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Building Community for Associations the Lean Startup Way

Posted by Karen McCord on Sep 18, 2018 11:31:30 AM

Minimum viable community

Need a community platform that allows you to get started quickly, then adapt as your community grows? Experience Breezio


In his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries makes the case for  getting new products into customers’ hands faster. He advocates for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach, starting lean instead of investing time and money perfecting a product that may end up being of little or no interest to customers. Ries’s methodology starts with launching the MVP and using it to learn what the market actually wants, then continually iterating based on that learned intelligence. This “build-measure-learn” feedback loop saves both time and money, enabling lean startups to get a product to market quickly and customers to help shape the solution that meets their actual needs, rather than needs founders think they have.

The MVP approach holds true not only for products but also for online communities...so, to carry forward the lean startup analogy, a Minimum Viable Community (MVC) approach.

Communities, like products, start small and usually require some experimentation along the path to maturity. This reality can make a big investment--both in terms of time and money--such a challenging ask that your community program could be at risk of being scrapped before it starts. Applying lean startup methodology to community building suggests that new community program owners should think in terms of launching an MVC, a small community where they can iterate quickly, both from a management and a platform perspective, to figure out what works.

Whether you’re starting a community from scratch or restarting one that didn’t gain traction for one reason or another, the process can feel so overwhelming that you can quickly get lost in the weeds. Researching platforms with varying capabilities; pricing geared towards established brands rather than startups or nonprofits with limited resources; elaborate set-up processes that can take months to accomplish--these hurdles can quickly become barriers to launching your MVC.

Building community the lean startup way requires a platform that supports the build-measure-learn approach; a platform that enables you to get started quickly then grow and adapt with your members’ needs. That’s Breezio.

Breezio has developed a pilot program to help you take your community from idea to reality in weeks, not months, with no long-term commitment and the ability to grow from MVC to mature community over time.

Whether you’re looking to enable learning and professional development, engage members around the content that’s most meaningful to them, extend the value of your events to deliver more value, or empower members to collaborate in real-time via live chats or video conferences, Breezio can do that.

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Want to learn more about how Breezio can help get your MVC up and running quickly at a price that even startups can stomach? Learn more here or schedule a demo today.

Build. Measure. Learn. Grow your community on Breezio.

 

 

Topics: Private community software, External community software, Software selection

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