Building community before product means first understanding who belongs and why people would return. The five steps below come from the early dua.com story, when we were learning that through our own community.
A 5-Step process for building a great Community that worked for us:
- Understand & create your Identity
- Build Trust by being transparent & responsive
- Engagement & Participation is key
- Reward: Give Value to the community
- Repeat & Grow
As important as defining what your community is about:
Define what your community is not about. Exclude.
Otherwise, it loses its identity.
Example in real:
1) Identity: dua.com for Albanian worldwide
2) Trust: Sharing weekly and monthly reports about our progress, sending newsletters to our community, communicating daily on our social media, answering all questions through our support (over 2’500 tickets so far!)
3) Participation: 2-way-communication, polls, surveys, AMAs, soon: in-App chat #duaa with the community), give-aways, community-marketplace, community-feedback that leads to new features/improvements – and way more to come!
4) Reward: The value we give to our community is dedicated #matchmaking through our app, they meet real verified people online whom they can match (over 1 Million matches so far). The marketplace is for everyone in our community, sell & buy. Win-Win-Win.
5) Repeat & Grow: We’re growing right now at about 1’000 people per day, which is amazing! We just crossed 180’000 registered users!
