I’m Martha Bitar, co-founder and CEO of Flodesk. Ask me anything!

[marthabitar]

Hey Neil! We chose Facebook because it wouldn’t require asking our members to log into and learn a new tool. The goal was to make it super easy for them to find each other and Facebook was already part of their daily routine. We launched the community along with our beta and let it grow organically. When we finally decided we needed to manage it, something really beautiful happened. One of our members in the community had already stepped up and was answering questions voluntarily. She was pointing members out to existing posts with answers or to our help center, and even troubleshooting with them. So we asked if she’d want to join the team and she said yes! It was such an organic process. We’ll probably scale this way if we need to in the future. A few pieces of unsolicited advice here: as a founder, you’ll see many negative comments in your community. That’s okay. If you go in with the expectation that everything is going to be positive all the time, you’ll face disappointment and will probably get some degree of anxiety. It’s best to go in with the expectation that if there are issues or some customers are unhappy, you WANT to hear this. You want to create that space for the hard conversations to be had and leave those posts up. First, it’s the right thing to do. We always want our customers to know all of the struggles they’ll find with Flodesk because in the end we want them to make the right decision for their business. And second, you’ll learn about issues so much faster and you’ll be able to address them properly. It creates an almost immediate feedback loop!