Sarah Leary, the Cofounder of NextDoor, joins us for today's episode. NextDoor is a social network for neighborhoods. This recording is from her talk with David Spinks at CMX Summit. Sarah will share NextDoor’s story and the tactics behind how they launched a community in 94% of US neighborhoods. Yes you heard that right, 94%. She talks about how they got their first users on the ground, recruited extremely committed local leaders, and how they scaled the community.
Sarah Leary, the Cofounder of NextDoor, joins us for today's episode. NextDoor is a social network for neighborhoods. This recording is from her talk with David Spinks at CMX Summit. Sarah will share NextDoor’s story and the tactics behind how they launched a community in 94% of US neighborhoods. Yes you heard that right, 94%. She talks about how they got their first users on the ground, recruited extremely committed local leaders, and how they scaled the community.
Too Long; Didn't Listen
Derek Andersen:
Welcome to the Seat of Steve podcast. I'm your host, Derek Andersen. After holding my first event in 2010, I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community-based in over a hundred countries. Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time, your customers, yet I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community where people could experience your brand in person or at scale. On this show, we talk with the brightest minds and companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in person experiences for your brand and customers before you're competitor.
Sarah Leary:
Oh, thank you for having me.
David Spinks:
You are a late addition to the events, but someone that we've been dreaming of having at this event for a very long time.
Sarah Leary:
Excited to be here. Thank you.
David Spinks:
Of course. So really happy to have you here and I think a really good place to start is just the beginning. Nextdoor has such a interesting story of getting started, a lot of people don't know that you actually had a different community you were running that you pivoted to Nextdoor. So maybe let's just start off, take a minute to tell us how did Nextdoor get started? Why does this thing exist? Now it's in over 94%, right? neighborhoods in the US but it started off very hands-on, very small.
Sarah Leary:
very small. In fact, we're very close to the first neighborhood that was ever started on Nextdoor, which was in Menlo Park. But let me go all the way back, I think it really starts with a group of people who believed in the power of community and going back to 1999 in fact, the core team that started Nextdoor, one of them was one of the co-founders of a company called the Epinions, which was one of the first places online where you could write reviews about products and services. And this was back before people really knew what user-generated content was, people didn't know the value of folks writing reviews and having your members being the generators of content on your platform. So we learned some hard lessons from 1999 to 2004 about how you build community. And back then of course, when you joined a community, you had a handle that you used, you didn't use your real name and your real identity.
Sarah Leary:
And so we learned a lot of things about building online reputation, generating high quality content. And of course one of the big discoveries at that point was that people had a lot to share, they wanted to have platforms where they could talk about things like the digital camera or the baby stroller or where to stay when they go to Rome. And so fast forward to 2008, and a group of us from Epinions, my co-founder, Nirav and I basically started talking about starting a new company and again, really focus on the power of online communities. And one of the communities that we thought was interesting that was underserved was the sports community. And so we built something called Fanbase and brought in a couple of other people from the Epinions' team. And we spent almost two years trying to get a community off the ground.
Sarah Leary:
I won't bore you with all the details of that, it's a little painful to revisit it because if any of you have worked on building communities, you know that in the beginning it's really, really hard and you're looking for signals that things are working or it's not working. And in reality, Fanbase was designed to be a platform for college and pro sports fans and we got out of the gates really fast, we had 15 million unique visitors a month in the beginning, but it was pretty clear that it wasn't taking hold and it wasn't accelerating, right? You're looking for those early signs that say that you're on to something great and that people are contributing and they're bringing on more people and frankly, we weren't seeing that and we spent about six months trying to address it. We tried a long list of different tactics to try and get the community going and we just felt like we weren't delivering something that people needed, something that they were craving every single day. And if you-
David Spinks:
I want want to ask about that too because I take for so many of us, we're focused on building our community and driving engagement. I just shared some stats how engagement's number one challenge, how do you know when to cut the rope and try something else or if you're just not quite there, you need to hustle or more to get that momentum?
Sarah Leary:
It's a great question, I wish I could give you like here's a stat that you need to look at and if it's green, go forward if it's red, go back. But it was more of a feel that you've got that just said that people were coming into the community, they were having an experience but they weren't accelerating their usage. And for us the most important thing is with any community, you need to get those diehards in early on, you need to get those influential users that are really going to set the tone for the community. And it just didn't feel like that was taking off, we weren't getting acceleration and it wasn't bursting onto the scene. And I think that that's something that, again, you just have to be in the community and recognizing are you seeing an increase in engagement from diehards or are you seeing it flatten out or worse? Are you seeing people join and then bounce and come back? Right. And so that was something that was, "Oh gosh, this isn't working and we probably need to do something else."
