Could trust be your ultimate innovation strategy?
I had been holding that secret for almost two months and the time to uncover it had finally arrived. I was in front of my business partner, one of my best friends, and I had to tell him that I was going to leave our own company.
It was late 2013, 13 years after we co-founded the company, 4 years after living a roller-coaster of euphoria and terror, 1 year after being acquired, and at that point in time, probably, in the best moment of our careers so far.
However, I had secretly lost my passion. I had lost my soul in the process and didn’t know where it was anymore. My intuitive heart started pointing to a new direction and following it was the only option I had. I was literally fighting for my life — more about it in future blog posts.
How I had intuitively discovered the value of community building
In reality, this new path in my career had started to be intuitively designed two years before that day. It was mid 2011, our company had been building custom digital products for other organisations for the last 10 years, and I started to develop this idea that software was becoming a commodity. We had one of the best tech teams in the market, and I decided that we should start creating our own products. So, I created a specialised team to build innovative products.
At the same time, as being a leader of a recognised think tank in Brazil I was into this idea of revolutionising democracy with digital technology. So, we founded Meevsu, a platform which helps any person to promote a live video debate and use the audience to decide who wins.
Despite already being a hands-on tech entrepreneur for 10 years, I had no idea about what a modern startup was about. In mid 2011, trends like lean startup, growth hacking, community building, were starting to get traction in the Valley. It completely blew my mind!
After having its Proof-of-Concept validated, Meevsu had successfully raised seed funding and we decided to invest in improving the streaming technology and the user experience before officially launching it.
The product was based on user-generated content, so we knew that to get traction we would need a minimum level of usage from early adopters and influencers. Our plan was to get another round of investment just after the launch, specifically, to invest in community building.
However, the early stage venture capital ecosystem in Brazil in 2011 was practically nonexistent and we ended up not making through the second round. From that failing experience I had two major learnings: first, disrupting democracy was a moonshot — and still is — and because of that Meevsu was an investment mistake from the beginning; second, investing in community building from the start is key to succeed as a startup, especially, a consumer one.
By 2013, I was becoming to be known as a leader in the innovation space in my hometown in Brazil. It ended up influencing the RBS group — an organisation which, in that point in time, was one of the biggest investors in innovation in the country — to offer me a position in their digital unit, where I would need to create and lead a specialised team to build innovative products.
At the same time, while in great momentum in my innovation career, the US partners who acquired our software development organisation were defining different plans for me. They bought our company to be their branch in Brazil, and product innovation were not in their plans for the Brazilian team. They gave me no choice.
Prioritising trust as the ultimate innovation strategy
When I joined the RBS group in early 2014 and pitched the strategy for the corporate innovation unit, I had absolute certainty, community building would be in its centre. My first slides literally said this:
- Developing software is not a competitive advantage anymore, we should stop trying to be a Google, after all, we are a media organisation and content is our core. The answer is in the people!
- The key of success is not about who does the best product, but about who gets and keeps customers. Competitive advantage is to have the ability to acquire and retain customers organically.
- Empathising with people and being part of their communities is key. We must be experts in influencing the influencers from the inside out.
What happened next was pure magic. We were a community-driven specialised team inspired by a new breed of leaders who believe work can equate to passion, community, and a force for positive change. Imagine all this happening inside a very traditional organisation. It was epic! — more about it on The Foodastic Story.
Jumping two years ahead, midst 2016, I am living in Sydney, Australia and having a career break. In the middle of this sabbatical full of life, chaos and emotions, one book hooked me — The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly — the founding editor of Wired magazine and one of the most respected authorities on innovation.
He wrote:
In this new supersaturated digital universe of infinite free digital duplication the only things truly valuable are those that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance. […] Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked. […] Since we prefer to deal with someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege.
One year more forward, it’s right now, 13th of December 2017, and I read:
Product differentiation, by itself, has become indefensible because today’s competitors can copy your better, faster, cheaper features virtually instantly. Now, the only thing they can’t replicate is the trust that customers feel for you and your team. — Andy Raskin
Holy molly! It means that being your true self is the new thing. What a moment to live! Sorry Kevin my dear, but I knew that since 2011! — Just kidding, K. Kelly probably knew that decades ago. Check his brilliant essay on 1,000 True Fans for example.
Based on the fact that the two scarce elements of our economy are trust and attention, having a brand that influences its customers as a trusted advisor can be your ultimate competitive advantage. That’s where Community Building enters in the game.
Community Building as a core part of the modern organisation
Businesses have been about trust and scale since the beginning of times. The opportunity now is that community building can scale trust in ways we have never seen before by distributing control and authority to people. And you can build trust in the deepest level possible through this.
Community is being considered a core part of how modern organisations function:
- According to a study conducted by CMX the top two reasons companies are launching communities are (1) customer retention and (2) fueling innovation.
- According to a 2016 MIT study, community is one of the primary catalysts of innovation, resulting in up to 37% increase in company performance. Community and purpose are the new sources of advantage in the social era.
The power of trust as a competitive advantage reminds me of the story of Rocket Internet — the “clone factory” — trying to copy Airbnb. “The barrier to entry was capital and execution. Community-focused companies wouldn’t do because it takes too much time and customer trust to make a lot of money. We tried cloning Airbnb, but it didn’t work because it’s so community-focused.”
As being a trusted community marketplace Airbnb virality is inherent. Having community as an intrinsic part of the product is certainly the most effective approach to organically acquire and retain customers. The growth success of ProductHunt is also a good case of using user-generated content to scale trust by distributing control and authority to people.
