Tech Week I Startup School: Community as your Competitive Advantage | Chicago
About this event
Community-driven companies harness the power of a highly engaged, connected, and passionate ecosystem of members to drive adoption, growth, and success. Community-driven founders are compelling storytellers who articulate a mission that a global community of members, customers, partners, and advocates can organize around.
And when a company is able to make the transition from simply delivering a product to building a community, they unlock an extraordinary amount of competitive advantages like:
- Enthusiastic members help acquire new members, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and a tight viral loop.
- Members are loath to abandon the community, resulting in increased retention and therefore improved lifetime value.
- Members support one another, resulting in high gross margins due to a lower cost of service.
So join us to meet Andrew Parker, a modern day founder, connecting younger people to older people-- he'll share how he has been able to fundraise from big-name investors Alexis Ohanian and Ashton Kutcher after proving that community is an investment theme.
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Parker founded the fast growing startup in 2017 after watching his grandfather, whom he called Papa, suffer from dementia. When he started, he didn’t realize the market potential. Then he dove deeper into the numbers, and realized that in 2017, 10,000 people were turning 65 a day. In 2020, that’s reached 11,000 daily.
With monthly growth rates of over 20% since inception, Papa is marrying purpose and profit. Joins us to hear lessons every entrepreneur must heed.
Takeaways
- How to build a startup that is balancing humanity and technology
- Fundraising tips and tricks
- Modern Startup Culture for companies under 5 years