Build an online community that transforms your startup - Insider Guidance

Today's topic is how to build a community, an online community where you can build relationships with your target audience or even generate revenue from membership fees and up sales. And we have an expert, a serial entrepreneur, Claudia Meiles, who has a lot of experience with building successful communities. What is the potential of building a community? Building a community, it's the backbone of a business. When you're building a community or tapping into existing communities, you can drive your business with a GPS. From the community, you can understand exactly the problem that you're solving, tune the solution there, and also help you on the development and help you to scale that development. It's not only an online group on Facebook or on Discord. a community it's also someone that can help you as an affiliate to grow your business in the beginning because when you're starting a business it's not only about relying on facebook ads and google ads make it grow it's about relying on people that can actually promote your product and help you to improve that product and when you have an affiliate working with you you're starting to build an ambassador an advocator and a business partner An affiliate and the community shouldn't be treated as a vendor, but rather as a partner because that's who they are. That's so true and very helpful for software as a service startup founders and other types of founders because to sell a software product, to sell a subscription, it takes so much trust because there are so many alternatives and many other startups and companies, they are not very reliable sometimes. So people your target audience are usually pretty skeptical. You have to convince them to work with you. But if you have already been working with them in a community, have been giving a lot of value, then of course, it's much easier to convince them to buy from you. It's about building an emotional connection with your community. And this happens in many ways. People usually come for the products, but with the community, they stay for the people. The relationship that a person builds with a brand and with a business, it's quintessential to stay that business. Because if we talk about 3D rendering software, there are many, many softwares that you can learn and be with, but if you have a special relationship with a brand and you're part of a community using that product, you know that you have support to grow, to stay there, and to evolve as well with that membership, with that software that you subscribe. a community can actually support you in other ways it can help you to reduce your customer support tickets for example you have people that already know your product and are helping other people to use your products in better ways and your role as the company to empower that and there are many ways that you can do that i can give you an example from a slightly bigger corporation chaos when i arrived i had a facebook group with around 10 000 people it was like many others some conversations happening but not much activity there what we did was we knew that we didn't have the resources to produce content there all the time but we partnered with community leaders they're the most active people to start producing live shows on the group every single week there was a new live show happening from the community for the community basically every single week live on the group or a podcast happening live as well. There was, of course, a schedule. The company provided resources for that financially, but didn't have the people to do it. When you have the community producing your own content, you are ensuring that you're creating new experts and that you are humanizing your brand. Because that's, unfortunately, the mistake many companies do is that they focus too much on the business and on the just beautiful design, but they forget that. Behind the company, there are people and it's with people that your customers will connect. And let me guess, the community became much more active and it grew probably in membership numbers. Yes, it did grow in membership numbers and not only. In terms of monthly generated content, we are talking about a thousand pieces a month that was created by the community. Before that, we are talking about 200. hundred let's say it was really low and it went to a thousand plus when i left there was even more happening and from that we were able actually to create other community programs and it was the backbone of our affiliate program as well that can make the difference between a successful startup and not successful especially for startups while bigger corporations can outdo you with advertisement but you can outdo them with personality, with connection, with the community. It's important to understand it's not about features that you are offering. It's about solutions that you are offering. People want a transformation. For example, if you are targeting entrepreneurs, they want to earn from now maybe 1,000 euros a month to 10,000 euros a month. And how do they do that? Maybe there are some features that will be helpful, but usually it's about... understanding how to use those features in the best possible way. With community, you can help your audience to use your software much better. You can learn from that and you can adjust your software, but also the other learnings that are outside of the software solution that can be very helpful to achieve the goal. Yes, indeed. Resources, they are scarce for most startups that are starting. If you have the time to build that community and to engage with them... you're saving yourself a lot of money on ads of course ads can help you scale to 10 20 countries 20 markets but it's important for you to scale very well in one