Video

Would you say it’s a full LMS like tutorlms on Wordpress ?

hey how about doing lms courses on heartbeat app.. uploading pre recorded content and pdfs as a course and how good is the security of locking the content from copying. does it has a LMS integrated like circle ?

Love this format!

Thank you Bri & Erin! I actually have a community based on Small Group Cohorts (didn't have a label for it before this) - and I'm working on (with the members) the next iteration as although it's transformational for the members, it's small number of members, and those members and their impact on the world deserves to be much bigger. Funny thing is, I had no idea how to build a community when we started it 5 years ago, so it essentially happened by accident. We just focused on what the members wanted and needed. Now for the next phase I'm deep diving into every resource I can find on what it takes to build a thriving & growing community. This interview was invaluable for me, and reinforces what others have tried to talk me out of what I know to be true - a community business is a business of the heart - not a fast track to easy money😉

I am very impressed with the feeling of trust and curiosity you inspire

Hello Bri, thank you so much for the video. Do members have to access their community on the internet browser or does heartbeat offer an app to users?

Good info, thanks!

Fantastic interview. You are a greater interviewer and I'm now obsessed with The Upside! Thanks Bri.

Hi, Any idea if heartbeat will implement skool like gamification features?

How much must he pay for that Slack? Slack is $7/user/month. Does he get a discount somehow?

Are you still using heartbeat today Bri? If so, what are your thoughts on it now? 🤗

Great video, Bri, thanks. If I subscribe to Heartbeat, would I still need to pay for Zoom, or would I be able to run meetings directly from the platform?

"It's a total mind shift from feeding an audience to fostering a community.” -Bri Leever 💡

First video of yours that I've consumed and it's an awesome one! Thanks for sharing this conversation!

I'm going over the blog where you give the comparison of each. I'm a little confused by this section (will copy/paste). When you say "no broadcasting" but then yes to "video room"...what is the difference? "❌ No broadcasting ✅ Live rooms (can have just a voice room or a video room) on all plans Heartbeat has a video conferencing tool. (Multiple people on a video call):

You are doing amazing things 🙌 congratulations 🎉

Started this video a while back and just rewatched to the end. I had no idea you built the hearth! I’m big on heartbeat and am about to begin building my own community there. Your insights are a valuable resource! Many thanks.

Where does Mighty Networks fit in?

Thank you! Super helpful! very clear!!! could you talk about Scool too? seems a lot of content creators using it

I am launching a community soon and this had a lot of great tips! Thanks. Love the idea of dissecting communities.

Great video. How much is the app on heartbeat?

👍 'promosm'

Yes, the discover feature is confusing. It can work well as the first tab in a space, but it lacks a way to better greet the user and help guide them through the UX. As for onboarding, MN's Welcome Checklist is interesting but still seems lacking. I'm fully onboard with MN for my communities and those I will launch and maintain for clients. Still, MN's community has failed to fully engage me.

Bri, I so appreciate your perspective. MN may better suited to new communities. I appreciate your perspective on Circle and Heartbeat. Those two seem to be community-first platforms like MN is. Thank you for the note on how MN used to be insufferable. MN may fully facilitate full menu build out in the left sidebar. Allowing for a page (feature) within a space is essential for creating an explainer and intro for the space. Please let me know if you have compared platforms for mobile/app. MN seems to do a good job for that. Oversimplification on desktop may contribute to the ease in mobile. I need to watch your video at regular speed to see if you were accidentally clicking on manage and that is why you ended up in unexpected places.

This is such a helpful review- thank you.

Love your content! What platform is nesslabs using for their community? EDIT: Never mind you just said circle!

Hi Bri! We actually did overhaul our navigation in December of 2022 - you can have it be as simple as you'd like (your whole community could be chat, if you want, for example) or you can have a feed (as you mention). Events, livestreaming, courses - you can add as little or as much as you like. We also offer unlimited Spaces, Hosts, and members and don't charge additionally for those unlike some of the other platforms you mention :) - would love it if you took a fresh look at what we offer! Let us know if you have qs we can answer. Thanks for the accessibility shout out!

The Discovery Feed in Mighty Networks has a CZcams Video thumbnail feel to me. That is probably a good thing if the community you are attracting is a regular CZcams user. Thank you for sharing your thought process as you compared the platforms. It is helping to inform my decision. It's hard because each platform has unique features that can make a difference.

