Event Replay: Context First: The People Playbook: How to Build a B2B Community People Actually Show Up For with Darragh Collins

00:00:00:12 - 00:00:22:26 Joshua Zerkel Hi everyone. Welcome to context first with gradual. I'm Josh Zerkel, head of marketing community here at gradual. In case you are new to gradual, it's the all in one engagement and community platform to generate context across your go to market and turn connection into lasting business impact. I would love to introduce you to our special guest today, Darragh Collins.

00:00:22:29 - 00:00:51:07 Joshua Zerkel Darragh leads community and external communications at relate and I native ERP for high growth tech companies. He's built three B2B fintech communities from the ground up, including off the ledger at Air Base, which grew to more than 7000 finance professionals. The zip community for procurement leaders and the close club at really, where he's at now a curated application only community of now, more than 800 finance leaders built in under eight weeks.

00:00:51:08 - 00:01:14:27 Joshua Zerkel Amazing. Before moving into tech, Darragh started his career as a journalist in Ireland, where he learned how to find the real story, ask better questions and build genuine connections. We should talk about that too, because I was also in journalism, so we share a background there. His work focuses on bringing the right people together and showing that strong communities are built on relationships, not platforms.

00:01:14:29 - 00:01:16:27 Joshua Zerkel Welcome, Darragh.

00:01:17:00 - 00:01:21:13 Darragh Collins Thank you so much, Josh. It's such a pleasure to be speaking with you today. Thanks for having me.

00:01:21:15 - 00:01:40:14 Joshua Zerkel This is great. I'm so looking forward to this conversation. So maybe you could just share a little bit about your background in journalism, because that's a fairly unique transition from journalism into, like B2B, especially into B2B community building. How did that background shape how you think about community and connecting with people?

00:01:40:16 - 00:01:56:04 Darragh Collins Yeah, I think it definitely builds a high level of like emotional intelligence, right? Because at the end of the day, you're speaking to people all the time and trying to, I guess, find a story and source a story. And I think that the art of storytelling, we heard so much in marketing of like, oh, you know, you have to have brands need to be storytellers or whatever.

00:01:56:04 - 00:02:12:03 Darragh Collins And I definitely think it contributed to that also helps. I guess it's only like your writing skills or communication skills, and it definitely made me feel like I wanted to kind of follow this path. It was an interesting one. You know, I studied in Dublin and did my master's in journalism, and I did it for a while.

00:02:12:05 - 00:02:31:01 Darragh Collins And in the end, I kind of decided to kind of pivot more into marketing and PR. And then, just like most community managers found themselves in community, I joined, air base, and we were trying to find, like, cost effective ways to go up against, like, bigger companies that had more funding than us. And, you know, ramp was like one of them in Brex, for example.

00:02:31:01 - 00:02:46:03 Darragh Collins And, you know, we maybe we're not able to beat them on the brand side of it, but we definitely beat them on the community side of it with, after ledger because, we built such a special space kind of during Covid where like a lot of finance people were kind of siloed and working from home for the first time ever.

00:02:46:08 - 00:03:02:29 Darragh Collins And then we created, like, this safe space for them to come to and kind of peer, connect and share together. And we organized like a bunch of webinars and kind of virtual meetups for them. And then we actually became their community, and it just kind of went from from strength to strength. And we grew to like over 7000 people.

00:03:02:29 - 00:03:08:10 Darragh Collins And, it was pretty incredible. It just kind of started from there. And that's kind of where the love of community started as well.

00:03:08:13 - 00:03:31:18 Joshua Zerkel That's amazing. Well, especially at air base, you mentioned how quickly and how large that community grew too. But it did start there. That's where it ended. So yeah, maybe you can talk about how the early days of that community looked like, how did you get that first initial group together? How did you get them to care? What was that process like for you?

00:03:31:19 - 00:03:32:16 Joshua Zerkel Yeah.

00:03:32:19 - 00:03:49:23 Darragh Collins I think the big one for me, and I think this, I say this all the kind of community managers is when they, when they're trying to start from. And how do you get from like 0 to 1. And the big thing we did and again, I followed this playbook, I an airbase at Zipp and also here and really is like, find out who are your most engaged customers, right.

