Tristan Pollock on how to build and grow communities remotely

Introduction and Experience in Building Remote Community

Nirmaan Agrawal 

So, welcome to another episode of be remote podcast. For today’s episode we have with us Tristin Pollack, He is an American tech entrepreneur and startup investor was created and sold to companies. And invested 30 million into Silicon Valley startups via 500. startups. Currently, he head’s community and cto.ai. And we’re going to talk about how to build and grow communities remotely. So just know that you would you just wanted to use yourself and, and a bit of your experience in building remote communities and also what you do at cto.ai

Tristan Pollock  

Yeah, so thanks for having me. I’m some sort of split of entrepreneur, investor and community builder, spent the last decade building and selling to startups and then the later half joining Silicon Valley, Vc 500, startups, and running but you know, 10, accelerator programs for them investing through their seed fund. And, you know, kind of helping hundreds, if not 1000s of companies going through the program, you know, from pitching and messaging all the way down to, you know, fundraising and getting your first customers. So I’ve spent a lot of time on the early stage of startups kind of around that pre seed, like post series day, on both the operator investor side, and the community builder part comes in, in a way that it’s just this philosophy of how I’ve always built companies and why I’ve cared about the organizations I’ve been a part of. And it’s this, you know, I call it kind of my movement building approach, where, you know, I really laser in on the mission of the organization, and I find kind of these like, growth channels or community growth hacking, ways to figure out how to amplify that mission, and thus bring people back into your community and bring them back to become your customers.

Team members & their location and distribution  

Nirmaan Agrawal    

Sounds interesting. And how large is your team at cto.ai? Like, and where are they located? Are they distributed?

Tristan Pollock   

Yeah, so at CTO AI, and that’s cto.ai as a URL, they, we I’m the head of community, which also kind of means I’m the kind of everything growth person, you know, we’re a small team, we’re 20 people. The team is, you know, it’s kind of a hybrid model. But, you know, obviously, during COVID, we were very distributed. So, we have people in San Francisco, we have me here in Minneapolis, where I’ve been, and this is where I grew up over my childhood before moving out to San Francisco. And, and then most of the rest of the team is based in Canada, between Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. So most people are based in Vancouver, but right now it’s I would say it’s completely distributed. Like there’s there’s office space, but people aren’t really using it. And so we’ve we’ve done a lot, we’ve definitely implemented a lot of interesting ways of working that are more focused on a remote first environment.

Tristan’s work on movement building 

Nirmaan Agrawal   

Interesting. And can you just elaborate on your work inside the company? Like, what are you responsible for? What are your goals? short term and long term?

Tristan Pollock    

Yeah, on the community side of it, you know, I’m growing the community live, I’ve grown up probably about 10X over the past year. You know, we’re building this kind of developer operations community or DevOps for short. And it’s a place that, you know, kind of his sits one level on top of where what we’re doing as a platform and but the platform is really the enablement piece of the philosophy of the community, which is, you know, we want to make developer operations and be able to scale elastically very flexibly and inclusively. Like very globally. For our the startups that work with us. And so a lot of times, you know, startup raises money. They’re trying to figure out, you know, how do I, how do I scale? How do I get oversight into my development team? How do I hit roadmap, my milestones and deadlines. And, and then, and then that kind of enter the CTO platform. So I’m basically growing this community, increasing the amount of engagement in the community, we’re solely focused in a Slack channel. But you know, that’s also, you know, spreads spans into social media, that spans to any sort of touch point where someone is interested in what we’re doing, or they’re interested in the greater community and ideas that we’re sharing. So I spent a lot of time you know, and when I say movement building, I think of a very much of a cross functional approach to growing a company and growing a startup, I think that you need all the different aspects under the growth plot, umbrella, you know, marketing, PR community, you know, all these things play together in order to tell your story, and to go out and find the channels to tell it, that will resonate the most. So in addition to kind of like being head, its head of community, and scaling the community and scaling the engagement, I also spend time and like, figuring out where these channels are, what sort of thought leadership can we do? What sort of, you know, fun things can we do to kind of engage people, you know, and share our kind of culture, ethos, and vibe of the community outward. One of those examples could be, we did a video with celebrities explaining DevOps tools. And so they were explaining, you know, Kubernetes, and Docker and AWS, and these are people like David Hasselhoff, flavor, flavor, and Carole Baskin from Tiger King. So like, it’s like trying to find these ways to kind of get attention, get people excited, and to kind of funnel that passion back into a gathering place. And, and then, you know, be able to empower them with the tools that we have built.

Nirmaan Agrawal    

That’s, that’s a cool idea of bringing celebrities, probably they would also have explained it in such a simple way. Right. And a lot of people would have found that very interesting as to how DevOps could be explained to you, man.

Tristan Pollock   

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was probably one of the most, the highest traffic bringers to our site that we’ve done to date, I think we’ve got, like, on Twitter alone, I think it was 150,000 views. So, you know, inevitably, it went viral. And just in this one specific community, not even like having the same sort of, you know, mainstream kind of pop culture sort of thing. It was just like, this is very, very specific, very, very niche, but like, it shows that there’s a lot of interest in how to understand these tools, and how to engage with them in a fun way.

Experience of building a community

Nirmaan Agrawal    

Super cool. So let’s just go back in time and revisit your first experience of building a community, how did that idea come to you? And how do you go about figuring out how to build a community? For the first time?

Tristan Pollock  

Yeah, for the first time? Well, I will probably go back to my first startup. And, you know, at the time community was something that was, you know, localized to community, it was like your neighborhood. And it wasn’t talked about as much as I’ve kind of a business building philosophy. And, but we did a lot of those things. And I think we took we took what basically that startup was a social impact media platform that we had organizations, like people from a shoka, or the school Foundation, as well as social entrepreneurs, blogging, telling stories, writing silly pieces of solution journalism, you know, here here that here’s the here’s like, the challenges and the problems of the world. But like, here’s, here’s people, and organizations and solutions that could work to help fix these things. And so that’s something I believe strongly about, it’s like, not just, you know, writing about doom and gloom, but like, if you’re researching a topic, then sharing about how you can actually solve that topic and what sort of solutions are out there and how can we help? You know, it’s kind of like the ending of a documentary with, you know, here’s the things you can do now, after we got you really excited about making change. And so I always came from this kind of intersection of impact and technology. And part of that is like, that was my foray into community building. It was like, Alright, now, we have You know, 200 contributors to the site in 25 different countries. How do we build this kind of cohesive glue between everyone, we were using this tool that I think Twitter bought and doesn’t exist anymore called posture s. And like, just, it was basically like early Slack, and we would get people in there sharing information, you know, setting a code of conduct, encouraging, you know, people to come, you know, meet each other. All sorts of things like this, we started going into like, video as well. And, you know, after a few years, we were acquired by a larger media company that was focused on corporate social responsibility, which is now you know, ESG, and environmental, social and governance, so, so we were like, very early in this kind of social entrepreneurship, social impact space. And very early in, like building that community around our writers and contributors, as well as the greater community. And I think if you think about community, there’s, there’s many layers to the onion, you know, we have our team, which is like the most, the tightest knit part of the community, like the center, and then you have your, we have our writers, and then we have all of our readers and our audience. And so the community is kind of spans out in those ways. And, you know, eventually maybe turns more into audience over community. Because, you know, maybe people are reading but maybe they just read a one time and leave, versus, you know, someone who’s consistently coming back and engaging with us, you know, in different channels.

Challenges while building communities

Nirmaan Agrawal   

Interesting, and what, what, what are the challenges for you to set up your first community, like as a, as a rookie community builder, what you felt, you, you really should should kind of bring to the game in order to do this better the next time?

Tristan Pollock  

Yeah, I think the hard part is, you know, the hard part is starting a community for sure getting zero to one. And to figure that out, you know, a lot of times you don’t have a ton of support or resources, you’re trying to figure out, okay, like, how can I engage with this community? And like, one, where do I even have people a great gather to like, Who’s, you take some time to figure out who the people who’s the 5%, or the 1% of the community that’s, like, more active, they’re more like the community ambassadors, you know, you haven’t had a chance to maybe identify them yet. And then from there, like, You’re, you’re also like, you’re trying to, you know, grow the community, but also engage with these, you know, maybe like, people who are more active have a larger voice in the community. And when you don’t have maybe have, like, a ton of structure or a ton of things you can give. So I think like, the big challenges are always, how do I get those first, you know, 100 people to love what we’re doing, or to, or at least first, like 100, people that are really like, excited by this, the greater philosophy of what we’re trying to do. So you know, in our case, maybe solution journalism, maybe they don’t even have to read social Earth, that was the startup, but like, they just need to be excited about solution journalism, maybe that’s an ad channel to get people in it in the beginning. And eventually, you know, they kind of like, oh, cool, like the people putting the song or like, actually, you know, putting words behind the action, and they’re doing this as well. And I’m kind of interested in that, too. So you can definitely start out a community in a way that is more philosophical and one layer out of the onion that you’re starting to create, where it’s, it’s a common interest, a common value, something like this, that’s bringing people together. Let’s say like, for example, like a lot of communities, I think start out of newsletters or sub stacks today, they start out of like content with that people are writing about a certain topic, but then you know, that then they might create a Slack channel or discord, and start bringing the more dedicated people actually into a community. So before maybe it was more of this audience or a lightweight community, and now it’s moving into actual community where people are sharing and interacting. And then your your job is to not just do all the interaction, but to also encourage these moments of collision between other community members, you know, that could be like there’s like an app called donut in slack that encouraged like basically sets people up who haven’t talked to each other in this in the slack and so there’s like little things like that and maybe like, or like having, you know, product feedback sessions or meetups right like that’s traditionally people have been done a lot. I’d like these, you know, offline meetups localized in a certain city, or geography so that they can meet each other. And I think that’s kind of your job as a community builder to build relationships, not just with yourself in the in the community and with like, maybe the company or the product in the community, but also with you, the community members and themselves. So that there there’s a strength building and growing within that community.

What Tristen follow to to understand more about community building

Nirmaan Agrawal    

Sounds very interesting. And in particular people that you follow it, in the initial days to kind of understand more about community building, as a marketing channel itself, like any any people that you still can go back and look at their work.

Tristan Pollock    

 Oh, definitely. I would highly recommend the CMS community. It’s like a community of community builders. David Spinks created it, he I used to go to his events in San Francisco, where they would bring together you know, communities, community builders summit, basically. Now they do it online. So they not only have like a lot of great resources, like the spaces framework, which is an acronym that stands for support, product acquisition, contribution, engagement, and success, which you can find on their site. But there’s basically like a framework to community building and community management, and here’s all the different aspects that you can use. And they also, you know, I think, are the kind of the premier community because they also have all these premier community builders that are a part of it, speaking at their conferences, participating in their Slack channel. There’s, there’s some other folks that I think are pretty good as well. Greg Eisenberg has been doing a lot of community community strategy and has done he’s he’s he’s a really amazing product person. You can find him on Twitter, he’s got a lot of great insights. And then also another person Mack read in who’s the founder of comScore, which is this kind of community operating platform. That’s helps you kind of understand some of your like KPIs and things like that. He’s, he’s also been really, really great, I think comScore and like their subsequent community Club, which is their kind of community of community builders is, is a really great tool. And another tool that could be cool to check out is orbit. Another, I think they just really have a really great philosophy around how to understand community building. And you can find them at orbit that love

What techies look for in a community

Nirmaan Agrawal  

sounds good. That’s it, look up these people. Moving on, to another very important topic for us, which is tech community building. So I think a lot of companies like yourself are trying to build communities for for developers or other skill, other skilled individuals in the tech community. Right. What do you think techies look for in a community?

