Freddy Vega, Platzi | The Power of Community and Content Marketing for Startups [Ep. 37]

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

Community, community, and more community… Today, in the startup ecosystem, everyone talks about community, but the truth is that building one is much harder than it sounds. Perhaps one of the most active technology communities in all of Latin America is Platzi’s, and today we have its CEO and cofounder, Freddy Vega.

We talk about how the Platzi community got started, why building community is a challenge you cannot solve with money, and how content marketing can be a competitive advantage.

Platzi was the first Latin American startup to enter Y Combinator and, to date, has raised capital from investors such as Foundation Capital, Mountain Nazca, and Omydiar Network.

What You Can Learn Today

Strategies for building community
Impact of the community strategy and how to measure it
Content strategy recommendations for startups

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Youtube Timestamps*

The Power of Community at Platzi

[1:03] - How did Freddy arrive at the world of startups?
- The Cristalab and Foros del Web communities
- Startups called web pages
- 10 million unique monthly visits
[3:19] - What role does community play in Platzi’s strategy for product, acquisition, talent, etc.?
- Hope that it works, more than a strategy
- The ClubHouse community
- Intentionality in building a community
- Survivorship bias of startups with a community
- Value of a community based on a sense of belonging and on what is not allowed (rules)
- Difficulty of building community and fragility of the result
[6:48] - What strategies have they learned at Platzi that work, and that do not work, for building community?
- Money invested in creating community
- The Michael Bloomberg campaign case
- Celebrities, advertising, and ads
- Concentration of interaction
- Authenticity, engagement, and organic interaction
[10:03] - How does Platzi measure the impact of its community work?
- Level of interaction and activity
- External and internal communities
- The same product metrics
[11:58] - How do you balance investing in an external community and investing in an internal one?
- Communities are not forced
- Reddit and its initial strategy of fake interactions
- Controlling an external community versus facilitating it
[14:00] - What criteria should an entrepreneur have for deciding whether to invest focus and resources in creating community?
- The Airbnb community and its intentionality
- Knowledge to share around a product
- Facilitating exchange among users
[15:08] - At what point do they decide to build community at Platzi?
- Platzi’s atypical case
- Previously existing communities and user culture
- Importance of the rules of conduct within the community
- Aggressiveness within video game communities
- Facebook as a place to buy and sell
- Twitter as a reference for community-driven product development (community-guided product development)
- TikTok and its visibility algorithm

Content Marketing for Founders and Startups, According to the Platzi Experience

[19:29] - How did Freddy get started on social media?
- A passion for writing and sharing
- Twitter and the need to summarize and avoid threads
[23:09] - Freddy’s Twitter account within Platzi’s strategy
- Consequences and implications of authenticity
- Biases connected to personal identity
- Sacrifices of authenticity in order to grow a company
- Similarity among founders of successful companies
- The human cost of starting a company
[28:32] - Reasons for the success of Platzi’s content marketing strategy
- Consistency and discipline for building an audience
- A problem that can be solved with money
- The returns are seen only at the end
- Exponential distribution law (1% of content generates 99% of results)
[30:22] - Opinion on the phrase “every company is a media company”
- Degradation of the image of traditional media
- Acquisition of media outlets by large companies
- Potential of the mass reach and audience size of companies such as Nubank and Uber
[32:48] - How do you know whether to invest in content marketing?
- Importance of the stage the company is in and its level of product adoption
- Media companies that became product companies (from NSB Media to Disney+)
[34:44] - Freddy’s personal management of social media from the start of Platzi until today
- Platzi and its social media management
- Consistency and a healthy community
- Conversations with Platzi students and their success stories
[37:02] - What should a founder who wants to develop a personal brand as part of their startup’s content strategy take into account?
- Each person becomes a brand
- Content planning, choice of social network, consistency
- Strategies for building an audience: being funny versus being authentic
[40:55] - How did they scale Platzi’s authenticity from the beginning to today?
- Clarity of the values and the rules
- Creating community implies having an identity attached to it
- Responsibility for the audience you have

Tweet Round

[44:03] -
- Recommended book: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
- Changes in Latin America’s startup ecosystem: greater ease in asking for help and more M&A
- Founder to interview: David Vélez of Nubank