During long bike rides, we often face a choice: wait a bit for a healthy, protein-rich meal, or drink something like Cola right away. While the carbs in the cola will give you energy right now, in the long run, if you want to ride long and often, you should choose healthy, protein-rich food as often as possible. In my opinion, it’s similar in business: while raising capital can be tempting, whenever possible, I am trying to prioritize generating revenue from real customers.
At the end of this summer, I started actively searching for companies that would be interested in transforming their community management practices from time-consuming guesswork into a data-driven process with measurable business value. I am pleased to share that we’ve now launched a very interesting pilot with a game developer.
Btw, if you want to transformation your community management practices too, please send me an email!
Some details
Our partner is a startup; they’ve been developing their product (a game) for just over a year and are preparing to release the first version of the game very soon. The team currently has a small Discord community of about a thousand beta players, which they want to use as a launchpad for building their gaming community.
The game’s leaders see our analytics platform as a catalyst for the managed growth of their community. They also see three main goals for their community.
1. Player support
In games, as with any other products, users have questions about the app and various technical difficulties that are impossible to predict in advance. The team wants to use open channels to support players.
I think this is a great idea, and the community can significantly reduce support costs by:
- Building an open knowledge base
- Motivating users to help each other
Furthermore, mutual help between players typically leads to increased engagement for both those providing and those receiving the help. The primary metrics at first will be the fairly standard TTR (time to first response) from community managers, and as the community grows, overall response time (by CMs and other players) will also be measured. At some point, we’ll begin measuring the growth rate of the knowledge base as well as ticket deflection.
2. Developing a game based on user feedback
Or, in the words of the game’s executives, it’s necessary to “ensure that users are satisfied with the game.” The best way to achieve that is to develop the game with the players’ wishes in mind.
Here I’d like to point out that, for users, the very fact of being able to constructively communicate with the developers, even if your suggestions are rejected, has an incredibly strong impact on user retention.
3. Player retention
Player retention is a consequence of the two sections above and a goal in itself, because how long a person stays in the game directly affects the company’s revenue.
In fact, retention and engagement are classic community management challenges. The only caveat is that the team wants to implement community initiatives focused not on community engagement itself, but on engagement and retention in the game. The mechanics will remain the same: events, contests, digests—everything we, community managers, love and do well! 
Bonus: Community and product growth driven by the users
In addition to the three goals mentioned above, there are two more extremely important aspects.
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Health of the community itself. The three goals set by management are largely aimed at the success of the product (the game). While it’s certainly true that if we do everything right and achieve our goals, the community will thrive, we agreed that it’s essential to measure the health of the community itself. This will be a significant challenge for my team, as most of our community health models are designed to work with forums, which have some structure in the data. Chats, on the other hand, are an unstructured stream of messages. So we need to think about how to adapt it for our data models. I don’t have any details yet, but I’ll share more details as we go.
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User driven product growth. Did you know that Stack Overflow spent exactly zero cents on marketing in its first years? How was it possible? Easy (actually, not at all!) The community members themselves were the main driver of success. I described this process in detail in my book, but here I’ll just say that I’ve long wanted to try a similar approach again.
Stay tuned!
P.S. Yes, we do support Discord from now on! Here is how you can get community management recommendations for your Discord community too.