How To Build A Winning Community in 2026 | NEXUS Masterclass with Jonny Quirk

okay greetings everybody it's johnny here from nexus and i'm really excited to see you today um so today is slightly different master class from myself because um today we're talking about building a winning community and we don't actually have any guests it's just myself who's obviously going to be presenting this so uh first off really pleased to see you here um i've been building communities as you can see from this slide for many many years um You know, I've been at top tier startups like Yelp, Deliveroo, WeWork. I've also worked in consultancies for the likes of KPMG, Zeely, and probably about 20 other brands. And ultimately, you know, I'm a really passionate person about building communities. Over the next 45 minutes or so, I'm going to be giving a bit of a rundown about, you know, what I think is so important about running a community, about building a community, why it's so important for a startup to build a community. Because there are so many different benefits that people don't realize from building a community beyond, obviously, you know, people expect to see, you know, celebrations, parties, events. And that's only part of the process. You know, there are so many different benefits that we're going to get into in a minute. So, yeah, really pleased you can join me for this today and let's kick off. So most important thing I just want to share at this stage is apologies if there's just a lot of kind of talking that kind of comes through. I've got a lot of notes down here. I'm not going to read them all, but I have put them here, obviously, in terms of if I want to share the deck later on that I can do. And then hopefully then you'll have a complete playbook about how to build your community yourself for your business or startup as well. There's only three things you really take away from today. It's the community building in my mind. is a really great way for you to extend the LTV the lifetime value of your customers and members because ultimately you're building relationships and the strength of those relationships will mean that obviously that will deliver more revenue to you as well it will also help you decrease your cost per acquisition and we'll get into that later on but of course you know Everybody can spend money on ads. Anybody can spend money on other acquisition channels. But ultimately, again, when it's relationship based or it's kind of word of mouth or different things like this, the acquisition is first off stronger, but it's also kind of like, you know, cheaper than an ad in terms of, you know, you might get somebody and they'll stay for, you know. a quick look around or they'll stay somewhere and just have a quick look at your product but ultimately if you build a really strong community then that will turn into a really really big funnel of people coming through as well and of course de-risking your business this is a big thing which i'll get into later on which you know ultimately there are many moats you can build in a business But I'm passionate about saying that a community is one of those moats that you should be building and growing. Because, you know, if you build a really winning community, it's exceptionally hard to do if you do it right. Don't worry, in the next 45 minutes, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. But it makes it very, very difficult for somebody to just come along and copy it. So they might have similar features, similar pricing, similar whatever. But if you built a community, then that's something which you own, which you've got people really engaged with what you do. and you know everything comes downstream from there so let's kick off right so like i said core principles it's about building community and it's about customer-led businesses there are loads of tips so please do get your notepads out and let's get on with it right so there are many many benefits about why you should build a community and i've kind of touched on a little bit but here's my top 10 reasons for doing this so first off like i said before you're trying to elongate ltv which is basically about developing excellent customer engagement and loyalty But if you've got a really strong community of 10, 20, 50, 100, 1,000 users who feel really passionate about your brand and believe you're doing something different, then they will provide you a high quality testimonial, something that will go on your website and just generally something which is really good quality as opposed to something that's quite faceless as well. Of course, your community can help you with problem solving and support. This can come from everything from customer service issues that you need to get solved quicker. um you know like looking at kind of your exact product you know are there you know ways which you know we can get from a to b to c much quicker and you know are there kind of any bottlenecks or loopholes that you know we need to get solved quicker so ultimately if you work with and you know this term's used quite a lot you know build alongside your community it means that you know you can really have a lot of cost savings in the full you know in the long term and also be really really innovative in terms of you know like working and delivering that product market fit which people are obviously really really needing because ultimately you want them to give you money for something that they need in their life that's the whole nature of having a business so if you work with your target market and people who already bought into you then it's going to make it a lot lot easier as well so there's brand awareness image and trust like i said people buy from similar people so you know you could see a million adverts on insta for something you go okay maybe but if i'm passionate about telling somebody about something they might write it down they might kind of check it out themselves and they go oh johnny or dave or sheila or whoever basically used um that service or product then you know they hopefully will think that they will buy it as well and of course you know when you are building a business whether you're national international multinational you know market expansion is so important because The way that the world is now with social media and global networks. You know, if you build up a really strong base in the UK and you want to expand to Europe or into China or America, you'll find that people have got friends in all corners of the globe now. So it makes it really, really