1500% user growth in 4 weeks: 6 steps in building an active user community in India with minimum budget

I have been working on a couple of projects to build online user communities in India. And I had to deal with the following:

• Cultural differences between Europe and India. I must also add here that I have never been to India and my interactions with Indians are very limited.
• Physical distance as I am based in Europe. Indians prefer to communicate face to face. So it is tough to build the trust.
• Low Budget. I had a very small budget to build the community.
• No good results from Facebook advertisements. We were getting a lot of likes but not much users, leave alone having a community.

Building an active user community is one of the most difficult task. The community builder has to understand the culture and psychology of the target users as well as have problem-solving and leadership skills.

In this article I would like to share my experiences with one such project and how we solved the problems with community building.

Step 1: Selected interns in India to help us build a community

I soon realized that we need people on the ground to bridge the distance and cultural gap. However we do not have enough funds. So, we decided to find interns studying in universities. I can recommend free websites like Internshala, Twenty19 and Intern Theory for posting job advs.

We posted our job advertisement in Intershala and got over 100 applicants in the first week and in total around 200 applicants. Their job was simple — they use their channels to get users for us and we pay them based on a success fee.

Tip: One of the biggest problem was to select the right group of interns. Everyone was interested and everyone was very keen. We did not want to select everyone, as we had to train a small group of dedicated interns. Internally we devised some clever tactics to select the right candidate [I may write about the methods in another post].

Step 2: Found out the motivations on why they want to do internship

Motivation is very important for our interns to do the job well. And I soon realized that it is not the money but what the interns were looking for is recognition. We decided to give them recognition of their work through:

a) A good title — We decided to call our interns Ambassadors. The interns loved it!

b) Letters of Recommendations (LOR) — Indians value LOR a lot and we decide to give LOR to everyone who do good job.

Step 3: Selected the right platform to communicate with our Ambassadors

Selecting the right communication platform is very important — our ambassadors need to be present there and should have a low threshold to join.

My first choice was Slack. I thought it might be the best tool because of its ease of use and flexibility. It was a horrible mistake! Only 6 ambassadors joined (out of 30) the slack channel and often they were not online there. It was dead even before we started.

Panic time: The overall number of users didn’t cross 100 in 2 weeks, so had to make some changes fast.

Next we tried WhatsApp. It was a great choice as within 2 days, all 30 ambassadors joined and even started communicating actively. Bingo!

Step 4: Understood Indian way of working and adapted to it

Once we got the ambassadors onto a channel, they were present almost 24x7 and I had another problem.

They were very enthusiastic and I soon found out that if they want something they were constantly pinging me and expected immediate response (even at middle of night!). Saying ‘I am busy right now and will get back to you later’ is often not a good answer. Another thing I found out is that it is very difficult for them to say ‘No’ to me, so they will agree and accept to things I say even if they do not understand and will come back later to ask the same questions.

So I did few things that drastically improved the situation:

1. Created a FAQ page with all possible questions: Within the first 3 days of creating the group, I had over 150 questions in my private message. Many were repeated. Questions as simple as “How to search stories on the website? ‘’ or “How to create a Facebook post?” were asked multiple times. So we created a FAQ page listing ALL questions and shared the link the in group.
2. Encouraged ambassadors to help each other: Indian are normally very helpful. So I also asked some of the active members to help others. They became the ‘thought leaders’ in the group and were very happy to help others.

Step 5: Was constantly interacting with Ambassadors

In the beginning, I was online almost all the time starting from 7am CET (India 10:30 am IST) and was initiating conversations multiple times a day. This showed that the group is alive and we care for them.

I was daily updating the ambassadors on the total amount of participants in the competition and how much we have grown in the last few days. It worked pretty well and mood in the group was getting better. Also, it was important to mention if someone was doing particularly good. Like: “Ajay got already 50 participants, let’s congratulate him!” Or: “Look at those wonderful posters Pragya made of the competition!”.

I was also writing personally to each of ambassadors to find out about results and their working approach, trying to help them to learn and perform better. I found out that some of the ambassadors were too shy to ask questions, and some others needed a push. Couple of the best performers thought they’ve already became winners and decided to take a break, so I had to motivate them back.

Step 6: Gamified the system

We decided to gamify the system by giving ambassadors additional prizes when they acquire certain number of users. For example, stipend amount was in slots, starting from brining 50 users and increasing with more users. Also, we had 3 types of certificate: The first one (also called participation certificate) was for those who brought atleast 20, the second one was for those who brought 50 or more users and third one was for the top 3 best performers.

The participation certificate was perhaps the most important as it helped assuage the fears of the low performers that their time will not be wasted.

FINAL RESULTS

Below is the graph shows number of users’ who submitted their stories (y-axis) vs time (x-axis) in the competition. We are extremely happy with the results as it was one of the biggest success for the competition.

Finally, the joy of doing anything is when we see the results and get feedback from people. Below are screenshots of some of the feedbacks I got from our ambassadors.

[I would like to thank Rudradeb Mitra for guiding me during the entire process and helping me with writing this article.]