How to Turn Your Customer Base Into a Community  ## Metadata - Author: [[HBR On Strategy]] - Full Title: How to Turn Your Customer Base Into a Community - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/d4d7d493-439c-4e83-9f06-b5fb36190dcd ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Community Drives Long-Term Success** - Building and prioritizing a community benefits both users and the company long-term. - Short-term profits may suffer, but cultivating a healthy ecosystem ensures sustainable success. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg Me, it all starts with community. That's really the beginning, the alpha and the omega. Everything that has been successful for WordPress in the past and everything for automatic has really been part of thinking about what's the best long-term answer for the wider, I Don't want to say community like 10 times, but the wider audience, people that are part of the ecosystem that makes up WordPress users and developers and integrators and all those sorts Of folks, because I do truly believe that working in their best interest is in the best commercial interest of the company long term. Maybe in the short term, you make less money. And that might frustrate some of our investors or something. ([Time 0:02:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1cf055ef-f1f2-4a66-9b6b-222b21fd6224)) - **Culture Formed by Actions** - Culture forms through repeated actions and example-setting from leadership. - Small behaviors, like how expenses are handled, signal what is acceptable in a company. Transcript: Matt Mullenweg Think it's just a rate. You know, if you look around the room, how many people have been there more than a year and how many people have been there less than a year? It's also what example are the people who have been there longer setting? Because essentially what you're saying, especially if someone's been there five or ten years, like this person is good. They haven't been fired. So they are demonstrating what it means to be a part of this organization. So if you're at a company dinner and they go and they order the most expensive thing on the menu and like an expensive bottle of wine and then they expense it, that's going to tell you something About the values of the company and what's what's the behavior that's okay so I don't think culture has anything to do with ping pong tables or any of that stuff especially since we don't Have that many people are not in the office it's really the culmination of a thousand little decisions and actions that people see and then they emulate. ([Time 0:03:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6afe1d6-ad7d-44d6-9019-a367d98bfcb0)) - **Maintain Culture Remotely** - In a distributed workforce, maintain culture via virtual examples and rituals. - Small initiatives like "trash pickup day" help keep quality and culture aligned remotely. Transcript: Sarah Green Carmichael Tell me a little bit about how that informs your decisions around building the company culture and that kind of thing. How do you, I mean, you're talking, your example just there, walking through the office, maybe picking up a piece of trash. Like what's the digital distributed virtual world equivalent of that? Matt Mullenweg It's funny because our designers actually do something. They call it trash pickup day. They literally go around all of our products and look for things that are just out of alignment or where the colors aren't right or the typography isn't well. And they just do little fixes. They generally, it takes less than half an hour or 20 minutes. ([Time 0:05:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a898bf84-10d0-4d42-b3f5-bb44b39b1fbc)) - **Hire Through Auditions** - Hire by auditions to test work quality and cultural fit rather than relying on resumes. - This method scales well even as the company grows. Transcript: Sarah Green Carmichael And I'm just wondering, is that something you've been able to keep doing as you've hired more people? And if so, do you use that to not only see how their work product turns out, but also to see, you know, how this person contribute to the culture that we've built? Matt Mullenweg Absolutely. In fact, I still to this day refer people to the HBR article. Yay! It's actually still totally accurate. The only thing that's changed is the numbers. You know, we're now 390 people. In the article, I feel like we were sub-200. So it's working, it's scaling. And in fact, you know, the more trials we do, the more times we run the process, I feel the better, the more people learn about it, the better they get. ([Time 0:06:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76eb67b9-7e26-4ac0-aba5-27c0991d8ccb)) - **Give Value to Build Community** - Give value first to encourage community participation, like a generous host at a party. - Avoid imposing obligations; genuine engagement comes without expectations. Transcript: Sarah Green Carmichael Internet native companies can do that established brands just can't? I would love your thoughts on that. Matt Mullenweg I feel like the equivalent of what companies sometimes do is they invite a bunch of people to their house for a party. And they don't put out any appetizers or things or anything. And they're like, why aren't people having fun? Why aren't they having fun? Go have fun. You know, you've got to grease the wheels a little bit. You have to, if you were hosting a dinner or a party, like, you would put out the snacks and the hors d'oeuvres, and you would make sure the liquor is flowing freely and the wine and everything. You're giving something to people, and then they start to participate, and whatever it is, the construct is of what you're trying to create. With WordPress, I mean, we give away extremely good software. It's multimillion-dollar software