important to obviously just make sure that you can land really, really well and really closely in different countries as well. So like I said before, competitive advantage, building your reservoir and moat is so important. A really good community, which actually adds a lot of value, will also attract new users and customers. And I'll talk about that in a minute as well. There are many, many knock-on effects as well, which I would just say are really hard to quantify. But ultimately, when you're actually out there meeting people in your community, when you're meeting your users, meeting your customers, they want to be letting you know how your latest marketing campaign landed. They want to be telling you about what they love about the product and really what new features they'd like to see added. They want to tell you like, God, you know, your product is great, but it's so overpriced or wow, why are you not charging more for your product? And then I think also they're going to be really good at knowing what your competitors are doing, because ultimately if you're a team of one, 10, 20, 50 people, you're all very focused and siloed on what you're trying to do. But these people are out there and they're following your rivals on Insta. They're following your rivals. They may be customers of theirs. So it's a really great way to tap into their energy, their knowledge, and all of this stuff as well. So in a nutshell, building a community or customer-led business is really good for revenue generation, really good for cost reduction. And of course, it's a really good chance for you to build a generation-defining service or product. So if you don't take, again, much from the actual how we're going to build it, these are the main reasons which hopefully have got you excited about why you should start building a community yourself. Cool. So that's the motivation. But let's have a look at kind of maybe some of the reasons to why people would want to be part of your community as well, beyond feeling passion and feeling love for your brand as well. So status and recognition and responsibility is very, very important. Like I said, in a nutshell, you know, if you're almost like one of the behind the velvet rope kind of people, it feels good. So if you've obviously got some insight into the founder, especially if you're in kind of a cool industry or you're in something that's quite unique. It's a really great way for people to meet kind of kindred people as them as well. Of course, we talked about passion and brand connectivity. I've built many communities where people have built friendship and belonging and really felt like they were in a really great place and met the kind of people that they love hanging out with, whether that's they go out for meals together, whether they go out for drinks together, whether it's because they have a certain niche interest as well. These are the sorts of really, really important things which you can offer, which people just don't get in normal day-to-day life beyond that work life. So you're building a third place, hopefully, to hang out where, again, you're the facilitator behind this and hopefully they feel very important as well behind that as well. of course work and career advancement opportunities are big you know people love volunteering people can put that on their cv or linkedin so you know it's a big thing to be able to put on there as well again you know if you've worked really closely with the founding team you know they'll probably give you again a great linkedin recommendation or a great testimonial for your cv and so you know people want to get involved for those kind of reasons and as i put on this next point about developing skills and building domain knowledge You know, it might be that they're really early on in their career journey or they're wanting to pivot or something like that. So being a member of your community or an ambassador or whatever is a real like shoe in or a leg up in terms of getting involved in that community as well. So, of course, fun and social mentioned food, drinks, blah, blah, blah. Your community is pretty boring. Not many people are really going to want to join it beyond it being a forum, which, again, I've seen work really loads of times before. People are just doing technical forums. It's great because that's what they're passionate about. But, you know, everybody's fun is different. Financial, of course, you know, some people are incentivized because, you know, you can offer freebies, you can offer massive discounts, you can offer all sorts of financial benefits. But I would probably put that as like one of the lower down the pecking order. Ultimately, you want to get people excited about what you do from a more organic level as well. And, you know, as humans, we love new shiny thing as well. You know, like. you know, something that's new and exciting and wow, you know, I need to really be part of this or wow, this is really cool. It's doing something new in the world. You know, that's a really, really cool thing to be part of. And I always put here, you know, giving back to the community, you know, there's something deep and tangible about being involved and being part of a community and belonging to something. You know, it's like badge of honor. It's like having that kind of sense of feeling like, you know, you're on the inside of something. So like I said, these are the reasons why your members would want to be part of the community. and really your job is to mix the first thing which is the company level with the user level and see if you can meet something that you know matches in the middle you get this right and people are going to want to stay with you for many many years and as i said before you know deliver excellent value for you in terms of the effort and the maybe capital expenditure you put into building a community program as well So I'm going to go through a few different mindsets. I've tried to make them kind of like pretty chill, but this is if I had to kind of build a community from scratch, this is kind of what I'd be doing from day one. So the first 50 is always so, so important. I try and stick this in my brain all the time when I'm building a community. If you've got 50 people who can come into your community who are super passionate about what you do, you've looked after them and really nurtured them really well, then those 50 people will. tell three or four or five other people and that becomes you know 100 500 a thousand members who really get it and those first 50 people if you've managed to give the values of your company and community into them again you know it's really hard to break that bond from day one so you know you don't need a million members to start a community you need a thousand members and you're not going to get your first 50 overnight but put in the systems that you're going to get your first 10 20 30 40 50 people And, you know, it might be that you need 200 people in your community, but only 25% of them are super engaged with you. But if you can get 50 people who are on first name terms of you, who've got your email address, who are ready to give you a call whenever they've got feedback, maybe not middle of the night, but anything like this, then honestly, everything kind of comes and mushrooms out from here. So see if you can find those first 50 people. Flywheel. There's a lot going on in this diagram, but I love it because ultimately, you know, You really need to make sure that the customer journey matches up with your community touch points. And as you can see, that's the dark blues and the greens that are on here. And what I'm trying to basically show from here is that, you know, every single action you have when you're basically got people coming in, you know, you can see this on the gray edge here, strangers, prospects, customers, promoters. The more they get involved and excited, they create more awareness and consideration of what you do. They create more content. They create more assets. They create more social noise. They create more word of mouth. And all of this kind of flywheel gets going and going and going. And people get really, really excited then about what you're building. And they want to get more and more involved. And the community gets more ambitious. But of course, as part of that then, you can see the purple in the middle here. You've got amazing chance to upsell. You've got better traffic coming towards you. You've got higher quality of customer. So the community flywheel is just, you know, see what you can build in terms of more users, more content, more ways to activate them, more touch points. And this will feed into, you know, everything which we say where it'll attract the right people, engage the right people and delight the right people. Then you've got a really strong product around, you know, a really strong community around your product. Get this right. And the flywheel just keeps kicking and kicking and kicking. And the more people you come and layer into it, the more the community will grow because the right structures have been put in place for it to grow over time as well. Now, mindset number three is something which I'm really passionate about as well, because, you know, we have this term in social media and it's the one nine ninety. And if you think about your own appreciation of social media and use of it, you know, think of 100 percent, you know, one big cake. That's why I've got this cake analogy here. you know if you think of your own social media use how much of a heavy user of it you're probably in the 90 on most apps where you consume but you're not really doing an awful lot of kind of contributing to that network you're more just like a voyeur in contributors it's the same with that nine percent so it might be that sometimes you get involved and will you know like something or you'll add a quick comment or whatever if you feel engaged to do this but again Life is this, that 99% of people around most social media apps don't really, aren't that heavy contributors. But then of course, right at the top, you've got those creators. You've got the super heavy ones who are on it all the time. Loads of socials, loads of content creation, loads of leading agendas. And this can basically be put through into community building as well. So, you know, you're going to have probably 90% of your community who are there for a vibe. They like what you're doing. They maybe want to see behind the scenes access to your latest features, your latest drops, blah, blah, blah. 9% will probably get involved. You know, sometimes they'll come to an event, they'll come to a webinar, they'll get involved with you sometimes. And then you'll get your 1% who are really, really hardcore. And they're probably like giving you loads of feedback and jumping on a call and all of this stuff. This is just math. This is the way it is. And again, I've seen this skew slightly. It might be that the top, you know, if you're lucky, might be 20% and then 80% lurkers. it usually kind of maps out in life about this is kind of what happens. So the reason I've kind of got this when I say on steroids is that imagine this 100% here and you've got 100 members. That leaves you with 10 people in your community who are probably really, really contributing. So that's not massively great because you're going to have like a couple of loud voices and you're going to have a few people who are going along with them and they're kind of steering your direction. So ultimately, if you want... You know, if you get 500 people, that's when you then have five really strong members and maybe, you know, 50 people who are contributing regularly and doing this. Get 1000 people, 100 people contributing, 10 people, the big hitters and ambassadors, maybe whatever. So as you can see, what I'm saying is the more people you get in, if you set up the right structures for your community building, the more and more people you get in. the better you've got in terms of heavy content and contributors up in the top of this, really. So if you're just going for your 50 or 100 people, it's going to be a bit of a tumbleweedy kind of situation. But if you can find ways to increase the size of the cake, then you'll get more and more people contributing. But it's very important to lay out. This is kind of what, you know, this is science in terms of exactly usually what happens when it comes to social media, communities, anything online, offline. It's just the nature of life. Snooze, you lose. I don't want to go too much into this, but ultimately, you know, like if you're not kind of like building a community, if you're not talking to your customers, then, you know, you are setting yourself up for not necessarily failure, but you do definitely need to get these things right. So ultimately, you know, treat your community with respect. Don't be crap, you know, get back to them quickly with stuff. If you've, if they've made the effort to sign up in terms of a mechanism or whatever you've done to get them on boarders. make sure again you're treating them with respect