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My love for communities was inspired by my work at Zomato. I was an early Zoman and VP of Marketing at Zomato for 8+ years and had the opportunity to help build and replicate our content and community playbook across markets.
In every city, we would meet hundreds of early adopters 1:1 to get to know them personally, understand their pain points, incorporate their feedback into the product, enable them to connect with each other, recognize the most active contributors and do so much more to help members add value to each other! At our peak, we had 35 community managers doing this across the globe at a time when community building was not a buzzword. There were no tools around so we built internal dashboards to make sense of all the activity and quantify the impact. It took anywhere between 6-18 months to build an organically engaging community in a city. It was a lot of hard work and doing things that don’t scale but at the end of the day content and community-led growth formed the backbone of Zomato’s growth flywheel.
The last few years have seen the rise of the ‘community manager’ as a must-have role across companies – both large and small. They play a key role in enhancing the brand and product experience by nurturing champions, enabling connections, providing the best support, curating relevant content, creating experiences, and that’s just scratching the surface. Community builders deserve all the unfair advantages but today’s tools cater largely to the decision makers and not to the ones who are in the trenches. There are millions of communities across Discord, Slack, Facebook, Telegram, Whatsapp, and over 300+ community tools. Yet, engagement data is in silos, there’s no easy way to understand member needs, managing a community involves manual workflows, and it is difficult to quantify the overall impact.
“I love logging into multiple dashboards every day.” - said no community builder ever.
I moved on from Zomato in 2019 and during my professional break, experimented with several ideas and eventually started Threado as a passion project just after the pandemic in 2020 to solve this problem. Shalini soon joined the journey as our first employee and after a few months of tinkering with the initial avatar of Threado, I met my Co-founder, Abhishek Nalin. Abhishek and I are fascinated with the potential of online communities and have a firm belief in the future of community-led growth. We believe that in a world where products are commoditized, building a community is a core differentiator.
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At Threado, we want to empower and champion community builders in every way we can and we’d love to see millions of businesses grow through the power of community. And today, we are taking the first steps toward achieving our vision. Abhishek, I, and the rest of the Threado Team are super excited to bring you three major announcements: