Authors' Community design update // Heartbeat event for member connection & stories // Butter for events
A quick update of a new heartbeat event that we’re designing to help with three ongoing challenges:
- Collecting videos of member success stories (for use in onboarding, encouragement, and external marketing)
- Identifying potential community volunteers & leaders (for operational scaling and reducing the single point of failure)
- Facilitating stronger connections between members (always a bonus if the other stuff is in place)
Solving these issues should, in theory, improve retention and also reduce reliance on me-as-figurehead.
I originally planned to deal with the first issue (collecting member stories) via an elaborate system of tagging and tracking member progress, allowing me to ask them to share lessons learned at key progress points. But that’s now seeming to be both technically challenging and relatively narrow in benefit.
Instead, I think we can get all three benefits by simply adding a new monthly event that focuses on asking members to share their recent lessons learned and breakthroughs.
The initial “tester” format could be, for example: 60 minutes total, 3x members sharing lessons learned for 10-15 minutes each (30-45m), plus 3x breakouts of 5-10m for 1-on-1 discussion and connection.
If the events were popular, we could easily “scale” by adding either more frequent sessions, longer durations (like a mini-conference), or multiple simultaneous tracks of talks.
Other misc benefits:
- Unlike our existing accountability events, these sessions would feel very natural to record and share
- If we do a good job with the video editing & promotion, members might be motivated to show up and make an effort even if the live audience is very small
- And lastly, operations are relatively easy to define and delegate, such that it won’t be a big drain on founder-time
For tooling, I plan to use butter.us (as opposed to zoom), which offers better breakout rooms, built-in timers and polls, an integrated agenda, and more. Although the video quality is noticeably lower than zoom, the other benefits should more than compensate, and browser support seems solid.
If anyone’s curious, here’s the two-pager scratchpad that we’re using to scope out this project:
Does this make sense? Are we missing a trick?
Comments (4)
I like the idea of a quarterly thing to aim for. From a OOC point of view, i like to think quarter is like a mini demo day (in the YC context) for authors.
This encourages the author-members to set quarterly target for themselves. And because there's an element of show-and-tell, it might motivate them to live up to their promise to fellow members.
I can easily see e.g. Q2 they present something like I'm going to try this marketing channel by end Q3. Come Q3, they will have to show something regardless the results. So in between Q2 and Q3, at the back of their mind, they know they have to do something.
Also a monthly makes sense for anyone to dip their toes in. This makes it easier for some authors to break it up into intermediate milestones. This has to be even shorter than the quarterly one.
Instead of short talks, I prefer the kind of QnA interviews you do with published authors.
Because the format mirrors the interviews with these successful authors, there is a psychological boost to fellow author members who have yet to publish. Of course, in a shorter format.
It becomes like, "hey i am one step closer to being like that person / favorite author / author i like to emulate who was interviewed by Rob" Of course Rob need not be the person interviewing.
And it be good if the interviewer asking the question actually did some research / saw beforehand whatever mini results the member is presenting.
A back-and-forth QnA style between two people _feels_ livelier too.
One suggestion is that members pair up so they can be one another's interviewer.
Even better if it's a 3, 4 or 5 way. E.g. Alice interviews Bob, Bob interviews Carol, Carol -> Damien , Damien -> Elsa, Elsa -> Alice. And just restrict to 3-5 questions or just restrict to max 10 mins.
I love literally all of this feedback. Give me much food for thought (especially since you're speaking as a part of that group!). Huge thanks for this.
you and the team are doing the hard work I’m just talking from the peanut gallery
Okay maybe the seat is a bit more expensive but haha you get the idea
you know the more I think about it the more I like what I said abt mini demo day and members cross-interviewing one another.
Any recs for gear?