00:03:49:24 - 00:04:09:04 Darragh Collins And find all those people that are already superfans of your brand, bring them together and start a founding members group. I think that's really, really important. And it's actually a very important step that a lot of, community managers skip for some reason. And I think it's really, really important. I also say from a community manager perspective, I kind of say like, I'm like Santa Claus in that regard.

00:04:09:04 - 00:04:24:14 Darragh Collins I just like ask people what they want and give it to them. And I think it's very important to kind of build our founding members group and straight away ask them, right. We're building a community. What do you guys actually want from a community? What's going to get you to log in every day? What's going to get you to be a part of it?

00:04:24:14 - 00:04:38:26 Darragh Collins Because right at the end of the day, I'm not a controller. I'm not a CFO, I'm not a CPO. I don't know what they want. I can only guess or assume, but if you ask people what they want, they might tell you, actually, we want to do webinars on a Saturday morning. We don't even want to do our webinars.

00:04:38:26 - 00:05:09:25 Darragh Collins We want to do just meet up meetups in person. We want to just to hear product update news. You just ask them what they want and build and shape your community around them. Nine times out of ten, you're going to get a lot more engagement. And for us, an air base to kind of answer your question, if it was Covid at the time and a lot of peers were missing out on, like that kind of mentorship angle, and that was something that they really, really wanted, they wanted to hear from other CFOs, controllers, VP of finance about how they were, kind of building their careers with a lot of younger people at the time

00:05:09:25 - 00:05:26:05 Darragh Collins who were missing that mentorship angle. I would off the ledger, we provided that space for them. And then suddenly, you know, we had people coming to us saying, I got my first job out of college because of off the ledger, or I'm able to build my network from this, or I was joining, you know, your webinars and learning so much and getting CPE credits.

00:05:26:05 - 00:05:36:25 Darragh Collins So we were just providing a safe value for our space with the community, building every single thing and putting the people at the center of it. And I think that's the playbook I've just continued to follow.

00:05:36:27 - 00:06:05:24 Joshua Zerkel Yeah, to me, that makes a lot of sense because I'm a firm believer if you just ask your people what they want, they're going to tell you it's your job and listen to that. And I've had many experiences where somehow the what they've told us and what we actually do gets lost in the translation. When you start navigating things internally and you start to hearing demands from other stakeholders, and then you can end up with something that actually your people don't want anymore because it's so far away from what they originally told you.

00:06:06:01 - 00:06:24:29 Joshua Zerkel So the fact that you were able to navigate the assets from your community or potential community members and translate it into a program that really landed with them is is pretty amazing. You actually have a fan here in the audience today. Kate Wilson says huge fan of your work, Dara. Thanks.

00:06:25:02 - 00:06:27:18 Darragh Collins Right back at UK. Thank you very much.

00:06:27:21 - 00:06:45:22 Joshua Zerkel Kate and everyone else who's joining us live. By the way, we do take questions. So if you have a question for either one of us, feel free to drop it directly in the Q&A and we will get to it live. So you've spent quite a bit of time in fintech, all in community focused work, from Airbus to Zipp to really one.

00:06:45:22 - 00:06:56:20 Joshua Zerkel What do you love about this particular space? Because you keep saying in it. And two, what did you learn at each stop from company to company that you brought to the next one?

00:06:56:23 - 00:07:16:12 Darragh Collins Yeah, great question. I think what I, what I love about it is the fact they don't gatekeeper. And that's really big for for community. I think sometimes in in marketing I find in other marketing groups, people are kind of afraid to give their marketing strategies to you because they're afraid you're going to steal it and just users. And I get that like, you're just going to take a playbook and regurgitate it to your company and then have success.

00:07:16:12 - 00:07:38:04 Darragh Collins But I'm actually blown away that in this ecosystem, people are very, very eager to share what's working with one another. And that really lends itself well to community. So that's really good. And I think on the other side of it, too, because of the rise of AI, a lot of these kind of finance teams, their their teams are siloed and they're way smaller than they were before, because there's a lot of automation in their jobs.

