This article was written for the Startup Huddle community to highlight key issues during #GEW2023.
The Challenge
I shared a poll last week with GEN's community of Startup Huddle organizers to determine what they consider their top challenges in coordinating an effective Startup Huddle. We all talk a lot about the issues we face but have yet to collect these challenges in order to compare data.
I pooled the challenges into five categories:
- Finding partners and sponsors to support & fund activities
- Confirming founders who can present
- Marketing, branding & awareness
- Building trust and community
- Event planning, admin & other logistics
The results won't surprise you if you’re a community builder, a marketing director for a big brand or an influencer at the grassroots level or on a scale like SXSW or Mr. Beast. More than 90% of the organizers responded that finding partners and sponsors to support & fund activities was their top challenge. This really is a fundamental part of the game for almost all of the grassroots community organizers that I’ve met from over 100 countries.
O.K. - I might be wrong about Mr. Beast now, but I would bet money that early on, funding was a major challenge for him as well.
This got me thinking about how GEN is operating Startup Huddle as a global but still grassroots startup community-building movement. I keep trying to figure out how we can maximize the chances of success for our organizers, and what the ingredients are to build an active and sustainable startup community.
Even if and when we discover the secret sauce (I don't think anyone has done so yet at scale) how would we package it so others can take it home, take it out of the box, and use it to be successful in their startup community building efforts?
Regardless, this poll helped me realize a few things about all this work I’ve been trying to put into words since I started leading the global Startup Huddle community in 2021.
The Community is the Product
Community building should be approached like a founder does their startup. People often say it is a thankless job — hosting events, reaching out to people, promoting, and being a connector to everyone — and it is. But so are many other jobs, especially founding a company, and, at the same time, the upside is high if you play your hand right.
There is a natural and obvious need for a certain degree of connectivity — between founders, investors, and supporters — within any startup community. Still, there’s no correct amount of startup activity or number of startup groups, accelerators or investment networks. So what should the target be for a community organizer if they're thinking about how to treat their community like a startup? What should they aim to accomplish?
At the very least, there needs to be at least a single active startup community initiative like Startup Huddle, Startup Grind or 1 Million Cups with a community-first methodology that gets the community sitting together regularly. If the people at your events or in your startup community don't know each other, what is everybody really doing here?
The human heart is the one thing AI won't ever replace, I think.
When you stick with community organizing for long enough, you begin to understand what the end goal or product should look like: a connected, trusting, and happy community. Some like to think that having many people attend an event is a sign of the success of an event. I'm here to say it's not.
What is the quality of interaction over time between the people who participate in your events? If people come to an event with 100,000 attendees but never talk to anyone they met again, that is way less impactful than an event where one has only 10 people and two of them start a company together. With this you start to see that the trust fostered in a startup community becomes the product. Communities and the brands that drive communities, like startups, are acquired or raise funding all the time and for good reason as earning trust and eyeballs takes time and effort. Let me explain more about what I mean by earning trust and eyeballs and how it relates to this concept.
So How Much is a Community Worth?
For me, there are three ingredients to building a startup community: time, money, and trust. Which is most valuable?
It struck me looking at the results of this poll. There is a significant financial reality to startup community building that is impacting the ability of people all over the globe to lead their startup community. As I said, leading a Startup Huddle community is, at times, like building a startup - just with a way less obvious go-to-market strategy.
To be encouraging, I want to suggest that the financial element is just one ingredient and that it's not even the most important. Either way, to source that ingredient over and over again, you need trust. If you think this way, you realize you don't need to worry about funding anymore, you just need to worry about who your friends in the community really are.
To find out how much your community is worth... don't think about how much it's worth. Focus on being the type of leader people can rely on to keep the founders and the people supporting them together. That being said, this is hard to qualify because it’s like a chicken or egg situation, in that the chicken is the trust and the egg is the people who finance and invest time and energy into building it in the first place. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
What's more important, trust or money? Family or colleagues? I'd argue that they're one in the same. I digress.
Back to the poll.
Funding is essential, yes. And the common challenge for organizers was a matter of securing funding and sponsors. But even still relationships are more important and actually necessary to secure sponsors and partners.
Startup community builders are more than organizers or facilitators—they must also be founders of their communities, much like the founders we support are of their products or services. When we think this way, it demands that you approach community building with a similar intensity and ownership that a founder invests in their venture.
So what is the equivalent of a founder pitching their startup to potential investors for an organizer growing their startup community?
Community builders can be as proactive and personal as founders when pitching investors. A level of carefulness is necessary to raise capital for any idea successfully. So, in the same way a founder builds relationships with industry-adjacent VCs and angels to pitch, a startup community builder makes that list of potential partners and sponsors to pitch — and yes, with the same die-hard, obsessive focus as the founder has when pitching their startup.
Think Like a Founder
To find out how much your community is worth, I always recommend that organizers send out personal letters two or more months in advance to anyone who they think should become a member of the community they're building. Start forming real friendships and asking for warm introductions where you can get them. They may not bite the first time and might never invest in your community, whether an organization, program, individual or otherwise — and that’s O.K. At the very least, it’s a touchpoint; maybe they’ll show up at your event and give you some face time.
Or maybe you learn that they have zero interest in the community. Either way, it's valuable information.
None of what I am expressing here is to assume anybody needs to make money off their startup community in the first place. However, it is a reality for some that funding is required to keep the lights on. For many, the resources are often plenty, and, as I tried to express earlier, all that matters is the quality of the interaction and subsequent trust. If you have a lot of funding but consistently offer a less-than-authentic experience, then you're just hosting another networking event.
In the end, the role of a community builder extends beyond organizing and facilitating; it involves being the community's founder and that role demands an investment of time, energy, and emotion akin to what a startup founder puts into their venture.