Idea #2: Affiliate marketing within our community
Our Discord server organically merges affiliates and general users, creating a potential sales channel unlike typical affiliate communities.
Potential benefits
- Affiliates get direct access to potential customers
- Users get authentic recommendations from fellow RรDE enthusiasts
- Sales revenue could support community growth and moderation efforts
Key question How might we prevent spammy behavior that undermines trust?
Our users already convert lots of sales, just by being helpful.
Avenues for exploration
- Clear guidelines on when and where affiliate links are appropriate (focused on guides, helpful content)
- Moderation system to enforce guidelines fairly
- Consider revenue sharing models to incentivize moderators and quality content creation
How can RรDE use our community to help us make better products?
Big tech companies crave data, but RรDE needs insights. Our product & sales team canโt analyze everything thrown at them from our users โ thereโs too much noise.
Community builders have a unique advantage. We can:
- Design targeted discussions, surveys, and feedback channels right within the community to surface the issues that matter most
- Use sentiment analysis tools to filter out random complaints and isolate the recurring themes driving usersโ needs
Ourfeature-requests channel provides helpful requests to our product team, along with data about how popular those suggestions actually are.
This approach ensures product decisions are grounded in real user pain points, not guesswork. This builds trust and fosters a sense that the brand genuinely listens.
You can read about how the chatbot I built ๐ Using Community Knowledge.
Community search vs brand search
For brands that have them, communities can form a part of a Unique Selling Proposition or USP. Even for slick brands, a strong community can be a major selling point. Users often go with the product or platform backed by the most active users. Why? If they have a niche problem, the community is more likely to have the answer.
Brands are usually reticent to promote community-written information, and rightfully so. What if itโs wrong or out of date? Or worse, what if itโs unmoderated and causes brand harm?
However, in 2024, one thing is for certain: users prefer community written information. They trust it more, they like it more, they use it more. Google just revealed theyโre going to be paying $60 million per year to have access to it.
So, brands with communities have a dilemma: they have really valuable data, but they feel itโs too risky to use directly. Could there be a middle ground?
What if brands were transparent about using community data? Itโs not about claiming everything is perfect, but framing it as a valuable resource with the clear caveat that it comes from the community, not official channels.
The new era of LLMs have taught us that users feel savvy about information that may not be accurate. They feel like they understand the advantages and limitations.
What did we learn from making this all work?
๐ What I Learned Building the RรDE Community
Community structure:
๐ Community Strategy (Respect helpers, give them tools)
Community content strategy:
๐ Community Content Strategy (Learn from audience misconceptions)
Using community data:
๐ Using Community Knowledge (Yep, another guy making chatbots)
Creating custom solutions:
๐บ๏ธ Creating a Meaningful Community UX (with Discord)
Service design:
๐ช Service Design (Brands compete on user experiences)
Proving it:
๐ Proving It (Result- chart line go up!)
Misc.
๐ Why Discord? โ Further questions for discussion ๐ Footnotes ๐ Meet the team- one other guy