Building a Chat Community for Embeddable

When we kicked off the Embeddable journey, we knew we needed an awesome chat community. Somewhere our customers could go for teamwork, swapping ideas, and giving each other a hand.

Why a Chat Community?

• First things first, we wanted a space where users could talk directly to us, the Embeddable team. Whether it’s tips, advice, or the best ways to use Embeddable, we wanted a way for our customers to reach us easily.
• We wanted to foster a place where users could learn from each other, show off their Embeddables, and level up together.
• We wanted to keep it casual. No formal emails or structured feedback requests, just a straightforward chat forum.
• We knew we’d be sharing updates and events, and we wanted these to reach our customers in a space where they already spend time with us.

Our Community Space

First things first, we had to figure out what we wanted our community to be. We decided on 3 core requirements:

• Casual: We weren’t going for suits and ties. We wanted this to be a place where everyone could just be themselves.
• Searchable: It’s really annoying when you can’t find something you know someone shared yesterday - so having a good search function was a must-have.
• Easy to join: Joining shouldn’t be like solving a puzzle. Signing up should be a pleasure, not a trial.

Spreading the Word

Next step was to let everyone know about the community. Here’s how we got the word out:

• New users: When new users joined up, we sent them a special invite to the community, so they could be a part of the family from day 1.
• Website: We put links to the community right on our website so anyone dropping by could easily join.
• Social Media: We got social and shared the join link on all our platforms.

Picking the Perfect Home: Discord vs. Slack

When it came to choosing where our community would live, we considered two main options: Discord and Slack.

Slack:

• More of a business vibe, which might work for some folks.
• Everyone in tech knows Slack.
• Hooks up to other tools we use, which makes life easier.
• Our team already use Slack.

Discord:

• A more chill space - coming from being born as a gaming chat space.
• Home to a lot of technical communities.
• Some great communities live there already - e.g. Retool, Airbyte.
• Great reputation as a community building tool.

Switching Sides

Even though we started with Discord, we hit a few bumps:

1. Confusing Interface: Some folks found Discord a bit tricky if they weren’t used to it.
2. Joining: Getting new folks to join wasn’t as smooth as we hoped.
3. Internal preference: Switching between internal Slack and external Discord was not ideal and let to a lot of additional effort required for communication.
4. Our early adopters: Most of our early birds were more familiar with Slack than Discord.

So, we switched gears. Before launching our first group of users - the Lighthouse Program - we moved everything over to Slack. It made things flow better and matched up with what our users were already comfortable with.

What we’ve learned

It’s been proven in the weeks since to be a great decision to make the move for our team and our customers at Embeddable. It’s also great proof that it’s never too late to make a change if you feel it’s in the best interests of your internal and external stakeholders. Building a community is really important to get right - but it doesn’t have to be on the first go!

So, if you want to take part in the Embeddable Slack community and have access to our team and community members for support, you can join us here.

We look forward to seeing you there!