Hi Bri: My main reason for leaving Thinkific is they have almost unusable communities, and I didn't want to have my course students have to connect to yet another platform for community I checked out both Circle and MN. Keep in mind I have 2 courses and need to have a very easy to use course platform. I found Circle to be almost unusable in terms of courses, and MN to be very easy and accessible. What I've heard from you so far in terms of superiority of circle or Heartbeat is in terms of live events. I haven't heard anything specific MN is lacking in terms of course communities. Am I missing something?

Hello Bri. I’ve enjoyed a few of your Dissection videos today. I’d love to hear your thoughts on my specific situation! First off, our community requirements are inclusive of a app. We need an app solution with good community features, along with course and livestream capabilities. Do you have good recommendations for us to look at?

Thanks for the video. I want to study and enhance my community. Can you suggest any courses or programs for me?

I had such a fun time chatting with you both!

A common theme with these dissections is that "community" and "ambassador"/"referral credit" flows are often used interchangeably on the brand sites.

Hey, just wanted to drop in and say hi. Thanks for all the nice comments about our Community, and the feedback and ideas you had. Very interesting to hear. Integrating community with the rest of Spotify is the overarching longer-term strategy for sure, and depending how that progresses, there's also the consideration of doing more with the Spotify APIs to bring more user information in from Spotify to the members' profiles. For now, the main use cases we continue to optimise against are Help & Support and Product Ideation, with our Superuser program underpinning things - The Spotify Stars. We are in regular discussions about Artist/Creator community... watch this space.

Great review! I think you called out a lot of really important points, both pro and con. The closing thoughts from Derrick particularly echo my own feelings about the Spotify community though, which is that it's great as a baseline, the fundamentals are pretty well done (although as a more advanced community user I feel a bit stifled by the lack of real category "list" views!). But I actually see it as a *massive* , massive missed opportunity to build community *around the music and artists* . And it makes me wonder if there is any general value in assessing communities on the basis of how much they capitalize on their opportunity *for* community (or perhaps "integration" as an optional metric), when you do these reviews. As an example, with your previous Notion review, although it could be convenient to have an official Notion community integrated into Notion itself, there really is not a large amount of *added* value from doing so, in my view. There is no broader cultural behavior of people talking about PKM and note-taking in a way that is immediately contextual in the app. It doesn't *need* to be connected to and integrated with the actions you're doing *in* the app itself. In other words community activities are not as intrinsically linked with the core service's value and functionality. Whereas in Spotify's case the idea of e.g. talking *about* the song or album or artist or playlist or genre you're listening to *while you're listening* is both hugely appealing (at least to some/many), and has a long history in culture more broadly (outside of the app context 😄). Sharing and talking about music is very much a thing people normally do, so it makes a lot lot of sense for community to be as tightly integrated as possible into the actual music listening experience. If you're not familiar with how SoundCloud does it, check that out, you can actually comment on *moments* in a song, which is really cool (though admittedly maybe overkill). Anyway, I realize it may be asking a lot of the dev team, but at the same time I think community is kind of a fundamental and important part *of* music, so it *should* (in my view) be considered a core part of what they're doing. That has not been the case to-date, and they've been doing this for 15+ years, so they've had plenty of time to add it and get it right. The lack of things that newer players like Apple Music do, such as album notes (and the fact that artist bios are crammed at the very bottom of an artist's screen) makes me feel this is an issue of internal values and priorities rather than a technical one. I also want to note that they do have a great community team, but there are disadvantages to community being (apparently) handled largely by a dedicated and separate team, at least in the case of the feature requests and communication around that. The problems are similar to your dedicated tech support departments that actually have little/no contact with development. You're right that they *appear* to give a lot of good status updates, etc. but if you actually look at the idea-to-implementation times, the consistency around whether ideas are "under consideration" (a status they talk about in their FAQ for the ideas section but that I can't seem to actually search based on) or Closed, and whether they actually get implemented and when, and the number of votes for an idea vs. whether it gets implemented, what I think you actually see is a disconnect between the *apparent* level of transparency, and the *reality* of what gets implemented and when. community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/idb-p/ideas_implemented/tab/most-recent The idea-to-implementation time there seems to be an average of 3-5 years! And the most recent feature to be implemented with more than 5000 votes is in *2019*, and *all* the rest are 2018 or before! community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/idb-p/ideas_implemented/tab/most-kudoed Meanwhile there are tons of ideas with way more votes that *haven't been closed yet*: community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/idb-p/ideas_live/tab/most-kudoed Now, having worked in software development I know that user interest doesn't = a good idea, or something that will be implemented. That's not my concern here. What I'm trying to point out is that if an idea is popular and the devs are open to implementing it, it should be implemented in a reasonable time frame, or the longer time frame should be clearly communicated. If an idea is popular but *isn't* likely to be implemented, it should either be Closed (a status and process they have procedure and rules for), or it should be clearly communicated that it's unlikely to come any time soon. Now *some* of the ideas in most-kudoed do seem to have a reasonable "Not right now" status. Hooray! But then you have 2FA, a super important-seeming thing, last updated by the community team with "under consideration" in... *2018*!? community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Security-2-Factor-Authentication/idi-p/1017889 And that's just one example I found in 30 seconds by looking at their top un-implemented ideas. So there really appears to me to be more of a veneer of transparency to me, unfortunately. And I know exactly how that can often happen when a very well-meaning community or support team wants to reassure people and be a good communicator, but isn't getting good answers from dev, for example. But is it better to have no transparency, or a *false* sense of transparency? Sorry for the super long comment. I'm kinda wordy. 😅

