You're a founder with a prototype or working product looking for a strong evangelist community. You may not be sure how to find your first customers, engage with them, or spend your time effectively with them.
Find your 100 early adopters in 30 days
Build Your Squad
Your community is already out there desperate for the product you’re building, but you haven’t found your early adopters or they aren’t sticking around. We’ll teach you everything that we know to help you discover your community in days or weeks, not months or years, then turn them into evangelists of your business.
We believe that community-driven growth is the future, and we're bringing together people who share the same interest. Build with your community. Find your 100 early adopters in 30 days.
with Mark Tan and Nathan Maton
Join the waitlist to be notified of upcoming cohorts.
A month-long masterclass on community-driven product building
Your early adopters will help shape the future of your products. Mark and Nathan will teach you everything they know about early product communities, transforming the next 5 years of your company-building experience. They will share tips and tricks to find the right customers using proven methods, connect them, and keep them engaged by taking best practices from their decades of experience and bring you world-class leaders from today’s unicorns. By joining this course, you will also have access to a community of builders.
Topics we'll cover
We’ll go in-depth on the following concepts
- Overview and trends in product-building with communities
- Finding your founding community members
- Building a tight community feedback loop
- Community engagement during testing and development phase
- Rally your early adopters to help you spread the word and get referrals by the time you launch
- Maintain and scale this community relationship as your company grows
Who this course is for
Tech Founders
Product Builders
You’re about to launch something new and want frictionless high-quality feedback on the product. We’ll save you time and energy to launch successful products and have customer sign-ups from day one.
Community Builders
You know how to build community but are not sure how to get support from your product, engineering, or leadership teams. We’ll show you how you can use the voice of your community to rally support from stakeholders.
Meet your instructors
Mark Tan
Led product and growth at Amazon & Twitch gaming communities of 10 million users. He's currently at Wyze, a consumer tech startup that recently raised $110 million in Series B, with community efforts that led to 30 product launches, 5 million paying customers, and more than 15k beta testers in 3 years. Mark scaled product communities from zero to 100k members. He also led a team of 8 Product Managers, UX Researchers, and Community Managers, combining these disciplines to champion community-led growth. He's a fellow at On Deck, Reforge, and Product School, part of 12 programs, and has coached more than 200 professionals.
In this course, you will meet and engage over 100 power users identifying how to find them, get their interest, engage them and turn them into community advocates. You have a prototype or young product that you want to build a community around. Either you haven’t yet found power users or your early users aren’t sticking around. We’ll teach you how to understand the trends and landscape, find your early community members, build a tight feedback loop, and create a framework that scales.
Bringing you best practices and guest speakers from world-class products.
Note: Lineup is being finalized, more details to follow.
Peter Yang
Product Lead, Reddit & Author, Creator Economy
Rosie Sherry
Community at Orbit
Sarath Kuruganty
Community Programs Manager at Product Hunt and co-founder at Shoutout
Andrea Guendelman
Founder, CEO, Cultural Strategist & Wallbreakers
You
This is also a community. We'll give you the stage to host community events to share your experience, during or after the course.
Cohort-based Courses
A New Type of Online Course
Active Learning, not Passive Watching
We will follow a workshop-style model that will allow you to create artifacts like backlogs and roadmaps while directly interacting with the coaches and guest speakers.
Excel with a Cohort of Peers
You will be surrounded by other founders and builders dealing with similar challenges and carry out meaningful discussions using breakout rooms and Slack.
Accountability and Feedback
You’re a busy person. You can figure things out when you have to, but it’s important to have feedback and accountability to drive your likelihood of success.
Case Studies of Live Communities
Get the chance to evaluate existing communities and immerse yourself both as a founder/builder & community members
Office Hours
You'll get personalized advice and coaching from Nathan, Mark, and other experts on your career goals
Testimonials
So excited to see Mark and Nathan teaming up to create this amazing course! It’s been such a pleasure to see these two natural community-builders in action through their engagement with On Deck, and I’m glad that they’re sharing their wisdom with others who are building community-driven products. Can’t wait for this!
Anthony Nardini
Program Director, On Deck First 50 Fellowship
Nathan is thoughtful, analytical, and motivated. He has a good instinct for community management and is unafraid to take on new challenges.
Tom Hulme
General Partner & Head of Europe at GV (Google Ventures)
Mark brings a strong perspective of the user community to the projects he oversees. Mark’s enthusiasm for looking to understand the customer and his involvement in projects are always with a positive attitude and interest in how to best define the best user experience. I highly recommend Mark.
Jason Levine
Senior Design Leadership at Amazon
Mark has a great passion for product management. His strong ability to organize information, attention to detail, strong project management skills, and experience in search and e-commerce, makes him a great asset for companies seeking platform optimization and user/community growth.
