A Startup Community Equals Hyper-Growth.
By: Jannis Dust
Tags: Startup Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Founders, Entrepreneur, Startup

A Startup Community Equals Hyper-Growth.

Photo by Wendy Wei from Pexels

What leads a company like Gymshark with millions of revenue, an evaluation from above $ 1bn, and hundreds of employees to extraordinary success?

What leads a company like Tesla, like Apple, like Starbucks to that much success?

A community OR a group of people who can identify themselves with the brand AND are actively participating in the development.

Why should you build your community for your startup? And why should you start as soon as possible?

Why are we at epap trying to build a community around our app?

Let’s dive in.

Why should you build your own community?

A community makes a lot of your work a hell lot easier. It will evolve with your company in a best-case scenario.

“A community is a living organism,” Sampson argues, “It’s either declining or improving; there’s no steady-state in a community.”

Communities exist since the earliest days. Those who worked together survived and those who stayed alone died — it’s deeply connected in our human being.

And it’s also based on every company nowadays.

Businesses are solely only there to serve a need.

In a world full of information and opportunity overflow to buy something, it’s not about getting it. It’s about showing who you are.

You don’t buy a coffee at Starbucks because it’s such a good coffee. You don’t buy a Porsche or and you don’t buy a MacBook because it’s so innovative.

You want to be a part of the group. You want to be able to identify with it.

We want to be part of a group that makes us feel supported and validates our identity. This is why when people feel isolated from others who share their identity, they’ll naturally seek out community.

You have a golden opportunity to build a community when you can identify a group of people with similar identities or interests, who feel isolated from each other.

Building a community around your brand is a terrific way to enhance brand loyalty.

Especially at the beginning, you will benefit tremendously from it. If you target a small niche and can convince people e.g. to using your app you will have great early adopters just because they can identify with your values and being “beginners”.

Community-building is a key component in long-term success for business but it’s also freaking challenging.

Can I just start a community?

Unfortunately, not.

You cannot just say:

Alright, here it is. Enjoy your community and you know, do community stuff!

Communities cannot be built in a day. They need constant nurturing to be grown and become self-dependent.

But as soon as you initiated a community, A LOT of things will be easier.

For example customer support: Users will help other users, users will be a lot more accommodating with mistakes, users will engage to help.

Building a community means going above and beyond the standard business/customer relationship by establishing that your corporation exists as more than a basic for-profit entity. You must have a focus on your client community, and engage in activities that are beneficial to the wider residential area in which your business is located.

Moreover, it will boost your brand’s reputation. Any campaign you launch via email or social media is much more likely to earn organic shares and engagement when you have invested in community-building activities. You’ll also find that your customers will go out of their way to bring you business even when it’s more convenient for them to shop online or at closer retail stores.

That’s another point. If you were able to create a community e.g. around your software or app you will definitely have a significantly higher referral rate than without.

Word of mouth will be huge for you e.g. for scaling your app and solving problems on your platform solution.

Community is key, he quickly realized. “[It’s] just as much a part of [our success] as any code that we can write on the site.” Unsplash, Mikael Cho.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you found it interesting to hear why I am eager to build a community around our company epap and why you should thrive to do so, too.

So, hopefully, you will accept that building a community is a key factor for success. I am sure everyone can do it if they try it consistently enough!