All posts by Evan Hamilton

But really, what would you do if there was no email? Thomas Knoll’s drastic experiment

We’re building the next generation of companies, and they look nothing like the previous ones. Right? Email is dead? Meetings are stupid? Companies should be flat?

I hear a lot of people talking about these subjects and some trying to implement them, but nobody as drastically and definitively as Thomas Knoll. His writeup on the email-less culture at Primeloop is both terrifying and exciting. Definitely worth a read!

Research and the Minimum Viable Community

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.

Danya Cheskis-Gold on CMX Hub

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.

UserConfCustomer 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.

“Community is a discipline”

“When community is your discipline, the core of your work is focused on understanding and putting into practice the development of communities. You might also understand and apply marketing, support or other practices but they’re traits, not your core discipline.”

David Spinks, as he often does, describes succinctly what I rant about regularly: Community is a discipline, and the more you try to make it a subset of other departments the more it fails. Other departments can adopt community-focused strategies (please!) but it will never make sense to say that the Community team is part of the Marketing team.

Interviews with me

A few very pleasant folks have interviewed me in the last couple of months, so I figured I’d share those here.

Support-Driven Podcast – Scott Tran interviews me about kicking off a community effort, finding your community niche, and combining customer service & community. Also available on iTunes.

Big Door – I discuss why customer loyalty isn’t marketing, the community management trends I see, and metrics one should look at.

Startup Product Summit – A little bit older, but arguably one of my best and most widely-accessible talks. I cover customer feedback, customer-focused product design, and how to understand when data or customers are misleading you. Slides available here.

Hope you find these helpful, useful, or at least entertaining! 🙂

The future is not #%*&ing smartwatches

“The Internet carries a surprising lesson for Intellectual Property theory. Despite the prevalence of infringement and the teachings of IP theory, people are creating and distributing more content now than ever before, by at least an order of magnitude.

The future of technology is likely to look quite a bit like the Internet. Lots of people will create lots of designs, code, and biobricks. Other people will use, repurpose, and improve on those things, often without paying.”

IP in a World Without Scarcity, by Mark A. Lemley

This is one of the most elucidating things I’ve read lately. It’s worth the time investment.

The punchline? The future isn’t #*%&ing wearables. It’s not some neat new social network. It’s literally changing how economics work when suddenly almost everything can be generated at home. It’s people printing replacement body parts and artificial genes at home. It’s about the change in interactions and communities when we no longer have to commute, go to the store, etc. It’s freedom & chaos & community & creativity. And it’s absolutely something you can picture as utopian or distopian…though probably it’ll be somewhere in between. It’s going to be a fascinating century, and smartwatches will be less than a footnote.