market and to understand what problem you're solving really defining your icp and the community can help you do that if you start a business with your community in mind you have much less chances to fail Knowing the industry is essential. When I started my first company, when I was 18, I had zero to no knowledge of business. I didn't knew business, but I knew community. I knew the people from the industry. I knew the industry itself. So when I launched my first business, I grew that up on the people that I already knew, on the type of industry that I already knew. And you can apply that very well. These people that you already know can actually teach you. where you need to double down your efforts and what is not relevant for them. If you focus on features here, you can understand from your community which features are not relevant and you can reshape back into the journey. As you said, if you're targeting entrepreneurs that want to earn 10,000, you can design the journey to them based on the insight that you're having. I think a business should be a really good balance between the human aspect. That is what's helping you to grow. but the analytics aspect, the data. You need to know how to see your data, how to analyze it, and how to take decisions based on that data. Unfortunately, I think that's where many businesses fail. Not on the data part, but on having the good human touch part to understand their data. It's easy to focus on the wrong numbers. It's easy also to lose the human touch. You are focusing on those KPIs and then... you are like trying to optimize everything towards those click-through rate or bounce rate but if you realize that those are actually real humans behind that and sometimes the numbers can be confusing you can convince people to click on something but if they don't like it it's not the goal there is no value in that Yes, awareness and performance, they are connected, but you need to know how to differentiate them. That's the difference between launching a great influencer program where you can really raise awareness and launch a great affiliate program where you actually are striving for performance, for conversion, etc. And that starts from a community. Going forward from awareness and building this relationship with your community to launch your affiliate program from that community, then you need to structure the things with a framework. I personally, Eight standards that I work in any project with community, I work in these three pillars. Support, inspire, and nurture your community. In the case of an affiliate program, then you go forward, recruit, activate, nurture, and retain them. Then analyzing the data, if you have two people on your affiliate program from your community, one is bringing you a thousand, they are both bringing you actually a thousand people to your website. You see that one has a great conversion rate, but a lower... earning per click number. And the other has a lower conversion rate, but it has a high earning per click. What does this tell you? When you have high traffic, high conversion rates, you know that what is promoting on the landing page is working very well. But on the other hand, when you have a higher earning click, you know that the audience of this person is an audience that is willing to pay more. It has a more quality audience. while the other has a good fit for you. But this one, you already know that is a high quality audience. So you know that you can promote with these affiliates higher paying products. And what have you spent there? Nothing. You just share your revenue with them. You have several models that you can apply here, but they succeed while you succeed as well. Let's do it step by step. Imagine a client, for example, a SaaS entrepreneur wants to create a community. What would be the first step? if someone came to you and wanted a consultation about creating a new community the first thing that i would do is to ask them to understand which product are you creating are you creating a product that is targeting entrepreneurs which kind of entrepreneurs let's niche down once we understand exactly the niche that is trying to target try to look at existing communities online let's see which discord groups exist which Slack channels exist, which Facebook groups exist. Let's go there and start creating unscalable conversation with those people. Second step, let's start to add value to those people in those existing communities. And third step, let's generate an offer for them that is interesting enough, exclusive enough for them to join your own community in your own house. You can put this on a real life situation. You first go to events, you meet the people at those events, you start talking with them, adding value to their lives. And then you decide yourself to organize events and you have an unique aspect that those people cannot find on the events that you're going, but they can find on your events. So they're going to start being part of both events. You transport that online is the same thing. When you start creating your Discord group, if you offer an unique value for those people and you're solving a problem to them, they are going to start joining your community. And it's important that they join and you keep talking with them. You have conversations with them. You keep adding value because that's the only way that they are going to recommend it to one friend and then to another friend. And you have this viral effect that starts happening. Did you have the experience that you thought the new aspect and the unique value of your community is great, but then you realize, okay, it's not... pooling so much, so I have to pivot a little bit. Yes, I did have that at Chaos, for example, with an artist community. Initially, I was applying some principles as SaaS targeting