Hi Bri, nice format! If you don't mind I have some feedback for the video. It would be nice to see everybody who is participating in the video right from the get-go. Also, I guess it's intentional that you go in almost "blind"? Sorry to say that, but this didn't help the episode (imo that may work better stream-style format on twitch or youtube). I think that's mainly because the notion community was so disjointed but I think it wouldn't hurt to not go in blind, have high-/lowlights you want to focus on and see if the guests agree/disagree or add new things. That may also help with structuring the video a little bit better. I'm looking for quality community management videos and think this format really has great potential. So please don't be discouraged by my comment. Wish you all the best for the upcoming episodes!

I totally agree with all your feedback! And this has confused me continuously as I have watched Notion's ongoing rise. Notion has been applauded for their community approach, yet I find it highly fragmented and confusing. But somehow... *it's working* . So what the heck is going on? Why is this working? What can we learn from this? If there was anything missing from your review, it's getting at those answers, or at least discussing why it seems successful despite the obvious apparent flaws you identified. I grant it's a hard question to answer though. My take is that Notion's "community" is *entirely* community-driven, community-built. The only official "community" channel is Twitter, as far as I know. And I think quite honestly they just lucked out to benefit from a lot of user enthusiasm, with Notion being one of the earliest and most social media-friendly of the "no code" tools, and the vacuum left by Notion themselves *not* providing community was luckily filled by user enthusiasm. But I don't think it's necessarily a strategy you can rely on or recommend, necessarily. There is something to be said for "supporting" the users in doing community around your product, of course. But not having something official feels like a big liability and even if it's not a problem for Notion now, it could easily become one in the future. They are riding a wave of user enthusiasm, but without control of *any* of their community spaces (and now they might be about to lose the *one* they do have control over, Twitter! 😅), they can't rely on that forever to keep growing and improving things. So I think it's quite short-sighted what they're doing, even though it has admittedly been working for them for several years now. It's always a bit challenging to level all this criticism at something that *seems* to be working well, and is clearly "successful" in the sense of user numbers, etc. But an interesting aspect of the scattered nature of their community channels (essentially all unofficial) is that it's nearly impossible for anyone, even Notion themselves, to know how *healthy* the communities are. You can say there are a lot of different ones, you can get a rough idea of user numbers within each and in total, but being spread across so many platforms, so many tools, and not having admin control of any of them, how does Notion even know how well their communities are functioning? Let alone any of us? Again, I think they're running on good fortune, not community savvy. For a look at what I would argue is a much more skillfully but still organically developed community around a similar tool, check out Obsidian. Company-led Discord, Discourse (forum), and moderated Reddit, among many other spaces. They are not exclusive of a multitude of smaller community spaces like Notion has (there are certainly many of those), but they have some of the most vibrant (and friendly and helpful!) *official* community spaces I've seen. Setting aside the functions of both tools entirely, I think they are a really interesting contrast in community approaches, and I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on the Obsidian onboarding and community experience.