00:07:38:09 - 00:07:56:07 Darragh Collins And as a result, they're kind of missing that ability to connect with others. They've got smaller teams. And if something is not working or they have a question now because the teams are smaller and they've got a lot of more junior stuff next to them, they don't really they don't they can't tap some someone on the shoulder and be like, hey, like, Josh, how do I fix this or what's working here?

00:07:56:09 - 00:08:24:24 Darragh Collins So I think by creating this safe community space for them to just like ask the room with like 800 or whatever other people that have the same job as them to say, hey, I'm stuck. Has anyone had this problem before? And getting a reply? That's invaluable. So I'm just really happy to be able to facilitate that. And I think, you know, we had we had our annual conference, last week at recon and we were doing our customer advisory board, and, it was just basically like, you know, 20 of our customers together in the room.

00:08:24:24 - 00:08:45:16 Darragh Collins And one guy at the end was like, accountants don't really get to talk to other accountants in person a lot. And he's like, thank you for like, organizing this. So I think that's why I like this space and I want to continue to stay in it. And then in terms of like what I've learned, I think from, from each of them, I think from Airbus, you know, definitely learned, that you have to put the people first above anything else.

00:08:45:16 - 00:09:01:09 Darragh Collins And I think as well, we had a very good community because it was like a strictly no sales zone. So if someone tried to come in and be like into the community and be like, hey, I'm Dara, come and buy my product, we're great. I would kind of gently tell them, this is not the space for that. We're here to try and help each other.

00:09:01:16 - 00:09:18:25 Darragh Collins We're not trying to slam dunk on each other or kind of bring that kind of LinkedIn energy in here. It's like a place for people just to to comment and connect and share or whatever. So that was really important. I think it's if I was so blessed to work with, like, I mean, everybody there was the highest performer in I've ever seen.

00:09:18:25 - 00:09:39:18 Darragh Collins They were all like incredibly talented at what they did, and it made me bring my own standards and levels up another level. And, you know, really saw what the best in class, in every position and marketing looked like from all walks of life, and really got to learn as well about how you, start making, you know, the community drive pipeline as well.

00:09:39:18 - 00:09:58:03 Darragh Collins That was really, really important. So zip was a really, really important step. I don't think I'll be able to to do what I'm doing really here. If it wasn't for my amazing time at Zipp and I worked with genuinely one of the most incredible VP of marketing there as well. So that was that was huge. And then, yeah, really, I think I've been able to operate at really speed.

00:09:58:07 - 00:10:13:29 Darragh Collins That's the big thing at radius, I think at a zip and an airbase, you know, we move fast and it was great, but it really is. We kind of our whole thing is like, will it speed? Can we do something faster? If like if we, if we can do it in, in, in, you know, a day like, can we finish it in an hour?

00:10:13:29 - 00:10:25:24 Darragh Collins It's like, how can we get everything done faster? And I think, you know, I came into that to really and I had like, this ten week playbook. And in the end, I just reduced it to five and said, let's just get everything done faster. So I think that that's kind of been it, really.

00:10:25:27 - 00:10:50:11 Joshua Zerkel I love it. One of the things that that strikes me about what you're saying is the importance of working with high quality people. I think if you've ever been lucky enough and it sounds like you have been to work, what I call a team of like eight players, it helps everything just get better. I worked on one team where, after leaving reflecting with some of my former peers, we said we were kind of like the Avengers of what we were doing.

00:10:50:11 - 00:11:10:05 Joshua Zerkel It was like the best of the best, all coming together to create something amazing. And to me, this speaks really to the the importance of working with people, high quality people. But all people, like all of us, have to work with a variety of folks along the way. In some of our other conversations, you'd mentioned how important it is if you're doing community work to get good at people.

00:11:10:12 - 00:11:26:28 Joshua Zerkel And I think as a former journalist like that, that is one of the core skills there, too. But it's obviously a core skill for community building. What what does that look like in your day to day community building practice for for that notion of being good with people because that can mean many things.

00:11:27:01 - 00:11:53:13 Darragh Collins Yeah, I think honestly, being a good listener, I think, you know, there's there's there's a thing now, I think because of our attention spans are being so reduced because of we're all chronically online, you know, me included. But like, I think you know, a big thing is actually just genuinely listening to someone when they're talking and making sure you don't have the talking stick all the time, like actually making someone feel seen, making them feel important, making them feel like I'm actually listening to you and I'm going to apply the things that you're asking for.