Tristan Pollock  

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think when it comes to developers, when it comes to like highly skilled individuals, I think they’re looking for the the needs are much deeper, and they’re looking for knowledge, they’re looking for solutions, they’re looking for product products that are, you know, they can have a part in building, you know, that’s why so much developer work and communities sent around, and the strongest ones sometimes sent around open source. And, you know, that’s not just like, that’s like the product, there’s feedback, there’s contribution, you know, people are contributing to these projects. There’s a lot of those components, I think that like, sent around like something that’s like open source in the developer world. But, you know, even for me, it’s like, let’s say, like, one of the communities I’m most active in right now is like the climate tech community, and technology solving climate change, is, you know, I’m looking for a place where they’re, I’m getting, you know, there’s kind of a vetting that happens, right, like people are sharing things that are like, this is really good work. This is really good news. Like this is an article worth reading. I can give you feedback on like, Hey, I’m looking at, you know, investing in this sort of company, okay, like, direct air capture is, you know, here’s, here’s the high level thoughts from the industry. There’s the current like, tempo or the feeling of like what scientists are saying about this. So I think there’s like a lot more of this knowledge pursuit, or the ability to you know, there also might be like the ability to like, become an active contributor, you know, so there’s like that engagement part of it, but there’s also just like, hey, like, I want to be a part of this, because I’m learning, you’re making me look smart. Like I’m, I’m like, up leveling myself and my work. And, and also like, you know, I can share this work back to the community and get their feedback on it. And so it’s like, you know, I think that’s when it comes, there’s like a true utilization there. And true reciprocity, where I’ve, you know, I, there’s this, the the people there, I’m able to, that I’m interacting with are able to support me, but I can also support them. And I think there’s this, that given takes, it’s pretty, it’s pretty important for setting that for a community. But I think that’s also very important for like highly skilled individuals that want to come, they don’t have a lot of time to interact with a lot of communities. So they just need like the like, the, you know, the few best communities for them that you know, really focus on the topics they’re interested in.

Building Tech community 

Nirmaan Agrawal    

Interesting. So there would be a lot of effort that goes into, like, initially building the tech community, I’m assuming a lot of moderation to maintain the quality. And at some point, you kind of reach a stage where a lot of content is content and value addition is crowd sourced, where the community itself is kind of adding value, I think that’s the stage or most of the, almost all communities would want to reach including the tech community, right?

Tristan Pollock    

Yeah, I think you want to see a graph over time of like, more contributions, you know, whether that’s content, that’s, you know, that’s submitting repos to an open source project, or, you know, I think you want to see that those opportunities increase over time, as the community grows more engaged, as the community goes larger, you know, providing these opportunities for people to, you know, find these engagement opportunities, whether that’s, you know, creating a design, giving feedback on the product, you know, writing a blog post, that I think those the attitude, you want to see that that level increase over time. And so you’re as the community builder, doing more, you’re creating more of the opportunities for engagement versus you’re creating the engagement.

How community works and provide value to members 

Nirmaan Agrawal   

that’s insightful. So I think, over a period of time, what, what would have happened is there’s a lot of extrinsic value, that the community is kind of giving to each individual, and not just the intrinsic value that they’re perceiving out of just reading the content on the community.

Tristan Pollock    

Yeah, yeah, I think that there’s, there’s, you’re definitely on the right track there, I think you’re gonna see, it’s Yeah, I think a lot of people think, okay, slack or Facebook group, or discord, and like, there’s just, there’s this kind of reading, you know, that happens, and like, probably 90%, who knows, like, a lot of times, there’s this 8020 rule, but like, might even be more 9010, or even more, or 90% of people are reading, and not saying anything, maybe they’re not even putting an emoji on something. And also, like, the literally, it’s very hard to tell who’s engaging. So it’s like, then when you have those people engaging, you have to really engage them. And also, you know, understand, like, provide, provide these opportunities for other people to kind of, like, motivate them to, you know, to, to move into that realm of like, Okay, well, maybe they’re not, you know, comfortable in doing this, but maybe they’re comfortable doing something where it’s like, they can do a kind of behind the scenes, like, let’s say, a poll, right, you know, more anonymous sort of stuff that like you can contribute, but you don’t have to actually like, hey, like, here’s my, like, specific thought on this, you know, so I think you have to kind of feel out your community and what that demographic and what’s interesting, and you’re kind of constantly experimenting, I think that’s why I think of like community growth hacking is something I’m more attuned to, because growth hacking is all about experimentation, right? You’re looking at, like, what can I do with the higher to get the highest impact with the lowest effort? And, you know, I’ll run experiments and then scale up things at work. And I think that’s, that’s a very similar approach I take to community building because I’m more on the builder side and less of the management side. I’m more of like, how do we like grow this? How do we get like a lot of engagement? How do we really get people excited, passionate about what what’s going on in the community and what’s going on with the company. And that’s kind of plays back into that movement building strategy that I talked about. So I want to, I want to build a movement with this community. I want to get people like, you know, pouring into this community because they’re so excited about what’s going on. They think it’s really game changing. The thought leadership resonates. And now they have you know, and that’s the motivation is high. And there’s ways that we basically then provide these ways for them to plug in.