entrepreneurs, trying to add value. But what they were seeing there was the brand only, not the person. That's how I started to shift that mindset and start acting there as a person and try to see which were the other active people in order to pivot and start creating something. with the people, for the people. The community is a lot about human relations and even psychology. As an anonymous company, it's probably much more difficult to build a loyal community. You have to put some face behind it, you have to put some people, like representatives, and then it's much easier to connect with members, isn't it? Yes, if a company will pull the same efforts. to build a community and to build content for your community and put the faces there as they do to build a tiktok channel they would have much more success because if you do the very same that you're doing on tiktok creating videos or in instagram creating a real if you do the very same in your own community and start connecting with people like that do lives there as well you'd have much higher results why because on tiktok and instagram you're scrolling but when you're in a group connecting with something live, here or there, you can immediately interact with them. The benefits are much higher. With TikTok, the advantage is that TikTok itself is promoting spreading your content to other people who don't know about you yet. The disadvantage is that... people spend so little time with each content piece and then they move to a completely new different channel all the time and they don't memorize which kind of brand do they interact with the loyalty is very low with communities a bit more difficult to bring people into the community but when they are already there you can nurture them and effort and money you invest into nurturing it's so much more worth than just having millions of views on some videos from millions of people who never remember you. That's the difference between creating an advocator and just being famous. If we look at socials nowadays, we are not looking at the social graph anymore. We are seeing an interest graph. You might not have such a loyal audience, but you can create awareness, but you cannot retain that awareness. That's the disadvantage. maybe a combination out of marketing social media channels where you can have those interested people see your content but you try to bring them to the membership site as soon as possible yes it's as simple as just make a video put your face out there on a vertical way and call them to your group give them something so valuable for them to convert immediately to the group that they come and then they engage with you and it will be easier to retain them there We need to just be bold enough to call them and to add value, real value. The more important companies will start paying to communities, the more they will earn. Because unfortunately, what I see in regards to communities is that they are part of other departments. They are part of social media. They are part of content writers. So it's not the same thing. It's a discipline on its own. And I would say that all of the others actually... Our community is the backbone of the others and social media as well can get out of that because then you can jump from online to offline in order to build a more loyal customer. Nowadays, the pace of trends and technology is so fast and the chances of each business idea to succeed is not very high. If you build a community around a specific target audience, you can always replace your business idea, your product. with something new so if you create a saas ai startup and suddenly you are overtaken or it's not necessary because jgpt is offering that for free but with this community that's your asset if each business idea has 10 to succeed then you can just adjust your business ideas and after a few years you can find the product that's really getting a lot of demand from them. But even if you don't find anything, you can offer affiliate programs to other already existing products. It feels like a much safer bet than just trying to build something and hoping to get clients. Yes, the journey of a startup. exactly that pivoting what we started with it's usually not what we are going to end up with we might start with the tinder for tech companies to match with developers and we end up with something around salaries for example to add value to companies the community can really help you to shape their adding the people makes the whole difference to pivot your product but most importantly to understand which problem you're solving When you start a company, the only thing that you need is not an external investor. You need to be solving a problem. And you need people that are willing to pay for that. So having a community helps you already having those people, at least early interests. The first six months of trying to launch something are crucial. Most people actually give up when it gets hard. But if you have a community, you have the responsibility to other people, not only to your fellow founders. It might be a bit difficult to go all in with a certain target audience in the beginning of your... startup journey, is it better to have a bit wider range of a target audience or a very specific niche of target audience? You need to start quite and then over time, when you refine the product, you start niching down a little bit more and you start understanding which sub-communities exist around that. When you don't have already lovers for your product and when you're starting, it's important to tap into existing communities. And there are communities for everything these days that you can tap in. so i have two questions first which platform do you recommend or which platform you wouldn't recommend for example to build a community you mentioned discord but there is also