Welcome to the very first Community Coach newsletter, a value packed read
for community builders who agree that members come first and egos to be checked at the door. 

I’m Carmen (aka “Community Coach”), an experienced community builder. I’m sharing my knowledge from building online communities for the past decade and helping them thrive from behind the scenes.

Here’s what to expect in these newsletters:

With intros done, let’s dive in!

In this newsletter…

• 📚 Community 101: What questions you should ask from day 1

• 🤖 How to easily convert your community member research & subjective data into actionable insights

• 🔥 Inspiring community builder Andrew Yeung hosted THE events to attend at SXSW - they were free yet had impressive waitlists!

• 📩 How web3 community managers can reach out to more users

Community 101: What questions you should be asking from day 1

It makes sense to start the first issue with the basics of community building. 

3 key questions to ask yourself before launching any community:

1) Why are you building your community? 

2) Who is your community for?

3) How will your community add value to your community members?

Download this free guide to go through these questions in more detail. Make sure the promo code CCNEWSLETTER1 is allocated - only for my newsletter subscribers!

An AI tool that can convert your community member research and "subjective" data into actionable insights

Speak AI will record any audio inputs and transcribe them.

That’s pretty generic for a lot of AI tools out there, but the real magic with this tool is it will take all your interviews, focus groups, youtube videos, and any other data you provide it and produce actionable insights.

We’re talking the ability for it to find common threads and popular keywords used across conversations, word clouds, sentiment analysis and other charts that you can easily clip and share in presentations.

You can then use this as your “virtual research assistant” - asking it questions based on your data as if it were ChatGPT.

This is HUGE for community managers.

It helps take the “subjective” data and create reports with compelling insights.

This is how it works:

Invite Speak AI assistant to your interviews, focus groups etc. If you invite it to meetings you can call it anything you like (it doesn’t have to be “Speak AI Assistant”). Make sure you let people know it’s a “transcriber” assistant so they aren’t wondering what it is.

Here’s where the magic happens. Not only does it transcribe, but it helps you pull valuable insights from all audio (you can also upload audio/video from social media sources!).

It then creates a searchable repository (think “chatgpt”) of your own data - so you can now search ANYTHING within everything you have uploaded.

More details can be found on their website. You can try it out for free for 7 days.

Note: I’m not getting anything from you purchasing a plan if you decide to do so, I truly think this tool is incredible for those who value member research (and every community manager should do so!).

Inspiring community builder: how Andrew Yeung hosted free high quality meetups at SXSW with an impressive waitlist

Andrew Yeung is a VERY impressive community builder - building communities across the USA that people love to be a part of.

Andrew wanted a “more thoughtful way to bring together the tech community to gather” and decided to do something different at this year’s SXSW.

His mission (i.e. the WHY) was to encourage people in the tech community to gather, collaborate and explore new ideas. 

In order to make that happen, he would have to create a space where:

• People felt comfortable with each other (and eventually, build trust)

• Be willing to turn up and share about themselves, trade knowledge etc

• Feel inspired to build something new

• Want to work on new things together

There’s something really important that Andrew also focused on…

People connect with each other when they’re genuinely ENJOYING THEMSELVES.

Andrew set his set of events apart from everyone else by hosting amazing experiences including curated meals by private chefs, wellness experiences, games and activities.

These are all ways that people connect IRL (not to mention creating FOMO - who doesn’t want to sign up to at least one of the above activities?).

Here’s how he stayed true to his “WHY” - to encourage collaboration and explore new ideas. He put attendees up on the “stage” with:

• An ongoing podcast always running at the events interviewing extraordinary people (you can already see potential collabs happening)

• LED billboard trucks showcasing the products that founders in the community were building - and shown to everyone at the events.

• Open-house co-working opportunities during the day.

  
  This is all true to the WHY - and it also provides VALUE to the attendees.

Other really important points to note:
1) The community didn’t pay a cent for all of these experiences
2) It was application-only to attend (most importantly: you can't buy your way in.)

This ensures quality people attend the event. As an attendee this is maximising the value they receive.

If the WHY is to have quality people come together and collaborate, then you shouldn’t be paying your way in. Applications in this case make a lot of sense.

This gives the opportunity to conduct some “match-making” behind the scenes. You want to make sure the right types of people were attending that could collaborate together on new projects.

Key learnings you can apply to your own community (you don’t need to spend $$$ to achieve these):

1. Be clear on the mission of your community - your WHY is important and central to all future community strategy

2. Understand what people really want and deliver value to them - in this case attendees superficially want fun and the clout of being able to attend an exclusive event - but they also want to be inspired, have access to future exciting opportunities and receive help to raise awareness and other advice required for their projects/businesses

3. Think twice before charging people to attend events or be a part of a community - it’s not to say this doesn’t work, but there are better ways to ensure you don’t have people dropping out. Creating a higher sense of FOMO will help a lot in this case.

Read more about Andrew’s experience building the Lumos House community at SXSW:

P.s. - if you are rolling your eyes thinking “wow another tech bro event”, I want to point out it is worth your time to read some of the responses to Andrew’s post above.

You can see from the comments they weren’t just “bros” that attended and they absolutely raved about the experiences.

This is a sign of an inspiring community builder - staying true to the WHY. You can see an incredible community forming with Lumos house - Andrew is headed to Miami next! The opportunity to scale out this community is huge.

Future of community: The state of wallet to wallet (W2W) messaging and how web3 community managers could potentially use it better

W2W refers to “the ability to send messages directly between cryptocurrency wallets, allowing for enhanced communication and collaboration within the web3 ecosystem.”

Coinbase launched W2W encrypted messaging in July 2023.

Blaze (a Web3 marketing automation platform) released a 2024 report covering the state of W2W messaging in Web3.

According to the report, over 40% of those with a crypto wallet have used wallet to wallet (W2W) messaging. Those initial adoption rates look promising.

The most popular platform for W2W is using the XMTP protocol (which powers the W2W messaging system in Coinbase amongst others).

There’s still a lot of work to be done with only 34% of W2W users “very likely” to use web3 wallet messaging in future. Most requests focus on improving UX/UI, notification systems and group messaging features.

But it was the last page of the Blaze report that peaked my interest: a new opportunity to connect web3 projects with their users via W2W DM campaigns.

Of course it goes without saying it’s important to DYIR on this one. I’ll personally be looking into this in further detail too. With it becoming more difficult to reach web3 users on Twitter/X, I can see more demand for services such as the above.

Feel free to reply to this email if you’ve personally tried it - I’d love to hear feedback on this one.

One last question from me to ponder

What is something truly unique that your community offers?

Reply to this email and let me know!

Or if you’re trying to figure it out - reply to this email with a link to your community and I’ll check it out.

Until next time,

Carmen
Community Coach

P.S - Once I reach 100 subscribers, I’ll be selecting 5 community builders at random to offer a free mentoring session with me. We will go through your community together and discuss any current challenges, what improvements can be made and advice I can offer.

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