Brainstorms Issue #6

Brainstorms Issue #6

What's this newsletter all about?

My name is Keevin and business ideas are my thing. For over 7 years I’ve been working with early-stage companies, and have learned that a quality problem is worth more than 100 “good” ideas. Each week, I scour the web, engage my network, and use a few top-secret tactics to find unmet needs. I then outline the business opportunities behind them. Here’s what you can expect:  

• I’m all about quality over quantity - I’ll send you (1) well-researched, hand-selected business idea every Thursday.

• All of the problem data synthesized, with meaningful context for why this idea is worth building or pursuing.

• A short, tactical game plan for how to turn the idea into a revenue-generating company quickly and efficiently.

Pretty straight forward, right? Last thing - as your host, it’s my job to make sure your time spent here is valuable. So please, reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions! 

Let’s dig into this week’s Brainstorm!

Opportunities in Online Communities

This week’s pain point comes from an online community manager - 

“I run two online communities, one on Slack and one on Facebook. The problem is that these platforms aren’t great for admins of communities, they just don’t have some basic features I want. It boils down to needing better ways to keep my audience valuable. We could switch to platforms with better features, but then no one engages with our community because they forget it’s even there.” 

- Online Community Manager

Market Background/Opportunity Size

Online communities have skyrocketed in popularity as a result of the pandemic. Even though physical locations have shut down, the need to gather, share, and hang out with like-minded individuals is even more important. The timing for solving challenges in the online community space couldn’t be better.

Here’s a quick breakdown of where the most online communities are being created:

• Facebook

• Slack

• LinkedIn 

• WhatsApp

• Reddit

Unfortunately, finding an accurate number of online communities that are hosted on these platforms was impossible. I found sources saying anywhere from 50-500 million groups exist on these platforms. Regardless, it’s a lot.

Even though these platforms have the most market share, Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Slack weren’t built to manage groups. Groups are just a feature they offer or they've been adapted to suite this need.

Because of this, a number of companies have cropped up to build better community management platforms. But, they don't come without tradeoffs - I’ll go deeper into that below. For now, let’s look at some of the major companies building these new platforms.

Major Players

Here are some big players that have created better community management platforms - 

Mighty Networks 

• Founded in 2010

• Roughly 31 employees

• Raised $16M

Hivebrite

• Founded in 2015

• Roughly 50 employees

• Raised $23M

Higher Logic

• Founded 2007 

• Roughly 355 employees

• Raised $55M

The Pain Points

As mentioned above, the reason these companies have been picking up steam is that the major platforms don’t support/offer community management features like:

• The ability to paywall content

• Helping admins to filter for signal vs noise

• Tools to help creators build a brand. 

Despite those shortcomings, Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp are still the go-to platforms because users already log on to them daily. This is a big deal. It’s much easier for the group to stay relevant and active when it’s literally on the home screen of your daily app. 

Irrespective of what platform you choose, there are still inherent challenges that come with running an online community. The two primary problems are, getting high-quality engagement and high-quality content. If there aren’t high-quality posts, no one will engage with the community. If there isn’t high-quality engagement, no one will post to the community. 

The Opportunity

I’m going to take a contrarian stance and say there’s a stronger opportunity in building tools that help make the current platforms better, rather than building a whole new platform. Here are some ideas: 

1. Reward software for most active members: Getting people to post high-quality content can be challenging. Just like some companies offer rewards for their most loyal customers/fans, you could do the same with your group members who post quality content. There’s an opportunity to build a software that tracks your top contributors and reward them for helping drive the community - things like swag, promoting them, or giving them special privileges.

2. Analytics for these tools: Right now, the analytics tools for FB Groups, Slack Groups, and Whatsapp and Linkedin, are lackluster at best and non-existent at worst. Creating a tool that analyzes group activity and gives meaningful metrics can help you diagnose areas for improvement within the group.

3. Tools for Paid Groups: One of the biggest complaints from admins is that there isn’t a built-in way to charge members to be a part of groups on the major platforms. I’d create a tool that makes the process for charging members and managing their memberships easy. Something like Invite Robot (I’ll talk more about that below).

4. Automated community digests: I am a part of two groups that send out weekly recaps and highlights from the Facebook Group via email. As a member, I love this because I don’t have time to sift through the feed and find the nuggets. I am almost certain that the admins curate this and send it manually. I would create a tool that finds the most popular/engaged-with content and curates it into an email for members to consume. This keeps members from getting lost in the noise and keeps your community relevant.

Current Solutions

• Invite Robot

  • Invite Robert is a tool that makes it easy and quick to charge your members to be a part of your Slack group. Invite Robot’s value proposition is saving time by integrating directly with Slack Groups. The problem is that it only works for Slack and not other major platforms.

• Shield

  • Shield is an analytics tool for personal LinkedIn usage. They allow you to measure the performance of your content and see which audiences engaged with the post. The tool seems to be great for individuals but doesn’t support group analytics.

• Lowdown

  • Lowdown offers a tool that auto generates email digests for Slack communities - the same idea as #4. This is validation that the idea may be worth pursuing on other platforms (although I couldn’t find their traction anywhere).

How to Execute

I’ll keep my advice here applies to any idea you choose to go forward with. Here’s what I would do -

1. Pick a Platform: To start, I’d focus your effort on building a solution for one platform and expand from there. Personally, I think the most potential is in Facebook Groups and Slack, they seem to be the market leaders currently.

2. Join Communities for Community Builders: There are a number of groups and communities specifically for people who build communities (how meta). These groups are likely going to be filled with your early adopters as they’ve already signaled they need help. You’ll easily be able to identify individuals to have conversations with and hopefully sell to. 

3. Build a Manual MVP: For all the ideas I mentioned they could be pulled off manually. It may not be fun work, but if you start out small (see point below) you could easily test your value proposition without building any software. To make it easier, just hire a virtual assistant on Fiverr to do some of the more mundane tasks.

4. Start Small: There’s no need to sell to 10 communities at once. I’d pick 1-3 communities that match your target demographic and run pilot tests with them to see what works and what doesn’t. From there, iterate accordingly and run another test batch. Soon, you’ll see which parts are worth automating and which ones you can cut completely.

Challenges

• Not Owning the Platform: Building a feature on someone else’s platform is risky - you’re at the mercy of whatever the platform decides to do. If Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, etc… build your tool themselves, you’re screwed. Or, any change to the platform’s API can make you obsolete.

• Monetization: Community engagement can be a tough thing to put a value on - it’s not the same as driving revenue for someone. With all ideas, but these specifically, I’d do everything you can to validate quickly that you can turn these ideas into a business and not just a cool tool. 

• Choosing The Right Communities: My assumption is that not all communities can be helped with the tools above. If the community is inactive, toxic, or just too small it may not matter what tools you introduce. To start, you'll need to find the right communities to work with so you can test the value of your solution.

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Thanks for reading - now get out there and build it! 

Catch ya next week, 

Keevin ✌