I posted this on LinkedIn and wanted to share it here as it’s part of my core passion in the work I do today ….
Here’s how I got started building, running, leading customer communities, which I now do specifically at hosting.com as Chief Evangelist:
It was 2009, barely two years into running iThemes & someone tweeted … “Is iThemes still around?”
It hurt. It made me mad. Because our team of around 10 at the time were working our butts off building, supporting our products.
But it was also a huge catalyst for us and me & how I do business.
I thought … the ONE thing we could do was BE the most human company in our space.
It was a huge mindset shift … our customers want & need us, depend on us & they are on a journey trying to live their hopes, dreams, goals & we were a part of that journey.
Why not give them an identity together, a place to belong, and a cause that was about THEM first.
Our key customers were freelancers & agency owners using WP & our products to build sites, but there was a lot more we could do to support.
We started referring them to as our “customer community” every chance we could.
We started live streaming on Ustream at the time. And for our big product launch a few months later, we sat on a green couch, opened a laptop & starting talking & launched it LIVE.
And our customers tuned in. Chatted with us. So we kept it going. And that became iThemesTV, a weekly show we did for several years, with live chat.
We were already doing webinars but now the focus elevated from just our products to THEIR journey that we were a small part of.
We talked about THEM, their work & offered ideas and insights to help them.
All of that built like a snowball over time, as we tested a bunch of stuff, but mostly we listened and learned from them and … showed up for THEM.
I felt & still believe … if we knew our customers better than they might know themselves … because we genuinely cared … AND then shipped & supported what they needed based on their needs, goals (products, features, content) … then that would be the ideal of Doing Good AND Doing Well … and our business & our customers would be best served long term by it.
Almost a decade later, when we were acquired in 2018 by Liquid Web, we had built our customer community of raving fans … people who depended on us, as we depended on them. And it was incredible & special.
An inspiring way to do business.
So now … anything, everything I do in business ALWAYS includes a key focus on building customer communities, for their journey.
The stories I heard over the years of people’s lives being transformed by the work we did are the part of the treasures of leading a business I’ll savor forever.
I’m biased, but I have seen it happen over & over again …
Thinking beyond the just the Transaction (the micro) … to the macro — Transformation.
Thinking beyond the Solo (what’s in it for me) to the Shared (what’s in it for us, together, EVERYONE) ….
That’s Customer Community to me.
And when business becomes the Something Bigger, Together.