Building Community With Zohar Steinberg, Founder and CEO of token

Like any product, your community needs to be flexible to change.

Zohar is the founder and CEO of token, a security-driven payment company on a mission to help people avoid experiencing payment fraud and identity theft by enabling them to stop exposing their payment card details. Follow him @zoharste.

Recently, YEC spoke with Zohar about his experiences building a community for customers and stakeholders in his business, and what others interested could learn about the process. His best advice is below.

Share Your Expertise

I’ve been part of several entrepreneurs communities in Israel, Europe and the U.S. The power of these communities is in their ability to share their lessons and connections. Building relationships within these communities is easier and faster since people know that it goes two ways — you may connect a fellow entrepreneur one day and receive great advice in return the next day. Beyond that, you are part of something bigger than you. You live within a community that shares and understands what you’re going through. This makes a real difference.

Create a Sense of Belonging

The main thing that differentiates a “community” from a list of customers or subscribers is the sense of belonging. In other words, you are part of something organic, you have the ability to make a real difference in someone else’s life or business, and you are part of something you choose to belong to — to contribute, to give and to receive.

Build Something Self-Managing

The best communities manage themselves. Start with a great framework around something people care about and can relate to. You just need to provide them the infrastructure to communicate with one another, to welcome others, to share experiences, and to support each other.

Be Flexible as It Changes

A community is like a product. It changes all the time. If I were starting from scratch, I would design my community to be more flexible and open. Find something unique about your community and tailor accordingly. It’s about finding the specific goal at the heart of the intersection and emphasizing it.

Embrace the Benefits for Your Business

My business helps people avoid payment fraud. We believe everybody can and should be protected, and that together, we can make payment fraud a thing of the past. Beyond the technology that we use, we build a community or a “circle of trust” in which people can invite their friends, family and the people they care about. This helps us improve the fraud prevention quality for our customers and protect the rest of the community.

Use It to Disrupt

A community has the power to unite people behind an idea. In our daily lives, we manage ourselves as individuals and follow social and corporate conventions. A community, however, has the power to change habits: to lower prices, to get better services, and even to disrupt traditional services and industries. Instead of waiting for a leader to change an industry for us, we can join forces to form a community and change it ourselves. We all waited for Steve Jobs to change the music industry and make it more affordable and accessible for us. A community can do the same in the TV industry, mobile carriers, banks and more. Communities can and should be a way to have our voices heard and create change. We just need to realize that we are much stronger together.