Threado Community AMA series is exclusively built for the tight-knit slack community we are building at Threado. We gathered and brought together community leaders from Notion, Mixpanel On Deck, Glide, Startup Grind, and many more fast-growing startups.

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For this episode, we had Kevin Newsum, Head of Community at Triple Whale joining us to answer all questions in the community. The session was filled with many amazing insights on community building. Here are the top highlights from the session 👇

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Q: Are all your members customers? And if so, how do you pull them into your community?
A: Majority of the members are customers, triple whale runs various channels targeted to specific areas such as only Google ads, only influencers etc. This along with various events and fear of FOMO is what pulls members. They also have various events to bring these like minded people together to create more interest in the community.

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Q: What quantitative measures do you use to build the community in triple whale?
⁃ look to take measures that convey brand trust and create trust with customers.
⁃ Look at independent sentiment to find what people are thinking.
⁃ Don’t forget the feedback loop where they get some experts to answers questions.
⁃ Looking at size of community, and engagement numbers.
⁃ Triggers to greater involvement.

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Q: What’s the secret recipe to building a million dollar community?
A: It all comes down to relationship building, genuineness caring about what your members want or what you’re trying to build. Building trust takes time and we need to have patience to build it with the community. Keep the idea in mind that we are here to help people help each other.

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Q:What are some key learning’s from past that you can apply to your role? What are some similarities and differences between Yelp and TripleWhale towards being community focused?
A: Community building is all about relationship building, while at Yelp Kevin focused on things around the city in conjunction with people to celebrate, while at triple whale, there are a lot of agencies and entrepreneurs and here it’s all about listening to them and providing answers and helping them close the loop whenever possible l

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Q: What are some of the initiatives at Triple whale and how do you measure the success rate?
A: From the early stages they have tried to connect with fans and customers in authentic ways and even now they try to do that on a manageable scale. They also try to do it in a way to show they are aware of the greater impact and physical distribution of the people they work with, they have created a team road show in various places to spend some face time and engage with the people there.
They do obviously measure success rates, overall engagement but they hope it’s a natural byproduct of their events.

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Q: Do you hope that your offline events create some FOMO? How do you curate them?
A: Yes, definitely! They try to curate them in a way that is fun and creative, they want people to spend time together and get to know each other. The important thing is to create actionable events. They saw an uptake in users after the offline event’s leaning into the idea that people will trust you more after face to face time.  Where it’s not feasible for them to have offline events themselves, they are creating ambassador programs.

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Q: How do maintain a feedback loop with the community? How do you ensure the community members can reach out and connect easily?
A: There is an automation drip where they can even directly contact Kevin. Even if it’s just very few people, it still gives them an insight into the community and what problems they’re facing. They have a group called blue whale where they take people at a certain financial threshold and put them over it. They have another group called ladies of e-commerce where they meet up regularly and triple whale is very off hands about it.  

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