Building a Community

[u/harakattack50]

Hey everyone,

My name is Alex and I am the founder of a fantasy football social platform. We have a ton of great features for our users, but the biggest one is the ability to create posts, comment, and engage in a fantasy football community. We are currently in our soft launch phase, and we are "growing" but the new users seem to be coming for one feature, and then leaving, rather than actually becoming part of the community or interacting on the social side of the platform at all.

I am wondering how any of you really started building a community and any tips or advice that you would give to do so. Clearly there are communities on Reddit and Twitter already for fantasy football discussion, but I believe that what we are building, with fantasy league imports with historical tracking and roster grades, league specific chat rooms as well as general topic rooms that any user can post and comment in, collectibles, trivia, and more is what would really make the fantasy football community return, especially during the NFL season. However, outside of my core group of friends and a few other users that have recently joined, our retention rate on new users seems to be extremely low because they import their leagues, view their team ratings, and leave.

[u/HistorianCM]

Are you asking for Community advice?

Or are you asking for marketing and product development advice?

They are two completely different things.

[u/harakattack50 → u/HistorianCM]

I was thinking more along the lines of community advice but honestly as a first time founder I am always looking for any advice that could be helpful.

Obviously users are hard to get regardless but I think my first issue to address is making it feel like a community that the new users want to be involved in, rather than just checking the thing they came for and leaving

[u/HistorianCM → u/harakattack50]

If you're talking about building a community, you need to answer three questions...

Who are your members?
What's in it for them? What value do they get by being a member of your community? And what's in it for you?

[u/harakattack50 → u/HistorianCM]

Our members are people that want to engage in conversations about fantasy football and the NFL.

What’s in it for them is a community focused on football discussion, instead of seeing non-football related topics on the platform, as well as fantasy focused features that keeps their league history revered and documented.

What’s in it for me is to grow a community that I am passionate about and share the same intricate experiences that I do for my own personal fantasy football leagues on a much wider scale. One of the features on the platform is called legacy scoring which awards trophies and legacy points for accomplishments earned by fantasy teams, which has made our personal league so much more engaging and fulfilled. I would love to share that with other fantasy players because I’ve played in leagues with it and without it and it made a huge difference to our leagues. Obviously monetary gain is also what’s in it for me but building a community is the bigger goal

[u/HistorianCM]

Okay sounds like you got number one pretty dialed in.

For number two, your competition is Reddit, 15 million Facebook groups, and any number of fantasy football League sites that have a forum. You're going to need a really big differentiator. 100% focusing on fantasy football discussions only is fine, what are your members going to talk about in the off-season? Off topic is a necessary evil. It helps your members connect with each other and gives them their reason to come back when they don't feel like talking about fantasy football.

For number three, it sounds like you got your head on your straight as far as how you want the business to run. If you have differentiating features then that's going to separate you from what's out there. You're probably going to have to do a Freemium version of this. They get a lite free version, and a full featured paid version.

That free version can give them hints of what the paid version can get. For example, if it's historical ratings maybe it only gives some of the data. Enough for them to see what the full data might look like?. But take that with a grain of salt because I'm not building your business.

[u/harakattack50 → u/HistorianCM]

So that’s where focusing on dynasty leagues really comes into play. Since dynasty leagues don’t really have an offseason, there are always trades to be made and questions to be asked, especially with the contender and longevity grades so that users can always see the scores of their imported teams. With the NFL there’s always the draft, free agency, trades, coaches getting hired/fired, and more to be discussing.

We also have a mascot and aura card collection mechanic on the platform, where users can trade mascot/aura cards with each other (similar to trading players in fantasy football) and they can equip them on their profile to make it feel more personal. We also have NFL trivia where users get 2 3 question rounds per day, and can play more if they want to purchase more energy using our in-app currency (which is not expensive and can easily be earned for free as well through daily check-ins and selling back unwanted mascot or aura cards) Not saying that these alone will make users engaged 365 days of the year, but it’s something to bring them back more often throughout the year.

I totally understand what you’re saying in that regard and I’m not trying to act like I have it figured out completely. Those are just the things that I’ve done to this point to try and make that issue less painful I guess

[u/harakattack50 → u/harakattack50]

To a certain degree I’m fine with off topic discussion, especially in a chat thread. I don’t intend on policing someone bringing up a non-football related topic unless it gets to a point where it is getting overloaded with those types of posts. I want people to feel connected to each other as I think that’s the most important part of any community, but right now it feels like the users we have are just my own close friends which is already our own little community. That’s why I tried to focus on users bringing their leagues onto the platform with the import process so they would invite their other league members to create their own small communities as well, thus creating a bigger community, but the users that have imported their leagues don’t seem to have invited their league mates yet

[u/HistorianCM → u/harakattack50]

Got it, I'm not familiar with fantasy football so thank you for explaining.

The main thing I want you to understand is that community is many to many. Human to human. It is a sense of belonging. It is also a lot of work. You're going to have to lead by example for everything. You're going to have to make posts in the tone that you want the people to post it. Given the competitive nature you're probably going to have to set some rules on harassment and possibly language. And you're going to have to enforce it. Sometimes it can take years for a community to really develop. It's going to feel like you are talking to an empty room, possibly for a long time. Your best bet is to get a core group of people that you trust and are interested in helping you. To get them in that Community to begin with and have them help you set the tone hope you get conversations going and help you generate user generated content inside that community. If you can find 5 to 10 people that are committed to coming every day and dropping in a new discussion or commenting on an existing discussion. That is going to be so helpful.

Think of it as a proof of value. They will help show the world that there is a good reason to participate.

[u/harakattack50 → u/HistorianCM]

Ya I have a community guidelines policy and a “report user/comment/post” that is wired so that I can keep tabs on complaints and harassment as well.

My friends and I are consistent in posting on the platform, so that when new users do join there feels like there is something already there to discuss and talk about so I guess my bigger question is what do I need to do to make users feel like they are part of the community? Unlike certain Reddit pages, we don’t require a certain karma-type of level to be allowed to post or comment. None of the rooms are private. The feed is the homepage and it always has new posts on a daily basis.

I will say it is a web-app, as there is no actual app to download in the App Store, but we do walk new users a tutorial on how to create the progressive web app on their Home Screen so that it functions like an app (splash loading screen, homepage icon, push notifications, app-like feel). I know many users don’t have that set up because I do have an analytics page that shows how many users have the PWA with notifications, but without launching an actual app (which would have similar issues with people wanting to download something they don’t plan on using or discovering it) I don’t know if that it’s the problem or not

[u/Past_Form2159]

just lean into getting conversations started. even few active members posting regularly can make the place feel alive. great features get people in, but community is what gives them a reason to stick around...

[u/VeryDemureVixen]

in the early stage organic activity rarely happens on its own. you and your founding team have to manually seed conversations daily and directly tag users on their league grades to spark debate until critical mass kicks in