Michael Seibel explains how startups can leverage power users to grow. He covers identifying your most active users, inviting them to beta programs, and giving them moderation powers instead of paying them, turning them into product evangelists.
One of the things you talked about differentiating Justin.tv is the aspect of community. I was curious if you could talk a little bit about what you've done to take a user and turn them into an evangelist for the product and activate the community.
So that happens automatically. For any product that has usage, power users will emerge automatically. I would say if they're not emerging, it's because there isn't enough usage. I don't think you make evangelists. I think you recognize them. How do you recognize them? Well, they're the most active users of your shit.
I mean, how do you recognize them and then behave differently towards them to kind of empower them?
I mean, it depends. So how do we do it at Socialcam? We have a beta group. So most of the time we're building iOS. And you know, in iOS, there's this long-ass fucking lead time for approval. So you have to make sure that when you submit, it's not shit, or else you screwed yourself. And so what we'll do is we'll recognize some of the most active users in the community and add them to the beta list. And basically, we'll put them on our TestFlight. You guys use TestFlight? Yeah. OK. And we'll give them access to a pre-release version of the app. And they think it's all cool, because they get to use the newest shit before anyone else. We love it, because when they crash, we have logs, and we can fix it. They're doing us a favor. So that's one way of essentially recognizing a group, which us in TV, we turned them into mods. So we gave them the ability to— kick people from channels who were chatting rude stuff. We gave them the ability to report channels that are publishing bad content, so on and so forth. Basically, it sounds really weird. We empowered them with responsibility. We didn't give them extra money or extra goodies. We gave them extra power, which is kind of a delicate thing. At points at Justin.tv, that was very challenging for us. Because they would take that power and get drunk and ban 50 users, and we'd be like, well, shit. That's not good. But overall, it worked fairly well for us to give those people power. It made it so that we didn't have to hire as many people.
