erictwillis

It's the positive nature of the community. Hacker News can be very toxic, for instance. There are extremely smart people there, but sometimes the attitudes don't make for a very positive, open community. The thing that separates PH the community is that everyone on PH is usually very good-spirited. I think it starts with Ryan Hoover. People will give constructive feedback, but it's done in a respectful manner. I've generally had good experiences on reddit but there are some toxic channels here as well. So you need to be very careful about how you interact in various subreddits.

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There is a lot of overlap, but I think there are some traits that are especially important for building communities. I won't touch on them all, but I will give some examples.

Community managers are constantly in touch with people in an individual-level or group setting... constantly communicating ideas or replying to people in the community. It's something that's required to do for hours daily. So it's important to have very strong communicate skills. You need to be able to communicate complex ideas in simple way but also in a way that is "clear" to a wide range of people that may participate in your community. That can sometimes be very tricky. You also think it's important to show consistent empathy. Being consistent, fair, and kind are major qualities that one needs to do well at building community. You'll be dealing with the extreme nature of personality-types and it's important to bury your ego and just always try to give people what that ultimately need from you.

Hello,

If it's a community-based product, get heavily involved in the community. I think it's much easier for smaller startups who are always looking for people to help out and you can get visibility because the organization would still be rather small. For an "established" startup... that can mean a lot of different things. I'll take it as you mean a fast growing startup that has raised a lot of money like Uber. Do exceptional work and get this work in front of someone who can either refer you to someone at that startup for find a direct line to someone who can make a decision or get you to a hiring manager and illustrate that you have what it takes to work for the company. Of you can get creative. I remember a designer who created a game to represent his resume (it was really cool btw). It was very beautifully done and bloggers picked up the story and wrote about it. Obviously, he received several job offers.

I think live streaming video is the next big trend. Obviously, live streaming video apps have been around for a long time. However, we've reached the point where billions of people have smartphones and bandwidth is available to stream at scale are relatively good quality. So I think we've hit the point where we'll see more niche, but still massive hits like Twitch and we'll see large consumer-based plays like Meerkat and Periscope get to 100M+ users. However, I think the interesting thing will be in the applications built off the APIs. You'll see startups handling customer service with live-streaming, you'll see startups using live streaming apps to get immediately feedback from users, I think you'll see dedicated studios for creating high-quality live streaming content. I think the applications are endless.

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