Community
Task and my role. Creating a competitive edge by rolling out community features that connect with user video content. I was on the team that built this from the ground up, focusing on research, UX, and UI.
Background
Our task as a business is to help creators earn money from video content and everything surrounding it.
There are various ways:
- access for fans to exclusive content on a recurring basis,
- marketing tools for retaining and attracting fans,
- live streaming format with donations,
- everyday communication with fans, including 1-on-1 (for an additional fee), tracking their progress, answering questions,
- upselling merchandise or educational materials,
- offline communication.
By fulfilling most of these points, we could create super fans (who will recommend on their own) who always support and participate in everything the creator does.
Situation
Creators communicate with fans regularly through third-party services like Patreon, Circle, Mighty Network, YouTube Premium, etc. Therefore, we are losing users—they are moving to other platforms.
Task
Reduce user churn.
Our assumption
Community deployment will reduce user churn by 50% and increase GMV.
Let’s go
Competitor Analysis
I looked at several key competitors, conducted an analysis of features, usability, and interface solutions.
Persona
An experienced creator with 200+ subscribers on our platform. Creates content with a team of 2+ people.
Plan
- Take interview with top key creators with the largest number of users who already have a community on external services. Get a list of must-have features.
- Create an MVP with the minimum number of functions.
- Get feedback to identify pain points, what they liked, and observe how they use the community.
- Look at fan reactions and engagement. Ask what features they need.
- Improve the project based on the collected data.
- Entering in a loop of feature enhancement.
Launch!
Key Monthly Metrics on Start
0
Active Communities
0
Posts
0
Commenters
First Interview
After conducting the interviews, we determine the minimum requirements we need.
- The name of the community and a header image for minimal customization.
- A feed with posts.
- Creation of posts by the creator with a title, text, and an optional image.
- The ability to pin one message (usually the community rules).
- Like functionality.
- Comment functionality.
First MVP
Gathering functionality. Reusing everything that can be reused.
- Image uploader.
- Comments (taking them as they are from the video comments).
- We hadn't planned it, but we also moved the sharing of posts to social media.
- Admin’s like visualization since we assume this will help users write more comments.
Improvements after Feedback
We removed the community header with the image and name, as it turned out to be unnecessary since users want to see posts immediately.
We switched to a two-column layout because users complained about layout jumps; now you can create a post without altering the layout.
New card design in the feed.
Instead of like and comment buttons, we use text, as most users did not understand their purpose. We also allow users to comment directly in the feed.
We moved sharing to the header under the dots.
Added post sorting because we assume that if we set posts with the highest activity as default, users will engage more often.
Feedback
The reviews are quite promising. Most users and creators are very excited about the community.
Users are requesting the ability to write not only comments but also posts, as well as attach videos, GIFs, and images.
As the number of posts has increased, users have found it difficult to navigate the feed.
For creators, it has become challenging to produce enough content to keep the audience engaged.
80% of interactions come from the mobile audience.
Improving Loop
|
|
| ≈ 9 months
|
|
Improving Loop
Key Monthly Metrics on Pre-launch vs Previous month.
↑11%
310
Active Communities
↑14%
5400
Posts Published
↑25%
+2500
Commenters
Preparing to Launch 🚀
Before rolling out the community to all users, we made a light redesign and added several key features that allowed us to retain users and reduce churn.
Posting Experience
We completely revamped the post creation functionality. We removed the title and kept only the text to make the creation process even faster. We added the ability to create polls and schedule posts. Now you can upload images, videos, and thanks to the integration with GIPHY, attach GIFs.
Nice trick—we used polls right in the community to gather feedback. The audience for creators varies; in fitness, some features were important, while in fishing, others were different.
Moderation
Since we allowed paid users to make posts, there arose a need for content moderation, which in turn led to the creation of community administration roles, as creators of this level have content managers on their team.
Channels
To divide all content into different discussion groups, we created channels. Open to everyone and closed for paid users.
AI Assistant
To help creators produce content more frequently, we have developed the AI Assistant as an experiment. It gathers context from everything uploaded by the creator and generates topics for potential posts. The tone of voice and audience can be adjusted.
Challenges
This type of retention originated from the sports industry. Creators can launch challenges based on video content from their catalog. Users watch one video a day and progress towards the finish line together.
There is also another use where tasks are given, and users post their progress in the comments in the form of videos or photos.
Key Metrics after 2 years
500+
Active Communities
20,000
Posts
45,000
Active Commenters
Results
We had a hypothesis that Community deployment will reduce user churn by 50% and increase GMV.
-47%
Churn Rate
Community users vs. users who have not used the community.
+$1M
GMV monthly
Bonus
Our big client and creator Yoga with Adrienne (FWFG) moved her community from Mighty Networks to Uscreen.
She has ≈14M subscribers on YouTube and 200K+ on Uscreen.
