Why Every Company Attempting Category Creation Should Invest in Community

StickyMarch 9, 2023Uncategorizedcommunity management, marketing, startupsEvan Hamilton

Category creation is one of the highest risk/reward plays in business. It can help your business stand out in the crowded software market by avoiding the crowded paths, it can help you create rabid evangelists for whom you’re the first company to truly see them, and it can help you access new budget instead of fighting to get a company to switch software providers.

The challenge, then, is that category creation involves creation. You’re inventing a category from, essentially, nothing. With this comes the risk that nobody buys in and that there’s not enough activity to sustain your business and the category.

This is why community is an essential ingredient for category creators.

The three strengths of community are scale, passion, and perspective. These strengths neatly address two needs for getting traction for your new category:

1) Creating and Building Excitement

It’s much easier to get excited in a group than alone. Putting like-minded people in a room together to discuss their category is a surefire way to get them hyped up and excited to contribute to the ecosystem.

Community can also be a great way to get these early category adopters to collaborate to create content, events, best practices, etc that help promote and legitimize your category. You writing on your blog about a category feels far less legitimate than dozens of community members doing the same.

And empowering your community to go represent the category far and wide gives you scale you cannot normally reach as a small category creator. Only a community-driven meetup program, for example, can regularly reach 15 cities with only one community program manager.

2) Preventing Category Despair

As exciting as a new category can be, it can also be lonely. You’re often the only person at your company with the title or responsibilities. There are few jobs out there. There’s not much content to tell you how to do your job or if you’re doing it right. And all of this can drive loneliness and despair in your early category adopters. Take it from me: I’ve been in the community industry since it was maybe 50 people worldwide, and seen the majority of my original cohort move into other roles. There are many times I questioned if I was on a dead-end path.

Community is the most effective way to create a support network for these members of your newfound category. Meetups help people not feel alone. Forums and chat channels allow them to get instant feedback on their work. And job boards give them a centralized place to see their options and feel optimistic about the industry.

Case Studies

Gainsight

Today, Gainsight serves 20,000+ customer success professionals out of a market of 300,000. But back in 2013, “there were literally a whopping 1000 people in the profession worldwide”, according to CEO Nick Mehta. This presented a problem. “Our business was building software for those people. So we could never build a big company if the job itself didn’t grow.” So they began building community. They started with a meetup series and grew into a conference that now hosts many thousands of this market, which all started with a little human connection. “We would host these like these little happy hours and they would leave these events and say ‘Gosh, like I feel a little less alone. I guess I’m not the only one going through this. I feel more validated.’”

Product Hunt

Product Hunt feels obvious today, but 15 years ago the idea that people would hang out on a site upvoting and discussing new startup products and inventions probably seemed…nerdy. Not something that would eventually drive millions of visitors a month. And it all started with community. Founder Ryan Hoover couldn’t do it alone would personally email founders with advice and connect them with other founders, creating a tight-knit group. He would ask founders featured on Product Hunt to create content about their experience, lending the site legitimacy and buzz. And eventually, they gave members ownership over hosting events. The effect? Product Hunt was able to scale and become the centerpiece of the intellectual builder category. “When people ask ‘How did you guys meet?,’ for the rest of their lives, our community members who meet at our events will say ‘Through Product Hunt,’” said member of the founding team Erik Torenberg. “People may forget an email exchange, but they are unlikely to forget meeting like-minded community members in person.”

Culture Amp

“Culture” is a word that, until a decade ago, tended to be primarily used in academic circles and by TV pundits complaining about the state of our society. But in recent years, the word has come to be closely associated with how a company operates. And that was in no small part due to Culture Amp helping create the culture category. Head of Community Damon Klotz leaned into the fact that culture fanatics were a niche and geeky minority, choosing to name their community “People Geeks” with the goal of “building something that makes Culture Amp part of the conversation on the changing nature of the HR profession and world of work.”. Today their community has over 20,000 active members and they have 95 chapters around the world run by community members. And notably, activity around the phrase “company culture” has grown 150% according to Google Trends.

