Community’s Role for Startup Business

One of the success in building a startup is fulfilling the needs and demands of future users. However, most startup owners only rely on their own intuition to justify their reach. Will this be enough?

Startup itself is defined as a new business that hasn’t run for too long in a certain market. This company can be based on goods and/or services that will eventually reach the hands of it’s customers. The population that represents the customers holds 50% of the deciding factor towards the new venture’s success. So, it is safe to say that no matter how good the product or services of the startup is, without enough number of customers the startup will not be able to be deemed as a success. Therefore one question emerges, how can we create a startup with a lot of users in such a short time?

An aspiring startup has to prepare everything well, including it’s scope of user, by building community far before it’s launched. This community is needed so that the potential user are going to be able to have the time to understand what this particular startup offers, they also need this time to ‘fall in love’ with this particular startup before becoming regulars.

The involvement of potential users since the beginning would enable them to have a strong bonding with the product we offer. This sense of ownership will be build into the hearts of the users, making these potential users a priceless asset which can provide feedback for the improvement and betterment of the startup. There are a lot of ways on how to build and raise a community that would be ready to embrace and welcome the goods or services of a certain startup. However, this all starts with the owner’s self realization on the importance of building a community.

The early steps of the strategy could be by opening oneself to the people or a general population that is felt to have a certain interest on distributing or sharing the information of the product or services that this startup offers. These people would be called the power user; these power users are in the front guards on the spread of information of the start up and are a pull factor towards other new users. After this, the viral effect will just move on by itself.

Thus, with this, I hope you’re able to picture how important it is on preparing a community before a startup is put into launch. This is done so that when the start up is launched, there would already be some initial loyal users. Of course, this community has to always be watched and maintained. It isn’t easy to build and maintain an initial community. However, speaking strategically, a community is crucial on the birth of a startup. I hope this could be useful for everyone.

- This guest post is written by Abang Edwin Syarif Agustin. It is initially published in his Medium page and has been republished under permission.

Abang Edwin is online community management practitioner. You can contact him directly on Twitter and LinkedIn.