the possibility to create a facebook reddit linkedin group but also school.com and then what is your experience and recommendation in terms of platforms it's very much depending which targets you want to reach for example when we are talking about sas around gamers We're talking about Discord, of course, over here. We're talking about fintech companies. We're talking about Telegram. The vehicle depends where your target audience actually is already and who they are. In terms of features that Facebook tends to offer the best ones, most people have a Facebook profile, a Mac profile. even if it's for their Instagram so they can go there. You have the possibility of having lives over there. You can make polls. You can really understand your community. But if you're targeting a younger audience, I would say that a good channel to build a community, it's your Instagram channels, Instagram groups. That's what I would say that nowadays and perhaps the next two years will grow even more. They are directly on your DMs over there. You can talk with them on the go. That's easy to create content as well. Instagram groups, it's very underrated at the moment. But if you're creating yourself an online membership, for example, around courses, etc., stick with the platform where you are in. If you are producing it in Kajabi, do it there in Kajabi because they're already there, so they will go with you. But for most tech products, I would say Facebook, Discord, Telegram, and I advise the Instagram groups because they are really growing well. We have a few Facebook groups. when we were living in munich we had a demand for some employees for this project so we created startup jobs in munich and it grew automatically we moved out of munich and a few years later it was 7 000 members wow it's startup jobs and tech jobs you will grow very fast and also in sofia bulgaria i created this english events in sofia group because In both cases, I just needed a group like that. And I said, okay, if there is no group, I will create a group. After two years, it's already 5,000 members, which is a lot because it's not a huge tourist destination. Not so many people come to Sofia. So most of the English speakers who are in Sofia probably are members of that group. Exactly. You can find many digital nomad entrepreneurs in Bulgaria. It's a good location, let's say. What do you think about School.com? I personally prefer to focus on what is already working, basically. Yeah, the problem with School.com and maybe even with Kajabi, that you need to bring the members from outside, usually. There is not so much community at the platform itself. They don't push your content outside of your membership. Yes, exactly. The less friction you create for people to be part of a community, the better, the closer you are to have a successful community. And that's why I mentioned immediately Facebook groups, Instagram groups as well. Why? Because people are spending time there. It's easy for them to jump in and to have conversations with you because that's what the community is. It's a never ending conversation going. And then you can explore more parts of the community, meetups, events. Social responsibility as well when you grow a little bit more your startup and having more impact in other people's lives. Create your affiliate program. You convert that community into emails. And when you have those emails, you can launch your affiliate program, but you can also push new promotions on your product. You can test new features. You can invite them to your beta testers as well and create a hype about that. If you have a Facebook group... Then you offer some lead magnet on your landing page and people have to give you the email address and then you can send them some emails. Willingly. Yeah, willingly. You're not going there to extract the emails, no. Willingly. But you need, of course, the lead magnet to provide real value there. And through your community, again, as partners. They are not only your users, but they are your partners that can help you, especially on the early stage, they can help you grow and scale. they can be your biggest teachers they are the ones with the problem you need to listen to those that have the problem and that are willing to pay to solve it how much effort is it usually in the beginning maybe some startup founders will say oh no i am so busy with other things i cannot spend so much time to communicate with members it's an essential part of building your business so you should find that time because That's what will help you to actually grow the business with a good GPS that you need to build your business. So I would say that in the beginning, you should spend at least one, two hours of your day talking with people, take notes, understand what they are feeling and add value to their lives. Community, it's like a group of friends. Are you going to stay all day long talking with your friends? No, but you are going to nurture that relationship with your friend. Building a community is the same thing. You're building a relationship with many friends. with many people that you're solving problems at. And in the beginning, yeah, it should be the startup founder. As you grow your team, the person that you will have that will deal with your community really needs to want to build that relationship with them. It's a strategic person inside of our company. But in the beginning, I would say the founders, they should spend a pretty big amount of time talking with them, even technical founders. The community should be for free, right? Maybe some years ago, this would be something that we could charge for, but now there is so many free communities that are charging for it, putting a paywall behind it. It's a little bit limiting, but there are situations where a community can be charged, of