David Spinks:
So we had a conversation about this and talked about how you saw that people had their social identity, their professional identity with LinkedIn, but there is a neighborhood identity-
Sarah Leary:
Yeah, exactly.
David Spinks:
...that you thought people would want to connect around.
Sarah Leary:
Yeah. So if you go back to 2010, you had Facebook for your friends and family, you had LinkedIn for your professional networks. And we were big believers in the power of online community, the question was which communities out there were underserved? And we felt as though there was a community that was very important to people's lives, your local community that was being underserved. This is where you live, where your kids go to school, right? It's where you interact with people. And so I think this was also a reflection of the founding team, we were in our late thirties settling down, and so the community that mattered to us more was different than what mattered to us when we were 24, and we were looking outside our front doors living in places in the Bay Area and realizing that we didn't know our neighbors.
Sarah Leary:
And that's not the way that we grew up. And then as we started to look around, it turned out that other people were having the same issue and that people were feeling very disconnected from their everyday lives. And so we turned our attention to that community and started to do a little bit of research. And what we learned was that these were latent communities that people had lost touch with, and we felt as though we could use technology as a way to help people reconnect with their local community.
David Spinks:
So what did the zero to one look like? You wanted to build the neighborhood community, did you start with one? I know you have a story of really getting hands-on. You told me your first hundred leaders had your personal cell phone number.
Sarah Leary:
Absolutely. So in the very beginning, and again, anytime you're starting community, getting the seeds of the community right is really, really important, I can not emphasize that enough. And even though we knew, geez, there's 200,000 neighborhoods in the United States, how are you going to get started? And so we basically went into people's living rooms, we talked to them, we were invited into homeowner's association meet-
David Spinks:
[inaudible 00:07:47].
Sarah Leary:
I was invited, yes, yes. And we were invited in to talk about how you could use this platform to help people stay connected. And a couple of things emerged that were really, really important. These are real world communities, they exist in the real world, and so real identity matters. People want to know that when you're having conversation with someone online about maybe buying a bookshelf that they have in their garage, that when you come over, you're not lonely girl 13, you're Sarah Leary, right? You're a real person. And so as a result, we just had to construct a platform that was very different than what we had created back in 1999. So things like your real name, verify that you live within the neighborhood have an identity of the neighborhood.
Sarah Leary:
So every nextdoor neighborhood needs to have a name and a boundary. But these were all things that we learned because we spent an entire year talking to people in the communities and understanding how they were going to use it. And frankly, those are two benefits there, number one, a lot of product feedback about how to improve the product, but number two was creating these real champions in every single neighborhood. So I think a key insight that we had was that you can't just launch a platform and say a group of people in San Francisco are building a platform for your neighborhood in Clearwater, Florida, for example. What matters is finding the person in Clearwater, Florida, in that neighborhood who was going to be the champion for the platform and introduce it to their fellow neighbors. Because ultimately what people care about in a community is a being a part of something that is authentic, that is for neighborhoods that's local, that feels like it's going to have the types of conversations that are relevant to that community.
David Spinks:
So I want to get the tactics here because everyone here is building a community, they want to know, "Great, how do I apply this to myself?" And so for your platform, it was critical to find the right people who can actually get a new community off the ground and build the community around them. So what are the things you've learned about how to find those core contributors? How can the people in the audience find their core contributors? What do you look for to know this is the right person to be a leader in our community to get this thing off the ground?
Sarah Leary:
Sure. So unfortunately, there's not like a master list across the United States of all the neighborhoods and who are the local champions in each neighborhood, I wish there were, but there was not. And so we had to employ several different tactics. Part of it was on the product side, so when you came in, you had to fill out an application to say you wanted to bring Nextdoor to your neighborhood, you had to draw that neighborhood boundary and give it a name. If you think about those steps, traditionally, if you were thinking about normal kind of growth online or growth hacking, that's a lot of friction along the way. And so people would say to us like, "Why are you requiring all these steps?" And it's because we wanted to find that person who was willing to jump through the hoops to say, "I want to be the one who brings Nextdoor to my community."
Sarah Leary:
And so in the application, they had to describe why they wanted to bring Nextdoor to their community, how many neighbors they knew. Even coming up with the name is a challenge for a lot of people, so a lot of friction. And then once they joined, they had 21 days to go recruit 10 members to join the neighborhood and those 10 members had to not just join, they had to verify that they lived in the neighborhood. So again, a lot of friction and it's counterintuitive, a lot of people were like, "I can't believe you're turning folks away from your service." But we felt it was really important to get those, what we called founding members, right. Because ultimately, those founding members were going to be the ones that were sending out the other invitations to the rest of the neighborhood to invite people to come join.
