What I Learned Building Online Communities for Airbnb, Etsy, Google, and More – Adam Howell

0:00[Music] [Music] this is my first and I'm working on a new product that I'm hoping to get to launch sooner than later called groupie for an icebreaker about me two of the things that you might have seen out in the world that I created as stupid as they were one is this tweet on the left back when I used to be on Twitter more often about a grown-ass man who was mad at his girlfriend at Olive Garden so he made a menu for it this tweet went viral and got me this close to being on Good Morning America back when back when Twitter was a little more edgy and

0:52popular than it might be today and they the production team was actually on the way to my house and Olive Garden PR called them and told him to shut it down because they didn't think it reflected positively on the brand if they read the replies to this tweet they would have been exactly right and then number two is if you remember back a few years ago when stickers were actually new and people still liked them and thought they might use them every day I created a sticker pack called phonies which let you place a thank-you there was gonna be sad if no one knew these two things and I was just talking

1:31about myself so thank you you put a I turns out to be trademark apple blue phony on top of your friends text to you and makes them look like they're saying things like oops I just pooped myself or you were right all along I'm always wrong and so that state on the app store for a week Apple called me the day after it got on TechCrunch and daring fireball and said to change everything about it or they pull it down I wrote an article about that conversation and said I will not change it so pull it down in a week and then that week it sold 30,000 copies so that

2:12was a lot of fun so my the rest of my career has been a little less interesting than those things made me think about one of my favorite quotes from John Malkovich it relates a lot to bootstrapping I think in his philosophy of moviemaking is basically I make for them and then I make one for me and one for him an actor's standpoint he's saying I make a big-budget stupid movie and that I may or may not be excited about and then that gives me the money and the ability to make a smaller movie that hits all my artistic needs and I don't know if it's just me up here who

2:50feels this way about my career sometimes as a bootstrapper but my corporate gigs have definitely been they for them of my career path coming out of school working for a big multi media conglomerate a couple years later joining a start-up which was at the time all I wanted to do in the world called jotspot about a year later we got bought by Google and don't let them tell you anything with their really great PR but it's just a big huge multinational conglomerate so after a couple years of just a really dorky corporate environment I left to start another bootstrap startup called mocks up which was basically envisioned before

3:25envision until envision got a bunch of money stole all my best ideas and bought me for pittance a little while later and then my last corporate gig was at a company then called lithium which I'll talk about in a minute but now called Kouros which is a terrible name and I was actually working on that platform for about five years and it's a community platform and I left late last year to work on my current app current SAS app groupie so when I started at lithium I'm gonna call it lithium nut chorus I felt like maybe I've made a wrong turn in my career in the mid 2010

4:02I was working on forum software and I thought I could maybe have been more than that as a designer working on a 20 plus year technology but after were after a year so much to my surprise the app or the space kind of started growing on me one of the things was it was product I was consulting I was in the professional services team and I was the first time I've ever consulted for a product and I liked the baseline that it set so you're using your creativity and your constraints to try and make this product which was at the time already almost ten years old

4:42long in the tooth you're trying to make it suit these modern needs for companies like Airbnb so for Airbnb an online community for them is host talking to hosts so how many towels do I setup when should my check-in hours be you know I've never done this before can someone help me out an Airbnb community was almost 500 thousand members strong so there's usually someone online to help those people out for an Etsy that is sellers helping sellers so you know who do you use for shipping and handling and what do you do during the holiday crunch and it can also be more aspirational a community doesn't have to be just

5:18support forum it can be more aspirational like Google local guides Google local guides as Google is attempt to compete with Yelp a time you leave a comment on a Google map spot that's considered you using local guides so they wanted to get people excited about this product they wanted to be more than it was so they created a community for people to share travel tips and more aspirational things in order to create this like-minded community behind their product so after several years of working on these communities and enjoying the work all except for the fact that the platform like I mentioned was long in the tooth and my days became