course, if it's part of the value that you're selling. If you are a coach selling masterminds, your community, it's a big asset there. When you have big business, very important businessmen over there. that can target each other it's important that there is a paywall there but those are specific cases as a rule of thumb i would say it should be free also one possibility is to create a wide big community for example on facebook for free and then when you have 10 000 members you start promoting a paid community on school.com or kajabi if you give them access to you the more access they have to you the creator of that community membership the more they are going to be willing to pay to be part of a smaller community. If they can have access to you on one-to-one or on live sessions, people will be willing to pay for that. Why? Because you're adding value to them and they are having access to you. And of course, you cannot split yourself in a thousand. So you need to be mindful of the time that you spend with the community. Let's imagine we want to create a community on Facebook, for example. What should we consider? when choosing the niche and positioning of the community? If you're starting the community from scratch, it will depend which existing communities you're going to tap in, which other Facebook groups are you going in, which events from the target group you're going in. But it's important when people land into your own group that they see already conversations going on there. So ideally, you're not going to start that alone. You're going to have your business partners that will be starting having conversations with you on the group. You're going to start creating value in the group, even when you have three people there. It's what I call unscalable. It's really building something big for two, three people. Yes, but those two, three people, they are going to be impacted and they are going to talk with other people. So they are going to start inviting more people because of the value that you created. And over time, you're going to empower conversations to be happening in with the community itself, user generated content. within your community so you're going to step a little bit back on that sense the bigger effort is in the beginning you look at the other competitors in the other relevant communities and then you find a unique aspect for your own community you don't just copy the same aspect of them for example if you are targeting software service startup founders you don't create a community for sas founders but you find something unique about your community. You could say, okay, we are discussing entrepreneurial books on our community, or we are discussing AI tools that are helping entrepreneurs. Something very specific, then it's much easier, isn't it, to get... Yes, you need to fine-tune the added value there. It can be a geography as well. You can make the SaaS group for people living in Berlin only, or a SaaS group where every single week... You are reviewing tech books on a live session and people can interact with each other. Yes, the unique value needs to be there. Building a community is not very different than building a startup. You need to have those unique aspects in order to attract the people. You can apply Blue Ocean strategy for building a community as well. A little bit. Yes, exactly that. A good framework needs to be on the top of your mind. For me, my framework usually, it's my three pillars to build a community, supports. inspire and nurture you build everything on top of these three pillars and you get yourself a good vision to build your community yeah for me for this episode the most important thing is to get started with the community because as soon as you have the ball rolling it's so much easier but the beginning so that you move from zero members to three members and then to 300 members that's the most difficult thing Just to summarize how I would start, look at your target market and look exactly the type of person you want to go a little bit wide. See the communities where that person is hanging out already. Facebook groups, Instagram channels. Go there, start talking with those people. Start adding value on those conversations. Building a relationship with them on those existing groups because they already have the people. Then take your founders and start creating conversations in an empty group with two people, three people. Let's start talking about our business. Let's start creating content over here, live content. And then utilize the people that you started talking in those existing communities and promote the initiatives that you did on your group and attract people one by one there. When they arrive there, welcome them. interact with them, try to make them introduce themselves. Why? Because having a community with 10,000 people, but the only thing that you hear is crickets. It's not pleasing. It's not sexy even. If you start actually empowering those conversations with two, three people and the first two, three people that you attract from the other community, you start really growing your own community. And one aspect can be, please be part of this group. You're going to have this unique value by being part of this group. And unique value can be, You can be a better tester for us. We will give you our product for free on the first three months, for example. It can be a good thing. Yes, or for example, you will have two-hour weekly meetings, hangouts that no outsiders can have. Or I will share some valuable information. Should the community be open or closed? Closed. Because it's very easy for someone just to be there like... They open, but they are not part. They just open it. That's it. When you close a community, you're basically increasing your value because people will be curious of what's happening