The Importance of User Communities

5 Takeaways from Gina Bianchini, CEO & Founder of Mighty Networks

Gina Bianchini, CEO & Founder of Mighty Networks

One of the founders that Techstars brought in to speak to us was Gina Bianchini, founder and CEO of Mighty Networks. Gina is a veteran of the valley thanks to her previous venture Ning, a platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks, which she sold in 2010. In addition to Ning, she’s also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for a16z, and she began her career at Goldman Sachs. It was a great opportunity to hear from someone with such a wealth of knowledge and experience, and here are some of my key takeaways.

1. Density of Entrepreneurship is still important. Early in the conversation, Gina advocated for innovation hubs like Palo Alto and incubator programs like Techstars given the fact that they continue to bring entrepreneurs in close proximity with one another. I thought this was an interesting take, particularly in light of the current virtual environment and the alleged exodus of startups away from Silicon Valley. Plus, Gina is in the business of online community building, so it will be interesting to see to what extent virtual connections can overtake IRL connections in the coming years.
2. It’s possible to be too early on a market trend. As Gina told us the story of her current venture, Mighty Networks, a platform for creators to organize and exchange ideas around particular topics, she told us how in the early days of the company her idea was very out-of-favor. At the time, no one could imagine building a community on anything other than Facebook, making it very difficult to raise venture capital for her company. Gina was able to withstand the lean years by striking a series of enterprise customer deals with large corporates to effectively fund her product development with revenue, and though it temporarily diverted her team’s attention away from their larger vision, it was essential to survival.
3. You don’t have to be an overnight success. As Gina mentioned, there were several years where the company did not have Product-Market fit. Despite the conventional wisdom of many venture capitalists to shutter the doors and shut down a company if it hasn’t found traction in the first few years, Gina instead chose to continue building as she had incredibly strong conviction that destination communities would eventually become preferred to mega-platform, catch-all communities. Part of her conviction stemmed from a keen understanding of high-level technology trends, specifically how technology repeatedly “bends to decentralization.” Eight years in, Mighty Networks is now taking off more than ever.
4. It is essential to understand your specific customer. Gina mentioned that if she were to start a new company from scratch today, one of the most important things that she would do is have meticulous clarity over who her customer is. Perhaps more importantly, she would start thinking about how to bring these customers together into a community even before her ultimate product was ready. Rather than simply try to build a social media following, something she argues is increasingly harder to accomplish and simultaneously less valuable given the inherent one-to-many relationship, she would instead try to build a place online where customers can find other people like them and where collisions between customers can strengthen the company’s overall network.
5. Having different features isn’t enough. Another piece of salient advice I took from the presentation was Gina’s word of caution that having “different features” is not enough to sway users or investors. In order to compete against a large established competitor, it’s not enough to provide additional value via features if the fundamental relationship with the user is the same as the incumbent’s, because the incumbent can just easily copy your feature. Instead, your company must have a completely different business model or a fundamentally different relationship with the customer in order to compete.