Flickr, the photo-sharing service which began in 2004, quickly became very popular and got acquired by Yahoo in 2005. In 2007, Yahoo made it mandatory to use a Yahoo ID to use Flickr, even if you previously had a Flickr ID. It was a decision that came in for quite a bit of criticism from the early users of Flickr.
Fast forward to 2017: Yahoo got acquired by Verizon. In 2018, a company called SmugMug bought Flickr from Verizon. One of the first things they did was ask users about changes which they were looking forward to. They were asked to delink the mandatory Yahoo ID and go back to having a Flickr ID. The original community had stuck around, seen over a dozen big company years, and are now happy campers once again.
Social networks Peach and Ello both promised to be the next Facebook. Five years on, neither of them have come anywhere close to replacing the big bad blue, but both are around, full of activity, and have a dedicated base of content creators.
On February 7, Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, wrote a well-read Medium post titled ‘Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company’. The post details how his startup survived even after the funds ran out; Gumroad is still alive and kicking only because there are enough independent sellers who still swear by that platform.
Closer home, both Swiggy and Dunzo may be flourishing today, but they got here on the backs of regular users who stuck around even when there were no venture capital-funded coupons, or when the delivery experience was not as smooth. Urban Ladder is another example of an Indian company that punches above its weight, thanks to the community it has built around its products.
All these examples point out that if a startup wants to play the long game, it is imperative to invest in building a community. A community that acts not just as customers, but also as content generators, and as an extended marketing arm. Many companies take a tokenist way out. They will have a blog or two, a presence on social media, or comments sections which are little more than spam magnets. I have been guilty of this too with my startups.
But it is easy to see why. With most other aspects of the business, be it sales or product development or operations, some modelling can be done on how the input correlates to the output. But when it comes to building a community, such a thing is impossible. Which is why most companies take an approach where they do all that is necessary — such as proper customer support, a consistent presence on social media, and so on — and hope to somehow stumble upon that X-factor which helps them build a sticky community.
The author heads product at a mid-sized startup in the real estate space