Sarah Leary:
We would help them, whether those were emails, flyers, or even physical postcards that we sent out, but it was really important that you were joining a community that had a local champion. The second thing that we did was that it wasn't all online, we did good old fashioned community organizing work. In fact, we had a team of people in the top 40 cities in the US going out there and trying to find at local events, who were the people that others in the neighborhood turned to? And this may sound crazy, I mean, now we cover the entire US, we have neighborhoods all over the globe and yet it still starts with having people going out there and making those connections. Even in the beginning when I was sitting down talking to folks, I could tell that someone was looking across the table at me and saying, "Do I trust you? Do I want to be on your platform, Sarah?" Right?
Sarah Leary:
So there's just this very human element of making that connection and getting people to believe. And those early users are so important for any community that's out there, they are the ones that set the tone, they set the norms and they are your ambassadors, if you will, to the rest of the community. And so I think we invested in that. If you go back, think about it, it was nine years ago that we did that work, those communities, those founding members are the ones that set the stage for allowing there to be so much growth that followed from that point on. And I just encourage people, kind of a little bit of the secret of community is yes, there's incredible scale that you can get, you can get all this great user-generated content that's very cost effective.
Sarah Leary:
All those things are great and you can think about it at the end state of how much scale you can get in the beginning, the reality is is that you should not be afraid to do non-scalable things in the beginning to get the community right, I can not emphasize that point enough. It sounds crazy for me to get in my car and drive down and go to a community meeting in Menlo Park to get the first neighborhood, but if that failed, nothing else would have followed. For all these community organizers that we had across the country, they were going to farmer's markets, to neighborhood watch meetings, they were going to community gatherings and telling people about Nextdoor, that's what gets the community sparked in that neighborhood and it's also the way that you build authentic community.
Sarah Leary:
Over time, you might think about ways to get more members into the platform, but if you don't have a core group of folks in the beginning who are setting the tone, who are adding credibility to the platform and also content, then you have nothing to scale and so do not be afraid in the beginning it will be slow, it will feel like you're not getting very far, but if you're focused not on the quantity of people on your platform, but rather the quality of the conversations that are going on, you will be heading down the right path, and I cannot emphasize that enough.
Sarah Leary:
I think a lot of people think about, "Well how do I get to a thousand, 10,OOO, a hundred thousand users, a million, whatever the number is, but it's really not about that, it's about the quality of the community. And I think it's one of the reasons why smaller companies and startups have an advantage over larger companies in launching community-based platforms.
David Spinks:
Right. And that comes with a timeline as well, right? I recently shared, if you're not able to invest at least 12 months into your community program, you probably shouldn't start.
Sarah Leary:
I would say it's even higher, right? It's more like 18 to 24 months just because you need to get things going and you need to see the ripple effect that it's creating. And again, quality, quality, quality is the most important thing to focus on in the beginning of a community.
David Spinks:
Yeah. And so broader level, you kind of shared how when you first started people were disconnected from their neighborhoods. Obviously the loneliness epidemic is a key theme in society right now, do you feel like tech and Nextdoor has helped actually solve that problem? Now looking back at it.
Sarah Leary:
Yeah, it has addressed it. If you go back to 2010, one of the data points that we saw was that 28% of Americans couldn't name a single one of their neighbors and 29% could only name one or two, wow, wow. And I know for myself in San Francisco, I'm a pretty sociable person, but I knew one person in my neighborhood and I don't think that that's because people don't care about their local community, they don't want to be involved, it's because life is busy, right? Modern life, you're commuting long distances, you're coming home kind of dealing with your life, you have a lot of distractions in the home. People are not sitting on their front step talking to each other, right? And yet we feel this loss of connection, I think that's where the loneliness comes from. Human beings want to feel a connection to the place where they are, and so if you look back over that period of time, what has shifted is that people now report, "I know more of my neighbors."
Sarah Leary:
What Nextdoor does and what I think communities can do is they lower the bar for people to follow their good intentions and have conversations with people who have something in common with them. And on Nextdoor, that's about your local community. And it turns out if you share a street, a park, a community, you have a lot more in common with people than you might otherwise think. And so all that Nextdoor is doing is saying it's easier to start the conversation. And it may start with someone borrowing a cup of sugar or a ladder or helping someone find a lost family pet, but it can grow from there and you can find that there actually are a lot of people who live around you who have shared interests and you can form even deeper relationships.
Sarah Leary:
And so that's why for Nextdoor, it's really important that you think about not just the online experience, but how that translates into real online connection. And I think that's actually true with any community, I mean, take this community, right? You can have a lot of conversations online, a lot of content, and yet getting everyone together in a physical space allows there to be deeper connections that then transcend and propel you forward till the next time you meet. And I think that that's true with any community, it doesn't matter if you have an online community thinking about how do you actually get people to want to come together and share information in person, that's just going to deepen their connection to your community over time.
