Growing (in) Community

If your startup is playing in a niche market where the community is important, you have to take some action for engaging with this community. In the event hosted by ScaleX ventures, I talked about what we do as a company, and what I did myself to grow ourselves in the community and to grow the community itself.

Transcript

5. Growing (in) an Active and Engaged Community Emrah Samdan, March 2020
6. About Thundra • Born in Opsgenie. Great example of intrapreneurship. • From zero users to hundreds. • From 5 people to 17 (yet). • Got a Series A funding recently by Battery Ventures, York IE, and ScaleX Ventures.
7. Time Travel March 2020 Core organizer of SLSDays Global. Full Community engagement. October 2019 First ServerlessDays in Istanbul. Talk acceptance rate over 50%. March 2018 Limited reputation. No marketing effort or people. 2017 Thundra was born in Opsgenie. First blog post.
8. Agenda • What does it mean to be engaged in community? • How do big pile of content can help? • Should I buy a ring to community to engage with them? • Tactics != Execution. What about behaviour? • Q&A
9. Who am I? Happy Father Product VP at Thundra Co-organizer of Serverless Turkey & Core Organizer of ServerlessDays Not founder of Thundra
10. What does community engagement mean? Connected with the users in different natural ways. Having stars in the team that people want to consult to. Enabling strangers without expecting a return Teaching and learning at the same time.
11. What did Thundra do as a company? Blogs, Blogs, Blogs Webinars, How-to’s, Product Videos Social Media Strategy Documentation
12. Social Media Trends
13. What did Emrah do to engage with community? Well, honestly whatever it takes.
14. What did Emrah do to engage with community? Well, honestly whatever it takes.
15. Evolve with knowledge, sharing and engagement. Takes time, effort and money but worth it.
16. Don’t. Ever. Do This.
17. Prove that you know about the subject • Write content. Ask for feedback. Change it or create another one. • Answer questions on public platforms like community Slacks, Reddit, forums and so on. • Start asking for 1-1 knowledge exchange. • Learn use cases. Change the product if possible. Tailor the content strategy.
18. Getting Accepted to the Community Events Catchy title but not too marketing. Don’t put your employer name anywhere in the abstract and description. Convince people that they will learn something
21. During the conference Study to the people Don’t ever argue with anyone Have a positive mood Socialize, socialize, socialize
22. Putting yourself in another part of the table. • Give back to community by organizing an event. • Learned a lot from reviewing other people's’ CFPs ;) • By helping other organizers. • By mentoring the first time speakers.
23. Behaviors matter. More than any tactic! • Be sincere with your activities or trash all of these. • Be extremely careful about diversity and inclusion. • Help other without expecting a return. • Always be ready for async communication. • Diversity • Inclusion
24. Results
25. Thank you!