People chatting in a bar — People Geek Meetup

How Category Creators Should Tackle Community

Hire an Expert Community Strategist

It can be very tempting to try to go cheap and hire an enthusiastic community member to build a community. But enthusiasm does not a community make. There are many highly experienced community builders in the market who know how to quickly and effectively build and scale a community. Spend the money; it’ll be worth it.

Hire Community Members onto the Community Team

That’s not to knock hiring community members! Their passion and connection to the community can be highly valuable in a community engagement specialist role, and they will go faster and farther than someone who is not invested in the category.

Let Go, and Empower Your Community

The more freedom you give your community, the more they’ll do. An empowered community can host events, create content, do interviews, organize projects, write code, and more. A highly-controlled community will have more consistent results, but a whole lot less passion. It’s a spectrum (you certainly don’t want your community members out spraypainting cop cars with your category slogan), but you should err on the side of empowering them and getting out of their way.

Measure Business Outcomes, But Also Enthusiasm and Adoption

I am the first community builder in the room to say “what is the business outcome?”, and that certainly applies here as well. Just because communities are about feelings doesn’t mean you can’t measure the leads they bring in the door, the retention they drive, and the costs they defray. But with category creation, you’re trying to build and grow a vibe, so I also recommend measuring softer indicators, like enthusiasm within the category and adoption of category terms in resumes, job descriptions, conferences, etc.

Category creation is a bold endeavor to take on, but with a community hyping it up, you’ll give yourself a distinct advantage.

When Leaders Should Get in the Weeds

March 20, 2025ManagementmanagementEvan Hamilton

man in a white button up holding his glasses and looking at a computer screen

I’ve been thinking a lot about when, as a leader, you should be in the weeds versus when you should be focusing on the strategic, high-level work.

The role of a leader is to provide strategic direction, drive internal support, remove roadblocks, and grow their teams. But does that mean they should never get in the weeds?

I believe there are a few key scenarios where you should – and a lot of situations in which you shouldn’t, but will be tempted to. Here’s my non-exhaustive list.

When to Get in the Weeds

1. Your team is suffering.

If your team is incredibly overloaded or stressed and you can ACTUALLY help out (instead of just performatively helping), hopping in can help dig them out and raise morale. When I first joined Reddit there was a HUGE ticket backlog, so I spent two weeks in a conference room with the team crushing tickets. (And let them hit me in the face with a pie after.)

2. You have a wild idea and you don’t want to distract your team.

Sometimes you’re chasing down a really fringe idea and it doesn’t make sense to distract your team. Go pound the pavement on your own to see if there’s something there.

3. You’ve been asked to do something annoying.

Sometimes a request comes down from the top that can be a little irksome. You still need to do it, but it can be nice to shield your team from these from time to time.

4. You need to understand the reality of something.

Especially if you’re planning on making changes to how your team operates, spending some time IN their workday understanding how it really works is crucial. Whether doing the work or shadowing, this helps you pressure test your ideas against the real world.

When NOT to Be in the Weeds

A) You feel guilty.

Your job is to be strategic, and that IS real work. Sometimes you can feel guilty as a leader for not doing the day-to-day work, but don’t let that pull you away from making sure you’re steering the ship.

B) You want to feel productive.

Similarly, it can often feel far more productive to go do a thing rather than think, research, and have conversations. Both things are important and productive, but again, your job IS to do the strategic work.

man in professional attire speaking to a woman in professional attire seated at the computer looking irked

C) You’re micromanaging your team’s work.

If you’re getting in the weeds because you feel you need to fix your team’s work, hit the breaks. There are two likely scenarios here: either you’re being overly critical and you need to chill out or there really IS a problem with the team’s work. If it’s the latter, fixing it yourself isn’t sustainable; you should be spending this time thinking through what structural changes you need to make to support them.

Solo image by MART PRODUCTION

Duo image by Yan Krukau

Building a Strong Community Culture

May 21, 2023Communitymoderation, rulesEvan Hamilton

Building a strong community culture is incredibly important for the long-term success of any community. Without a great culture, a community can start to scare off new members, harm existing members, and damage your brand. But “culture” is one of those things that seems so touchy-feely that it’s easy to wonder if you have any control over it.