5:57more about calling down upset customers because something had crashed or trying to make up for the deficiencies in the software so eventually I'd had enough of that and I felt of course like I could do that better as the designer of me needs to point out that this is the last week's landing page that I had to make quickly for this talk it looks a lot better now so I'm gonna go ahead and quickly skip past that but a few things that I learned in those years working on communities number one one of the things I had to constantly talk to my customers and clients about at lithium I kind of

6:30called it a post web world like no one's gonna come to your community and join it just for the sake of the warm fuzzy feeling of joining your community someone's gonna sign up without a desperate need right then to get a question answered or maybe answer a question but most likely they have a need that he needs serving right now so are larger companies like a narrow beam beam or Etsy they would use single sign-on so they would connect to their own login platform and it would be kind of a you know a silent handoff to transition them to the community product so they don't have to create another account

7:04before the smaller companies that I'm gonna be servicing with groupie and a lot of customers want to try the marketing department often uses a community as a way to go around the developers and their team to get a lot for more information from their users so that's one of the things that hamstrings a lot of communities as people try to put you know a driver's license application into the onboarding for their community so they don't have to try and convince their boss but they need these extra fields for the users so from the aspect of group II that shows that very well but I'm using essentially

7:40password lists sign up and log in to try and get around that problem point of most communities so send a verification code or a magic link login and get started right away and I hope that that especially for mobile users breaks down one of the biggest barriers that I saw was people just not wanting to sign up for a community number two the thing that I spent most of my days on as a designer and in the developer good-looking communities are a lot of work mostly because at its core especially an old-school support forum it's a wall of text that you're fighting every day it's just people writing title

8:13tech titles for their post even if they don't really feel like they needed to just because the software forces them to it's hard to upload images because you're dealing with a ten-year-old piece of software so you're constantly fighting this wall of text and the ways that I found to most inject visual interest into a community we're top-down and bottom-up so top-down is an admin or a community moderator it being as easy as possible for them to feature content that is visually interesting throughout the community that's the way that even if there's not an image attached to that post or an interesting image attached to that post an easy way to feature for a

8:55moderator something visually interesting makes it a lot more likely that they will and makes that wall of text start to break up with interesting imagery and then bottom up make it dead simple for the user to add good for my work with groupie that is not just having the catch-all post of title and body breaking it up into events breaking it up into quick post articles and then questions so that that helps create a little bit of visual interest on the page and I'll show you in a minute what that looks like but also just for the administrators I worked really hard to make featuring as as easy

9:39as possible but also as powerful as possible so there's an image in the post that automatically adds that image to the feature at the top but also there's a library of the image of colorful imagery that the user can choose to change the background and then change the color so simple stuff for us but for just a comment a community moderator or an admin they can very quickly add visual interest to a page and down there is an example of an event microcon for 2019 to break up a page and make it a lot more like the social networks that users now used to not less like the 20

10:18year old Support Forums that the tools were built for this was a really interesting one that I think comes kind of as a combination of people wanting to live their world their lives I'm a little less online the past few years I know personally for me getting off social networking not you know trying to keep my phone at home as much as possible and then a lot of the online communities that I worked with towards the end of my stay at lithium they were trying to work in in real life events and we're kind of buttress up they're only online communications a really good example of a company that is

10:54this really well is meat is dribble their dribble meetups are global we think a dribble you think of their online community but you also think of their physical events that they have every week around the world and so for me if we groupie that means making events into a first-class citizen so not only is it I have a question I need to answer or I have something to say it is you know show your interest in this event on the community and we'll garner an offline community as well as an online community my last point is people will the the biggest hurdle to get over with any community is the constant

11:36onslaught of negativity or just a very popular community like Airbnb they have 500,000 members posting a lot every day and all that content is really hard to get through so my biggest that's all white bust that's okay my biggest one of the biggest most the things I'm most excited about with groupie is using modern tools and they didn't have a decade ago with lithium of sentiment analysis and a little bit of machine learning for good measure to help moderators and admins process all of that text so I am done you have any questions

12:17thank you