Ever start a Facebook group where no one participated? Ever craft an ambassador program that no one applied for? Ever spend hours coordinating an event and only have a few people show up? I have.
Communities, like products, fail when we don’t develop and understand the members first. We go heads down building and when we pick our heads up for air, we realize no one needs what we’ve built.
Customer Development is about checking our theories against reality to make sure what we plan to build is actually valuable. And it matters just as much for communities as it does for products.
Love love love love love this. It’s so true, and so hard to do. It’s much easier to sit at your desk and write up plans and create Facebook groups and do things nobody actually cares about.
I probably spent 1/8th of my time at UserVoice talking to customers & community in person, and another huge chunk of time looking at forum data, survey data, visitor data, etc. And I probably should have spent even more time doing it.
Customer Service Breakfast Happy Hour was our MVC, and after it was clear it was valuable to people, my boss Richard White pushed me to do something bigger. I’m extremely grateful for that…it can be easy to fail in the opposite direction, where you don’t scale the things that are going well because it’s SCARY.
The result was UserConf, which is now approaching its 5th event and just had its first that was fully sold out. I no longer work at UserVoice, but I already have my tickets for the next one.
As we mentor and support each other, let’s keep ourselves honest: do the interviews, do the research, do the diligence before you start solidifying any plans.