Thankfully, over my 15+ years working with communities at companies like HubSpot and Reddit, I’ve uncovered some of the core building blocks of a strong community culture.

A Strong Cultural Vision

You can’t have a strong culture if you don’t know what you want it to be! Taking the time to think about what vibe you want for your community – and what vibe will allow you to please both members and business – is worthwhile. Are you creating a raucous nightclub or a quiet library? A messy fun run or a professional race? Writing this out will give you a north star to execute against.

Clear Guidelines

Correspondingly, it’s hard to enforce a culture if members don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Capturing the dos and don’ts of your community in a formal document will help guide your members and give you something to point to when you have to hand out punishments. The Coral Project has a great guide to building a code of conduct.

I recommend making your rules specific enough that they’re clear without having them be so targeted (“you can’t say words x, y, and z”) that you have to constantly amend them to factor in new, creative trolls. (And let me tell you, from 5 years at Reddit: they will always come up with new ways to be nasty.) And don’t forget to list them prominently – research has shown that this can decrease problematic posts.

What punishments you assign to transgressions will depend on your community and the level of transgression. In some cases you may want to consider a 3-strikes rule; in others, you may have zero tolerance.

Great Founding Members

The founding members of your community are going to set the vibe. Whatever content they post will be what the larger member base sees when they join. These are the village elders that newbies will look up to. So you absolutely must carefully screen your founding members to ensure that they both embody your cultural vision and that they’re committed to helping you deliver on it.

Staff That Model Behavior

Just as your members will look up to your founding members, they’ll look up to you and your staff. The moment that you break cultural norms, everyone will think it’s ok. Ensure that your team knows the rules and vibe and diligently stick to them.

Positive Reinforcement

Studies show that positive reinforcement tends to be more effective than negative reinforcement. Shout-out the members you see doing an amazing job living up to your values. Consider awards or surprise-and-delight budgets for these folks. But also consider positive reinforcement for problem children – if you rain praise down on someone when they make the right choice, they may lean away from all the wrong choices they had been making prior.

Consistency of Punishment

Even if it’s not as effective as positive reinforcement, we do need to enforce our rules. Importantly, consistency of punishment is shown to be more effective than severity of punishment; it’s hard to prove any decrease in crime from the death penalty, whereas studies have shown that hard-to-avoid DUI checkpoints are quite effective.

This means making it easy for members to report transgressions, setting up automation to catch troublemakers, and enforcing the same way every time. Even if someone has traditionally been a good member of the community, you have to treat them the same as everyone else.

Evolution of Culture as Necessary – WITH Your Community

Communities are living, breathing, evolving entities, and it’s rare that their culture will remain stagnant or a ruleset will cover all situations until the end of time. You will likely need to evolve your guidelines over time. To do this successfully, consider involving your community in the discussion and be default transparent about the changes.

The Secret Weapon

What makes a strong community culture can’t truly fit into a blog post; it’s the day-to-day work of community professionals nurturing, supporting, and enforcing in their communities. If your business hasn’t hired a community professional, that’s my cheat code for you: hire someone who is great at this.

_{“Rules” photo by Joshua Miranda}

_{Cars photo by Michael Pointner}

What Community Professionals Need to Do to Weather These Hard Times

February 21, 2023Communitymetrics, recession, roiEvan Hamilton

There’s no denying it: Community teams are being hit very hard right now by layoffs. The tech industry is seeing revenue dry up and taking massive action to reassure stakeholders, largely by letting people go.

We could debate the intelligence of these decisions, the morality of the choice, the side effects they’ll have to deal with. But that’s neither here nor there for Community professionals who worry they are next.

The fact of the matter is: companies are cutting heads and functions that they don’t think will help drive or retain revenue over the next 12-24 months. And if they’re cutting Community teams, that means we didn’t do a sufficient enough job generating and retaining revenue and/or we didn’t do a sufficient job promoting our success.

