Can you really scale community?: A chat with Laura Nestler

“Community is not transactional by nature. Humans seek to connect on a deeper level. They’re looking for validation or for support or for something bigger than themselves.

Now that community is such a buzzword. Everyone wants it and they want it quickly. We have more levers than ever, and they work. But when you growth hack with incentives, what you gain in volume, you erode in authenticity.” — Laura Nestler via the Get Together podcast

So what are our options if we want to grow an authentic community that aligns with business goals and is valuable to community members? If anyone knows how to scale community collaboration and connection, it’s Duolingo’s Global Head of Community, Laura Nestler. (Laura also helped shape Yelp’s community-driven growth!) Pre-Covid, Duolingo community members were holding over 700 in-person events per week. Her team made a hard pivot, shifting to online events, and ramped up to 300 online events in a short period! I reached out to Laura to see if she could help us understand how to thoughtfully scale community programs (and get the resources needed to do this in a healthy way).

I know it took lots of testing and time to find the right events model that could scale. What kept you going? How did you know it would work?

I didn’t! I had a hypothesis that it would work, but I certainly didn’t know, and this impacted my approach. I firmly believe you must treat your community programs with the same rigor as you would any other product trying to find market fit. So while I didn’t know if it would work, I did know that I could apply principles to cheaply prove my concept and then systematize. As I saw signs of success, I transferred more resources in the form of time and money into proving it out further. This is a slow and measured approach, and it requires that you’re not precious about your idea. If you’re proven wrong (and when, because it will happen), you must realistically assess whether you’re solving for a real problem.

Can you help someone starting from scratch? What steps to they need to take to test a community strategy?

Yes! Step 1 = Testing it yourself. You need to understand the pain points/problem you’re solving.