How to Build an Online Community-Part I

Apurv Pandit, Editor, PaGaLGuY.com
Out of curiosity, just before writing this piece I Googled 'how to build an online community' to see what advice is being dished out on the WWW to newbie entrepreneurs. The search yielded primarily two types of articles – the first kind, viewed creation of online communities purely as an intensive technology patch-up job with massive tutorials on installing forum software and plugins or signing up with Ning. The second laid out a structured approach that spoke of things such as 'harnessing the power of man's social needs for creating value' and 'laying out a three-stage plan to attract and retain users'.

I believe that these days, such approaches are being advocated by online consultants to all sorts of interests (business, social, enthusiast) who feel the need to have their fingers in the social media pie. Our experience in starting and maintaining the niche online community of MBA applicants and students using the forums medium on PaGaLGuY.com was however, completely different. The greatest point of difference lay in the fact that PaGaLGuY.com was not started with the intention of making money but for the personal need of its Founder, who was looking to do an MBA himself at that time. That single reason – of not being money-driven – insulated us from a lot of mistakes and shortcuts business heads of online communities make in the haste to increase numbers and make money.

We started monetizing only in 2006, after the community was four years old and it seemed too compellingly stupid not to use it to create commercial value. As of today, we receive about 200,000 unique visitors each month, 14 million page views and are the most popular education site in India according to Alexa. We are a 12-people strong company and completely profitable.

Instead of making this a self-congratulatory story of our growth, I’ll instead put down some points and specific examples that illustrate the challenges and lessons learned by us about the growth of a niche online community from our experience.

Starting and growing a community

A thriving and vibrant online community has to grow organically, it cannot be ‘synthesized’ using a corporate plan – a community has to take its time. Services, features, sections and applications must come as a demand from the users and should be designed with the active involvement of users. Involvement of users is often ‘under-interpreted’ with surveys or focus group questionnaires and usability tests. While these methods have their importance, communities need to do a lot more in terms of providing a space for users to voice their needs and collaboratively design services.

We do not believe in launching online communities where the creators plan a comprehensive structure based on assumptions (or imitation of a similar existing website) and roll out 15 features packed in one product in one Big Grand Launch. In the end, either most of the features remain unused or the quality of content/use is abysmally low. It shows up poorly to new users of the community, who then do not make a second visit, forget about being passionate about that community.

A few other vibrant niche communities in India – Xbhp.com, Indianguitartabs.com – have followed similar paths: that of slow, organic growth and we love them for what they are.

Involving users

Successful communities inherently function on Wikinomics. Users have to be given phenomenally high levels of freedom and power to create value inside the community. On PaGaLGuY, users singlehandedly started a nationwide community service where the users meet up in each city every weekend to take up entire grassroots projects for NGOs. The idea and execution was done completely by the users, without any nudge or intervention from the community heads.

Our learning from this has been that the only job of a good community administrator is to provide a kickass technical platform and a constructive interaction environment and then leave everything to the users. Magic then takes place by itself.

The Internet has moved away from the ‘publish and browse’ to ‘read and write’ web in terms of Content. Platforms too, will have to follow this path in order for web properties to last. A web company cannot ‘publish’ platforms and expect users to populate them in a sticky manner. Users will have to be actively involved in creation of platforms and related product offshoots. Only then will your platform fit your niche to a T.

This might get a little uncomfortable for companies coming from the legacy era, where sharing future plans and intellectual property in the public domain with users might mean a business risk. We have however found this to work in our favour and help us stay ahead of the competition. We believe in living the Open System.

Shrill Crowd vs Vibrant Community

Quality and level of participation should be the focus of a community, and not numbers. When there is great quality, numbers follow. Every community in its initial stages attracts a great set of people who set the bar of the content and quality of participation. The community then attracts only those people who can articulate themselves at least as well as the people currently on the community. The rest select themselves out automatically. Any community that sets the bar low in the beginning will suffer poor content until time eternal. Over time, it will lose all natural bases to exist, forget about monetize. Last week, at a rock concert in Delhi I found people being forced to register on a social network in exchange for free food coupons. This might create good numbers for them, but how long the illusion can stay, leave alone building a property that will be profitable in a lasting manner. After all how far can you get with a bunch where everyone “wants to make frenship with everyone”? One might say that quality content is too much to expect from the masses that stay in class B and C towns. I think that is an excuse and not enough thought has been put behind building communities beyond the need of small town males to “make frenship” with small town females.

We rabidly believe in the inherent goodness of people and their willingness to share and help others selflessly. For a niche community, tapping this is extremely important.

(To be continued…)