and you know you're really really involved with them as well you know they can really drop out and they'll go somewhere else and all of that knowledge all of that value in the community will disappear and that's a terrible thing to waste as well and then of course you know inspiration is kind of everywhere um you know from my perspective there are so many people doing amazing communities out there you know um lego amazing worldwide community starbucks has those community notice boards where they give back to charity Red Bull, of course, you know, they have branding on every single kind of extreme sports and music and cultural, the kind of cool stuff. So, you know, of course, you know, people feel a real affinity to that brand. GoDaddy, again, this is where you have to really think about the kind of community you want to build. It's not particularly sexy domain names, but they have built like a great developer community around this because, of course, developers want to be using URLs and hosting domains and everything like that. So, you know, again, they've... taken something which is within their Venn diagram of a field and created a community around it. And, you know, I've got these two tokens down here for Web3 and, you know, Web3, the massive kind of community where a community led kind of industry where people are genuinely building with their community. They're bringing global people together. So inspiration is everywhere. I would just basically say as a top tip, have a look out there, see exactly the kind of community you want to build and really, you know, make sure it matches up with something that you're going to find exciting as well. Right. I feel like I've discussed a lot here in terms of, you know, why we're doing it. Now let's kind of go into exactly how to do this as well. Right. So community strategy, before you start off with anything, I would really think about, you know, storytelling because, you know, when you're, you know, let's say you're a script writer for a movie or a TV show, you know, you kind of are going to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You want to take people on a journey. so that's why i'm kind of like mentioning this right now a journey because you know if you think about how that works you know in any kind of scene you know you set out the movie who these people are what are you doing here um you know like you know what what's the what's the problem you're trying to solve um and that kind of sets up the middle act of like what people do and get involved in and of course you know the end story is like where people are successful they've slayed the dragon they've beaten the magic kind of you know a massive robot um i'm trying to think about marvel-y kind of stuff here or you know the the romance comes good or bad or whatever so you know think about you know the different acts about where you want to take people on a journey And I'll explain why I'm talking about it in this kind of analogy in a minute. But ultimately, start thinking a lot about how people arrive in your community, why they should arrive in your community, and ultimately, you know, what the problem is trying to solve about why your community exists. Think about what goes into a successful story and then go from there. Or, and I'm going to mention ChatGPT here, think about the Amazon approach. And there's a really amazing book called Working Backwards, and it's about how Amazon approaches everything. um tldr they start off with a press release a fake press release i should say as if they've already launched a new product or feature they write it all out they talk about how wonderful it's going to be how much it's going to be blah blah how much revenue is going to be or make and then they work backwards from there about what it takes to get to that stage So, you know, you could basically put in what your dream outcome would be from a community-led business, stick it into chat GPT, you know, in 12 months time, I want to be a community of thousand people. We want people to feel really passionate about our, you know, Android, iPhones, whatever you're selling and work backwards from there, you know, what would it take to build the community this side? What would the metrics should be that would be really important? will be some of those checkpoints that people would find really really useful so it's a couple of different ways you look at it think about scripting a story about where you want to take people or work backwards from you know looking at kind of like what success might look in 12 to 18 months time as well and again i'm not really going to kind of go into too much detail this is some information for obviously if you are looking at this workbook afterwards which i've shared with you but you know again really think about what your vision is what journey you want people on Have you set those achievable goals and targets about what success looks for you as a community builder? You really need to think about your brand and your values. Does the community match or line up with it? There's no point in launching this community if your product is this and it just doesn't make any sense or it doesn't offer any value. There will not be that deep engagement. It's a bit like people being on a mailing list if they have no knowledge about your product or care about it. you may as well just remove them from your mailing list if they're not going to engage with you um you know are you doing something unique in the community space you know do your research find that out as well have a look at the milestones about what you want to achieve in the coming years and really just look again about like you know measuring success you know is the community having an actual impact on your business success And the good news about this isn't just like a thing of after three or six months. Oh, well, it's not working out. Things just don't happen overnight. It's about relationship building. But ultimately, you know, there are ways you can layer this into business success. Again, think deeper about, you know, like what kind of community we're building. Do we have an AMA every month on a webinar where we're giving company updates people can see behind the scenes? Are we doing an event every quarter to bring our community together? Are we doing this? Are we doing that? So it's really important, I think, to be thinking about, you know, like literally like where the business kind of matches up and links in with this as well. Right. So let's just think about this. So your community strategy MVP, everything I've just mentioned there, very, very solid thoughts about before you set out on this journey as well. So there's loads of different things you'd be thinking about community building, but pick the elements that work for you. I think ultimately that's what you need to be thinking of here. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the kind of different programs and different things you can be building as part of your community. But this isn't a let's do 30 different things and absolutely bamboozle the hell out of like your audience or people who are getting involved, you know, or you want to get involved. I think, you know, there are. Unless you've got a community or marketing team of 5, 10, 15 people, it's going to be very difficult to do this, especially if you're a founding team or whatever. You probably just want an MVP community where you're talking about forums, you're talking about connection, you're talking about doing some kind of engagement with people. So ultimately, like I said, pick and choose the bits that work for you, offer the most value. And then, of course, you can then look to hire and backfill in some community support as and when that's important as well. Right. So I'm not going to go into too much detail here because there's a lot of words. But the different types of community that you could build are, you know, are varied, I would say. So there is your internal customer community, which I'm putting out there because this is aimed at tech startups or business startups or businesses or whatever. But this is usually the most important thing, really, which you can build for a community is the internal one. So ultimately, you want to be strengthening your relationships with customers. encouraging loyalty and gathering feedback. We've talked about this. I think that's really, really important stuff. The features you probably want to put in here are discussion forums, customer support opportunities, product feedback channels, and one-to-one calls with your members. Benefits of rolling this out, enhance customer satisfaction because A, you've listened to someone at one-to-one level, or B, you've turned their insights into something where you've been able to make an improvement in the product. You know, you've been able to turn that feedback into something which creates more participation and repeat business. So if you're going to build any community and you're stuck for resources and time and everything, your internal one is so important. Now, of course, on top of that, you can layer in some brand advocacy community. You know, this is to mobilize your enthusiastic customers to become brand advocates for you and promote your business. You know, with this point, this is where you get a little bit more exciting. So you can be doing things like adding, you know, exclusive content, adding different rewards, incentives for sharing, recognition programs, all of these different things as well. So again, if there's two different types of community aspects you can add, I probably would add these two if I was you as well. Excuse me. Of course, you want to go a little bit deeper. This is where potentially you can add even more different community layers. So this is a knowledge sharing community. And the purpose here is to facilitate exchange of industry into sites and best practices. So again, this could be something for maybe inside, say you're in FMCG or in SAS, you're in whatever. This could be B2C or B2B. But you want to basically set this up as a great place where it can come from information, knowledge exchange, and feel like they're getting something that they can't get anywhere else. nice thing about this is is that the more you get involved in knowledge sharing you can you know almost become a brand master you can become a real like thought leader on this process and you can turn a lot of these conversations that are happening in your forums into like ugc yeah that's user generated content people who don't know where you can build um you know that's very very important in the age of ai Because ultimately, it's real insights. It's real information that people can't get. It's just scraped from the net. So a knowledge sharing community is important. And of course, as I've mentioned a couple of times, innovation communities are important as well. This is where you can put things like collaboration spaces, innovation challenges, calls with your product team, hackathons, anything like this that's potentially going to make your product go like this, bring something new to the market. So, yeah, like I said, these are all ones which make sense for a business or a tech startup. And that's why I would kind of like really highlight the first two with these two potentially coming later on if you've got more time. Of course, these are all the ones I'm not going to go into details here, but you could create a professional development community. You could create an employee community as well. So, again, really good places for your employees, really good places for your, you know, like partners. where obviously they can get a lot from them. On the partner's level, it's great because ultimately they, again, might want to spend more money with you and your company. From an employee's stand, it's really important that they feel bought into you as a person. So they're developing their skills, their assets. They're also getting very engaged with you because you're offering benefits and bonuses and doing something a little bit more out of work. So again, these are worth thinking about if you're growing a business as well. And again, just two other things, local community, look if you want great press great word of mouth and like you're actually wanting to do something in the local community it's amazing for a business to be doing this so again think about how you can get involved with local community engagement and you know social impact again is super important not only is it going to bring in loads of positive good news about your business and get your brand out there it just ultimately gives you more you know of a raison d'etre if you're a business as well i mean you look at patagonia you know read the book um you know let my people go surfing it didn't set out to become a you know multi-billion dollar company but it kind of turned into that way and it's a slow burn but people really bought into their environmental vibes they really bought into their employee the way they look after employees so there's a lot that can be done really that will