With that in mind, here’s what I see as the name of the game for the next year or two…

👇 Get Focused – no superfluous activities.

Community teams need to figure out where they can be most valuable and laser-focus on that. No unnecessary campaigns. No flights of fancy. No expansion of scope because some other Community team is doing it and it looks cool. Do 1-2 things, and do them well.

🔬 Experiment & Iterate – don’t launch & hope.

There is too much at stake to do a big launch and hope it works. New community ideas should go through testing & iteration, much like new product ideas. Start small, measure results, expand and pivot as needed from there. Don’t stake your whole reputation on a big launch.

📈 Measure Results – get as specific and close to dollar value as possible.

Fairly straightforward. We need to be measuring the value we’re providing, and tying it as closely as possible to driving or retaining revenue. Satisfaction scores and social reach are not going to do the job.

🤝 Build Connections – make community an invaluable partner for other teams.

Along these lines, the most defensible teams are the ones other teams want to defend! Don’t build off in a corner – find other teams that have challenges you can assist with. Become their hero, and they’ll become yours.

📣 Promote The Work – make sure nobody is unaware.

Community builders are givers, which often means they’re bad at self-promotion. You need to stuff that humble instinct in a trunk and lock it during this time. Every win you land should go to your boss, and possibly your boss’s boss, and possibly many other people in the company. You should be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Reorgs and layoffs often, sadly, happen through gut executive understanding of what’s working. Don’t wait for them to ask if things are working – make it impossible for them not to know.

👩‍🔧 Share Stories – make sure people FEEL what the community has done.

“Evan, didn’t you just say metrics and dollars are the most important? What is this storytelling nonsense?” Yes, the numbers are the crucial thing. But storytelling is very powerful, and community generates amazing stories. Let the impact of your work be seen in the metrics and felt in the human stories you tell.

None of this is any guarantee you or your team won’t face cuts, of course. But these are the table stakes. Any Community teams not taking the above actions are at high risk until we get out of these dark waters. Stay vigilant, stay true to yourself, and hang in there – we will get out the other side, but it’s going to be rocky for a bit.

The Top 10 Links from Community Manager Breakfast 2022

December 19, 2022Community, Community Manager BreakfastEvan Hamilton

Picture of a coffee cup with the text "Community Manager Breakfast" over the top

Nearly every week, I curate three of the best links about community building for my newsletter, Community Manager Breakfast. I scour the web, reading sometimes dozens of articles a week to find the cream of the crop. For the end of the year, I thought I’d take that curation even further and take a look at which of the roughly 140 links I’ve shared this year got the most clicks. Here are your favorites for the year!

10: What are the Indicators of a Successful Online Community?

In this piece, my amazing friend Carrie Melissa Jones walks us through the five key elements for a community to succeed.

9: Offensive and Defensive Community Onboarding

Ian Vanagas, one of my favorite new community writers of the last few years, provides a great framing for two approaches to consider for onboarding your community members.

8: Community Discovery Framework

This framework from the folks at Burb falls into the “I wish I had written it” category for me. They provide a clear way of thinking about how to explore and discover the right community for your organization. It maps extremely well to how I think about the topic!

7: Community Strategy Planning for 2023

Jenny Weigle, one of Community Manager Breakfast’s biggest cheerleaders, blessed us all with a five-part series on yearly strategy planning. (Scroll down to the bottom to find the other entries.) In-depth, thoughtful, and immediately actionable.

6: A Big List of Community Advocacy Program Incentives

Sometimes you just need a list. Jenny Weigle lands two spots in a row here, this time with her inspiration-provoking list of methods to reward advocates.

5: What it takes to scale

Many of the links above focus on how to launch a community and achieve success…but how do you achieve scale, and what challenges do you face once you hit it? Gareth Wilson has some answers.

4: The Community-Led Growth Report

Common Room took advantage of their massive dataset to give us all an early holiday present, covering a plethora of topics including: does the initial surge of chat community activity drop off? Do communities contribute to lead generation and conversion? How responsive are community members? Great stuff.

Customer Experience Musings

Evan Hamilton talks customer experience, community, and retention.