My community building journey

Akanksha Bhasin: Hi everyone. So let's get started. My community building journey building awesome developer communities in a fun way. I have learned these things over the years that things like hiring the right people or building a brand, trying to make it more fun and inclusive as possible. Hence, let's build communities in a fun way and inclusive way as possible, an introduction. So, hey everyone. I am Akanksha Bhasin technical community evangelist at symbol. ai and I work in the DevRel space, evangelising about the product, building technical communities, and looking after the partnerships and dev acquisition space.

And I often amplify about build with symbol. I'm also the founder of Women in Voice India and love advocating about voice. First, I'm a tech evangelist having three plus years of experience in building communities and I've actively led Google's developer student lab in the past. I've hosted more than 25 plus sessions on voice tech, which has impacted more than 2000 developers across different parts of India. And on the personal side, I love to dance and I would love to connect with you all and talk about startups, technology and anything related to community building.

So today I will be sharing about my journey and some tips on how you can build a community from scratch and grow it holistically. I'll also share how the student community is run differently from product like communities and how companies bridge this gap by engaging with developers. And a note in the beginning, all citations are based on my learnings experiences and through some remarkable folks in the industry who are breathing in and out the elements of developer relations.

So before getting started, let's understand what is a community? A community is a group of people who share a commonplace experience or interest and they basically come together to communicate, work together and pursue their interest over time. It could be a technical community discussing about Android or web technologies or maybe something like hiking or cooking or related to medicine. While the environment is different, the fundamentals of how community form have always been the same.

So to the moon communities could be it any mood, be it online and offline. I read somewhere that in the previous year on an average, a new community was created on Reddit every 2. 4 minutes. Isn't that huge?

More than 1 billion people are participating in Facebook groups every month. It took me like five seconds to tell you about the statement. It's safe to assume at least one new community must have been formed in this timeframe somewhere in the world. In fact, communities have been forming, evolving and dying consistently since the beginning of humanity. So building community is part of being human. Opening a new community is very easy, but sustaining it will be a tough road to hoe. So let's understand the importance of community building. So why is community important?

Because community saves us from the isolation and the alienation. We feel because in the real world, people have no choice because community is all about finding each other and a place we can call home.

But we are also compelled to build community not only because we are survivors in an existing order, but because we bring differences to a society that it raises all the differences. Whether it's a community formed off similar interests, a remarkable product that we had launched or doing a personal branding. We all want a community where we feel heard out. So by building a community, we put some order in this fragmented world, whether it's a platform for learning, networking, software products, e-commerce or the whole world in general, we all need one community. So let's understand what's the benefit of joining a community. You get a chance to meet and greet where peer to peer learning happens, which provides an awesome experience and will enhance your knowledge effectively.

Most of the people often ask this question, why go out for a community meetup? We have to spend a lot of time on travelling or by get up early on a weekend for a conference as a lot of material is already available on the internet, but you never know what brings you in.

You might learn something new or learn from the past mistakes of the speaker so that you don't repeat it. Or maybe you could find your future co-founder or a hackathon partner. When I was in my sofa mall, I found my hackathon partner from a different college. And on top of that, the hackathon wasn't in a different city. My parents were totally against it as I haven't travelled my entire life to a different city. But somehow I convinced them by saying it's my heart calling and I have to go.

And that life-changing experience proved to be really beneficial and I felt independent at that moment. So it was a great learning experience. Next is the speaker sessions. So some sessions provide real world experience whether you are taking part in some online conference or even you can also work on the existing technologies and build projects that solves real life problems. There are various open source organisation companies and communities that host conferences and events. So do attend those and it's open to all you get a chance to network with like-minded folks and people with diverse backgrounds as well. You might also get a chance to get hired as well, and it's good for personal growth as well since you get an opportunity to upskill.

So here's a remarkable tweet by Hamesh who is the co-founder of HubSpot.