Role of content creator in building an engaging community 

Nirmaan Agrawal  

So have you have you had to kind of reward the content creator in your community extrinsically and portraying that these rewards have been shared? Have you done that? Anytime? rewards for being engaged in the community? Yeah. engaged in the community as a content creator, not just a consumer?

Tristan Pollock    

Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think there’s like, you know, I mean, rewards could be as straightforward as, you know, I’m getting paid to even create content, right. Like, there’s, I think there’s things like this, like, let’s take like Lyft, like, you know, Lyft, in the US, originally would, once once they had drivers that were, you know, doing ride sharing, that were really good and highly rated, they would get paid to then onboard a new driver, once they were like, on the system. And they’d be like, hey, do you want to pick this person up and like, show them the ropes. And so it’s like, I think there’s even components like that right there driver communities and our helping on helping onboard the other, but there’s also a financial incentive to so it’s like, you’re rewarding, highly rated people, but with a financial incentive, but they’re also helping you with like, work and in the process of making more really great drivers. So I think there’s like, the, you know, I couldn’t cryptos is a really interesting example of this, where you see platforms out there, you know, whether it’s airdrops or, you know, you get you get tokens for your engagement with the community for doing certain things for taking jobs for filling out your profile for, you know, you get like high high interest rates for, you know, doing different giving them leverage, there’s all these different ways that the crypto communities are, you know, financially incentivizing their community members, which is pretty interesting. I think it’s actually probably the forefront of community building right now.

Collaboration with other communities

Nirmaan Agrawal  

Great example, I think, lots to read into that. And do you? Do you recall any community or your efforts where you’ve had to actually collaborate with another community to kind of get attention to your own continuity?

Tristan Pollock   

  Yeah, and I think that’s a great idea. I mean, I think a lot of times, you know, let’s take like, an example from the developer world, you know, which I’m sure spans into a lot of other spaces is like, just even doing it like a co hosting a webinar. And, you know, it’s like, well, one person, you know, these guys have an email list, those guys have an email list. And they do this webinar together, collaboratively, and they share some interesting insights. It’s, you know, that takes the pressure off even presenting it for like a full hour, instead, you have like a split up, plus q&a. But then also, both sides are sharing it with their, with their, you know, all their contacts. And so I think you think about, you know, community building the same way, it’s like, it could be things like that, that are like, you know, maybe South feel more like marketing. But like, you’re just working on these, like, you know, novel types of collaboration that basically gets exposure to you to other communities by providing value. And so I think that’s kind of the key part is like, making sure that your mission aligns with your content minds that these are in line with these collaboration so that when people see that, then they see like, oh, there’s true value here. And I understand clearly what they’re trying to accomplish. And so maybe not in some subset of that audience from that webinar, go back and join the community. And we’ve definitely done a lot of things like that.

Pre and Post Covid Community Building 

Nirmaan Agrawal 

Sounds interesting. And you’ve seen a lot of difference in community building happening before COVID to post COVID? What are your thoughts? Like how this whole community building activity has changed?

