Building Communities: Lessons Learned from Google to a Startup

Building Engaged In-Person Communities

Erica Hanson: Hi. Thank you. I see some familiar faces, so I appreciate you being here. It's thank you so much. I am gonna be talking to you about building communities, and I'm gonna focus mostly on in person communities.

But I first have a question. How many of you have built community programs at your companies? Cool. Awesome. How many of you have been community organizers?

Awesome. Yeah. Great. So I'm sure there's a lot I can learn from all of you as well, and I'd love to chat with you more today. So yes, as I mentioned, I'll be talking about building in person communities and lessons that I learned from working at Google to a startup now.

So I'll share three things about me and why I'm talking about communities today. So one is I've been at Flutterflow for over a year now. And I lead our developer relations team, but I also work on a few programs. One of them is I started Flutterflow Student Ambassadors, and we also have a YouTube content creators community. And just to let you know a little bit about Flutter Flow, it's basically a visual development environment.

And it helps people build the front end of apps. There's some drag and drop functionality. So it's kind of more of like a low code tool. But we still have a number of developers using it, hence our developer community. We also just greatly updated a product called Dreamflow.

And this will become more of a Flutter IDE in the future. And it basically help people can import their code, edit directly. You can also edit it visually and then also using the AI agent. So it seems like people like it so far. We'll see how it goes.

Second thing about me, I was at Google for seventeen years and spent time in the Bay Area, Singapore, London, and New York. And at the end, I was leading a team that managed Google Developer Groups, Google Developer Student Clubs. These are communities all over the world. They basically are volunteer led, and they host events about Google's products. Between both of the programs, are about 3,000 communities around the world, reaching about 3,000,000 developers each year.

And those are some photos from when I was organizing programs in Indonesia. And third, I am a community organizer as well. I co founded Geek Girl Meetup. It was a community for women in tech, and I learned a lot from that experience. So now let's talk about community.

And when I think about building communities, I really want to build awesome, long lasting, and engaged communities. And when I think about that, I actually think about this guy. And this is my dad, Larry. He has been part of the same tech community for over forty years. It's called ISAKA in Los Angeles and it's for IT auditors and also, for folks in the cybersecurity space.

And this is my dad forty years ago. This is when he went to his first event. That's me, the baby. That's my mom. So you probably have an idea of my age, but this is when he went to that first event.

And I asked him, you know, why did you go? And he said it's because he had a work question. He doesn't even remember if he got the question answered, but he stayed with the community. And I think part of that reason is because he became a more active participant over the years. He started out as a member and then he became a speaker and eventually he says he got roped into being the president.

So and now he's still involved. He's retired and he's still a volunteer. This is his main activity. And I think it's because of the people. And I organized a surprise seventieth birthday party for my father.

On a whim, I said, let me just ask the president of the community. Do you wanna come? And she said, absolutely. And 12 members of the community joined. And my dad's an introvert and so this community, they've really created a sense of belonging for him, and and he's really thrived.

And now he says he's still involved because it's good for his brain. So I hope he he continues to to stay engaged. And they've also welcomed me in. I've been to a couple of events, and I've also been a speaker at two of their virtual events. So when I think about building long lasting active communities, Isaka and my dad's journey, these are the models for me.

Finding and Supporting Community Leaders

So today I'll talk about two important parts of building communities and that involves people and engagement. I'll share what I learned at Google, Flutter Flow, and also from my dad. So first, the people. It's really important to find great people to lead these communities. And it's good that they have some technical skills.

They've led communities before ideally. But really, it's so important to understand the motivation. And when we have video calls with them, just understanding, you know, why do you wanna lead a community? And there has to be some motivation about helping other people learn and grow. And also not too much about them.

And it's helpful if they're they're humble, seem easy to work with. And and that really will carry through the rest of the community. So so that's very important. So when we started a developer community program at a start up from scratch. A friend, a former colleague of mine from Google came over.

His name's Mano. And he started it. But before we were like, we said, let's start a developer community just to do it. We said, let's actually ask. Like, maybe people don't want this.

And so we sent out a survey to all of our we have about 2,000,000 users. And and we sent out a survey. Hey, if there was a meet up in a city near you, would you go? And 70% said yes. And they also told us the cities, those specific cities.

So we said, okay, there's some interest. And we also saw online that there were quite a few meet ups already happening. So we said, let's do it. The first thing that we did was go to our networks, like community organizers we knew who were amazing. And we said, hey, would you be interested in doing a Flutterflow community?

