F2F #59: The community iceberg

One of the things I've improved lately, is that I speak about my new projects without that sheepish timidness of a first-time entrepreneur. The downside of it, is that I get a lot of feedback. And it isn't always good.

Let's start from the beginning. I remember almost 15 years ago, when I was starting my entrepreneurial career, I talked down my projects, downplayed them a bit, to avoid sounding fake. I didn't want to oversell something that wasn't valuable, in my eyes. My impostor syndrome was sky-high during the first years.

I often said "I am building this little thing", "oh, it's nothing to write home about", "you probably don't know us", "yes, but my company is way smaller than yours and we won't ever reach this size" and other sentences that belittled everything I was building.

Nowadays, I am doing it differently. Maybe because I've learnt that everyone pumps their shit up. I still don't, but at least I don't downplay it. I take more pride in what I do.

For instance, I have started bringing up Founder to Founder in more conversations, in- and out of business, and lo and behold, I am getting lots of feedback in return.

However, the best feedback I've received lately isn't any recommendation, and judgement or any action. I have found out that I have more followers than I thought.

The community iceberg

Last Wednesday, I hosted Midudev at Life on Mars, and I was trying to discuss how to deal with community, knowing that the loud minority is more outspoken, opinionated and hateful than the silent minority. Active participants (trolls and otherwise) seem to influence strategies more than passive and silent (and invisible) community members.

And while doing so, I came up with the idea of community iceberg. We only see the loud minority but we rarely ackowledge the silent hundreds, or thousands, of members who will never reach out, comment, retweet or share a content. We almost always only check on those who comment, insult, refer your content to someone else, write back, suggest changes, complain about your new strategy, etc.

Beyond metrics

Metrics only show people who want to be tracked. For instance, you can consume content on most platforms without being logged in, hidden behind VPNs and other stuff, or read blog posts (like this one) without registering to the newsletter.

The reason I bring this up is because in the last two weeks, I've had multiple friends telling me that they loved this or that article, even coming up with their own top 3 or top 5 and I didn't even know they're subscribed to this newsletter. They probably aren't. They read it because it's available freely on the blog.

Same happens with my twitter, or the content I put on YouTube.

Now, I am designing my strategy on all things I do with two variants: one for the online, loud, minority, and one catered to the silent observers, who are as, if not more, important than the loud minority. Just because they don't speak doesn't mean that they don't have an opinion. If you lose these, you will lose a majority. Converting the silent ones to loud ones might be the real game-changer for your project.

If you don't get out of the cave and remain obstinate about A/B testing and measuring everything online, you are missing a big part of the picture.

Meet your community offline, too. You will get very different insights and, somehow, their feedback felt immensely more valuable and tangible to me. It is more real, and it definitely keeps me pumped about writing more often on this site. If you love a certain newsletter, podcast or event and you've never told the creator that you love their content, do it now. He or she might be about to give up and your feedback might be the thing that keeps them going.

Thank you for reading!