Community
Task and my role. Creating a competitive edge by rolling out community features that connect with user video content. I was on the team that built this from the ground up, focusing on research, UX, and UI.
Background
Our task as a business is to help creators earn money from video content and everything surrounding it.
There are various ways:
- access for fans to exclusive content on a recurring basis,
- marketing tools for retaining and attracting fans,
- live streaming format with donations,
- everyday communication with fans, including 1-on-1 (for an additional fee), tracking their progress, answering questions,
- upselling merchandise or educational materials,
- offline communication.
By fulfilling most of these points, we could create super fans (who will recommend on their own) who always support and participate in everything the creator does.
Situation
Creators communicate with fans regularly through third-party services like Patreon, Circle, Mighty Network, YouTube Premium, etc. Therefore, we are losing users—they are moving to other platforms.
Task
Reduce user churn.
Our assumption
Community deployment will reduce user churn by 50% and increase GMV.
Let’s go
Competitor Analysis
I looked at several key competitors, conducted an analysis of features, usability, and interface solutions.
Persona
An experienced creator with 200+ subscribers on our platform. Creates content with a team of 2+ people.
Plan
- Take interview with top key creators with the largest number of users who already have a community on external services. Get a list of must-have features.
- Create an MVP with the minimum number of functions.
- Get feedback to identify pain points, what they liked, and observe how they use the community.
- Look at fan reactions and engagement. Ask what features they need.
- Improve the project based on the collected data.
- Entering in a loop of feature enhancement.
Launch!
Key Monthly Metrics on Start
0
Active Communities
0
Posts
0
Commenters
First Interview
After conducting the interviews, we determine the minimum requirements we need.
- The name of the community and a header image for minimal customization.
- A feed with posts.
- Creation of posts by the creator with a title, text, and an optional image.
- The ability to pin one message (usually the community rules).
- Like functionality.
- Comment functionality.
First MVP
Gathering functionality. Reusing everything that can be reused.
- Image uploader.
- Comments (taking them as they are from the video comments).
- We hadn't planned it, but we also moved the sharing of posts to social media.
- Admin’s like visualization since we assume this will help users write more comments.
Improvements after Feedback
We removed the community header with the image and name, as it turned out to be unnecessary since users want to see posts immediately.
We switched to a two-column layout because users complained about layout jumps; now you can create a post without altering the layout.
New card design in the feed.
Instead of like and comment buttons, we use text, as most users did not understand their purpose. We also allow users to comment directly in the feed.
We moved sharing to the header under the dots.
Added post sorting because we assume that if we set posts with the highest activity as default, users will engage more often.
Feedback
The reviews are quite promising. Most users and creators are very excited about the community.
Users are requesting the ability to write not only comments but also posts, as well as attach videos, GIFs, and images.
As the number of posts has increased, users have found it difficult to navigate the feed.
For creators, it has become challenging to produce enough content to keep the audience engaged.
80% of interactions come from the mobile audience.
Improving Loop
|
|
| ≈ 9 months
|
|
Improving Loop
Key Monthly Metrics on Pre-launch vs Previous month.
↑11%
310
Active Communities
↑14%
5400
Posts Published
↑25%
+2500
Commenters
Preparing to Launch 🚀
Before rolling out the community to all users, we made a light redesign and added several key features that allowed us to retain users and reduce churn.
Posting Experience
We completely revamped the post creation functionality. We removed the title and kept only the text to make the creation process even faster. We added the ability to create polls and schedule posts. Now you can upload images, videos, and thanks to the integration with GIPHY, attach GIFs.
Nice trick—we used polls right in the community to gather feedback. The audience for creators varies; in fitness, some features were important, while in fishing, others were different.
Moderation
Since we allowed paid users to make posts, there arose a need for content moderation, which in turn led to the creation of community administration roles, as creators of this level have content managers on their team.
Channels
To divide all content into different discussion groups, we created channels. Open to everyone and closed for paid users.
AI Assistant
To help creators produce content more frequently, we have developed the AI Assistant as an experiment. It gathers context from everything uploaded by the creator and generates topics for potential posts. The tone of voice and audience can be adjusted.
Challenges
This type of retention originated from the sports industry. Creators can launch challenges based on video content from their catalog. Users watch one video a day and progress towards the finish line together.
There is also another use where tasks are given, and users post their progress in the comments in the form of videos or photos.
Key Metrics after 2 years
500+
Active Communities
20,000
Posts
45,000
Active Commenters
Results
We had a hypothesis that Community deployment will reduce user churn by 50% and increase GMV.
-47%
Churn Rate
Community users vs. users who have not used the community.
-10%
Churn Rate
Platform users.
+$1M
GMV monthly
Bonus
Our big client and creator Yoga with Adrienne (FWFG) moved her community from Mighty Networks to Uscreen.
She has ≈14M subscribers on YouTube and 200K+ on Uscreen.