Tristan Pollock  

Yeah, I mean, I guess the obvious side is, you know, people are you there’s been a lot of venture capital falling into community building tools, online event tools, hop in comms or, you know, all these these types of types of platforms that, you know, basically enable these things like zoom. Right? And, you know, it’s like, so there’s just these new icebreaker was another one. Like, you know, I think there’s, I think there’s just a lot more of these things that you know, like take even like the donut donut example, the slack app that I gave before it’s like the you know, before you might not have if you were all in office, right? Like you maybe don’t set you up you’d go like have a coffee or something or maybe that wasn’t even necessary because you just randomly see people and Okay, you want to grab coffee. Today, but now you know, you need these kind of prompts, you need this kind of like structure because it’s there is no ad hoc a bill ability to just connect with each other people on your team or Nick in the greater community, because there just isn’t these visible in person events, right. So big as those come back online, the really great thing that was created out of COVID was that people are, you know, now you can build this community of people have similar values, or believe in the same mission, you know, internationally, very easy, and it’s a lot more status quo than ever has been, where before, I think there was a lot more geography, geographic focused communities that maybe have the same mission, but also you’re in the same city. And now it’s like, well, now maybe I want to, I want to know, like, what the best people are thinking about this topic, no matter where they are in the world, they just want to have that being the part of the community with the best insights. And so I think that that that’s actually it’s a very subtle shift, but it’s a very big shift at the same time is that there’s just an openness now to online communities, and there’s a lot more tools and technology to support them.

Suggestion for other community Builders

Nirmaan Agrawal    

Cool. So what would be a suggestion to other community builders to go about? figuring out where the community is, let’s say, for your own example, right of building community for CTO.ai, ready to go and find developers make your initial 200 to 500 developers to kind of invite them, and then print them. So what would be advice to other community builders? who are just starting out?

Tristan Pollock   

Yeah, I think for a lot of successful community builders out there, I think that you can, you know, follow on Twitter, or you can join some of the communities that I mentioned, that I think a lot of people are in. They, it’s it’s like, you know, you’re you’re, you’re basically like putting yourself out there, right. You’re, you’re you’re talking and be really excited about a subject, a topic of products. You’re interested, you’re like us, maybe ever there’s a parallel community that you can join, and, you know, start to make a name for yourself within that community. But basically, you’re you’re putting out content, you’re putting out thoughts, you’re putting out ideas, and you’re just drilling home, what you really care about. And I think that’s where you see, like, you know, hey, if I’m just talking about, you know, Amazon Web Services over and over and over again, at some point, maybe that leads to a career path to joining Amazon, if I’m working on this startup that I’m like, really excited about climate technology. And I’m just like climate tech, climate tech, you know, I hashtag everything I share a lot of news, you’re just kind of building yourself into like, a community leader, and you’re trying to, you know, either create a movement or join a movement. And so I think that’s the, that’s, that’s kind of the key to getting started, a lot of startups have, you know, be straight have begun that way, right. Like, I’m like a email, I’m an, I’m a newsletter, or and like, out of that became a US a website that became an really engaged product. But I think there’s just like these basic things where you’re networking, you’re talking to other great people in your field, you’re, you’re and you’re doing the same like kind of putting out these thoughts online and building these relationships and like sharing, you know, refining your own strategy, thesis and ideas that like start to pull people in there and just what you’re talking about, I think that’s the easiest first step, right? It’s just you just need to like, build your network yourself in an industry and shit. start sharing those thoughts. As you feel comfortable around the topics that you’re you’re caring about, you want to build that community around.

Favorite books

Nirmaan Agrawal    

Cool. That’s a good advice. And I would like to kind of pick up on this. So what are your favorite books that are outside of your work, which have helped you think, in becoming a good community person?