there. And it's important that the initial value that you offer in your community, it's something that people would be willing to pay even to add it. But you are offering them that for free over there. So access to exclusive meetings, beta version, discount on the product as well, or even the product for free for a certain amount of time. Of course, these are unscalable actions. You cannot do that to attract a thousand people, but you can do that to attract your first 10, 15, 20 people. Imagine a room with 50 people, it's a room full of people. So a Facebook group with 50 people, it's a Facebook group with a lot of conversations that can be happening. The potential is there. You just need to look how it would be in real life. If in real life this would fill up a room and you'd be happy to attract that amount of people, that you have something very good to start with. Absolutely. There are specialized pages or groups that are very small, maybe a few thousand members, but very specific. And those organizers earn a lot of money. On the other hand, there are also very general, maybe entertainment groups that have... hundreds, thousands or millions of members and they are struggling to sell anything because if you have a very specific group of people, you can make quite a lot of money even with a small number of people. So it's not all about just having a lot of members, but having the right type of members and having active members. The world of marketing is changing a little bit. And that's true. People started to stop trusting so much these macro influencers. Then they start leaning more towards those nano or micro influencers. I have built some influencer marketing programs with startups and corporations. And I tend to focus a lot on those smaller creators because of that, because of the influence that you can have. And also... The higher engagement you see on smaller creators, you don't see on bigger creators. They can actually talk with their audience. And we can make a perfect parallel with the community. It's better to have a Facebook group with a community of 500 people that you can actually talk with than 10,000 where you really don't have a touch. So you will have a bigger chance to influence a smaller audience than you will have to influence a bigger audience where your message is just correct. other communities without being spammy or being flagged by the admins you will not be flagged by an admin if you are generally interacting with people over time and what you're offering it's actually a value you're not there selling crypto on the group you are there providing value of something that will exist in another group and especially if you're not competing you can actually approach the admins of the group and partner with them you'd be surprised how many community leaders are willing to partner with smaller communities to help them and to help each other. Perhaps you have something of value that you can offer to that community leader. Or if that community is not actually made by a business, you can make that your community even. And that community leader will be happy to be the community leader for you and help you influence. So you have many ways that you can build a community. You can start it from scratch or you can tap into existing communities, partner with them and make them. your own communities and corporations nowadays are doing that they are not building their communities from scratch and they are tapping into unofficial communities partnering with them and they are getting their awareness from them if you don't want to have the hassle to build a community on a daily basis just partner with others and let them do that for you offer them something relevant for them offer them something valuable for them and they will do it for you i will give you the example of chaos group a SaaS company with rendering software chaos has one facebook group but there are hundreds of other facebook groups that are unofficial and they talk a lot about chaos products they are not part of the company but they work with the company they are the ambassadors because they partner with us and they started actually acting with the voice of the company there and when we would do a launch of a new software they would announce it there they would create those conversations there they would humanize the brands on that way If your product is already quite popular, it's easier to give those other community admins some extra access or some material. Which other examples maybe you can give for which kind of value you can give to those admins? When your product is not known, what you can do is that you can actually offer your product to them. You can have a rev share agreement with them. They can become your ambassadors slash affiliates. That will be something that can be enticing for them. They can earn with their group. It's the same as you working with an influencer, but in this case, it's someone that is having an existing community. You don't have to invest upfront. You create a share model with them and they will earn from their own community over there. So it's what I call social selling. That's a good idea. You need probably to set up the affiliate system so you can... You can do that on existing platforms such as... CJ Impact among others, or you can build something very simple in-house too. What do you think about giving them money for sponsored posts or featured posts? It's easier to have a hybrid model. When you have a hybrid model where they earn per performance, they are going to do the things with a different kind of motivation. It's not only about the awareness. If your goal is only awareness, yes, go ahead, sponsor a post. It will be on the group. And you will have the awareness there. It can convert or not. But when you're partnering with the community