Community is where the money resides!
Harold Hughes is the founder and CEO of Bandwagon, the venture-backed identity infrastructure company helping customers to transparently aggregate, manage and store valuable consumer identity data, and he stresses the importance of community when building your company.
“The value of community is the fact that you can bring community anywhere,” Harold Hughes told host Will Lucas on the latest episode of the Black Tech Green Money podcast.
He also shares that when you build up a trusted brand, the people will follow and suggests that founders “start with one thing that people are going to pay you for.”
From there, he says figuring out who that group is will determine the capacity in which your brand will be shared with the masses.
“Creating [a] community allows you to do a lot of stuff better,” said Hughes. When he initially set out to begin building Bandwagon, he shares how he posted his company goals to Facebook which in turn created a sense of community around learning but also allowed others to hold him accountable for what he said he was going to do.
Hughes also speaks to his own experience in building a community around his business and pivoting to a Sales As A Service (SAS) company.
“We loved the idea of bringing fans to live events,” he shared. ” Our thought process was that if we could help to create a better experience for fans, they’d be more willing to come out to events.”
For him, an important moment in building his company was understanding that no one really cared about who the company Bandwagon actually was, they were more interested in the sports team whether that be the Dallas Cowboys or the Clemson Tigers.
Instead of leveraging the company name, Bandwagon, on products and services, they switched their handles to “built by Bandwagon.”
For more on community building as a B2B company, how Black founders can avoid getting pigeon-holed, and more listen to the full episode below:
