Note: This Venturescale Trends report is part of the Startup Ideas & Trends Library, which covers topics such as 🤖AI SaaS, ✍️Creator Economy, 🔵Web3 Startups, and the 🚀Unbundling of the Internet.
In this report, we’ll explore:
- What are the new ways to create paid communities
- The rise of community building software for creators
- What is community-driven capital
- Strategies for building, managing and monetizing online communities
Section 1: Key Market Trends
(1) Paid communities are the new EdTech:
- Paid communities are re-shaping educational tech. This e-learning business model allows educator-creators to launch cohort-based programs, deliver live teaching sessions, assignment follow-up, and facilitate collaborative learning experiences on a variety of topics.
- altMBA is a 4-week online program that helps participants develop leadership skills.
- The Crypto Academy by Anthony Pompliano is a cohort-based course specialized in Bitcoin & Crypto.
- ProductLed provides teams with a 4-week live program to help them optimize their product-led growth strategies.
- FreshLearn is a software that helps creators turn their knowledge into live online courses.
(2) Community-as-marketing strategy:
- Customers are the new communities. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies are capitalizing on their existing customers to create online communities that offer exclusive access, personalized experiences, and deeper connections with the brand and fellow customers.
- Peloton’s paid community allows members to connect with each other and access live and on-demand fitness classes through its at-home fitness device.
- Modern Fertility is creating a safe space for women to discuss fertility issues and receive fertility expert advice.
- Nideco is leveraging the community for co-creation and beta testing. Customers can submit beauty product ideas, vote on them, win 500 euros, and see their ideas become real cosmetic products.
- Aerie offers a community where customers can share their stories, fashion trends, charity movements, events, and workshops.
(3) Unbundling of LinkedIn:
- Online communities are unbundling LinkedIn’s core functions, with verticalized online clubs emerging for every profession to provide specialized social networking, recruitment, and education services.
- Swipe Files is a community for SaaS marketers.
- Handshake is a job-search + networking platform for college students.
- Bravado is a community of trusted sales professionals endorsed by their customers.
- Fishbowl is an online community where you can get professional and career advice from coworkers and colleagues.
- Blind is an anonymous professional network where users can share career insights and network with like-minded professionals in the tech industry industry.
more…!!
(🔒 MEMBERS-ONLY) +5 more key trends, backed by real company examples:
🔑 (4/8) Monetize with valued-added community experiences (5 examples)
🔑 (5/8) What is community-driven investor community? (4 examples)
🔑 (6/8) Monetizing co-working-as-a-service as recurring membership (5 examples)
🔑 (7/8) No-code tools for creator-first community building (5 examples)
🔑 (8/8) How to financialize online communities? (5 examples)
🔥 Unlock Full Post :::
Section 2: Market Players & Company Databases
(🔒 MEMBERS-ONLY) Access the full database:
- 🏢 Total 109 market players.
- 📍 Total 9 niche segments.
- 🗃 Data points: value proposition, website, stage, total funding raised, year founded, company size, location and LinkedIn
Section 3: Problem & Market Needs
(1) Lack of accountability:
- Although self-paced online learning platforms like Udemy offer a wide range of courses, learners often lack the necessary accountability and support from peers and mentors to stay motivated. This can lead to high dropout rates and limit the effectiveness of the learning outcomes.
- Online learning communities offer an alternative path for individuals to acquire in-demand skills, connect with industry experts, access quality educational resources, and collaborate with peers who share similar backgrounds.
- Emily Kramer is developing “Building B2B Marketing,” a 2-month cohort-based course in which marketing leaders will learn how to develop a marketing strategy, lead an effective team, and drive results.
- Enlight is a cohort-based platform that offers community-driven online courses in web development and project-based coding.
- Teachfloor provides tools and software for instructors to create and monetize their own online academies through video lessons, live events, and other engaging activities.
- Eduflow helps corporations and higher education institutions create social-focused online courses by providing a system to manage video course content.
(🔒 MEMBERS-ONLY) +4 more insights to validate customer needs:
🔑 (2/5) Monetize by solving lack of access (4 examples)
🔑 (3/5) Monetize by solving lack of multiple income streams (6 examples)
🔑 (4/5) Monetize by solving lack of human capital (5 examples)
🔑 (5/5) Monetize by solving lack of sales and customer engagement (4 examples)
Section 4: Startup Opportunities & Predictions
(1) AI-driven community building:
- AI will recreate the role of community managers in areas such as community moderation, content recommendation, forum engagement, 1:1 intros and analytics. Emerging startups can develop AI-based community tools to help community builders reduce repetitive tasks and automate workflow.
- AI networking: Lunchclub leverages AI to make personalized introductions for 1:1 video meetings that can help individuals advance their careers and expand their networks.
- AI moderation: OpenWeb uses machine learning to assist publishers in delivering engaging comment experience and readers engagement.
- AI meeting scheduler: Solutions like Clockwise can help members in determining the best time to schedule meetings and increase the rate of community engagement.
- AI insights: Brand24,for example, can analyze community conversations and extract insights about the most frequently mentioned products, brands, news, and articles.
(2) Unbundling of Reddit:
- Every subreddit has the potential to be unbundled into smaller, more focused niche communities. Founders can leverage this trend by developing paid communities that cater to specific interests, fostering connections, conversations, and content that can’t be found elsewhere.
- r/gaming (36.8M members) a subreddit dedicated to gaming topics, including news, reviews, and recommendations.
- r/personalfinance (17.7M members) is a place for discussing budgeting, saving, investing, and retirement planning.
- r/gardening (5.4M members) focused on all things related to plants and their care.
- r/FemaleFashionAdvice (3.4M members) focused on sharing and discussing women fashions.
- r/blackmagicfuckery (3.8M members) focused on sharing and discussing mind-bending optical illusions and magic tricks.
(3) Audio-based community:
- Social audio is emerging as a popular new medium for creating online communities. By enabling creators to engage with their audiences through informal and live conversations, social audio provides a more passive and low-pressure alternative to video chats, which require active attention.
- Startups can develop tools that allow creators to monetize their audio content by paywalling private live chat rooms, where creators can sell exclusive audio spaces to their most dedicated fans.
- Geneva helps online communities manage and organize chat rooms with threaded replies, reactions, GIFs, attachments, and polls features.
- Stereo lets you find audio communities and join real-time voice conversations on various topics.
- Wisdom is a social-discovery app to make deeper connections & lasting friendships with like-minded people.
- Discord’s live audio chat feature enables users to host conversations with groups of people in real-time.
- Spoon is an audio live streaming platform for discovering communities.
(🔒 MEMBERS-ONLY) +4 more startup opportunities:
🔑 (4/7) Community tools for lucrative target markets (6 examples)
🔑 (5/7) Subscription models for online community (4 examples)
🔑 (6/7) Increase e-commerce sales with shopping community (6 examples)
🔑 (7/7) Niche NFT communities you can start (5 examples)
Section 5: Product Strategy & Recommendation
(1) No-code stack for building online community:
- Community management: Use Circle to create a paywalled community with a range of features such as forums, members profiles, live streams, chat, events, and memberships.
- Live virtual events: If you’re not using an all-in-one community software like Circle, you can use tools like Zoom or Luma to host your virtual events, webinars, ice breaking sessions, networking and workshops.
- Wikis and docs: Use Notion or Slab to create shareable documents with members such as community rules, values, leaderboard, FAQs, and knowledge bases.
- Gated content: Use tools like Podia (suitable for video content) or Memberful (suitable for paid newsletter) to create gated content. These tools allow you to offer exclusive content, courses, and other resources to your members.
(🔒 MEMBERS-ONLY) +4 more actionable ideas and recommendations:
🔑 (2/5) 3 tactics to discover niche communities opportunity
🔑 (3/5) 5 tactics for increasing community engagement (+ 5 no-code tools)
🔑 (4/5) 5 tactics to encourage community to generate content for your site! (+ 4 tools)
🔑 (5/5) 6 business models for monetizing an online community (7 examples)
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