leader and you're offering in upfront a flat fee plus rev share, it can be a percentage per sale, etc. He's going to be motivated to make these posts perform, make these announcements perform. He's earning from it, he's growing with you. When you share your success with others, you're going to involve them much more on your journey. Because they are going to be your partners, not only your vendors, let's say. If you post on your closed Facebook group, how many members will see those posts? In a Facebook group, usually it's the more active members that you'll see. I would tell you around perhaps 50% of the people, if they are active on that group. But it's much higher than a social media post. A Facebook group and an Instagram group, etc. You can have people really seeing your posts. You can have them be notified as well. You have that option to have notifications from the group. But usually it's a higher reach than any social media platform, perhaps with the exception of LinkedIn, where LinkedIn has this great reach. What about LinkedIn groups? Is it worth it? Do you have some experience with that or opinion? I don't have much experience with LinkedIn groups, but I have experience with LinkedIn as to create content in LinkedIn. In terms of content, the reach on LinkedIn, it's incredible. over there, especially video content and content that is providing value. If your target audience is business owners or a certain professional community, Facebook groups are quite worthy. Yeah, I've heard the LinkedIn groups are not very effective. They didn't do a great job with LinkedIn groups. You said support, inspire and nurture. So you have, let's say, 500 members. How does it look like with support, inspire and nurture those members? You support them by educating your audience on how to use your products, how to succeed in the industry. You can inspire them, for example, with success stories. You can inspire them with social responsibility of what your company is doing on a daily basis. You can show them the backstage on that community as well. And you nurture them by adding value to their lives in that group. really adding value on a daily basis. That's how you nurture them by communicating with them, listening to them. You can also treat your community with 500 people. You can definitely treat your community as the first line of support. So you have the people talking, asking questions, technical questions there. You go there and you answer. If nobody's answering, you answer. And when you see the community starting to answer, you know that you're working great and that the community is active. Do you have still... to spend quite some time when the community is active, being active yourself, or can you just do it passively at some point? You can identify the most active members and you can do it passively. You identify those most active members, you talk with them, you partner with them, you make them your ambassadors. Over there, you just step out. If you want to hire someone to manage your communities, look at the community itself and hire there. Hire someone that already understands the conversations and that grow up with your wife. That person will become much more aware of what's happening, much more motivated and happier. What are most common mistakes that you've seen that we didn't cover yet? For the community, it's essentially focusing only on groups. That's one aspect. It's a very common mistake. A community, it's not only a group. It has many dimensions, many programs that can be launched. Another aspect is also treating the community as a channel of awareness and not as a channel of performance. It can be a channel of performance, definitely, to build affiliate programs out of it, social selling that we talked also about. And the third is, as you grow your company, to just put community and social media on the same bucket, because they are not. It's not about like surface relationship. It's about really establishing a relationship with them. How do you do a balance between not being too pushy, too salesy and like probably different stages allow you to be more or less salesy? There is no golden recipe on that sense to not be too salesy. One way to sell in a community, it's actually to create really exclusive offers to them, really offers that they cannot find outside of that community. Add more value to your offer to them, meaning not only a discount. Add a course when you're selling that to them. Add a mentorship with your team when you're selling something to the community. Make them really feel that there is advantages that they are having in converting to your product within the community then if they would find you from Facebook ads. How do you see the future of Facebook groups and also like the alternatives to Facebook? The communities are going to start becoming a little bit more niche-oriented with less people. And more and more companies are starting to having that, which is to have videos over there, live videos, engage your community directly live and do live. And I think many communities will be doing live social sharing as well. It's starting right now in Asian countries like South Korea and China. It's happening quite a lot. But from the social media channels, we are going to pass into the community channels and make social live selling. it's probably feels like you are part of the video kind of instead of watching a video on youtube or on facebook you can also ask questions as an audience is it one-sided is one person talking or is it also the audience the can also talk yeah yeah talking with the audience why because when you're talking video first of all you need to be genuine over there. And if you're talking with the audience and the audience is interacting with you, they will know that video is not pre-recorded. Actually, they