Max - Thank you so much for taking the time today! I would love to know: 1. What are some of your favorite community moments that you have experienced? 2. Have you found any good Brazilian food in Ireland yet?
Hey Max! Always great to hear from you :) fab questions!
1. I have a lot but possibly two that stood out for me:
1a. When I was creating the Dropbox’s community strategy, I knew we needed an ambassador-like program, so I started the super user program. Fast forward about 1.5 years and even with all risks/blockers/challenges to execute on it, I was able to fly our top 10 super users to San Francisco to spend a full day in our HQ and have a meet & greet session with our CEO (Drew H).
It was an epic day because we did everything from joining scrums, had lunch in a big group in the Dropbox’s famous tuckshop, spent hours sharing feedback with multiple squads and then ended up the night with drinks and a cold drunk walking tour :)
1b. When I created my own (Edublin) event in Brazil and we hosted 1,000 paying attendees - I never thought I was going to have that many people and manage such a large event 100% remotely (remember I live in Ireland, so I had to organize everything including managing vendors remotely and then arrive 2 days earlier to see if things were in place, lol). High-risk, high-fun!
To your second question, I DO! Not only have I tried great Brazilian food in Ireland, but I created a series on my YouTube channel where I invite my non-Brazilian friends to try out Brazilian food. Some videos have passed the 2 million views mark! Here’s the playlist.
Izzy- Edu, appreciate you being with us today! I wanted to know if you had any tips for CMs who are tasked with marketing their community for the first time ever. Also, any tips on how you balance work & life as a Head of Community and a CEO/founder?
Hey Izzy!
Yeah, so ‘marketing’ your community - I assume you already got something up and running, with few active members and you want to get traction / reach critical mass or something (if not, please let me know!). I’d start with inbound activities - pick existing users of your product/brand, such as people who just signed up (you can schedule calls or add flows to their onboarding process / welcome emails); look at sales leads, people who raised support tickets, people who converted in landing pages, etc. These are the ones who will be more likely to join in. You can look at several entry points you have to your product and draft a flow to get them in the community too.
As for work-life balance, that’s a great question! For years, I had pretty small fun hours as I was working on my side gig in the evenings and most weekends. I recall having a trip from Ireland to Brazil (it’s a 14h+ flight with 1 connection) on Friday morning, landing in the evening, doing an event for Edublin all day Saturday and the morning of Sunday, getting the flight back at 2pm on Sunday and arriving the next day DIRECTLY to the office to go back to work… it was a bit mental, but it was well worth it! Nowadays, I have a team running Edublin, so my role is more of an advisor, helping with some decisions and removing blockers, and sometimes creating some content myself because I just enjoy doing it a lot :)
Naya - Edu, thanks for joining us today! What digital marketing tools and strategies have you leveraged/would you recommend for getting knowledge of a new community out to its target members?
Oh interesting! So, my tech stack varies from company to company but there's nothing better than a couple of reports from sales, support and the “traditional” Zoom calls (Calendly is great for that).
As for strategies, I still like using the playing-to-win framework to set my aspiration and resourcing at a high level before I start writing OKRs.
