Burb - How creators grow community | Product Hunt

How creators grow community

Thanks so much for hunting, @chrismessina!

Thought I’d share a bit of our story.

Burb started in a community, as a rambling DM. @daniellexo and I, back and forth in the @beondeck Founders Fellowship Slack.

From that conversation, one incredible insight emerged:

Communities originate like little suburbs around interests, values, and relationships. Communities grow and spawn their own ‘burbs.

Over and over again.

There have been a lot of apps for community recently, built for wrangling thousands of members. These apps help B2B brands reduce their support costs or plumb the depths of member data for leads and market signals.

It occurred to us that an app for communities would support leaders of the ‘burbs, not just the cities. Who leads the ‘burbs?

Small communities are often budding businesses, led by:

👩🏾‍🎨 Professional creators 🧑🏼‍🏫 Educators 👷🏽‍♂️ Makers 👩🏿‍💼 Solo entrepreneurs

Tired of fighting algorithms to reach their audiences, creators are taking their 1,000 true fans off public social. Supporting themselves with courses and memberships.

But this isn't easy. We expect creators to learn:

📈 Digital marketing 👯‍♀️ Community management 💻 Dozens of software systems 📖 How to teach

Could we make this easier? Could we lower the bar and help more creators create fulfilling careers?

This is when @finknate fortuitously intro'ed our CTO, @philip_james2.

From his work on the @patreon platform, Philip has an intuitive understanding and passion for the challenges creators face.

He got what we were doing implicitly.

The Dream Team officially joined a little over a year ago, June 6th, 2021, and set out to build.

We recruited a select group of folks doing this kind of work: @caremjo, @bryonycole, @tatfig, and @sonalinigamnyc.

The offer: we’ll do whatever it takes to lower your ops burden and give you more visibility into your cohorts.

In January of 2022, we launched our MVP into closed beta:

⚙️ Integrations 📊 Unified data from community, learning management, and email marketing apps ✉️ Schedule posts and series, DMs in bulk 🏷 Tag members by activity or interest

The last major functionality slotted into place in April:

🅶 Google Workspace integration, send members messages from your own email 🤖 Automations, complex workflows made simple, templatized and shared

Like Danielle I used to ramble about.

We shifted to an open beta and have been working with hundreds of communities.

We’re a small team and these are early days, but we’re excited today to launch and iterate in public.

From a rambling Slack DM, to an amazing team, helping people while learning, then scaling those lessons to hundreds.

Onto the next step!

I’m ecstatic to introduce: Burb 🏘

We deeply appreciate your support!

Have a community on Slack, Circle, or Discord? We'd love to have you try us out.

On his Product Hunt community! I'm Danielle, Burb's chief community officer. I've been building communities for 15+ years at places like Etsy, and Lyft. I've never had a set of tools that supported my work in the way that I truly needed. So I'm helping make these tools a reality at Burb!

Our first set of features support my community building best practices, and the best practices gathered from the incredible communities in our beta.

🗂Feature: An instant CRM. This is a feature I wish I had running a community during the early Etsy days. (We had little budget, or need for fancy software.) Integrate your community platform and we'll give you one source of truth for your membership.

🏷Feature: Tags & segmentation. Community members have varied needs, motivations goals, and interests. Categorizing is the first step to personalization, and to going from ‘This is all in my head!' to being able to expand & share the make up of your community.

💌Feature: Schedule & send DMs to segments of members. Sending personalized notes to members can be nearly impossible as you grow. But keeping a pulse on the people in your community is so important, and can easily be deprioritized if you have to send these 1 by 1.

🤖Automate onboarding: The new member experience can make or brake a community. Burb helps you create personalized onboarding flows, so no one gets left behind. Also, when you can automate the tedious non-human stuff, so you have more time for support and connection.

🎉 And we're just getting started! Come hang with us & lets make our community tools dreams come true🤩☁️🌈

I've been a creator on the internet since before we were using that word. Building videogames and websites and webcomics eventually led me to working in tech, building the creator economy at places like Eventbrite, Stripe, and Patreon.

What I knew from first-hand experience and from my work at those incredible companies was this: Building a creative business is hard!

But here's the secret: The most successful creative businesses have a community built around them.

This is where Burb comes in. Whether someone is making courses, videos, podcasts, professional forums, or zines, they need to grow their community, and that takes time. Burb gives creators time back through automations, messaging, and community health notifications. Creators who use Burb spend less time wrangling widgets, and more time making their art to share with their community.

Thank you for checking us out, and I can't wait to see how you use Burb!

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Shoutouts: @simonw and @andrewgodwin (Burb is built on Django, and the migrations framework has been clutch throughout development), @obra (for being a good friend and rubber duck throughout my journey), and @finknate for introducing me to @drewdil and helping get this train in motion.