Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

You need to have a mission if you want to build an awesome community. A powerful mission gives your community a shared sense of purpose and motivates them to contribute. As Jeff Atwood said:

Being open with your community is the best way to get them to buy into your mission.

Jeff and Joel solicited feedback every step of the way, and built the site their community wanted.

From our interviews we also discovered that it’s critical to foster connections among your community (through forums, events, and user groups).

around your startup, they feel more cohesive as a community and can come up with ideas that you may not think of yourself.

Jeff said that failing to initially allow cross-connections was his biggest mistake i...

Meta is, of course, the place where you go to discuss the place. Take a moment and think about what that means. Meta is for people who care so deeply about their community that they’re willing to go one step further, to come together and spend even more of their time deciding how to maintain and govern it. So, in a nutshell, I was telling the people who loved Stack Overflow the most of all to basically … f**k off and go away.

Community members love to hear from other members.

Alexis also sent shirts, stickers, and other gifts to early users.

He went so far as to coordinate an open bar tour for redditors, where redditors connected and drank on reddit’s dime.

Sending emails and gifts is great, but nothing beats personal interaction. It’s just easier to form a lasting relationship with someone when you...

channels like offline events and speaking engagements. These occasions present great opportunities for customers to conn...

Because these community guidelines were prominently featured on the site, users often policed the site on their own—even more aggressively than Jeff himself would have.

Unfortunately, a common occurrence is that the quality of communities starts out strong but gets diluted over time as evangelists either leave or get drowned out by newer community members. This decline in the overall quality of the community causes more good people to leave, which creates a downward spiral from which many communities don’t recover. To prevent this negative cycle, it is important to focus on quality early on and set standards that can be maintained as the community grows. When quality remains high, many communities become an essential asset for the managing company or organization.

Like building an asset, your customers can also help you develop your actual product. Not only does this kind of community improve your product, but they will love you for giving them the chance to help.

Hires that come from your community already buy into your mission.

community members who didn’t just believe in your mission, but also took the initiative to help you achieve it.

I think building a community can be your traction. This is no small thing: it can truly get to crazy proportions on its own. That being said, there are definitely products and services that don’t lend themselves to community building. If I were doing something with advertising and retargeting, it might be hard to build a community around that.

There are some businesses that lend themselves to doing this very well. Companies whose core function is the connecting of people are best set up to take advantage of community.

when a company’s underlying value is in bringing people together, and where people matter in the system, that’s where this community stuff can really take off.

Cultivate and empower evangelists. Foster cross-connection among them and among community members in general.

Set high standards from the start. Focus on community quality early on and set strict standards that can be maintained as the community grows. You can build tools and processes into your community to help your community police itself.

Bootstrap off an existing audience. Find initial evangelists by sharing your mission with complementary communiti...