are invested in talking with them. And that's what will make you closer to your audience and more connected, essentially nurturing your audience in another level. Do you recommend to record those social videos and post them? Yeah, some part, unless you're hitting something. like sensitive and data that you shouldn't reveal yes and use them on your social channels attract people from your social channels to your community utilize that show the value that your community has but don't share everything because otherwise people don't have a reason yes absolutely so much valuable info claudius thank you so much is there anything else you would like to mention to our audience as a last message what i would say is Pay really attention from day one to build a community because that will help you to build a better business and to understand when to pivot and to have people that will help you also to scale it and to grow it. absolutely what would you like our audience to do we will of course include all the links first of all you have this amazing book on amazon that people can buy about building community yes i do have the how to start your membership i'm currently writing a second one as well about communities actually called the community is the heartbeat of creativity everyone is welcome to reach me out i'm always open to talk about any aspects of building your own company scale marketing ops as well, marketing operations. And I'm available for good conversations and mentorship too. I started my career as a five-time founder and also to exit. So I can also talk about that with the people if they reach me out. You played the entrepreneurial game in full extent, like two times. Actually, from the five companies I found. two were sold one of them was just a non-profit company and it was targeted to younger college students to benefit from real experience so perhaps the project that i'm most proud of is the one that i haven't sold because it was a non-profit i would say that entrepreneurial journey early on was what shaped me nowadays as a marketer as well because entrepreneurship is not only about starting your own business it's about skills that you acquire that can help you to solve problems in the world and make a bigger impact. That's really motivating. Today, there were so many things to explore, how to get the ball rolling. You didn't have so much space to listen to all those interesting stories, but I know for sure they are very mind-blowing stories. Like you mentioned, you are going to Mount Everest, but it feels for me at least that you already achieved. climbing to Mount Everest in some of your entrepreneurial projects. So it will be really interesting to listen about that. Yeah, Mount Everest, it's quite a goal. 2027, the top of Mount Everest. I'm looking forward to its big journey. Doesn't sound very comfortable. No, but I guess, look, do you know what I find really amazing about hiking a mountain is that it's the only sport that when you reach the top, you need to come down and climb again. if you want to have that feeling. So it's the same as a startup. When you reach the top, you're just halfway there. And if you want to go back up, you need to work hard as well. If you get at the point where you maybe sold your company or got investors or decent revenue stream, it's not the end of an entrepreneurial journey. It can be maybe even... a beginning of a next level where you have more money and you have even more work sometimes yeah you can do it with different resources many times i see first-time founders that you get an investment from a series of angel investors let's say 150k investments and they are like amazing life is done no no that's actually when the hard space they start. Unfortunately, they see that as the end goal, but you need to be very mindful with the investors that you bring on. The journey is only starting and it can only get more challenging from there, but also the fun is starting. So yeah, it's the same as climbing a mountain. When you're on the top, you're only halfway there.

Building a community can be a growth engine.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to build an online community that creates trust, drives referrals, reduces support load, and can even become the backbone of an affiliate program.

Claudio Meireles (serial entrepreneur) breaks down what community actually means (it’s not just a Facebook group), why people join for the product but stay for the people, and how founders can use community as a “GPS” to shape the right product for the right audience.

Key takeaways ✅
• Why people join for the product, but stay for the people
• How to start by tapping into existing communities first
• A simple framework: support – inspire – nurture
• How community turns users into power users (and cuts support tickets)
• Choosing the right platform: Discord, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram Groups
• How to build ambassadors and affiliates without being spammy

Connect with Us:
- Host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilhelmlaubach/
- Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudiomeireles/

Chapters for Easy Navigation:
00:00 Introduction to Building Online Communities
01:13 The Role of Affiliates in Community Building
02:05 Emotional Connection and Brand Loyalty
03:02 Case Study: Chaos OS Community Growth
07:12 Balancing Human Touch and Data Analytics
09:57 Steps to Create a New Community
18:07 Choosing the Right Platform for Your Community
22:34 The Importance of Community Engagement
25:02 Starting and Positioning Your Community
27:26 Three Pillars of Community Building
32:48 Leveraging Community Leaders and Ambassadors
34:40 Monetizing Through Affiliate and Social Selling
40:45 Future Trends in Community Building
42:40 Final Thoughts and Entrepreneurial Insights