So he says that product-led growth is great. What I'm excited about now is the community-led growth companies that create massive communities for the category and ate connections, build win hearts, minds and market share. Community is a catalyst for growth. That's so well said. Every company nowadays it's trying to be more inclusive and tries to build human to human connection and focuses less on the conventional ways of marketing. Even Instagram accounts of big companies try to be more personal by giving a human touch to their posts and post replies. And even in the tweets, the way they market their products is more community led than those conventional marketing techniques. So now let's understand what's community led growth all about?

So communities are a powerful growth driver of growth. There are new age catalysts of growth that brings substantial value to the product and sales.

That's why like almost 70% of the companies with communities say that they will be investing in them further this year. Big companies like Atian, Salesforce have created huge communities around their product and they host events, conferences and reward their champions regularly. Talking about big guns like Google, Amazon, apple, one hearts of public through thriving communities and there was a widespread adoption of their technologies and products. Communities have always been existed in the market. It's like 2020 and 2021 when the pandemic hit, it has accelerated. And community led growth is a go-to market strategy that relies on network impact, influence and inputs from a strong supportive community as a main lever for product and business growth.

In other words, community of product enthusiasts, whether it's external folks like ambassadors or raving fans by not that you have been thoughtfully building and nurturing over time access the driving force for developer acquisition, customer acquisition and activation and retention. Even in our company we follow these AA a RP model.

So what's the RO one? So developers and customers who feel part of a community are more likely to refer their friends and less tempted to leave for a competitor. They often become brand evangelists too, which is free and effective marketing for the company. And in case of early stage startups, community members often act as focus groups giving valuable product and experience feedback that companies can use to improve their products more quickly. And a lot of investors and leadership team often ask for ROI for the community. It's important for all the advocates and evangelists to clear the tangible and fundamental metrics as everything can't be quantifiable.

The impact of the community may not be Imma, but it'll definitely Bo fruits in the long run holistically.

So product led growth and community led growth. So community led growth and product-led growth gets hand in hand. Community led growth often amplifies the product led growth. Community led growth is the next step. It doesn't replace the product led growth and excellent customer experience is still the key to gaining enthusiastic fans. Instead, it builds on top of the product led growth by harnessing the power of existing customers and they all feel a natural desire we all have for the community. While product led growth leans on the product usage and user experience to acquire new users and maybe increased user retention maybe to the APIs or SDKs and even boosting customer lifetime value, community led growth relies on building and nurturing a strong community that will directly influence the product growth in the long run.

A few big names like Figma, Coda and Notion are good examples of products that are amplifying growth with a community-led strategy, there has been a statement like Product-led growth and community-led growth can exist very harmoniously together by Bob Moray.

So as we just heard from Bob Mure, the line gets between effective product-led growth and effective community-led growth. So it's kind of a Venn diagram. All the best things are in the middle of it, but both sides equally matter. So the takeaway of the three key benefits that your business can gain from a community-led growth are acquisition, retention and uncapped feedback. And on the left hand side can see as we know about product led, we have user research, product analytics, pql acquisition feature adoption, product experience. So basically we can leverage our community and both can work together holistically and community led. We can build personal relationships with the person so that they don't just come and just sign up and don't use our product.

Afterwards we should try to maybe having some feedback calls in between doing more one-on-ones with them or maybe sending them resources that's not available on docs. Maybe something exclusive on top of it, which they can build some amazing projects and virality of referrals or maybe hosting some giveaways or maybe inviting them to develop a spotlight series so this way you can continuously engage with them.

So now it's story time and up our knowledge session. So I started my journey in voice by developing actions for Google Assistant and then later explored voice flow, Alexa and Bixby. After learning this new technology, I felt really motivated, excited to bring the voice revolution in India. I wanted to teach others about this latest technology. I wanted to make the voice ecosystem better in India, like people getting access to resources more easily. You must have seen in 2018 there was a widespread adoption towards voice first technologies like Google Assistant Alexa.

So I regularly hosted some sessions. So here's a short journey of mine. So I was a regular attendee in meetups to becoming an organiser, hosting events and then speaking on meetups. So the transformation had been really awesome. All thanks to these voice communities that have always supported me.