Duolingo’s Ambassador Program is another great case of crowdsourcing strategy. By getting their loyal customers to become ambassadors of their brand, they were able to create an intrinsic motivation for positive word-of-mouth.
Other examples of community ambassador programs are: theSkimm, lululemon, hootsuite, googledevs, creativemorning.
However, even if your product don’t have a viral characteristic itself you can have content that has — the Mint app launching strategy is a good example.
“We focused on building out a unique personal finance blog, very content-rich, that spoke to a young professional crowd that we felt was being neglected. Eventually the blog became #1 in personal finance, and drove traffic to the app. Our app didn’t have a high viral coefficient but we had content that was. Our infographics and popular articles became regular hits on Digg, Reddit, etc.” — Jason Putorti (Mint Lead Designer)
Mint became more than just a product. It became a place for all things finance. Talk finance, trade stories, share advice, etc. The financial centrepiece of your life was Mint. — Kissmetrics blog
Here is the list of reasons I used in my pitch to the RBS Group in 2014 to convince them about the business value of community:
- An engaged community can be an asset more valuable than the product itself.
- It establishes a sense of co-ownership when engaging influencers.
- It creates a powerful emotional trigger.
- It fuels virality with user-generated content.
- It’s an ideal platform for a soft launch strategy.
- It builds a platform for ethnographic research and prototyping at the same time it creates a genuine story.
According to the CMX’s SPACE Model communities can derive their business value from one of the following areas:
- Customer Support/Success: create a space for members to answer questions and solve problems for each other in order to be more successful with the product or service.
- Product Ideation, Innovation and Feedback: create a space for members to share ideas and feedback that will be used to drive innovation and product improvements.
- Acquisition and Advocacy: build a network of ambassadors and/or advocates who drive awareness and growth for the business.
- Content and Programming: gather the people who contribute information, goods, or services that make up the product or assets within the product.
- External Engagement: create a space for people who have a common interest that is related to, or focused on your brand or product.
- Internal Engagement: deepen internal employee engagement or engagement between suppliers, vendors, or other teams that contribute to a company’s end product.
Community Building Guidelines
Following are some of my personal guidelines to start exploring community and developing a strategy.
Strategy modelling
1. Your content needs a mission — it must fill a need:
- Who are you helping?
- What role does your product play in the world?
- What story are you going to tell? “Those who tell stories rule the world”
2. Clarify your values, vision and voice:
- What makes it unique?
- Who are you? I mean, your true self!
3. Determining where your community lives (mapping the digital landscape):
- Create personas.
- Identify your audience and influencers.
- Identify forums: topics, sentiment around those topics, types of content, how people engage with content, different channels they are spending time.
4. Strategically define your channels
5. Create a content strategy and editorial calendar
Best Practices
Values and vision matter to the community:
- Your values are your promise to the community — they establish trust. Your job is to deliver on those values consistently.
- Your vision, how you want to change the world, identifies your allies and your enemies.
- Without these, your brand stands for nothing… and therefore, nobody will stand with you.
Be as transparent and authentic as possible!
Your people are your seeds:
- Give your people the stage, don’t communicate as a logo.
- The first community is the one already inside your business — expose it.
- Interact with community by actively participating in conversation.
Follow the influencers:
- Your community will overlap with influencer communities.
- Your product won’t be the only place where your community exists.
- Study your audience’s haunts.
- Study how influencers in your space have encouraged community development on their products: Do they reward involvement? Do they share the spotlight with top contributors?
Storytelling core principles:
- Relate your unique experience.
- Employ the element of surprise.
- Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
- Involve the audience.
- Speak from your whole heart.
- Live the story.
- Tell someone else’s story.
- Share memorable human interest.
- Use memorable humor.
- Make it personal.
- Understate. Simplify.
- Show. Don’t tell.
- Lay out a vision for the future.
- Swim upstream.
- Sometimes you just gotta say wtf.
It’s all about being your true self
Beautiful, you are pumped and want to implement it in your business right now! That’s great, keep your confidence and do it! However, be calm as well, community isn’t a short run investment, it’s a long run one.
Because business became obsessed with short term results, the main reason community initiatives fail is lack of executive buy in. Just thing a little bit — unicorn startups, venture capital, the stock market, the whole system today is all about having results as fast as you can get. I’m not against it, but I advocate for more balance and sustainability.
Jeff Bezos is a great example of having massive results by thinking in the long term.
“Big things start small […] Basically, you can’t skip steps. You need to put one foot in front of other. Things take time. There are no shortcuts. But you want to do these steps with passion!”
Despite working with digital business for my whole life, I’ve never really get hooked by social media. I mean, by the sensationalist side of it. What has always attracted me is how the power of network cooperation and peer collaboration can positively revolutionise people’s lives — which today is called collaborative economy.
When asked about how to make strategic decisions in the right timing, Jeff Bezos concluded that it is a natural consequence of intuitively following your passion.
“You follow your passions and then you wait and have to have the hope that the wave will catch you. […] I think everybody has their own passion, their own thing they are interested in. And you are very alert to the things that are in the sphere influence of that passion.”
I have always believed on work-life integration — the idea that in reality there is no boundaries between one’s professional and personal life, and all together make who you are. Success is just a consequence of being your true self and following your passion.
Since the beginning, purpose, authenticity and long lasting relationships have always been my thing. The difference now is that I have absolute certainty.
