Ricardo Molina talks to a guest about building a community from scratch. Start with a narrow, unique niche and offer something different: short 10-15 minute talks with frequent breaks so you can feature more speakers and topics. Track engagement early on through website traffic, newsletter signups, and how long people spend on your site.
Chapters
If you were kind of talking to another, let's say an event organizer that is looking and thinking about building a community, especially with the characteristics of yours, top of the funnel, what would you say again would be the first steps again, obviously getting the editorial content, but what would be kind of the KPIs or milestones at that point in time, especially when you're focusing on adding value.
First, I'd say the first thing is niche. So find a. Find a community, Find something, find something unique. It's more niche. The more unique the better and the easier in my mind. Secondly, make sure you've got something differentiated to offer. So if you're just doing the same stuff other people are doing, it might. Whereas if you can find a unique angle or a unique twist or a different way of presenting things. And we did that with our conferences. We have the way we structure the days. We have a lot of very short presentations. So we have quite a number of smaller 10 or 15 minute ones and then a break. So when everyone else does sort of 30, 40 minute chunky stuff, we do quick, short, sharp. And so what that means is if you're sitting there in the audience and there's something you're not interested in, it's. It's over pretty and equally. It means there's a lot more speakers, there's a lot more diversity, there's a lot more topics and content you can cover. And I think as long as it's broken up every hour with time for coffee and some networking, that it's a different format to what most organizers do. So that was how we looked at it in terms of niches and differentiation. And in terms of your question about KPIs, I would say for us, we looked at engagement on the website, we looked at traffic, we looked at visitors. Are we putting out stuff that people want to read? Was. Was really the start. And then are those numbers growing of the more people signing up for the newsletter, other social channels getting more populated? Is the average time on the website increasing? And we didn't really have any numbers of what success looked like. It wasn't people need to be on for 3 minutes and 20 seconds or anything. We just knew we wanted them to increase and keep going. So that was how we looked at it.