And and most of them said yes. And so we had those people who were very experienced community builders. And then they could coach and mentor the other community organizers who weren't as experienced. And then we just put out an open forum like, hey, FlutterFlow developers out there, do any of you wanna start a community? And we had hundreds of people responding.

I was surprised about that, but pleasantly surprised. And so we've started a bit smaller. And to make things a bit more scalable, we've also used Meetup. And it's all in one place. We have design assets to have them be a little bit more consistent.

And and I think we're not gonna grow too much more, but this has been an awesome base of of communities around the world. And we also have a post event form that we send to them that they fill out to let us know the events they've hosted, how many people came to the event so we can keep track of how active they are, how many developers reached. So when I talk about great people, I I did wanna share the story of Nick Byron. And he's just an example of like a great community leader to me. He oh, that's Patricia.

She's in the audience as well. Hi, Patricia. So he is a freelancer. He he leads our New York community. And he just wanted to meet other Flutterflow builders and and he was just excited to to try it out.

He'd never let a community before. But we love his positive contagious energy that really permeates through the entire community. So just wanna briefly take you through the journey of this community. So this was the first event. This is another event.

You start to see some of the same faces and workshops. He's done a couple of co working events, bring your project, have some pizza, people are building together. And we've also had fun, like, outside of meetups. He's just, like, a joy to be around. And he's really created a great sense of belonging within the community.

And that's been important to keep it active, engaged and and thriving. So step one, finding great people and everything else will follow. But two is you really have to support them. Community programs are not like set it and forget it. Cool.

This is scalable. People will just come. You have to be there to support the community. So ways that we did this at Google, I wouldn't say this is scalable, but we had onboarding summits for all of our community, the student clubs community. And I was leading that program for a number of years.

So we had onboarding summits. This was in Indonesia. This was in Nigeria. And also we do trainings. We would do I really like this framework from CMX, the seven p's of community.

And before we even talked about this, we would say, let's first make sure you have a core team. And if you're a student club organizer, find a faculty advisor. But then we'd walk through these and I'll call out a few. Just thinking about the people, do you wanna focus more on beginners or mobile developers? Participation.

Think about the Larry's. How are you gonna get people more involved? If someone seems active, maybe ask them to like be at the registration booth next time and people often say yes. And promotion. How are you gonna get the word out there?

A lot of them would set up social media channels and a lot of WhatsApp many, many WhatsApp groups and sometimes Discord as well. Not as much Discord. And I would always talk about the community commitment curve. This is from Douglas Atkin. He was at Meetup and also Airbnb.

And I mean, I definitely think about my dad and his like getting the foot in the door and then eventually he became the president of his community. But also there's other smaller steps especially with virtual, when there's a virtual element. Like maybe the person writes a blog or posts videos or eventually leads a community. We would also host regular meetings with them. These are the student ambassadors, so giving product updates, program updates.

They would share best practices, what's working, what are some of the challenges, and also give feedback. We would often ask them for feedback. How do we improve the program? Also, and templates. At Google, we had a community leads platform.

I I think they don't use this anymore. But for many years, we there was a portal. People could log in, find content, design assets, trainings. And we would always provide a lead guide for a campaign series. Like, if you wanna host a DevFest of this type of event in your city, here's all you need to know to get started, assets, content.

At Google, we would invite them to global and regional summits. This was in India. And it was a lot of fun. We invited, it was like women makers, experts, GDG, all the g's, a lot of acronyms. So it was confusing at times.

But it was good because it was like training and also, but they could meet each other and oftentimes they would find speakers at these events. Like, oh yeah, I can speak at your next event. And at ClutterFlow, smaller scale, you know, if locally we'll invite people to to gather, meet at the office. And often time, we we communicate with them via via Slack. So I sometimes just put in a group like, hey, you guys, you all live in Canada.

Why don't you maybe collaborate on on an event? And I often encourage the community organizers. It it the first step is that's the hardest is hosting the first event. Just like jointly work with another ambassador, host an event together, or even find a community that's related and maybe just host an event with them. So that that's worked out well.

We support them, but they also support us, which has been fun at local events, like being at our booth. We sponsored some DevFest events. So it's critical for people to find great people, but then also support them. And then recognize them, thank them regularly for the awesome impact that they're having in their local communities. Ways that we did this at Google, we would invite them to Google IO for the active community organizers, especially if if they were hosting events every few months, we would call that active.

And sometimes we'd have them nominate themselves. We had a nomination form like sharing, why do you want to go to Google IO? What kind of events might you host when you get back? And we would pay for some of the travel expenses. And at Plutterflow, we do have an annual developer conference.

