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    What form of community building do you do for your early access/beta users?

    Carsten Pleiser
    11 replies
    Thinking about inviting our early access users at Paperless.io into some form of community, private FB group, Slack community, LinkedIn etc. with the goal of learning faster, engaging them, getting feedback etc. What's your experience with these type of communities and which channel do you use? If you choose "Other", please elaborate what activities you're doing.

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    Carsten Pleiser
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    @dawn_veltri1 are you guys doing that yet?
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    Dawn Veltri
    RAEK
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    @ckpleiser We've talked about this a lot and we decided to pause on it. I think groups are fantastic community builders but the groups I actively use are for products where I need a lot of help getting started or know I can get an answer faster than going through support. Neither of those apply to our product. I think you just have to decide if it fits into your strategy and only do it if it has a specific purpose. In general though Facebook is more community driven. Slack is good because most professionals are on it but not as community friendly from my experience.
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    Carsten Pleiser
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    @dawn_veltri1 Makes total sense with what you say about getting support. I was thinking of a way to getting feedback and building 1:1 relationships with our early adopters so we can learn faster. However, I've been in Slack communities for early stage products as well and found them too noisy and distracting. They were good for support & bug fixing. So will probably park this idea as well for now.
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    Dawn Veltri
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    @ckpleiser The only reason we considered it was for the feedback which would be extremely beneficial. I definitely agree with you there!! But we decided our product didn't have the initial trigger that made people search for a group.
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    Sharath Kuruganty
    Undefeated Underdogs Podcast
    Undefeated Underdogs Podcast
    I would look into Circle It helps build a tight-knit community for your product/service.
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    Carsten Pleiser
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    @youreka Nice, how do you decide who to invite? Have you found that you can get feedback faster and engage better than running surveys, for example?
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    Diane Prince
    I currently have a Slack community because my clients prefer Slack to Facebook. However, I've run Facebook groups before too. I find that startup people prefer Slack but I've also found that it's not as community-building friendly as Facebook groups.
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    Carsten Pleiser
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    @diane_prince For what product do you use Slack at the moment? Do you use it for support, feedback?
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    Diane Prince
    @ckpleiser I initially had my Slack workspace only for my paid coaching clients where I share tools, articles, resources, pitch opportunities, etc. That way when one client needs something (for example how to set up their advisory board, what metrics to track, how to hire your first people), everyone can benefit from the content. It's also a place for my clients to meet and support each other. As an added benefit, some of my clients who've met on our Slack workspace have started doing business together and using each others' products. It's also a way for my clients to reach me for asynchronous support. So, it's how my clients reach me in between our sessions. I temporarily opened it up to other startup founders so send me your email if you'd like an invitation and you can see for yourself :-)
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