00:11:53:16 - 00:12:10:16 Darragh Collins I think, you know, one thing I really that I've started doing and I again, I don't know a lot of community managers that do this, but like, I'll actually just go out and meet my community members in person. You know, if someone joins the closed club community and they're in New York, I'll just DM them and be like, hey, Josh, so you just joining closed love?

00:12:10:18 - 00:12:24:29 Darragh Collins I'd love to pick your brain on community. Can I just meet you for a coffee and I'll just go and meet them? Yeah. And I'm not trying to go there and be a big salesman for realsies. And be like, join your bio. Product of a great. I'm just going there to be like you. Just join the community. I'm interested to hear what are you looking for from community?

00:12:24:29 - 00:12:44:05 Darragh Collins What are you what's going to get you to log in? What what do you want from events? What kind of content do you one. And then suddenly there going to be a lot more engaged. And it's it's coming from a place of genuine interest. You know, like if a, if a cafe opened a block down the road from you and the owner of the cafe came and nothing on your door is like, Josh, what do you want from this cafe that's going to make it a success?

00:12:44:05 - 00:12:59:06 Darragh Collins And you said, you know, I want to see this painting up there. I want a guy in a Wolverine mask every day. And I want, you know, beans from Colombia. And then the next week, he's like, okay, there's a guy in a Wolverine mask serving coffee. There's the painting you asked for is up there, and I'm going to give you these, these beans from Colombia.

00:12:59:12 - 00:13:17:23 Darragh Collins You're probably going to go there. Right. And then he turns up and gives you a t shirt or whatever, a piece of swag. Again, it makes it just feel part of something and have a genuine connection to it. And I think, you know, as if we got to the point where literally every single thing we did in the community, the community members, had a touch point on it, even from the swag.

00:13:17:23 - 00:13:35:27 Darragh Collins We have an incredible, like, fig jam design session where the community members designed what the swag look like. They designed what the landing page of the website looked like. And we again, we've done the same thing with Reddit here because again, suddenly they have this emotional attachment to an in that I had a saying that, you know, I had a part to play in that.

00:13:35:27 - 00:13:44:22 Darragh Collins And I think that in terms of the in terms of the, the, the people skill side of it, just being a good listener. And then Actioning, I think that's really, really important.

00:13:44:24 - 00:14:14:12 Joshua Zerkel Yeah. I love literally everything that you just said. Like that level of co-creating with your community is how you get the level of buying that. All of us who build community programs are dreaming of. People want to feel seen. They want to feel like they're part of something bigger, and they want to feel like their voice matters. And the way that you've brought that tangibly into the real world of your program is much bigger than companies that say, like, we're customer centric or we care about our community like, no, we actually really want your opinion.

00:14:14:15 - 00:14:29:04 Joshua Zerkel We're going to come into the real world and meet you, and we're going to create opportunities for you to co-create this experience with us. That is how you get real, true depth of buy in, in ways that you can't be just doing surface level things 100%.

00:14:29:04 - 00:14:46:23 Darragh Collins You know, I remember as well, Josh, before I joined Ziff, I had like a month off in between jobs and I joined like 50 communities just to kind of see what was out there. And not one of them made me feel personally addressed. I had no attachments. Any of them I would join, and it was just this other random space.

00:14:46:25 - 00:15:03:26 Darragh Collins I remember just thinking, why? Why would I come on here every day? I don't there's nothing for me in this. I mean, for me as an end user, I'm joining a community because I want to get better at my job. I meet other people like me. Those are my two reasons for joining it. And I joined so many communities, and none of them ever reached out to me to ask me what I wanted.

00:15:03:26 - 00:15:17:14 Darragh Collins Are welcome me, or like I said, what I was looking for from it are why did I join? You know, of course I'm not going to log in. So I think that for me I was like, right, whenever I build a community, I'm not going to make it make it like that. I'm going to make sure everyone feels somewhat personally addressed.