I'm organizing that this year. It's in October in San Francisco. So we'll also be inviting some of the community organizers. Sharing stories. We would share recognize them by sharing their stories often through blogs, videos.

We would showcase different cool apps that came from their communities. So this one, Dana, his community created a flood alert app in Indonesia. And so we loved making videos sharing those stories. At Flutterflow, we have an annual at our annual developer conference, we have community awards. So recognizing champions, community champions, and also educators of the year.

So three takeaways for people. If you're building community programs and you want them to be engaging, long lasting, and awesome, people is critical to this. And finding great people to lead these groups, then supporting them, and then recognizing them. And that's really important. I also want to touch on community members.

We don't have direct access to them unless we meet them at events. But we do encourage the organizers to get feedback. Feedback is a gift. It's a difficult gift. Some sometimes a gift you don't wanna receive, but it's a gift nonetheless.

And I learned this through being a community organizer at Geek Girl Meetup. We weren't I we would email and say, hey, fill out this form, and not getting responses. So we started printing out physical feedback form and giving people pens and saying, please fill this out before you leave, and that actually worked. And I went in thinking like, we're gonna learn how to code. This is a coding community.

And then they're like, no, thanks. It's we'd like to focus on building startups. I was like, okay, cool. Let's do that instead. So we kind of shifted the focus and had different events.

So that's what I learned through that. And some of our communities do raffles. If you fill out the feedback form, join in for a raffle for some swag. We also highlighted community members through stories as well. I'd often ask community organizers, hey, is there somebody that really stands out and yeah, a story that you wanna share of someone in your community.

And in Indonesia, the organizer mentioned Hastu. She had said that she didn't think she could be a developer because she is deaf. But after joining the community, she built her first app and has been successful. We invited her to Google IO. She met Sundar and joined me on stage.

It was wonderful meeting her in person. We And were always very open and looking for stories and creating videos of those stories as well. At Flutterflow, we're not so much building videos, but we are doing social media posts and blogs about cool apps that have been built on Flutterflow and showing some like enterprise clients that have built cool stuff. And we also repost and retweet if if we see cool stuff out there. And that's just a bit more of a lower lift scalable way of doing that.

And I still do ask people, organizers like, hey, there community members? You just wanna share their story? And Nick, who who leads the New York community, he mentioned Charles And and he drives two and a half hours each way to come to events. And he's been to, I think, all events. Yeah.

He's been to all the events. And he's just amazing, building really cool stuff. And so that really inspired and motivated Nick, the organizer. And he shared this quote with me, which I love. He said, you know, it's not just a meet up.

It's a source of belonging, connection and inspiration. Sometimes people come for the tech, but stay for the people. And that's the best feeling as an organizer, knowing you helped create that space. So I I couldn't agree with him more. And same for my dad.

Effective Engagement Strategies for Communities

You know, he came for the tech and and stayed for the people. And also for his brain, he said. So that's community members. So talked about people, the importance of people. Now I wanna talk about engagement strategies as you're building community programs.

How do you make them active, long lasting, engaged? One way is through global event series. But first, it's always good to think about like why are we doing this? I saw a number of funnels yesterday. I know Jeff's talk had a funnel as well which was helpful like a lot of funnels.

And this I I use this one from Puff. He worked at Google Firebase. He's at Flutterflow now. This is a a DevRel adoption funnel. The usual stuff and, you know, awareness to activation.

I focus my time on the love support and connecting with champions and and working with them. But now that you know what you're doing, why, then you know, and you decided I wanna do a global event series. Here's one that I see as a great model. So this is DevFest. These happen every year at the end of the year, usually like October to December.

It's been around for like thirteen years. Oh, Sheni also is here. She worked on this program with me. Hey, Sheni from Google. Many years.

And it's community led, one day tech conference. Lots of talks and workshops. And they had a consistent look and feel. Like this was the design that we used. But local, very different vibes, and and a lot of fun.

This was in Poland. I was there and then London. And so these are good because it's like some communities weren't active for months at a time, but then everyone would do the DevFest. It's like, okay, we do this. This is our end of year celebration.

And so it would activate a lot of communities. And these are the things that we provided them for these events. So we we had an organizer guide with design assets. We'd provide budget, swag, content, and also would connect them with speakers if they asked for that. And marketing, we would have a global push sharing on socials like, check out this event near you.

So we would do a lot of marketing around it. And so it was a global movement but very much had a local feel. And we had hundreds of these around the world happening every year. And people would get excited and look forward to it. And I think we're gonna do more of these at Flutterflow in the future as well.

