Why I started this podcast (solo episode)

(You can also watch this episode on YouTube)

Today’s guest is… me, Steve McLeod!

In this special solo episode, I share why I created The Community Lounge podcast and how it connects to my product, Feature Upvote.

I tell the story of how the podcast become a way for me to connect with community managers, learn how they work, and provide a space to share their stories. I talk about how it all started, the lessons learnt on the way, and how feedback from the games industry helped shape Feature Upvote into what it is today.

And especially, how one person’s help made Feature Upvote what it is today.

The Community Lounge is brought to you by Feature Upvote – Painlessly collect feedback from your players. More insights, less noise.

Transcription

Hey everybody, Steve here. Today I’m both the host and the guest. Yes, this is a solo episode. It’s something I haven’t done before in the community lounge podcast, but I wanted to take one episode out of the current season to explain a bit, a bit to you about why I’m doing this podcast, what I hope to achieve and to tell a bit of the backstory. Now, solo episodes are harder to pay attention to as a listener.

Because you don’t get that variety of voices changing the to and fro of two people. So I’m going to try and keep this shorter than usual, about half the normal length. Okay. Let’s get into it. I’m going to ask some questions and answer the questions. So question one, why, why am I creating the community lounge podcast? Well, this is the big picture answer, which is it’s a project to help me with marketing my product Feature Upvote.

But there’s also some smaller or medium picture answers. It’s a way to help me network with my existing customers, to build up my relationship with them. It’s a way to network with potential new customers and even to get to meet people who might one day need Feature Upvote or know somebody else who needs it.

At this point, I want to tell you a little story about season one of this podcast. We didn’t mention it much at the time, but the first two guests from the first two episodes were both had been existing customers of Future Upvote. One guest had been a customer. He introduced it to the studio he was working for, but then he left that studio, thus still using it to this day at the studio he used to work for.

And the second guest is from a company that’s a studio that’s currently using Feature Upvote and have been using it for years. They really seem to be happy with it. The story doesn’t end there. Another person I talked to in season one. They’re not a customer. They haven’t been a customer, but he got in contact with me at one of the big industry events to talk to me about Feature Upvote, to tell me that he was very interested in introducing it to their studio.

But at this point, they haven’t done so. It can take a long time for these things to happen. So it was also a chance for me to get to learn more about him and his role in the industry and how he works and so on. So you can see there how it’s really good for networking with existing customers and potential customers. But I’ve also been inviting people onto the show that who I think have a story to share, who I think it would be interesting for both me and for you to hear.

Now, if we continue with that medium picture, every time I share an episode of the community lounge on LinkedIn or on social media, it’s a chance, the chance just to show to other Community Managers in the industry and other people in the wider video games industry that we exist and what I’m doing. So it’s very much a, a marketing project for my product Feature Upvote, but I’m hoping it’s more than just that. I’m hoping it’s also a way in which.

You can learn about community management. hope it’s providing a great resource for Community Managers. A chance for you to hear the stories of how people became Community Managers of learning how to do your job better and even sharing how you do your job. And finally, it’s helping me learn more about Community Managers. I’m not a Community Manager. I run a software company, but it’s Community Managers who seem to be bringing Feature Upvote into game studios and publishers.

And I need to know more about how you operate, how you think, how this job is defined. And it turns out it’s loosely defined. Everybody seems to have a different definition. And this is the stuff I’ve been learning by running this podcast and inviting people like you onto it. So there’s the first question answered. Why am I creating the community lounge podcast as a promotional tool for my product? Yes, but also a way to network and a way for me to learn and hopefully a resource for you.

Hey, I want to just briefly tell you a story about a friend of mine who is a product, is a Community Manager, or at least was she’s now in a more senior community related role. And when I, even before I started this podcast and I wanted to learn more about how to reach Community Managers, I got in touch with her and asked if we could chat for a while on zoom. And I asked her, where do you learn about how to do your job better? What are the events you go to, et cetera?