00:15:17:20 - 00:15:31:23 Darragh Collins I'm about a very ambitious thing. I remember when I joined Zep, I was like, I'm going to send everyone a video message when they join, just like to actually welcome them. I didn't actually get around to doing that because it was just crazy. But I remember thinking, I would love to. Like if I had the time, I would love to get to that level of detail.

00:15:31:26 - 00:15:46:06 Darragh Collins You know, again, and I would advise someone, if they're really trying to aggressively start a community, go, go that to that level of detail, send them a voice note or something. Even like going that extra mile really, really makes it because you have to show up for your community before they're going to show up for you. You know?

00:15:46:09 - 00:16:15:12 Joshua Zerkel Absolutely. This is one of the things that I think is generally misunderstood from people who don't do community work as well. We can just put it there. Things will happen, and then we can start asking community members for stuff, right? Like, no, you cannot do that. It doesn't work that you have to show value. You have to show people that they're seen, that their opinions have weight, that there's opportunities for them to learn and connect and give them real value from all of that before you can ask them to do anything for you.

00:16:15:12 - 00:16:17:04 Joshua Zerkel Because why would they?

00:16:17:06 - 00:16:30:28 Darragh Collins Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. If you haven't scratch their back, why the heck would they do something for you? So yeah, totally. You have to actually give proper value. And I've said it a few times, but just make them feel personally addressed.

00:16:31:00 - 00:16:56:15 Joshua Zerkel You know, you you and I chatted about this a little bit. You're building community in B2B and I too have done that in both B2B and B2C and there's a lot of misconceptions, I think, about what B2B communities look like and who takes part in them and what they want. Can you share a little bit about just your take on what B2B communities can be, and what they should look like, and the mistakes that people make when they're building community and B2B?

00:16:56:17 - 00:17:13:19 Darragh Collins Yeah, I think a big thing to your point on that is that, like people think that as soon as someone joins a big corporation that they're no longer a human, that like, oh, they've just turned into this like corporate robot. Now they no longer, you know, communicate with people and they don't use social media and they're just, you know, they're gone.

00:17:13:19 - 00:17:31:10 Darragh Collins We can never get them back. But like, at the end of the day, they're still human. So they still crave connection. And oftentimes they're working with a fast growing startup or something like that. And they've got a tiny team and they're lost and they need help. And it's a high pressure role. And they've got budgets. And it's really, really difficult.

00:17:31:10 - 00:17:47:20 Darragh Collins So actually finding people that are similar to them and bringing them and introducing them, that's really, really, really valuable. And you're creating genuine value for your brand. And I think as well. Right. We're in this world right now where again, you know, as if I had to speak to a lot of our customers and they're working in procurements.

00:17:47:27 - 00:18:02:29 Darragh Collins And they said they used to tell me that they were overwhelmed with the amount of these new AI startups that are that are popping up. So it's the market has never been more competitive in the B2B space. So the way you can stand out is by winning on community. It's a huge differentiator if you can get that right.

00:18:03:01 - 00:18:21:13 Darragh Collins So I think it's a massive unlock for, customer retention, for cross-sell upsell opportunities. And then also the other side of it too, like if you're trying to get a prospect to join, right. And they're not interested in your product at the time, you know, if they're like, well, you know, I'll kick it down the road a bit, you can say it to them, no problem.

00:18:21:16 - 00:18:40:08 Darragh Collins Why don't you join our community, come in and have a look around. Suddenly they're in the community. They're going to come to your dinners, which is all going to be a bunch of your community members and customers. They're going to hear about the product kind of organically from the horse's mouth, from other practitioners, not from some, you know, sleazy sales guy on a call or whatever it's going to be from another practitioner doing the work.

00:18:40:11 - 00:18:58:14 Darragh Collins And then, you know, and again, I've seen this with Relus a lot already in the last couple of weeks whereby someone joins and as a prospect, I had actually a guy yesterday who joined our founding member of the. He was a founding member of her close club community. He has been in every single session we've done so far as a prospect.

00:18:58:16 - 00:19:14:10 Darragh Collins And yesterday he reached out to me and just said, hey, I've joined the new company. I don't want to speak to BTR, just get me your best sales rep. I want to evaluate, well, it and check it out. And there you go. That's that's community led growth. And I didn't. And I wouldn't have got that opportunity if I was badgering him every week asking for a demo.