Another engagement strategy is competitions. This helps people activate product adoption. Sometimes we're just reengaging existing users. At Flutterflow, I've done a couple. One is the AI for Good Hackathon.

I like to have a theme and it's just a good way of like getting people, encouraging folks to build on the platform. These were a couple of the winners. And it's also good for marketing afterwards. You can showcase some of the cool stuff that people built. And yeah.

So that's it's also good for communities because you can say like, hey, you can host a meet up for everyone to work on that project for that competition at the same time. So that increases engagement as well. At Google, I led yeah. I led the student clubs programs for many of year many years and and also the solution challenge. So this was an annual competition.

It's like, okay, you've learned through workshops, now let's build. Let's build something. We would often encourage them to use more than one Google product. So oftentimes it was like Firebase and Flutter, for example. And then we'd have a demo day at the end.

We had a theme, UN's sustainable development goals. And it was a good time to just activate communities. They had a lot of like lunchtime meetups to like work on their projects together. And and it was a lot of fun, definitely increased engagement and some great stories from that. And lastly, partnering with other companies, I'd say especially at a start up.

It just if you partner with other companies, you can kinda split the budget, more exposure on both sides, and also the split the effort. So we have we did partner with Google Cloud in India on a hackathon recently. And then RevenueCat were one of the the partners for the vibing, vibe coding award, think it's called. But what I like about RevenueCat, this is in August, is they have a build in public award. And they said they got like so many submissions for that one.

Just encouraging people to build in public, and then I think they picked the one that built in public the most. And that just helps with additional exposure. So I really like that idea. So three takeaway for engagement strategies to get your communities active, engaged, would be global event series, competitions and also partnering with other companies. And so in summary, it's all about people and engagement, and that leads to awesome, active, long lasting communities.

And if you take nothing else away from this talk, I would encourage you to find a Larry near you. Someone who's a community member and just continues to engage, participate in the community, and becomes leadership and continues to support. Maybe you're not setting out to build a forty year community program. I know that tech is changing fast, but just you want it to be long lasting. So definitely look out for Larry's near you.

So thank you so much, and definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. Take care. Awesome. Thank you. And I'd love to chat with you afterwards and learn from all of you.

MC: Thank you. Thank you. I think we may have a couple of minutes if anybody has any questions for Erica. Thank

honestly not quite: you so much. That was so inspiring and exciting. And I've always loved your work, so everybody should follow Erica all the time in all the things. And I have a new role now, and I'm honestly not quite staffed for community. And I wonder if you have any tips on this situation where we don't have a community manager.

It's just me and a couple of engineers actually trying to relaunch community.

Erica Hanson: Thank you. Yeah. That that's a great question. I mean, at Google, one thing I didn't mention is we had teammates all over the world and a lot of like Google employees managing those communities around the world. And at Flutterflow, for 53 communities, it's Mano who's leading it.

And for the 30 student ambassadors, it's me. But at some point, you can only you can't really add so many more. So, that that's a great question. I I would say it's like starting small and then also finding champions within those groups that can be a bit more involved and engaged. Maybe some of them could host some of the meetings and sharing best practices.

We naturally over time find some that are just wanting to share their knowledge a bit more and help out a bit more. So some of them do end up volunteering. So I'd lean on some of the champions a bit more. But there is gonna be a limit to the scaling. And then at a certain point, you might not be able to engage with them so much, then you have to hire.

It's like it is very helpful to have, at least one person who's the point of contact. So, yeah. I'd love to also learn from other people, like, what they've done in those situations if anyone has any advice.

MC: Yeah.

also a product: Thank you, Erica. I'm also a product of the of your work at Google. So my question, I work for an enterprise company, and most of our users are probably developers of the enterprise company themselves. How do you have any tips on how to build communities with this type of users?

Erica Hanson: We we're doing more of that now because we we do have an a whole enterprise team and there's been some discussions of how do we support that team more engaged with them because there are a number of developers at the enterprises that wanna learn more and they are interested in meetups. So what we've been doing so far is inviting them to the existing meetups near them. We've been getting some of those developers to be speakers at events. So we're just trying to integrate them into the existing communities. There could be some, like, a separate program for developers from enterprise, but we've tried to integrate it.

And I think we're gonna be doing more and more of that because it's definitely helpful for them to continue to learn and meet other people and speak at those events. So yeah, I think it's so useful for sure. All

MC: right. Thank you so much, Erica. Again, please give it up for Erica.