Lake Dai
VC LDV Ventures
I really enjoyed working with Nathan! I was new to community management and he taught me a lot. He is a very friendly and organized person who manages to keep people busy with a good atmosphere even in difficult times. My whole Gameful experience was really positive. For that, I have to give credit to both volunteers I managed and Nathan who was managing me!
Edwige Lelièvre
Developer Unity C# at Gamabilis
Meet the Team
Innovative leader in learning experience design delivering world-class and mission-aligned online learning through evidence-based design, creative problem-solving, and compassionate leadership. Diplomatic and effective communicator and collaborator across non-profit and corporate learning teams and university leadership, faculty, and staff. LinkedIn
Brandon Pousley
Learning Experience Design Lead
Worked with institutions around the world to develop courses that will be taught on the Minerva's learning platform. Conducted research into the impact of land use on the climate, both nationally (Argentina) and globally using publicly available data and brings a lot of experience in online and active learning. LinkedIn
Kirsty Hall
Cohort Experience Lead
Learn with a comprehensive curriculum
Understand the trends and landscape
Analyze how the landscape is shifting from building products FOR the customers to building products WITH the customers. We'll share best practices of successful startups that took a community-driven approach and how you can apply these learnings to your own product. We will also cover common pitfalls and missed opportunities when you don't have your own community.
Topics include: (1) Understand why building with your community is important and build the foundational knowledge that you can use, (2) Create or refine your community vision so that your members can help you and each other in the best way possible, (3) Drive user-to-user learning, invite users to try your product and get that conversation going.
Find your early community members
Where do you find them? How do you ask them to participate, knowing that they are busy with their jobs, families, and other commitments? We will provide you with resources and tactics to find them and provide you with ideas to build the right incentive plan.
Topics include: (1) Establish guiding principles to get your community started, (2) Create a culture that aligns with the mission, (3) Use tools and frameworks to find your first set of members and grow that effectively.
Build a tight community feedback loop
We will discuss the mechanics and systems in place to make sure that you can collect, prioritize, and build a tight feedback cycle and ensure that you have ongoing engagement from your early community members.
Topics include: (1) Create a community feedback cycle and get a more holistic set of recommendations, (2) Turn your customers into partners so you can get support based on their areas of expertise, (3) Create a culture of collaboration with your community.
Build a framework that scales
Sustain engagement and scale this relationship. We'll help you build a cadence of feedback, support, and engagement to maintain user relationships while increasing referral or word of mouth. Building the right framework will help you get the right support from your community to have a successful product rollout and we'll help prepare you for launch.
Topics include: (1) Retain and reduce churn by executing your retention plan, (2) Continue to scale the group and build your community plan for different stages, (3) Discuss practices that you can explore today that can prepare you for the future of communities - whether it's web2 or web3.
Be the first to know when the next cohort starts
Join the waitlist to be notified of upcoming cohorts.
Frequently Asked Questions
I'm super busy. How much time will I have to spend on this course?
We understand that most of you have busy full-time jobs, so we will look at the cohort's availability and do our best to accommodate your schedule. We will have live sessions on Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:30 am to 10 am Pacific Time. During these sessions, we will discuss course content, discuss your challenges, and find solutions that you can apply right away. Your total time commitment is around 3 to 5 hours per week and we encourage you to participate as much as possible to get the most out of this program.
Do I have to attend all of the live sessions in real-time?
All sessions will be recorded and made available to you so that you can view them later at your convenience. However, we strongly recommend that you attend these sessions live as you’ll get to interact directly with the coaches, guest speakers, and your cohort.
What's included in the course?
We will have live sessions or workshops, exercises, office hours, and guest speakers. Lectures and workshops will be recorded, and a resource library will be made available. We will also have a Slack or Discord community where you can interact with other students, so you don't miss out on resources and discussions. One of the benefits that you will get out of the program is forming a tight-knit community that will go beyond four weeks, so being present will play a huge role in your success.
Do I need community-building experience prior to joining this course?
Not at all. This is what we’re here for! We will teach you the fundamentals, structured thinking to find people and bring them together to help you build your products. We welcome founders, product managers, and community builders in our course and the active learning happen between instructors, guests, and fellow students.
Will I get to interact with other students and speakers? Will I get feedback on my work?
Yes, that is the essence of a cohort-based course. You will be surrounded by founders and product owners from various backgrounds and working in companies of different sizes and at different scales. Their inputs will be valuable to you and we will form accountability groups so you can achieve your goals. Finally, getting honest feedback at work on something you attempt for the first time can often be difficult to get or feel risky. This course offers a safe space for you to experiment and get valuable advice from your peers and the instructor.
Can I get reimbursed by my company?
Many companies treat work-related courses such as this one as reimbursable expenses. And if yours doesn’t, you can always ask your team. We will provide you with a template you can use for the request and we can help work with you to identify the returns that this course will bring back to your team.
What is your refund policy?
We honor full refunds up to 10 days before the start of the course. While we cannot offer refunds within 10 days or after a course begins, we can always transfer your registration to another cohort.