I asked her, what are the events for Community Managers? And she said, I don’t know, none. I asked her, what are the podcasts for Community Managers? She said, none that I know of. I asked her, what are the open communities that you can go to as a Community Manager? She said, she didn’t know of any. And I was a bit surprised. And then I started doing my research, hoping to find these communities, perhaps so that I could sponsor them or advertise on them. I was surprised, not surprised. I basically saw what she was saying. There really isn’t much there. So I’m hoping that with the community lounge, we’re at least helping improve that situation. And we’re not done by the way. Each episode of this podcast is giving us helpful information that one day will hopefully become some useful content on our website and which all Community Managers can learn.
Okay. Let’s go back a step now with question two. What is this product I keep talking about? I say that this is a promotional tool to some degree for my product. What is this product? Well, the product, as I’ve said, is a Feature Upvote. It’s a feedback management platform. It’s about eight years old. And when we first started it back in 2017, we marketed it as a tool for software companies, for small software companies.

And yet, and yet, somehow, despite us never marketing it to the video games industry, it became unexpectedly popular amongst the video games industry. It became something useful for video games where they were drowning in player feedback. They found it really hard trying to manage it on Discord or Reddit or Steam forums. And they kept on having to deal with getting the same feedback over and over again.

And I’m happy about this because I have to say the, customers we had before, nothing wrong with them, but it was boring corporate world, right? And video games companies are actually nice customers to have. They’re nice customers doing nice, enjoyable work. They’re doing interesting things. It’s an interesting industry and they seem to be very happy and content customers. So we made it our main focus.

You know, the strange thing is back when our focus was actually a wider among software companies, if you had gone to our homepage, then you would have seen the most corporate, dull looking website because you know, we wanted it to feel right for people in corporate software companies. had this artwork that was this very pale blue stick figure type of thing that’s used in corporate sites and the whole text that really didn’t sparkle.

And yet despite that, despite the fact that there was nothing about our website that said this was the right place for video games companies, they were still finding us, signing up for our free trial and becoming customers. So yeah, we seem to have um…
We seem to have hit upon a niche and now we’ve moved the whole company to focus on that as of about eight months ago, as of about September 2024. And I tell you, it’s so much more enjoyable than surfing the corporate world.

Okay, move on to let’s move on to question three. I’m going to go back another step even further. Why is it that Feature Upvote feedback management platform is popular with video games companies? Good question. Self-serving question. You’re right. But the answer is because of Rubén. Because of who? Because of Rubén. And there’s another story to tell. So Rubén was working with me back when we started Feature Upvote. At the time we were three people in this small software company I run.

And we had another product that was our main focus. Now, Rubén and the other team member went away and I was the only one home here in Barcelona for a week or two. And while they’re away, I had been thinking of this idea of creating a feedback management platform for a while, but I hadn’t mentioned it to anybody. And while they were away, I made some wireframes like of how this tool might look and how it might work. didn’t even have a name for it at the time.

But it was basically what Feature Upvote is today. And when the team came back from their respective holidays and I showed them what I’d been working on, they were both excited. But Rubén in particular was really keen to work on this product. And I was a bit surprised at the time because I couldn’t see how it was so interesting for him, but he really liked the idea. Rubén, I have to add, had a background in the video games industry. Now, if I had been thinking or listening properly at the time, I would have asked him why he was so interested and so excited. And I would have learned a lot. And probably I would have saved some years and realizing that the video games industry is where we should focus.

Rubén was working half time with me. So he was working four hours every morning, Monday to Friday. Then he’d go home for lunch. And then he was working on another project, a video game with three of his friends or acquaintances. I really don’t remember exactly. But amongst this group of people working on a video game, he was both the game designer and the customer support person. Let’s face it, when you’re in a very small team, everybody has multiple hats. They hadn’t yet launched, but he really wanted to use Feature Upvote with this game. We hadn’t launched either video Feature Upvote currently at that time had one product using it. And that was our existing product. And it was in beta. was private beta. No one else knew about it, but he really wanted to use it already for their game in time for their launch.

And again, I didn’t quite get it. It’s like, we’re not making this as a video games tool. Like, why would you want to use it? Like it’s for software companies. Again, if I had listened, if I had asked them some questions, I would have saved years. But Rubén saw something I didn’t see. He saw that this was a tool that could really help manage the flood of player feedback. So Rubén and his team did launch their video game.