David Spinks:
I think part of the challenge is we start off in this very hands-on way and it's very personal and you're very involved and we all start our communities that way. But all of us are doing this for a living and for the most part, we're trying to scale our communities, we're trying to make them bigger, larger. And as they become larger and as you scale, you start to automate more things, right? And you did that with Nextdoor. But as things get more automated and we're seeing this on all the big social platforms, we lose touch with the humans on that platform and all of a sudden, the system can start to kind of form its own cultures or form its own... issues arise that you just don't have as much of a hands-on involvement in, and I know for Nextdoor there were some issues with racial profiling on a local level, the culture started to become a little bit out of your grasp, can you speak to that topic and what you're able to do to kind of take care of that problem even at that large scale?
Sarah Leary:
Sure. I think one of the things that happens with the community is it does take on a life of its own and you have to constantly monitor that and be attentive to it, right? We are connecting people in a neighborhood who previously couldn't communicate with each other or couldn't easily communicate with each other. And that became a public forum where there were conversations that we didn't like, and so that forced us to actually step back and say, "Wow, how do we help people be their better selves online?" And frankly, when we first started to see reports of some of these issues on racial profiling, we did what I think a lot of people do, you look at other folks and say, "How have you dealt with this?" Look at the other large social networks out there, how have they dealt with it and try and get the best practices.
Sarah Leary:
And it turned out that there weren't any best practices out there and that we were facing a unique challenge and an unique problem. And we were also willing, this goes back to 2015, we were willing to address it because our mission is to bring communities together, not be divisive. And so I found myself actually having to go into the academic research circles to try and figure out how to address this. And we were very lucky, a Stanford professor, Jennifer Eberhardt, has done a lot of work on bias and understanding unconscious bias.
Sarah Leary:
And unfortunately, she didn't have the answer either, but what she did have was some research that talked about how do you get people to stop and think before they take action? How do you get them to slow down? And again, that is very counter to "We've got to think about growth, we're a technology, how do you get people through a funnel? How do you do that with the least amount of friction?" And so we went on a journey of trying to understand the issue and then introduce some improvements there, and these improvements basically created a checklist. So if you're reporting something in crime and safety, which was that's where the problem was arising, we put three points of a checklist to get you to stop and think. And these were things like racial profiling is banned on the platform, and by the way, this is what racial profiling is.
Sarah Leary:
It was things such as you can't report thing... it's not a suspicious activity if someone just be walking through the neighborhood. So be very specific about what it is that you see that is behavior that is truly suspicious. And then if you're going to describe someone, describe someone very specific, right? Don't say a general category of someone... be able to identify an individual. And we put these steps into place, we stepped people through a process of asking more questions and we basically created a lot of friction through the whole process. And this was something that we had to get comfortable with, but we felt very strongly that it was more important that we have useful, helpful content and not just a large quantity of content.
Sarah Leary:
And so we rolled this out, we tested it, it took several months to try and get the language right. And we actually were able to reduce racial profiling on the platform by over 75% with this. And so it's something that I think we at Nextdoor are very, very proud of, but we know that the work is not done and we continue to work at it. But I think this idea that takeaway should be, "Hey, if you get people to stop and think and create these what's called decision points, they get out of being reactive and emotional and they will start to think about their actions and how it can play across the entire community."
Sarah Leary:
I think that that's actually helpful information and the way to think about any community. If you have any community where things are getting a little out of hand, finding a way to get people to stop and think before they act is really important. The other thing is don't lose the human touch, right? Don't be afraid to pick up the phone and talk to a user and understand what is going on because we're trying to solve these problems that involve human psychology, human behavior, it's not just technology and so that's why to me, I think there's never been a better time to be in the community space. The world is realizing how important community is and how challenging it is to get it right and you need to find people who get this intersection between technology and understand the humanities and understanding people.
Sarah Leary:
It's one of the reasons why at Nextdoor, we're building an entire team that's focused on community health and vitality. So if anyone out there is interested in being part of building these systems and being a part of one of the world's largest communities, please come find me afterwards, we're hiring. But I truly believe that the world is waking up to understand that social networks are incredibly powerful, but they're introducing new sets of challenges and problems. And so people who want to think about taking technology and marrying it with the real world and addressing these issues, there's never been a better time, and frankly, there aren't enough people in our industry who know this stuff well. So you all are investing in a great industry for the next five, 10, 20 years and I think great things are ahead and hopefully, you can be part of being part of the solution.
David Spinks:
I think that's a great note to end on. All right. Thank you so much Sarah.
Sarah Leary:
Thank you.
Derek Andersen:
I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod, again, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.