just obviously give you many benefits when you're building community program as well right Let's have a look at this. Here's some more and more tips here, which hopefully will work for you as well. So this is the groundwork you should be doing from day one. Plan of action. Think about the platform you want to use. I would probably start off on something pretty simple, to be honest. I've seen some great communities built on WhatsApp, especially if you're growing to your first 50, first 100, first 200. The only thing I would say is that there probably is going to get to a point where you're going to have to migrate those users. to another platform that's more community led so just be really thinking about how you know like you know when i say community have more features and something which feels more custom mighty network school all of these different platforms so you have to work out how comfortable you want to make people feel in that place before they then just go oh why should i bother me with this new platform i feel quite happy here so you might want to build straight away from a platform or you might want to do that just make sure that there's not too many barriers to entry or friction because if there is then you're a bit screwed and if you kind of like you know want to try and get people onto yet another app onto your phone personal preference but i don't think slack particularly works too well for a community there is far too much noise instant nature of it and people feel like it crosses into their work life a bit too much so I don't really think Slack works too well, but, you know, prove me right, prove me wrong. Send me a couple of Slack communities and I'll quite happily, you know, be proven wrong about that as well. But any ones I've joined just seem to fizzle out over time and they're the reasons why. So like I said, be clear about the community program, make sure there is some way to onboard people that gives them a little bit of kind of friction just to get some information from them. So, you know, create a landing page and an application form. Think about who the people you want in your first 50. What kind of people do you want there? What do they do? What kind of value would be maybe where they hang out? How are you going to get them into your community? These sorts of questions. Obviously, you want a tracker, whether it's a CRM, some Google sheets, whatever. And of course, initial engagement plan, you know, the first messages you're going to send them, tell them how they can get involved. That's the most important thing. If they just end up in a white space and nothing going on, they're not going to ever come back. Make sure there's a really good onboarding structure. And of course, see if you can jump on to a quick call with them in the early days as well if you're a founder, because that personal time will really, really stand you in good stead for looking that you really care as well about what you do as well. So your goal is to create genuine connections with these first 50. Really be thinking about that. Think about the competitor research and make thinking about what makes your community unique. And I would just keep surveying as well. I'm a big fan of surveying. You want to ultimately get to community market fit, which means that you're serving something that genuinely people find useful. And whether they want to pay for that, whether they get it free, say if it's more of a community around a product, then it's going to be free because ultimately you want them to buy the product or give some value to your product. But ask people what they would like to see more of. Ask people what they want to see less of. What annoys them about your community? exciting about a community so they're the sorts of things which you want to be thinking in 0.5 number one i'm not going to go into this because this is basically more of a very very early stage kind of plan but really you know be thinking about you know your weekly engagement plans Be thinking about, you know, doing something which people can't get anywhere else. It's going to keep them sticky. And as I mentioned before, think about community surveys and just making sure you get data off them because you can make these small tweaks week to week and you'll be amazed what it can do to just increase stickiness in your community as well. Version two, I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but like I said, it is really important to just be thinking about, you know, what you can do once this 360 flywheel is in place. You know, you can do everything from reward and recognition models. You know, if someone's proving that they're doing an amazing job, maybe they become your next employee. Maybe they become an ambassador. Maybe they become a mentor to your community. You know, how can you get people involved? UGC, user-generated content. Your community forums will be full of all this amazing content. Whack it into ChatGPT. Pull out the best strands. Use your personal touch to kind of highlight some of this. Turn it into assets, get it out there, turn it into social testimonials, whatever. All of this great stuff is hidden behind community usually. So you have to repurpose it and get it out there as well. Formal ambassador squads, you know, this is one of those things where maybe when you've got a little bit more kind of resources committed to this. But again, ambassadors can do so much for you from hosting webinars to going out to events and helping you co-host these sorts of things. Same with partnerships. You can do if you've got a community, you've got critical mass partners want to get involved with you because you've got built up a community of active users. Online programs, offline programs, campaigns. Again, more people join your community, the higher your social engagement will go because you can post your posts in there and ask them to kind of get involved as well. And really, this is probably the point where you would start thinking about hiring an experienced CM, community manager. to support the team's growth um because you know ultimately you can't do it all all i would say is just make sure that you invest in a very very good quality community manager and make sure they're thinking about the why and the context of them doing everything and that they're really passionate about your business and the community they don't get the why of the context then you're just constantly to explain what's happening and they're not going to be going like you know for instance say someone's really