You just listened to a medley of audio recordings shared with us by users after we nominated them for SoundClouder Of The Day. \n
I'm going to take you on a little journey and talk about how we doubled-down on community with SoundCloud. For those of you not familiar with SoundCloud, SoundCloud is a social platform enabling anyone to upload or record and share their sounds across the web. With over 4 million users, it's like Flickr but for any type of sounds. Freemium model: need more features, upgrade to one of the Premium plans\n
I joined in 2009 when 100,000 users - wore many hats, jumped right into action and got things done:\nSupport, building social presences, blogging, outreach, support forums\nQuickly learned that there were three reasons why people got involved early on:\n
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Easy to use, instant gratificiation\n
Once people engaged with other people, a technical product suddenly became emiotinally meaningful\n
Listen & observe. What’s the tone, the voice that works. Then apply but stay focused on the mission, roadmap and strategy \nMake no mistake: you have to say "no" a lot. Developing the product meant recognizing patterns, extracting what benefits to a broad majority of users and use cases, iterate fast and close the feedback loop to let users "own" the feature.\n
Replied to every user email \n
It’s not 9 to 5, it’s 9 to 9\n\nI’m calling the second phase The Ballad of the teenage queen after song by Johnny Cash\n
January 2010 kicked off like a bang \nMore and more higher profile artists joined: Moby, Sonic Youth, Jimmy Eat World, Kylie Minogue\nBut then, another big bang: 24h outage\n
January 2010 kicked off with a bang \nMore and more higher profile artists joined: The Royal Society of Literature, Moby, Jimmy Eat World, Kylie Minogue\n\n
Second bang: celebrated 1,000,000 users in April 2010\nHoly fuck, 1 million people around the world care about what we're building\nBut then, third less pleasant big bang\n
But then, a different big bang: 17h outage\nOur own Black Friday\nBiggest outage ever\n
All about the product & performance: scaling, feature improvements, make it easier to share, Creative Commons...\nPriorities were driven by growth and user feedback\nPeople want to feel the progress, they want to be part of the journey, the want to own it.\n
And we doubled down on Community outreach by introducing a lot of new community series by featuring users and their success stories.\nMain lesson second learned\n
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700 local SoundCloud communities around the world\n\n
50+ recorded voice mails\n
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Continuing to nurture relationships with users and the developer ecosystem on all levels of the company. \n
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Today the team of six Community Managers is to....\nIn essence, it really is about people and their stories. What’s behind a feature or a use case? Where is the emotion, where is the life-changer?\n\n