?
Which of techniques worked best for you?Thanks!
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@maxshash our community in numbers:
Community on Medium: 6.8K readers, 31 writers, 150K unique views per month. It took us 3 years to build it (https://medium.com/flawless-app-stories)
Community over social accounts: over 10K followers.
Community around our open source activities is hard to calculate but let's sayAwesome Design Tools https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Awesome-Design-Tools 156 contributors, 16500 starts
MArketing for Engineers https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-Engineers
5.3K starts-
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i voted at every place where i have an account. really amazed by all work
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Which of techniques worked best for you?
Proving learning content, free resources and motivating community to contribute. We used all of the things I mentioned in my initial post and even more 😅
Keep in mind, we have been working with the community building since 2015....
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ps: I think I will come to the Kyiv meetup, so we can chat more!
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hey Max!
Happy you liked it! We put a lot of efforts in making it :)
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I'd love to add that you can build community with limited resources as well :) We did that for our projects based on steps I mentioned. And it worked 💃
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Thanks for sharing this. It's really helpful for us right now as we identify our community.
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@senorcodecat good luck with your community building 🚀
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Hi Lisa,
Thanks for sharing your community-building experience. I'm particularly interested in your idea 6, "Get Community Offline." As much as we are in the hi-tech era, people want high touch. I believe that's the importance of your step 6.
I've been building a small community of writers or authors since 2015 by the name Book Writing Clinic. Today we are about 100 strong. We communicate mostly via WhatsApp and via offline meetups. We recently developed a photobook of all members and people love it.
I believe you're on the right track. Keep it up.
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wow! having a photo book is such a cool idea!
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This will be my weekend read.
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the best weekend read ;)
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Good thread!
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I have a question. What do you think is important when you building a community?
I mean what quick simple steps you should do in order to jump start it?
I have an idea about building a community. I think I have good experience that can be valuable for others. But as other people - i have limited resources. like it's hard for me to go from door to door - promote it and always be positive :)-
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Don't you mind sharing what type of community do plan to build? around your product? Is so which one?
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sorry for long message. thanks for your time.
I want to build a community around food tech topic. My imaginable users should be interested to combine forces and move projects more quickly together. I have a lot of experience in building projects related to food: recipe websites, meal planning software, food delivery, etc. I name it Food Alliance. sounds good in my opinion
I also start a long thread at Hackernoon forum https://community.hackernoon.com/t/food-alliance-project-diary/2034/
where I post information that I collected for 70 days straight. I want to create a separated website and slowly move information from that forum away. That information should be re-organized, have categories, etc.
because when I start to talk with people that interested to join - that thread become a mess. I was thinking about creating a discord chatroom, so I can have more clear/separated conversations, but it will require additional time and I'm also not sure if it will have a lot of success.It also hard for me to understand what to do next. I'm very nerdy, so when I start a conversation with "normal people", they have hard times to understand what I mean and how they can benefit from my knowledge and also from joining this alliance.
So growing userbase is another big issue for me, but I think when I move part of the content and prepare it - more people will find it pretty useful.Another issue - I don't want to use normal ways - aka setup newsletter/cross-post to social media, etc. because I have more fun with code and while it does not have any exposure - I'm pretty lazy.
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Loads of great research there, there are many steps - which do you put more effort towards and why?
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I'd love to add: we try to help folks from the community as much as we can. That comes to Actively communicate with the community.
- when we can, we share tools done the community
- support Product Hunt launches
- share articles of folks
- mention them in our newsletters
and much more! Now it's very organic for us :)
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yeah, being helpful is super important, even in a daily life 🥰
#givefirst
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thanks for asking!
Now we focus more on the contribution step. When you have already community (which we have) it makes sense to engage more with the people.
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Thanks for sharing this resource Liza! Love the piece around enabling people to create and contribute resources to the community.
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basically a good quality feedback loop u r creating! Good job
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Hi Lisa,
A question from a beginner community builder.
I'm trying to build a community by running a meetup. I've started it around 4 months ago. But it doesn't really take off. I have around 80 people on meetup.com and around 10 on the FB page. Around 10-15 show up to offline meetups.
I guess what I'm struggling with is building momentum. When I post a question or some useful link people don't engage. Even when I DM people to find out what they need, they answer quite reluctantly. And I'm not even trying to sell anything.
So my question is what should be the steps at the very beginning of community life-cycle to really make it a community, not a bunch of people?
Thanks,
AlexP.S. By the way, I see a lot of people from Kyiv. I've been there for 5 years before relocating to Prague :)
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hey @AlexMartynov! 10-15 people is not a bad result. At the beginning of my community-building work - it was a radio silence as well. For our first meetup, which was in an event with one speaker, showed up 8 or 10 people.
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and for our first posts, we had almost zero engagement. It takes time to build a community and a lot of manual work in the early days. To boost community at the beginning, you should find 2-3 ambassadors, who will create the first activities. That's like market places or community sites like Quora: firstly founders were making all the buzz. Otherwise, the place feels very lonely.
Same about meetups: having 10 engaged people is a big win, as you can motivate them to help you building community
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5 Comments
Out of curiosity who in the company do you reach out for sponsorships at a big company like Adobe? And what does a sponsorship give them / give you?
Joining this question. The main mystery is -- what was your proposal to them?
Hi,
I wonder what is your business model for this project?
Thanks!
Congratulations! Seems like today calls for a celebration!! :D
nice one Lisa! It's important to make projects sustainable, and when the sponsors are a perfect fit it helps everyone...that's when sponsorship is great!