angry in your community about a new product feature or whatever this is amazing news because it shows that they're passionate about something and they're going to let you know and hopefully that's the same relationship people are having outside of the community about your product so don't have a community manager who's affronted by this or takes that a negative way have someone with a brain who's able to go oh do you know this is great i'm going to jump on a call with this person and find out exactly what the problems are and in 20 minutes time i'm going to have a rundown of what we need to get fixed to feedback to the product team That's the kind of thought you need in terms of building a community and the kind of people you get harder as well. Right. I'm not going to go into all this because there's all the different stuff that I talked about at stage one. But if you're reading the playbook, then this is kind of like all of the benefits that you'll get from it as well. So find your first 50. This could be your low hanging fruits, but honestly, this is the people to really put your time into. And it's not a quick thing, this. You know, you might be building your product, you might be running a team, you might be hiring, you might be doing your marketing, you might be raising investment, but you should be having probably four, five, six calls with members each week where they're booking into your Calendly, they're in there, you're building relationships, you're onboarding them into your community and you're making them feel good. That's all you need to do. Do that over six, eight weeks and you'll have a really strong community and keep it going. Don't just let it slide because it'll be harder to get back into it as well. And as Gary Vee says, you know, basically you really, really want to just make sure that you're giving that personal human reply and the human touch as well. If it feels that this is just a community, you know, a sales ploy by you to get people involved or it doesn't feel genuine or it's all a bit fake. It doesn't really wash like people will just be able to smell that a mile off. So, you know, your job is to be a facilitator, connecting human beings and empowering people to unlock their best self. You know, if you do that, then they will engage, engage, engage with you. And they'll also sell, sell, sell your product for you ambiently. And that's a really nice position to be in as well. That's the reason you want to do it. Plus ultimately, I think my ultimate test of a community is if your product failed tomorrow and went bust. would the community still keep going tomorrow because you've built an amazing community of people who are super engaged what you do if they do then that's great and if your company has failed and bad luck if it hasn't I'm really sorry to hear this you own the community you can then build alongside them to create the new better version 2.0 to find out what went wrong and why the community didn't so why the product didn't work so you own the asset the community you can do a lot with it as well um but again that's only going to be if they genuinely feel like they bought into you as well so again we'll get reaching the point where i'm going to wrap up in a minute but here's some important tips and tactics to consider as well so get your onboarding right make first impressions always important life first impressions are important Make sure that your community knows what to do next when they arrive. You know, literally, let's talk about this. Are they arriving in there? Is it blank space? Or have you used a structure where they know what to do in there? Most important things, they can actually do something early on. Fill out a profile, send a hello message, a welcome message, meet some fellow members. That's the kind of thing you'd be looking for. The sweet spot is thinking about exactly where you need to get to as fast as possible. If people had to explain what your community does, could they explain it in a couple of lines very, very quickly with people? And that's the sweet spot where you build a community. It's very clear why it exists, very clear what it does. And it's got something people keep coming back to every day, daily active users. Great, that's where you're at. And can you keep building this 1,990 up to make sure that the cake is getting bigger and you're activating a lot more people as well? Number two, narrative building. all about building narratives so i put email symbol here email still a great way to communicate with people make sure you've got stuff that's bringing people back into your community platform amas even if you're not raising investment i have shareholders i'd be hosting an ama every month to bring your community and top customers together so so important social media make sure you're shouting about your community once a week here's what happened in our community want to join the community get involved in the community here's how you can join and really again keep pushing points about how people can get involved more and more and more you'd be amazed what happens actually when you say to people um this is um how you can get involved and this is you know like what we want from you we can help people might meet an investor at an event they might meet a media personality they might meet somebody else they will basically go on and be able to kind of make those introductions to you but you tell them that's what you're looking for so be very open your community be that kind of founder or member who's always talking and is able to always kind of be saying like oh could you help me out with this or could you help me with that or here's where you know wear your heart on your sleeve and be really genuine as well ambassador squads we've talked about this but if you're building a really strong ambassador squad um you know it's almost like that's the next level up they're not quite an employee of yours but they will be somebody who's really good quality who's really looking out for you as well so really think about building ambassador squads again build programs inside for yourself and you know we have the trailblazer community at salesforce lego do all these collabs yelp which i believe you know from when i was working there truly one of the best communities out there so yeah be thinking about kind of you know what that elite squad is like and the movie insiders i love this at disney the movie insiders because ultimately it does speak out there about how um you know like insider just makes me feel like i want to get