Walking in the user's shoes🚶🏽♀️Cindy Au of Kickstarter, Zagat, and Brainly
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Episode at a glance:
GUEST: Cindy Au
COMMUNITY: Kickstarter, Zagat, and Brainly
HOSTS: Bailey Richardson & Maggie Zhang
“When you work in community, you get to be the person who thinks about the customer all day long, who thinks about people, who thinks about how they connect.” - Cindy Au
Show Notes
Cindy Au set out for a career in academia but soon found herself as employee #9 at Kickstarter. Back then, the community team would review and help write each project submitted to the site. Later as their VP of Community, she oversaw the evolution of Kickstarter as it grew from 50,000 users to 10 million.
After her experience at Kickstarter, Cindy launched the first community program at Zagat, the restaurant discovery platform. Now she’s the Director of Community & Engagement at Brainly, the world’s largest peer-to-peer learning community.
With over a decade of experience, Cindy shared how she learned by walking in the shoes of users and how she fostered a team of niche experts that served sub-communities on the Get Together podcast.
While you’re listening, keep an ear out for our favorite insights from Cindy:
Though core tasks may vary, community building is about building with users.
“Those of us working in community [ten years ago] walked into an area that needed definition,” Cindy shared.
When Cindy was asked “What is community? What do you do?” she jokingly responded, “me and my team, we do everything that’s not actually coding the site.”
The root of her work has always been in taking care of and being responsible for people — customers, users, and stakeholders. Cindy and her team gave early Kickstarter users personal feedback on their projects in writing and even wrote the campaign copy for their page. She used her skills from her PhD in English to “TA” creators on Kickstarter and supercharge their ability to succeed on the site.
“Walking in the shoes of the user,” is essential to understanding them.
At Kickstarter, early employees were encouraged to launch a project of their own, so they can really understand what it’s like to run a campaign. Cindy launched a Kickstarter book campaign with her sisters telling 20th century history through the eyes of great leader’s dogs. They called it Canine Chronicles. Her project took two years and taught her many lessons about the difficulties of staying on schedule, and running a creative project. This experiment allowed her to develop a layer of empathy and understanding for the Kickstarter users.
The canines of the Canine Chronicles
Build teams to support your community’s interests.
While Cindy was at Kickstarter, she hired experts in each industry to be the community lead for creatives making projects for that industry. From music to video games, books to tech, Cindy had an expert that both she and her community could rely on for insights. She described this approach as “thinking like a newspaper.”
Dim Sum Club dining experience.
Communities often spring from a personal interest or passion.
Cindy started Dim Sum Club as a personal project to unite people over a love of dim sum. When Cindy began at Zagat, her Dim Sum Club turned into one of their first community launch events. The program eventually expanded beyond Dim Sum with the intention to give people the opportunity to come together and just try something new with other people who love food.This community started in a personal place before it became strategic, something that we see over and over again in our community research.
Get Together is produced by the team at People & Company.
We published a book and we’ve worked with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
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