James Simpson is the CEO & Founder of GoldFire Studios, HTML5 game developer and publisher. Follow him @GoldFireStudios.
Recently, YEC spoke with James about his experiences building multiple communities through his business, and what others interested could learn about the process. His best advice is below.
Find Value Through the Communities You Create
We’ve built both online and local communities around our business and industry, and both have provided lasting value in maintaining and growing our business. Our core online community has been vital in sustaining us through our early days through crowd-funding, testing and more. They’ve been invaluable as a springboard for growth. We also started a game developer meet-up locally, which has been a fantastic sounding board and community to hire from. Whatever your industry is, if you can galvanize people around what you are doing, you are surely onto something worthwhile.
Don’t Just Make a List and Call It Quits
Communities are made up of people who are passionate about a particular thing. They must interact with each other. Most importantly, they must also interact with you. If you aren’t interacting with your community, then the value is mostly lost. It takes hard work to start and maintain a vibrant community. Simply building a list just simply won’t cut it.
Start small and let your core community members grow your community further for you. The biggest mistake most make when trying to establish a group is thinking that they have to get all of their members to join at once. In reality, you want to start with a few passionate people who will set the tone and culture for future members. If you have a solid culture in place, it will be infectious. Your community will grow itself from the ground up.
Rely on Your Original Members
Don’t try to do it all on your own! Because communities are made up of people who are passionate about something in particular, many of them will want to help maintain and grow the community right alongside you. Let these people help you. They will be your greatest asset. You won’t find success without them.
If I could do it over again, I would have empowered our core members earlier than I did. We wanted to do it all from the early stages, and this probably hampered our growth for quite some time. Once we started bringing more of those passionate people into the fold, things really started to take off.
Look for Candidates Within Your Community
We’ve hired multiple people out of both our local and online communities. They’ve been incredibly valuable members of the team, and I think it is safe to say we may not even exist today without those resources. In addition, we’ve found our online communities to be the perfect source of QA testing possible. They are thrilled to test out new features early, and their passion shines through in the form of extremely detailed testing and feedback.
Look for an underserved niche within the community. There are always outliers who are looking for a community of their own that doesn’t quite exist, except in the broader sense. Once you’ve fulfilled that niche, you can always expand the community beyond its initial roots.
Don’t Be Afraid to Meld Groups
We try to find overlaps between our various communities and allow cross-pollination. So, instead of having to manage communities as singular entities, we are able to use that shared expertise across groups. Our community members then have that same shared experience, which makes it more like one big community. This both serves to make management easier and to make each individual community stronger.
