A Founder’s Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your First 1,000 Community Members

There are still plenty of misconceptions around community, especially in the earliest stages of company building. It’s a fuzzy concept with all sorts of different implementations, from running a series of events to starting a Slack group, to building a comments section into your site. And most founders consider community something to tack on as an afterthought, post-finding product/market fit.

Founder and CEO Joseph Quan had many of those same misgivings early in his startup journey. But when his HR analytics startup was running on fumes after sales plummeted in March 2020, he decided to try a different approach altogether and spun up a community aimed at helping Chief People Officers navigate the COVID crisis — called CPOHQ.

In our latest on The Review, he walks us through exactly what happened next and doles out plenty of hard-won lessons for creating a community from scratch — scaling from 0 to 1,000 C-Suite members in one year. Eventually, the CPOHQ community served as the foundation for re-launching the analytics product, unlocking critical customer insights and even community members providing warm intros for fundraising efforts.

The step-by-step process he lays out for other founders includes:

• Step 1: Quickly validate the idea and pinpoint your competitive advantage.
• Step 2: Spin up a scrappy MVP and build a hype train.
• Step 3: Onboard with care and lean on your power users to scale.
• Step 4: Experiment beyond your MVP.
• Step 5: Measure the right metrics at the right time and shore up your team.
• Step 6: Supercharge your company with community as your moat.

It's an incredibly thorough deep dive into community as an under-used tool in a founder's toolbelt. "The businesses that succeed have always been the ones that are closest to their customers. Being customer-obsessed means deeply understanding their problems — not just how they interact with your product. Those are critical insights a community delivers," says Quan.

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing — and happy Thanksgiving from your friends at First Round Review!

-The Review editors

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