Here are some glimpses of some sessions that I took in different colleges along with my colleague. In most of our meetups, we covered how to make voice actions and skills making bilingual apps along with focusing more on the conversational design which matters the most. So we held sessions on fire base, GCP, dialogue flow, and a lot of them, and I've helped a lot of people in getting started in the field of voice and have given more than 20 plus sessions on various technologies in four different states of India, which impacted more than 2000 people in the span of two years and in November, 2019.

So all these three years during my college time, it has been building communities either with Google voice flow. So in November, 2019, I started giving some sessions on voice flow as well in meetups. And in just three months it got 500 plus developers across India and a little about voice flow. It's like a NOCO tool that helps you in prototyping and building Google actions and Alexa skills.

And because of my contributions in voice communities, I was also invited to speak at Voice Global. It was my first international talk. So next comes Women in Voice. So I'm the founder of Women in Voice India.

So Women in Voice is an international organisation for supporting women and minority genders in the field of voice. It has many chapters all across the world. Our mission is to celebrate, amplify, build community and empower women and gender minorities in voice. We launched Women in Voice India back in 2020 in middle of the pandemic. It was very difficult and challenging, but somehow we worked hard and we scaled it to one 50 plus members. And we also had a virtual launch for Women Invoice India last year and people all over India joined us for the event.

So some rewards. And so I received the Append Coming Voice award this year for my contributions in the voice ecosystem.

And so this is the place where I work symbol ai. So symbol AI is a conversation intelligence platform that enables you to add AI and ML on top of your voice video or text communication interfaces. Think of symbol as one-stop shop to manage all your conversation and generate automated speech recognition, sentiments, actions, questions, custom tense, this so much without building and scaling MLN real time. We have an awesome sort of APIs and SDKs that works with the REST interface for URLs and even with streaming audio. And the best part, like we recently announced our CDA last week, so it's my first job straight out of my college that to been devil, it felt a little overwhelming in the beginning, but those strategies, frameworks, and learning from the community proved to be really beneficial at Symbol and was the key role to grow the developer community exponentially and holistically. And my journey with Symbol has been completely phenomenal. I joined back in 30th March and I'm really proud to say that we have grown our community exponentially and talking about some de initiatives that we have launched in our community. So we had Integrated Disrupt Hackathon, we have hosted virtual Happy Hours, we have also launched a developer ambassador programme and we also experimented with the developer month to promote our main agenda, like hashtag Build with Symbol.

And we have an amazing community on Slack and Twitter as well. Feel free to join it.

And so these are some learnings from my Deborah journey. We launched a lot of initiatives. So these are the amazing stats from our hackathon. We had 2066 participants, 88 ideas submitted, and 56 teams, shortlisted and signups were more than around a thousand. So it was great. The first time we hosted it was around February that time we had 200 participants, but this time we scaled it up to having more than 2000 registrations.

So it was something huge. So was there any secret recipe? So all these were the learnings from the community. We collaborated with other communities, we had various networking sessions and we did a lot of live streams. We did product feedback calls, developer month, happy hours, even had some fun giveaways and developer swag. And the best part of that, the whole journey of integrated Disrupt hackathon was we also had many support calls where we helped developers wherever they were facing any doubts in the project. So whenever you host some hackathon in your company, try to give individual attention to all the developers and try having some events in between so that they don't just come and submit their project. There should be some feedback calls or maybe something inclusive where they have some fun as well.

And each and every initiative summed up to an army of devs who have evangelised build with symbol. And in just six months we scaled our community to 2,500 plus community members. So that was something I'm really proud of. And the last thing we had had to be first 2021. So it's a great way. It was the first time we participated in hack October Fest. So we open source our reports and received a lot of participation from community. So if you are a developer advocate or evangelists hosting some events on maybe open sourcing your repositories where people get a chance to directly contribute, they will feel more inclusive as well.

So you can also try hosting this open source activities. Yeah, so that's all about it. Thank you so much everyone, and I'm open for any questions and feel free to connect me either on LinkedIn or Twitter.