And it was really successful really quickly. This is a great thing to have when you’re in private beta with a product like Feature Upvote, because your product is getting stress tested by somebody who’s on your side. I had thought that Feature Upvote, you know, a product might get a hundred pieces of feedback over a year or two or whatever. Video games get that much feedback in a week, sometimes even in a day. So Rubén’s team.
They had a good launch and before we knew it, they had like a thousand pieces of feedback and Feature Upvote. And it actually broke it. Feature Upvote couldn’t handle more than a thousand pieces of feedback. We quickly fixed that and got it working again. Um, so no problems there, but Rubén would come in on a Monday morning and he would say, Hey, I’m really struggling with problem X. Could we work this week on fixing it and Feature Upvote? For example, I’m really struggling when I get 10 pieces of feedback in a day and I want to approve it all. And it’s really monotonous having to go into each piece of feedback one by one, look at it, approve it, go back. Is there a way we can do it in bulk? It was a good request, so we did it. And then the next week he might come in and say, um we’re getting feedback that has like two suggestions in one. We need an easy way to split it. Currently I’m having to go and create it manually and it’s really time consuming. And I thought, yeah, that makes sense.

So we added a split button where you could turn one piece of feedback into two. And because Rubén was really using this feature, we managed to make the usability, the user interface off this split feature really good. And we did the same with merging duplicates and with our search feature, with adding screenshots, was all stuff that he was really finding frustrating. So we would fix it. Hey, if you’re ever making a product yourself, you can’t beat having somebody in your team who’s actually using it for real life because they’re coming in with all these feedback, but they’re also testing your, your solutions to their problem. So I have a lot to thank Rubén for. He left our team a long time ago. He’s now working in a well-known games-related company in Spain, here in Spain. And that’s the answer to the question. Why is feature up for popular video games companies?
A of has to do with the decisions Rubén encouraged us to make and boy I wish I had listened more.

The fourth question I have for myself today, question four, why am I making this podcast for Community Managers in particular? Why not for other roles in the video games industry? It’s a simple answer. They are the ones who seem to introduce Feature Upvote into studios or publishers. That’s Community Managers. We have talked to lots of customers and asking, who is the person in charge? Who’s the person off the Feature Upvote board or who is the person who introduced them?
And almost every time, if it’s a video games company, the studio or publisher, the answer is a Community Manager. Sometimes it’s people with a related role, some type of marketing person or customer support. But then when we talk more about, when we ask more about what they’re doing, we realize there’s a real community management aspect of what they’re doing.

Often when a game has a better than expected launch and the community team or customer support team are suddenly overwhelmed with feedback and they go and talk to their colleagues or their, um, their contemporaries in other companies asking for ideas for how to fix this. get told Feature Upvote is a great way to deal with that. So, and again, it’s that community management world where it’s, it’s been spread. So it made a lot of sense that the other people I want to have on the show, the other people such as yourself I want to talk to, the other people I want to promote the podcast amongst.

So wrapping up, you might be asking, so what, why should I care? And this is a good question. Why should you care? Why should you care about what I’m doing with this podcast? Well, you should care because I’m trying to make it a place for Community Managers to learn from others. If you’ve listened to a few episodes, you might notice that there’s certain questions I’m asking over and over again. I’m asking Community Managers, how do you learn to do your job better?

I’m asking Community Managers, what tips do you have for other people? I’m asking Community Managers to tell their story of how they got into the role. And I’m hoping that these answers are something that we can all learn from. I’ve been learning a lot. Hopefully it’s also something that you are learning from.

I’m also wanting it to be a place for you as a Community Manager. Assuming you are a Community Manager, maybe one day you’ll come on a future episode and you’ll tell your story. If this isn’t something interesting for you, if you are interested in the idea of being on this podcast one day to tell your story as a Community Manager, do get in touch. You can either email me at steve@featureupvote.com or you can connect with me on LinkedIn and DM me.

We’ll have all of that in the show notes, of course. So there you have it. That’s the story of why I’ve created the community lounge podcast. That’s the story of the product I keep talking about Feature Upvote. That’s the story of why I think Feature Upvote is popular with video games companies. And that’s the story of why I’m talking to Community Managers in particular. Okay. That’s all. Thanks for listening. Bye.