Summary and Acknowledgments
In this playbook, we have provided our best advice – collected over dozens of portfolio companies and expert interviews – for founders who seek to build community as a competitive advantage. To do so, founders need to follow this simple checklist:
Start with a narrow target persona (the “who”)
Define your business objective in forming community
Define what community success looks like
Develop your plan to form and engage the community
Deliver a community value proposition – an “aha” piece of content as a carrot
Solve the “cold start” problem by organizing an existing community
Define a portfolio of community member journeys and value them at any given point in time
Once you have formed your community, you can begin to do more sophisticated things to get the most out of them, such as:
Design the community to support itself
Leverage the community as a product development resource
Build strong “community effects”, which make the community value proposition even more powerful with scale
Measure community ROI so that you can justify investing more in the community
The Flybridge partners wish to thank and acknowledge the contributions of all of those who helped make this ebook possible. First, we want to thank our portfolio company executives and founders who have executed on their community visions, inspiring us all. They include Zach Sims and Alyssa Vigil of Codecademy, Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan of Chief, Mac Reddin and Jacob Peters of Commsor, and Grace Francisco, Meghan Gill, Eliot Horowitz, and Dev Ittycheria of MongoDB.
We also want to thank the thought leaders and interviewees who contributed to this ebook, including Jono Bacon, Bailey Richardson, and Cassie Mayes of Atlassian.
Finally, we want to thank our designer Weston Baker Creative Group for
their terrific work to make our prose readable and accessible.
This website was built using Morphic, a website-as-a-service product that allows you to create agency-quality websites for a fraction of the cost and time.
Follow us @flybridge for more.