involved in it if you're into movies or whatever then great you know you feel like wow i'm going to get something from this so think about the name think about the branding think about the program you're going to take people on that is like a behind the velvet rope look which again people can't get anywhere else And again, we talk about events a lot and this doesn't have to be you running six events a month and it's like, you know, really out there, big events that cost loads of money. Just bring events that get people together regularly, whether that's online or offline. Again, that's so, so important as well. Think about your content strategy and think about how you can do a lot more UGC, bringing members in. bringing people where they can map themselves to what you're doing and, again, see themselves reflected in this content. They might then want to get involved themselves as well in terms of what you do. And reward and recognition is really nice. And this is probably something later where you might have something that's more of a formal reward and recognition model. For instance, the reward and recognition of, say, like a Yelp elite was become a really active user. And, you know, you might get invited to some meals where, you know, they'll be free, but they're not like just to do this and you'll get that. It's like a really nice, like behind the scenes curated event in a private restaurant. So it's kind of rewards the most active people. Now that's down the line for you building a community. But in the early stages, what you probably want to be thinking of is like a bit of surprise and delight. be thinking very much about like, you know, what if somebody has gone above and beyond what about those first 50, you know, could you send them each like a handwritten thing and say, really enjoyed our call. Felt like it was so nice to hear more about you and your life and hear more about why you love what we do here. Um, you know, here's a box of chocolates or even just written card or whatever, you know, looking forward to seeing you get involved more and more with us or whatever. So just step it up. tiny bits in terms of reward and recognition and you'll honestly like find that people get really sticky and really enjoy what you do but again it's got to have a bit of personal thought in there as well and let me just see here and again like i said before if you don't ask you don't get think a lot about what you're asking people for and you know like just be very very clear about what would be really useful to you and also ask people what they want to get It's a two-way relationship, community building. It's about building almost like a whole new friendship group. And of course, there's something deeper about it. It's usually because they want to be part of some interest or some kind of product or something that you're offering, but it's a big thing. So, you know, ultimately make sure there's relationship and conversation happening on both parts as well. This is one of my final slides here. So I'm just putting it out here. Community is funny because people... always start out as newbies like you would do but then they're going to reach a point where they're not the newbies anymore and they're going to be there in the middle of say their community journey with you um so you need to find ways to keep them a bit more engaged over time because the novelty will wear off as i said at the start the bright shiny thing ultimately some people will churn because you're just not serving them anymore or they're going on to something else that's new or whatever so be thinking about what you can be doing that's gonna really engage people in the beginning it's going to keep them engaged in the middle but as you get towards the end if they're waning a bit new ways to get them involved and this is why i put phoenix here because ultimately if you can identify this and find out that people are potentially churning or they're some of your very top most active users but they feel a bit taken for granted because you're putting all your time into newbies or whatever get them on ambassador programs find out ways to get them super involved work out exactly how you can re-engage them with calls maybe you know yelp we did this thing when it was like the gold elites where someone had been a member for five ten years and they got an even better higher level of like you know engagement and reward and all of this sort of stuff and that just makes that all the values and all of the great energy that you've built up over the years doesn't just drift off into nowhere and you're having to constantly go back to the start again those people are super important so without making people feel too entitled or whatever find ways to elongate um you know the relationship that you have with people and they might be able to help the newbies come involved and get them involved and all this sort of stuff you get that and you have a really nice kind of you know community that's growing um and you know again people like this especially if you go global people want to get exposed to new markets new cities new ways of thinking so um Just always be mindful that it's not a one time and you're out kind of relationship. It's always about building those relationships that last for a long time as well. Right. So we don't have any time for questions, unfortunately, today, but I will be sharing this, of course. And if there's any other questions for people, then I'm more than happy to obviously answer these on a catch up or an email or send me a message on LinkedIn. Johnny Quirk. Like I said, I'm head of community here at Nexus, but I also run my community consultancy, helping tech startups grow, helping businesses across all sorts of different industries as well. So if what I've talked about resonates or you think would be really useful and helpful to your own business, just give me a shout. I'm always happy to jump on a call and talk about community stuff because, again, hopefully you've seen over the last 45 minutes, I'm super passionate about it. And that was that. Thanks very much, everybody. Looking forward to catching up with you soon. Enjoy rest of your day, and I'll see you soon. Cheers. Okay, bye.

Community is no longer a “nice to have” for startups — it’s a growth strategy.

In this NEXUS Masterclass, Jonny Quirk shares practical insights from over 20 years of experience building and scaling communities inside global platforms including Yelp, Deliveroo and WeWork.

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