that you can download for free. And so just from the start of it, people feel like they've gotten a lot of value. And for us in particular, they get so much, again, for free, no expectation of anything, that a lot of people turn around and say, well, what can I do in return? What can I give back? Just like after a good dinner party, you might have a few of your guests helping out with the dishes. They're so appreciative of how good the food is. What a great host you were. ([Time 0:07:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9e22abca-975f-493c-8dbd-edf7877fcdcc)) - **Balance in Freemium Models** - Freemium models succeed when free offerings provide significant value and premium upgrades are compelling. - Product economics and costs determine the feasibility of free versus paid tiers. Transcript: Sarah Green Carmichael Do you think that's something that would work for more companies? Do you think it's just something that works for your company? It's sort of a vague question, but I would love your thoughts on that as well. Matt Mullenweg You know, it just depends on the product. WordPress is relatively inexpensive to run for people, and so it doesn't cost us a ton to have people use it for free. And so it's a smart business decision to essentially use free as a mechanism to get more people on the door and then a percentage of them convert. And the economics of that work out. We have another product called VaultPress. So VaultPress is a real-time backup system. So for the sites that you really care about, you can pay VaultPress five or $15 a month. And the instant that you make a change on your site, it's backed up to nine different places. So it's literally like ultra, ultra good backup. This is a premium-only product. There's no free version. And that's because, well, it's really been to the run because we're storing nine or 11 copies of all your changes in real time as soon as you make them. So that's an example. I think it just depends on the economics of the product as well. Apple doesn't give away free phones, but maybe they'll figure out, you know, they work with phone companies to make the economics more affordable for people in the U.S. So they can subsidize phones. So you just have to kind of look at your particular business model. The Internet does make freemium very, very attractive. Yeah. Sarah Green Carmichael I mean, and I guess the thing is the premium product then has to be worth the upgrade because if it's just marginally better than no one would pay for it, they just keep using the free product, I suppose. Matt Mullenweg And that is the hardest part is deciding what to put in the free version and what to put behind the paid version. Because the more stuff you put in the free, the more value it is, the more growth you have. But if you don't have anything that's super compelling behind the paywall, if you will, no one's going to bother upgrading. ([Time 0:10:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/af7af88e-dd79-46ef-bc99-10d4ae90a0b7)) - **Beware Ad-Only Business Models** - Advertising revenues are volatile and dominated by major players like Google and Facebook. - Sustainable business models combine advertising with direct customer payments. Transcript: Sarah Green Carmichael And I guess that's sort of the other question I have is how much of this can we keep supporting off of ads? Matt Mullenweg You know, advertising is definitely going through a rough spot right now. You know, a lot of the oxygen in the room is being eaten up by the Googles and Facebooks of the world. So I wouldn't bet my business on advertising. I think if you can have a hybrid model where in good times, advertising can support you and in other times you're providing enough value to your core audience that they're paying you Directly, I think that can be very sustainable. But it is possible that when you think advertising is fundamentally trying to get us to make an action, usually a commercial one? They'll be able to close the loop on this a lot better. So advertising dollars will get smarter and smarter, where right now they just have a lot of work to do. They're a little bit lazy, so they'll go to the big guys. And folks who are holding people's attention, let's say it's a great 8,000 HBR article that takes 30 minutes to read and 10,000 people read it. Like, you have a lot. You have 300,000 minutes of attention there. ([Time 0:12:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f6cf5c0d-f139-49be-af78-d9226dbc9ec0)) - **Adopt Tiny Habits Daily** - Develop tiny daily habits to improve well-being and productivity, like morning stretches. - Use deep belly breathing to calm yourself and enhance focus during work. Transcript: Sarah Green Carmichael And I was wondering if you have any current ongoing personal productivity experiments that are sort of currently underway, things you're trying to do differently just to be happier Or get more done? Matt Mullenweg Yeah. Something I'm focused on right now is tiny habits. It's probably the easiest way to put it. And things like I do two sun salutations when I wake up in the morning, which is very easy, right? But by making sure I'm going to do two, no matter how early or late I am or how rushed I am, I often end up doing a lot more. And these daily stretches are a great way to start the day. I do that with some exercises. I try to read a chapter of a book every day, very minimum. And then just one thing I've been more conscious of is productivity we think of in terms of what you're outputting. But I think it's also really important to think of your state of mind that's creating this. A lot of this, if you kind of break it all down to many different things you can do, breathing. ([Time 0:15:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/85456e7f-ac05-4a01-9864-ac682d93e0a6))