00:19:14:11 - 00:19:29:09 Darragh Collins You just got to let it happen. He met the customers organically. Look what he's done. I think that's a success metric. And again, I've seen that umpteen times. But like, again, it's just it just shows in the B2B space. It doesn't need to be boring. And you actually have so much opportunity for for growth. There.

00:19:29:11 - 00:19:50:19 Joshua Zerkel Yeah, I love that because what you just described is, is the journey of a community member. As it turns out, people change jobs. And if you really inculcate yourself into that person's way of thinking and they feel welcome in your community when they go from job to job, yours is the product they're going to remember because they had a positive experience that they got value from in your community.

00:19:50:26 - 00:20:07:23 Joshua Zerkel So that example of someone changing jobs and then saying, I'm at this new job, I'm ready to move forward. That wouldn't have happened without the work that you've done. A community to help them feel like they got value from it. So that's that's really tremendous. That actually ties it to a question that comes from one of our guests.

00:20:07:25 - 00:20:25:12 Joshua Zerkel Hannemann asks. Beyond just managing the community, I'd love to hear if you have any tips or channels or workflows for passing community feedback into the product roadmap. I've actually expand this a little bit towards how do you use community to offer context to the rest of the business, product sales, CSS, etc.?

00:20:25:14 - 00:20:44:08 Darragh Collins Yeah, it's a fantastic question and it's a very fine line and kind of delicate balance, right? Because at the end of the day, if someone turns up to your community and it's just a big, humongous nonstop ad for your product, they're going to kind of be like, oh, I don't really want to be part of this, because if they're a prospect and they're coming in and it's like a big nonstop ad, it's not good.

00:20:44:08 - 00:20:59:20 Darragh Collins So you have to you have to there's a definitely, like a wheel, right, or a notch. And you should turn it off a little bit. I wouldn't say to dial it up this far, but maybe this far. So how I've kind of done it is what I have, like a private, channel that people can subscribe to.

00:20:59:23 - 00:21:16:03 Darragh Collins That's just called product updates. And that's all the customers like living there. And what I do is like a weekly, monthly, bi weekly, depending on your company, we should products every week. We do like, a weekly update, of all the product updates that we have. And again, as if we did it, it was it was, it was monthly.

00:21:16:03 - 00:21:34:03 Darragh Collins As if where we put it in like a monthly update, I was like, here's everything we shipped in the last month. Right? And you put it in like, it's very, like, bite sized, and it's just like a little emoji next to it and like here. And the update put it all out there. And again, one of my community members and rid of actually asked me recently, how to take that to another level.

00:21:34:03 - 00:21:54:19 Darragh Collins She was like, could you put a poll in and put a poll and say, what do you guys want to see next month? I thought it was a really smart idea. And again, like, it ties back to that element of asking people what they want and giving giving it to them. There's actually nothing more impactful if you announce, right, this is our monthly, product updates, and then someone puts in a poll, saying, well, I want to see this in here next month.

00:21:54:21 - 00:22:11:01 Darragh Collins And you turn around and say, well, you asked, we delivered. Here's your update. That's amazing. And that's community like growth as well. Right. And that's huge business impact. So I think that's kind of how I would bring that element to life is have a product updates channel. And you can do all your comms there and have a poll as well.

00:22:11:02 - 00:22:16:06 Darragh Collins Ask people what they want that creates more engagement. And then you can actually build a really, really strong community around it.

00:22:16:08 - 00:22:31:11 Joshua Zerkel Do you do any sort of live syncs with product or CSS or other teams where you talk through like, here's what we're seeing in community, understand from them what they need, and and just work with your stakeholders to align and and goals and what you're seeing from community and how it ladders up.

00:22:31:14 - 00:22:50:07 Darragh Collins Yeah, I think that's that's huge. So, we did a product update, product roadmap session with our head of product. And, and again, we did this a zip as well, which is incredibly valuable. Right. So like the community members opt in to jump on a call with your head of product, they demo everything that's coming out in the next month.

00:22:50:07 - 00:23:04:18 Darragh Collins So essentially they're getting like a sneak peek of what's coming. So again, that's community value too. You don't get that if you're not part of the community. So you can hop on and be like, well, this is all the things that they're shipping in the next month, and then you actually have the opportunity live in the call to say, hey, I didn't see this there.

00:23:04:21 - 00:23:24:11 Darragh Collins Would that be something you guys would ship and you can get like a, a reaction live in the call from the head of product. So I think that's been really, really big. And then in terms of your other question, yeah, I send out surveys, as well, like once a quarter or like biannually to be like, okay, you know, what's working in the community, what's what's not working, what do you want to see more of?

00:23:24:16 - 00:23:42:10 Darragh Collins And then you can kind of build your whole content strategy around that. So if anything, it actually makes your job as a community manager way easier. I remember my old VP of marketing as if used to say, instead of trying to do like 20 things, just pick 5 or 10 and do them really, really well instead of trying to do, you know, be all things to all people.

00:23:42:10 - 00:23:45:11 Darragh Collins And you have that ability of just by asking your community members.

00:23:45:14 - 00:24:08:27 Joshua Zerkel I love that. Well, ironically for you, you're wearing many hats. So speaking of just doing a few things, well, you are running community analyst relations events and comms. Each of those, as it turns out, is a full time job and sometimes even more. Many companies have full teams to do each of these things. How do you manage all of that without the community feeling like an afterthought?

00:24:08:29 - 00:24:29:26 Darragh Collins I think if you build I remember again some I heard someone say before, one of my community networking calls that if you build a strong enough community, it should be like a real estate investment where you can just kind of sit back and let it take care of itself in some regard. So the most important thing is getting your community to a point where it's strong enough that it can in some way, go on autopilot without you.

00:24:30:02 - 00:25:02:29 Darragh Collins And somebody says, well, I actually think it's better than if you're a community manager. Obviously you need to drive it and get behind it and own all the content. But if you're posting in there and you're the only one posting in there, that's kind of weird. And it's like, again, you're just not it's not really anything. So in some ways it's good to go as a community community manager for a little bit, and have other folks in the community actually driving the content themselves, asking the questions, because if you're just, you know, constantly prompting people or whatever, then it actually becomes just this random guy, just, you know, posting all these things in there.

00:25:02:29 - 00:25:20:06 Darragh Collins And it's actually not a finance community. It's a guy in marketing posting all the time. So I think in some ways you have to build it up and make it make it good enough that people want to, post in there on a, on a regular basis. And with that happens, then you can start going to try to get your, your, your company featured in Gartner or Forrester through all of these other things.

00:25:20:06 - 00:25:22:06 Darragh Collins So I think it's good in that regard.

00:25:22:09 - 00:25:40:00 Joshua Zerkel Yeah, exactly. I think you I think the tendency for most community builders is like, let's put all the surfaces out there on day one. Yeah. And hope for the best. See what happens. Based on the feedback that we got from our our early partners has been telling us what they wanted. But sometimes things land and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they don't land right now.

00:25:40:00 - 00:25:57:17 Joshua Zerkel But they might six months, a year or more from now, it's the community reaches different depth and scale. And so I think in my experience, the world of community building is a world of constant experimentation. We make our best educated guesses based on the information we have. Sometimes things land, sometimes they don't, and we continue to evolve from there.

00:25:57:17 - 00:26:02:24 Joshua Zerkel It's because we're working with people. It's near constant adaptation as it turns out.

00:26:02:26 - 00:26:04:14 Darragh Collins 100%. Yeah.

00:26:04:17 - 00:26:06:25 Joshua Zerkel Predicting what people will do is really hard.

00:26:06:28 - 00:26:12:07 Darragh Collins Really hard. And it's a lot easier if you just ask them, right? You know, you can just get the answers to it.

00:26:12:10 - 00:26:26:25 Joshua Zerkel Exactly. So in our last couple of minutes, unless there's more questions from our audience, which we have time for a couple more, what advice would you give to people who are trying to build a B2B community and have it feel truly engaging?

00:26:26:27 - 00:26:49:25 Darragh Collins Yeah, I think I think the first thing I would do, you know, if I came in would be speak to your CSS team and say, rice, give me a list of our biggest customers. Are our customers that love us the most, that are considering references for us that have done case studies for us. Give me their name and then email them, all of them and just say, hey Josh, I just joined X company as a community manager.

