On December 2, 2021, Mark Tan joined us to talk about the importance of bringing customers into your product development and engaging with your community of customers and users.

Key takeaways

• There’s compound value in having both a community and a product and getting the two working well together.
• To create a community feedback loop you need to first understand what makes a community successful. Four key ones are a sense of belonging, accessibility, inclusivity, and acts of service.
• Building products involves many stages and with community-led growth you have an opportunity to touch all of these steps from ideation through to launch. Community can be a powerful source to accelerate product-market fit, improve your product’s quality, and help you build a loyal audience and set of advocates for your product.
• To build a tight feedback loop you need to bring your customers along for the journey and treat your community as an extension of your team. Opportunities include making them part of MVPs and betas, providing space to actively participate and share their feedback, and collecting that feedback as you go while turning them into advocates and cheerleaders for your product.
• Competitors may be able to copy your products, but they cannot copy your community.