Launching a community - like Feverbee
Here is an interesting article from Richard on how he consulted EventBrite on their new Discourse community.
Thought there might be some ideas "to borrow" for the CSM team
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Interesting read for sure. Though I think it speaks volumes that you need to hire FeverBee to launch your community if you opt to go with Discourse? Correct me if I am wrong but what I always hear is they have a lot of developers but not a lot in the ways of support staff.
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@BrendanParm You're wrong, sorry
.Feverbee is hired by companies that use our platform, Lithium, Salesforce and others. It's actually a sign a company really invests in community.
However, it's true Discourse does not have a support staff, they do have a couple of people who help with success. For example they hired Sarah Hawk who used to work at Feverbee and is well known in the community space. Certainly not as large as our team, but they do have resources
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@Adrian said:
@BrendanParm You're wrong, sorry .Feverbee is hired by companies that use our platform, Lithium, Salesforce and others. It's actually a sign a company really invests in community.
However, it's true Discourse does not have a support staff, they do have a couple of people who help with success. For example they hired Sarah Hawk who used to work at Feverbee and is well known in the community space.
I think you misunderstood me slightly. I am not saying you have to buy FeverBee consulting if you buy Discourse, but if you buy Discourse because their support staff is minimal, you will be more so alone in the woods as you try to launch a community. I guess my comment is more so in vein of FUD towards Discourse.
The same can't be necessarily said for clients who opt to go with us. Admittedly, we do what we can, but the CSM team hasn't ever been formally trained in the notion of community and it is to some degree a 'make it up as you go'.
There's also a lot to be said for the fact that making sure someone is using your product properly isn't the same thing as being a community advisor when your product only represents a portion of overall 'community'.
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The community around Discourse is a lot larger than you think. I think it's unreal to assume people are "alone in the woods" anymore than our open source or non-corporate paying customers are.
What I have heard from the larger businesses, Jeff and team are very involved. So the big brands that choose them get the support they need. They can also tap into lots of people who use the platform.
So sure we can make up FUD, but I think it's more representative of where they were a couple of years ago, and not so much now. They have a couple of technical advocates on staff.
Certainly we offer more support, but we need to be careful not to confuse things with the past. Anyway we have veered really off-topic on this. We can discuss this further later one-on-one.
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