00:26:50:01 - 00:27:02:01 Darragh Collins We'd love to get 15 minutes of your time to, building a community. I want to hear what you want from it. Jump on a call with them again. I've done that is, if I did that, I'd run it. It's really, really important. I on my first day at release, I think I spoke to like five customers in the first day.

00:27:02:01 - 00:27:15:21 Darragh Collins I just paid them and I was like, are you free now? Let's do it. I just speak to them and pick their brain and be like, I'm starting a community. You're probably in other communities already. What do you like about those? What do you dislike about those? If we were building a community here, what can I do to make it feel genuinely valuable?

00:27:15:27 - 00:27:33:29 Darragh Collins So do that afterwards. I would, pull together a big survey and send it out to all the customers. So you go kind of micro with the individual calls to the super funds macro with all your biggest customers. And again, I'm building a community. What do you guys want from it? And at the end of the survey. So we're also building a founding members club.

00:27:34:02 - 00:27:58:22 Darragh Collins Do you want to be part of it? And if they opt in, brilliant. Then you say you have, you have your founding members cohort. Reach out to all of those people and say, right, I'm kicking off the founding members of our community. We're going to have a kickoff call. And if you guys join us founding members, you know, I'm going to send you all the free part or whatever, or like a t shirt or a swag piece, do a kickoff call, bring them through what a founding member actually means, and start building the community around everything they say.

00:27:59:00 - 00:28:15:13 Darragh Collins And then suddenly, right, you've got all of your ICP, all the people you're actually trying to sell to from a prospect perspective, telling you what they want from community. Chances are, your customers who have the same job title as your prospects are going to want the same things, right? Build a whole community around every single thing that they ask for.

00:28:15:20 - 00:28:32:15 Darragh Collins Again, they have. I give that example of of your local cafe or whatever they feel like they have a say and an ownership of it. They're going to drive it for you. They're going to actually feel like they're going to be the ones posting the questions. They're going to be the ones turning off to all your webinars. They're going to be the ones, giving, word of mouth and driving it for you.

00:28:32:18 - 00:28:49:13 Darragh Collins Then you've got engagement, you've got a community there for you. Right? And you've already got your family members group. And then what you do is you can lock that group, make it a private channel. And if you ever have an idea of a crazy idea, just I use them to like, sense check. I might be like, guys, I'm thinking about putting like this crazy poll out or I want to post this meme.

00:28:49:13 - 00:29:04:11 Darragh Collins Is this funny? They might say, yeah, that's hilarious. Post me, or else they might say, no, please. This is this is stupid. Let's go back to the drawing board. So I think having that is invaluable as well. So I think that's what I would do in my kind of first, kind of 30 days as a community manager, starting a new job.

00:29:04:13 - 00:29:15:01 Joshua Zerkel Amazing. Well, Darragh, thank you for all of this wonderful information and learning more about you. It's been so interesting. And in your approach, where would you like people to find you online?

00:29:15:04 - 00:29:33:05 Darragh Collins Yeah, I think I think LinkedIn is probably the best. I'm not super active on the other kind of socials. So come to to my LinkedIn page. I try to post a lot of community stuff there. And again, if I'm always open to speaking to any community builders, I'm I do not gatekeeper. So if you ever want to learn a bit more, just just ping me on LinkedIn DMs.

00:29:33:05 - 00:29:35:28 Darragh Collins I'll get back to you. And I'm more than happy to chat to anyone.

00:29:36:00 - 00:29:59:15 Joshua Zerkel Awesome. Well, everyone, I encourage you to connect with Darragh. Also, you can connect with Dara here in the graduate community where he's doing an online AMA and our forum. I invite everyone to check out everything that we have for [email protected], including our upcoming events. And Darragh, thank you so much for sharing, everyone. Thank you for joining us and we will see you at a future event.

00:29:59:17 - 00:30:00:07 Joshua Zerkel Thanks everybody so.

00:30:00:07 - 00:30:02:13 Darragh Collins Much. Cheers. Josh, thank you so much. Thanks, guys.