Creating community and subject authority and then building a business for this community is a strategy fast gaining ground.
What does authority-based community building mean? This means creating consistent value addition for a group that looks forward to your offering. Value creation can be in any form ( learning, awareness, understanding) and is not dependent on specific mediums for its delivery. However, here in this post, we will talk about the value offered primarily through online content and information.
Ditto seems to have executed this perfectly. Today, Dito is in a quest to simplify the process of insurance buying. An interesting fact to know here is that the founders of Ditto are the same set of people who have been running the financial newsletter Finshots.
Finshots was started to make financial news accessible in a simple and easy-to-understand style. Finshots offers just one news item a day. In a short span of two years, Finshots has managed to have more than 2 lakh subscribers.
Before Finshots and the likes of The Ken, financial news on the online medium was dependent primarily on the web editions of business newspapers, the content of which was suited for the print medium but wasn’t actually readers friendly as per the standards of the web.
After successfully delivering Finshots and having created genuine credibility, the founders of Finshots then ventured into the online Insurance selling business.
We know that operating a finance news portal and insurance selling are two different core operations and require differentiated skills. The founders of Ditto certainly possess them, now that we know that Ditto Insurance is doing so well. Of course, there are factors bigger than community building that has contributed to Ditto’s success.
What the Finshots community did is that it ensured a ready set of an audience of finance-based news, which could also be targeted for a financial product that Ditto has to offer.
Being the news and analysis provider, Finshots tapped into a community of people that was financially savvy. The content also helped build the authority of Finshots as a trusted entity. And, if one can trust an entity for its knowledge and insights, it can also be trusted for its other actions. Anybody who believed in Finshot’s idea of financial news presentation would also believe in its other business activities.
In the case of Ditto and Finshots, it is entirely possible that creating Ditto was an afterthought. What is important to note here is that business building on the power of community and subject authority can be planned. If you intend to build a business, you can look to build a community of subscribers first, based on quality content offerings.
