How to build a thriving community ft. CTO at Reddit, Chris Slowe

This is Grace Weekly, where you can find the best take-outs we have collected for you, taken directly from our “Smart Venture Podcast” and our interviews with the best of the best.

Did you miss last week’s newsletter and the best tips on how to monetize your content ft. Austin Evans (1Billion+ views on YT)? You can find it here!

But what’s content without a community to share it with? Let’s find out how to build one with our weekly advice from the best entrepreneurs out there ft. this week’s guest Chris Slowe

Chris Slowe is the CTO and founding engineer at Reddit. He helped build Reddit, sold it, and has recently come back with the other co-founders to rebuild the platform. He is currently leading the engineering division and the architectures at Reddit. Prior to Reddit, he holds a PhD in Physics from Harvard University.

What’s content without community?

When you found the best meme ever and you have to tell everyone about it.

In the last few weeks we have found so many good take-outs about how to build the best content for your business, but something every entrepreneur should also take into account is how to build a nice, self-sustaining community around it. If you want to learn how to do it it’s best to get advice from someone that has years of experience in that, like Chris.

Parts of this newsletter are freely taken from our interview with Chris and adjusted for reading. Everything a person says in the interview only reflects his/her own opinion, not the newsletter or our brand.

GG: Why do you think Reddit grew steadily compared to other companies that you've worked for, especially at the beginning?

CS: This is something that wasn't obvious at the time, we didn't realize that Reddit originally had an immediate product-market fit. That phrase didn't even exist until five years after Reddit was founded. Reddit always filled a solution to some, it filled a need that people had. It took us another 10 years to articulate what that need was, and right now, the way we describe it is that Reddit is a community platform, and we help people find community and belonging. That enrichment seems obvious now, but at the time, it was like we were just trying to get people entertaining stuff and a chance to communicate. User acquisition for Reddit was difficult, but once we get people, they stick. There's something magical in the product that makes them want to stay. 

Would you like to join our community?

CS: To contrast, for example, working on Hipmunk was the opposite of Reddit in many ways. Hipmunk was a travel startup, the first opportunity to grow a company past its startup phase, that taught us how to grow a company by learning how to hire, and fire, and the importance of management. Every user we gained on Hipmunk was hard-fought, and retaining users on a travel startup was a big deal. Seeing the same user twice in a year meant we succeeded. This was very different from Reddit, where we talked about daily active users and retention rates on a day-to-day basis. The nice thing about the contrast between the two was that after five years of working at Reddit, having a company with a built-in business model was a breath of fresh air. We got to really learn about the value of experimentation. When you have a funnel, you don't want to mess it up, especially if the last step is someone entering their credit card number. You want to make sure everything is working perfectly, or you risk losing users. Making sure we had a good idea of what the UX should be, our goals, vision, and mission became part of running a company. We discovered this while working on Hipmunk, and bringing that back to Reddit was actually the fun part.

GG: With a travel startup, it’s hard to make people stick around, whereas, with Reddit, people started using it every day right away. What were the different problems you faced?

CS: One of the fake taglines for Reddit that I really like was "come for the cat, stay for the community". Initially, Reddit's attraction was entertainment or information. The community at Reddit has always had an innate snarky skepticism, which has been a part of the culture for the entire duration of the site. And it means that Reddit is the one place on the internet where the comments are actually better than the content, when traditionally it's like, “why would you read comments?” That said, we put a lot of effort and time into making sure that the experience is smooth, because we've always been outnumbered by our user base by about a million to one, and so whatever things we do have to scale up faster than our team can. And so, we've always tried to optimize for community self-governance and make sure that we can actually keep track of it. So, for one example, voting on Reddit has been a core competency since the very beginning. With Hipmunk, the funnel is just so sacred. You have to make sure that with every step you add to it, you're not going to lose users. And if you're talking about optimizing for getting single digits of bookings in a unit of time, that better be as tight as possible. You have to be able to identify all the places where you're losing people and why. We always have to scale up the product, the experience, and the technology, all of which have different pitfalls and learnings along the way. Applying these learnings to Reddit it's more challenging due to the vast amount of activity happening on the platform at any given time.

“I will show you the power of cat memes.”

GG: How do you keep a community so strong? 

CS: Where we put a lot of our work is to figure out what we call authentic behavior. This is a way to absorb things like spam, which is the first problem encountered while building a community. It is impossible to do a perfect job on spam, but we catch 99.9% of it that's actually going out. Going up from there is providing a safe environment for users. We just keep trying to keep the bar for discourse high and pay attention to user safety as a main component of how we operate. We try to facilitate our users being able to see what they want, to control what information they share, and honestly have a fun but real experience. And it's a very tough line to be able to stay on top of. Edgy but safe is difficult, but we'll always try.

GG: This reminds me of an Innovation Stack. We had the Co-founder of Square Jim McKelvey on Smart Venture Podcast (you can find our best take-outs from our interview with him here dear reader), he wrote a book called “The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time”, and essentially a lot of things you guys were doing made Reddit “unbeatable”, I guess even uncopyable if other apps are trying to replicate the community feeling. Do you feel that having a safe community and self-governance helped you in this?

CS: Yeah, I think what has been really hard to replicate from Reddit is the platform culture, and also all the cultures that are formed in the communities. There have even been some fantastic studies of how rules on Reddit have turned into cultural norms. It's almost like watching experimental sociology.

“Another s#$&poster. Unbelievable.”

GG: When it comes to hiring, Reddit seems to be proactive and hiring really technical people. As someone who is non-technical, how do you recognize good technical talent and what benchmarks do you look out for?

CS: It's been a game of continuously trying to raise our bar for the talent we hire. The nice thing about this is that as you hire better people, they naturally attract better people and the company gets better, almost like magic. Getting started is always the hard part, and there's importance in having good people in your initial founding team. Growing a business is tough because if you're constantly raising your bar, it means you may grow past some of the people you hired early on. This can be an opportunity or a crisis, depending on how things are arranged. The opportunity is that as the business moves, you need to keep growing to keep up with it. As for recognizing the right talent, defining your culture helps you identify the traits you're seeking in potential hires. For Reddit, we prioritize candidates who are hardworking and collaborative. Given that it’s a community platform, it's essential that our team members work well with others. As a general rule, if they seem really smart, but you can't understand what they're doing or how they're trying to achieve it, it's probably not going to work. They can be super awesome and a great person to start with, but you have to be able to communicate with them, especially as a co-founder. In the initial relationship, you have to share some common values and frameworks to talk about.

“You know what rhymes with opportunity? Community. Yeah, we said it.”

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So what do we take out from this? People want to feel a sense of belonging whenever they are online, and building a community of like-minded people can really fast-track your business to succeed and open it to new business opportunities. (On top of the friends you make along the way). 

Top takeaways from our newsletter this week:

Different business ventures require and help you build a diverse set of skills.

Trying out new things has value but don’t let it impact your sales cycle.

Nothing beats a good, friendly community.

Self-governance in a community can help you focus on something else.

People that share a common ground work better together.

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