You’re Invited: Join Piktochart’s Slack Community

In a short five years, Piktochart has grown from an idea in our co-founder Ai Ching Goh’s mind to nine million users worldwide. Over the years, our team has seen that people associate Piktochart with more than just a way to make their information beautiful.

• They feel pride and excitement after creating their first infographic.
• Piktochart community members instantly connect when they meet at our worldwide event series, PiktoTour.
• Countless educators, marketers, content creators, and non-profit managers have blogged about their success using Piktochart, and even share tips and tricks with their peers at conferences and summits.

A Place for Friends

When I first joined Piktochart, I wrote about being inspired by brands like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Unsplash to create a brand that goes beyond a mere product. The goal is simple — go where the Piktochart community is already thriving, see where we can add value, and let others in on the fun.

My role focuses on interacting with our users at every level. Each day, I work to uncover and develop the community that has organically emerged since the product launched in 2012.

Rather than creating a community, our team aims to simply join and strengthen it.

After witnessing the energy of PiktoTours, an idea came to mind:

What if we could channel the excitement we are seeing on social media, blogs, and at in-person events into a single online space?

What if there was a place where Piktochart friends, users, and everyday people could gather to share ideas, learn, and build community?

Choosing a Community Platform

There are many platforms online that provide ways to see our ideas come to life. From Discourse to a ZenDesk community space, there are no shortage of platforms to vet.

One platform stood out to me: Slack.

Not only is Slack how we communicate across continents here at Piktochart, but its use among community builders in the startup world has been on the rise. I am a member of around a dozen Slack communities right now, and find tremendous value in what is being curated, created, and shared.

Slack’s flexibility, ease, innovative features, and growing user base convinced us to try using it as our community platform.

Slack is pretty awesome. Launched in February 2014, it is now the fastest growing B2B application ever and is being used by over four million daily active users. And Slack is where things are happening — the average user spends 10 hours per weekday plugged into Slack!

Using Slack, we can organize community conversations in open channels by giving everyone a transparent view into everything that’s going on. Setting up a community profile and building relationships with others is a piece of cake.

There isn’t a requirement to be a member of a social network like Facebook or Twitter to create a login, which reduces barriers for those who have left networks that don’t serve them.

Slack also facilitates one-on-one private messaging and even calls, which is perfect for collaboration or asking another community member specific questions.

By building a Slack community rather than a more traditional help desk forum, we could encourage conversations and add real value to community members beyond just how to use our product.

Introducing Piktochart’s Slack Community

Our four reasons for creating a Slack Community are simple:

We launched in private beta late March to give Slack a test drive and hear what community members think of the platform. We reached out to 200 partners, ambassadors, guest bloggers, and friends of Piktochart to invite them to join us. We heard back from a little over 10 percent of those we invited and welcomed them into our experiment.

Over the course of a month, we polled the 24 participants on why they joined the Slack community to be sure the platform was a good fit and that the content we planned to provide was relevant.

Here are the reasons why our beta participants chose to join us (respondents picked more than one reason for joining):

From the research our content team and UX researchers have conducted in the past, it came as no surprise that 75 percent of the participants had joined the community to learn from others. Showcasing examples of what can be done with Piktochart by others is something we talk about often on social media and on our blog — it helps with inspiring new creations!

However, what did surprise us was the excitement around testing new Piktochart features.

In addition to the four goals we started with, we also saw an opportunity to get help with growing the Piktochart product and to receive valuable feedback on new features. We were thrilled to see so many beta participants ready and willing to help us create the next amazing features for the entire Piktochart community!

You’re invited to Piktochart’s Slack Community

Today is the day our team has been anxiously awaiting — public community launch day!

We drafted Slack Community guidelines in an effort to grow this community with like-minded, positive, and supportive members from day one. We talk about Piktochart company values and how they apply to our Slack community. It’s exciting to see that the values we live by each day will be a part of this community as well.

We welcome feedback from members on how we can improve these guidelines. It is a living document that we hope will evolve over time.

We have also launched a signup form for those interested in joining us on Slack. After signing up, we will review your submission and email you all the information you need to get started.

Come join us! Our small community is a bubbly group of people we admire and care about. What could be better than having people creating value for each other?

We need you there and we’d be honored to have you join us on this journey. See you on Slack!

This post originally appeared on Piktochart’s blog.