Discover the journey of the Soulie community from the perspective of our CMO and co-founder, Ann, as she shares her insights on the importance of community-building in the earliest stages of building an app.
With this post, I’d love to give a special shoutout to the Soulie Community - our wonderful 6000+ waitlist members and 700+ humans in our Discord server.
Our small community has been a huge help in getting Soulie off the ground, and in the spirit of *building in public*, I’d like to share our experience so far with anyone who might also be in the early stages with their idea or product like we were when we started, and still are.
Why start a community?
While we were taking the first steps with Soulie, we knew we needed to do away with our Estonian shyness and put our idea out there even if it wasn’t fully formed, just to make sure we were striking the chord we thought we were and to fully understand who our future users were going to be, and if there would be any users in the first place.
While we had workshopped and designed the first Soulie prototype that we were very hyped about, we wanted to hold our horses and put off development as long as we had proof that the hype was there also among potential users.
We set an initial goal of signing up 100 members to a waitlist and to get a few users to join our community — thinking that would be a good enough start for us in order to have a few chats with our users, understand them better and calibrate our approach to building the app.
Our thinking was — if users dedicated their time to getting acquainted with Soulie via our landing page, then signed up to the waitlist and then were eager to join our community, that would be an ultimate sign of a buy-in from our users, giving us the validation needed to start building.
How we got started
When coming up with the strategy to find those first 100 people who would not be people from our immediate circles, we opted for a classic Paid ad -> Landing page -> Sign up to waitlist funnel, to which we added an option to join our Slack community. There was very little overthinking — since we considered ourselves the target audience of Soulie, we created all the marketing assets so that *we* would want to sign up.
We created a simple ad, and ran it with a small budget on a platform where we usually end up mindlessly scrolling and hating it — Instagram.
We created a landing page on Webflow. We used Typeform to set up a quick and beautiful signup form. We created a basic Slack workspace with a few channels.
We targeted a broad audience (thinking “Well, we’re interested in tech and social media and we love Soulie, so let’s target people who love tech and social media”) and introduced just enough friction in the Ad -> Sign-up funnel to weed out lazy signups. We still kept it decidedly simple and engaging with cute Soulie imagery so that people wouldn’t lose interest.
And as part of the sign up form, people could opt to join our community:
And then we were set. We launched the campaign, hoping a few people would trickle in.
Just a few minutes after launching our ads, they did! The first people signed up to our waitlist and joined our Slack community pretty much immediately. It felt weird, if not a bit scary in the beginning. We had a hunch that people might vibe with our mission but we expected that it would take more time to find them, expecting to tweak our campaign settings, our copy and creatives multiple times. We tried to keep a level head as we greeted the first users to Slack, but naturally, we were over the moon.
In a week, it was clear that our idea had landed where we had hoped it would. People from all over the world were hopping into our Slack community to say hello, telling us they had been waiting for Soulie for ages, asking us how they can help us build the product. In terms of metrics, the ad and landing page was generating results unlike anything we’d seen before.
Most importantly — we had ourselves a community! No code had been written, no dev resources wasted, and Soulie already had friends. And future users.
The key insights from starting a community
In the mega-early stages of Soulie, starting a community allowed us to very quickly:
- Understand who our users really are vs who we thought they were gonna be. We had a hunch our users would be Millennials like our team is, but turns out they are mostly Gen Z, with some younger Millennials in there as well. Meeting our users and learning about them in the community allowed us to make informed decisions about where to take our brand voice and tone, as well as where to look for inspiration when designing and building our product further.
- Understand the core issue that people want Soulie to solve. Talking to real people who want to change their scrolling habits allowed us to directly understand the cause of their problem and the urgency, as well as how they are trying to solve the problem currently.
We kept on building our community, but the story isn’t linear. We kept our waitlist running but closed access to our Slack community at 600 members to run our first product tests along with a scientific experiment with our community members. While it was the right decision at the time, it stunted the growth and dynamics of the community for a while.
And then, a little later, we found out that most of our core users were in fact on Slack only because of Soulie! Since we had found out that our audience skewed younger than we thought, we knew Slack was no longer the right choice for us. We made the decision to move the community over to Discord, to start building it from the ground up and open it up to the public again. We are now happily accepting members and coasting along with close to 500 members in the community, growing every day.
So what exactly goes on in the Soulie community?
- Testing! Testing! Testing!
Our community members are the first to hear about any product testing — we have done product exploration interviews, quick A/B testing, product demos and much more. Having a community on top of our waitlist has allowed us to get user insights in real time.
- Research & knowledge sharing
In team Soulie, we constantly monitor the research on the topic of mindless scrolling as well as any developments in the AI/ML field. We share everything we find with our community, helping them understand the reasons behind why we mindlessly scroll (hint: no, it’s most likely not because you’re lazy. Your attention is being hijacked!) - Early access to everything
Soulie Alpha was launched only to our waitlist and our community, giving them an opportunity to participate in our first product and scientific experiments. Soulie Beta will be coming soon, releasing in less than a month for our community members first ;)
And of course, it’s an opportunity for Soulie community members to chat with cool people from across the globe.
Granted, we are still in the very early stages both with our product as well as with our community. There’s so much we can still do, and will do.
Having a community does not make anyone immune to messing up, and it certainly does not guarantee that the product will be a success. If you’re hardcore ROI-minded and want to only extract value from your users without giving anything back, steer clear of starting a community.
For us, having a community is one of the best ways we know to test our ideas as we build Soulie and to keep a laser focus on our core user group, to make sure we’re building the app for them.
With that said, you are cordially invited to join our community on Discord!
Ann M. Järvekülg
CMO & Co-founder of soulie.io