Tristan Pollock   

Yeah, you know, I think there’s a really good book that just came out that was by David Spinks, the founder of CMS, that community of communities I was telling you about called the business of belonging. This is not belonging. Okay. Yeah, this is a belonging. I’ve also you know, heard that like a lot of Airbnb community, people have read the art of community by Charles Vogel. But like, I’m also like, I’m kind of, I’m less of like a, I use business books like a Bible maybe like, you know, I like reading just like the I kind of reference the certain chapters and try to flip to them versus like reading them all the way. Through because I kind of find a lot of times it’s business books would be kind of boring. But there’s, there’s like other kind of books that I think will teach you things that maybe you don’t even realize right like they might be because they’re related to the topic you’re doing or they might be something like, I’m reading this other one called blueprint blueprint for the revolution, which is by this Serbian, Serbian nonviolent protester who helped overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, when they’re when they, you know, that area in the world. And Serbia was just in a really bad place and a lot of war and a lot of dictatorship. And so it’s like, it’s interesting, basically, the, the the name of the subtitle of this book is how to use rice pudding, Lego men and other non violent techniques to galvanize communities, overthrow dictators, or simply change the world. And so it’s like, Dave, things like that. I think like, having a hit one of the big components of this book is like having fun being using comedy. Even in the most intense situations where you’re trying to overthrow a dictator, it works because it gets people excited about what you’re doing. And I think there’s a lot of these subtle emotional things for when it comes to community building that you have to tap into treating people like humans, and what would you do with your friends, if you’re trying to get them to go on a trip with you or like, trying to host an event? for like, the people that you know, you’re you’re trying to host an event for your own community, your own family and friend group? And like, what would you do to get them excited about it? What would they care about? And I think asking a lot of those questions goes beyond even like business books, it goes into books like this, it goes into books around psychology and tribes and you know, just like, even like, PR, and like what, you know, thought leadership, like, you know, how do you? How do you once you have that idea? How do you share it. So that’s why I often default back to like, I think that there isn’t just one way to build a community. And I think you, you know, once you get into a community, you start to realize what people really care about how to like, be creative, and encourage the growth of that community, or even to your own sub community further, so I always encourage people to be creative around it and not get too stuck on like, it has to be done this way. I think there’s a lot of frameworks and pieces out there now for community builders, that is that will be that are helpful to get started. But don’t let that stunt your creativity and your and the innovation that you can bring around some of these ideas.

companies you look forward to kind of reading more about community

Nirmaan Agrawal    

Cool. And what kind of companies you look forward to kind of reading more about in the community building space, which which you find promising any any such tools? You said any any kind of tools are that you get to try out or you recently tried to try it out? And you found very promising and you can you look forward for them to kind of innovate in this space?

Tristan Pollock   

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, discord is getting a lot of hype. And inevitably, like your community gathering space should just be easy for the your community to join it right. They’re already using the tool, maybe they’re already using Facebook group. So you create another Facebook group, or they’re already their business community, they’re using Slack, so it’s easy to add another slack. Or maybe they’re tired of using Slack, and they just emails better and you make an email listserv, or an email group. So like thinking about those things, it but also going to where the current behavior is, I think is important. And then like some of the tools I mentioned before, I think there’s going to be a lot more on a community tracking. Right now. It’s kind of very disparate, and crawl across, you know, how many people attended my event? How much web traffic are we getting, like, how many people sign up for the community, you know, it’s like all these different places. But I think there’s going to be more tools that like pull that together as like a dashboard. Even if you’re not using something like geckoboard, or whatever you could, you could end up using something like comScore or orbit, like I was mentioning before where I think they’re going in that direction. They want to have a platform that you can monitor and understand where your community sits and like who you can encourage to then move into a more engaged status. I think that’s going to be the really breakthrough moment for for communities. Because I think community is kind of like, you know, it’s like the new marketing, right? It’s like authentic engagement, you’re encouraging. You’re creating a gathering place and you know, you’re not just like trying to like advertise your goods over and over again, you’re, you’re like letting people have a say, and I think that’s also why you see crypto communities doing what they’re Because they’re like co Ops, you know, people have like a stake in the game now, right? Like they own a part of the company, essentially, right. So like there, I think that sort of stuff is those models are interesting too, for communities of, you know, community owned, and LED. And so that’s kind of, I think we’re like some of this creativeness can can come out of like, the real core of what you want to create, right? Like having, having that vision of what you want to create is really important. And, and we’ll figure out how to track it and manage it and all these other ways, but that that kind of core of what the foundation of what you want to create and how you want to have community involved and not just marketed to, I think is important differentiation.