Alibaba built trust in new markets by creating free, community-generated content starting with product guides, then expanding to sourcing and shipping advice. The community became a testing ground for new features like financing tools, and eventually helped attract additional partners to strengthen the ecosystem.
Chapters
Yeah, to dive a little bit deeper into the, you know, the importance of kind of building out like, let's say, community or kind of like the partnership, you know, ecosystems in the earlier stages.
Yeah, yeah. So in terms of the community, as I said, you know, with the exception of like events we organized or co-hosted, it was completely free, right? You have content that's generated by our partners, our customers, anything with kind of like the objective to help you run your business better and grow. independently of any benefit to you, right? Of any benefit to us. And this was integral in like building the trust and becoming an ally to our community early on. And there's like numerous examples out there of businesses that have grown on the back of their communities. Like think of HubSpot, think of Etsy, right? Like these businesses really doubled down on that community. And the way we started really, I would say, is through our own content eventually, but in the beginning, but eventually it became our partner content. And we started with like, things closer to our product and then we went outward from there. So like how to transact with Alibaba, how to do X with Alibaba, and then like how to, what are the best products to source? Like what are the best businesses to use to ship and outward and outward. And then that created kind of like a place where you would come and, you know, first of all, it helps you build the brand. With the right target audience that you want. And secondarily, it drives leads to you and you have kind of like a large community to tap on for not only to convert them into your marketplace, but also and more importantly really to have a line of communication with the local buyers and sellers, right? This was like a critical channel that we were using at any point of time to kind of like experiment with new ideas, right? Like we wanted to launch a new financing tool. we would go to that community first and kind of like do, you know, a lot of interviews using them, like, and run a lot of different topics to see what would be of interest to them. So community at any point of time and investing in that is really, really critical. And you don't need to kind of like reinvent the wheel. There's so many resources out there that you can recycle in the beginning, but you have to be laser focused in helping the right buyer and the right seller who's coming in that. And obviously, It could be expanding to actually using that community to attract partners too. So of course in the beginning you focus on like the buyer and seller, but then eventually it becomes all about how do you become known in your ecosystem as an important player so that you can attract others to be part of your business.
