October ‘21

"Don't make me tap the sign."

As a tech community grows, so does the opportunity for support. Mentors, advisors, consultants, trainers, and coaches, all flock to help communities thrive, sometimes out of the kindness of their heart (perhaps they've had an exit, and want to give back), sometimes to boost their brand awareness and ultimately sell more of their product or service. Sometimes there's a muddy bit inbetween with a little bit of both.

In CodeBase, we get a few of these requests a week. Sometimes it's to provide quite broad "startup mentorship", more often it's a focused bit of help around product, IP, branding, sales, etc. Sometimes the request comes in cold, sometimes it's an introduction from one of tenants. Either way, they tend to follow a similar structure - here's what we do, here's our proof points, and here's what we'd like to do. For the last part, generally speaking there are four flavours:

Can you send this email/deck/one sheet to your community? I can more or less guarantee you this will not happen. There's a huge amount of information about what's going on that we share, and we have to be very careful not to overload our comms. For us to do this from an introductory email, it would have to be an offer so good we couldn't say no.

Can we put on a free workshop/seminar/audit of your tenants? Nothing in life is free, and entrepreneurs' time is their most precious resource. We tend to steer away from these requests as well, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we already run/host a pretty packed schedule of events, and there's a really good chance that the topic you want to talk about is already coming up. Secondly, by putting you in front of the community, we are tacitly endorsing you - and if we've only just met, that's a really hard thing for us to do. We don't know if you'll use the workshop to really provide value, or just sell yourself.

We don't know what we want to do. People say this more often than you might think. I admire the honesty, but please, don't expect us to figure out your marketing strategy for you.

Can we sponsor an event? Now we're getting somewhere. Rather than creating something new from scratch, why not plug into the existing community? Every tech community has a smorgasbord of meetups, events, and conferences. Sponsoring an event can only cost you a few hundred pounds in marketing spend, and get you direct exposure to your target audience. We do run our own events, but most tech meetups come from the community - you're better doing your research and contacting organisers directly.

None of these are a particularly satisfying way to start an interaction with a community, and when they do happen, they can feel like shortcuts that are quite clumsy, short-termist, and really difficult to measure the ROI on.

I can't prescribe what will work for you to build that level of engagement and trust with a community - ultimately that's your hustle. But the advice I would give is think from the bottom up, and engage with the people on the ground. Here's three things you might want to consider trying:

Go to events as an attendee. Not just to pitch yourself, but to truly listen to what others in the community are doing - what their concerns are, how they're operating, what they need. This is the hard yards, but will really help with your profile. Carve our time every month to attend a few different meetups and see what you learn.

Directly contact the people you want to work with, ie the founder, head of marketing, head of product, etc. I wrote a piece about cold emails earlier this year, which you might want to check out. If you write one super personalised email every day, I guarantee you'll eventually start getting those Zoom chats you're after.

Create great content. We're overwhelmed with content these days, but if you can create a video/blog/social media post that really cuts to the core of the problems your target persona is facing, it can massively cut out the trust building exercise. Great content is much easier said than done, of course. Use your imagination.

Other than these three, get creative. It's your own story, your own bit of value you're adding. And try not to get frustrated if it takes a while to build up those relationships.