Bettermode's Journey Through 2021: A Year of Innovation and Growth

If 2020 was the year that entirely transformed the lives of people, 2021 was the year that had the lingering effect. As physical distancing and disruption continued, the need for social connectedness increased.

Similar to COVID in the physical world, communities have also gone viral in the virtual world. But, the virality of online communities is a good thing—they are playing an instrumental role in keeping people connected.

As a company that provides a platform for businesses to create communities, we want to thank our customers for their trust and support! 2021 was a significant year for Tribe since it was a year of unlearning, learning, and setting a foundation to roll out unique features in 2022.

In this post, join us to look back and explore the highlights of 2021:

Successful adoption of the remote-first model

In my 2020 year in review, I mentioned how we adopted the remote-first approach. We entered into 2021 with 25 Tribe members and ended the year with 40 Tribe members.

There are team members from North America to Europe and Asia. We have set up processes for various organizational functions with trial and error and by looking at the best practices of other remote-first companies. We'll continue to optimize how we operate as we learn more from each other and the world around us.

Specifically for communication and collaboration, we're using tools such as Notion, Zoom, and Loom. For example, if we need asynchronous communication with a team member, we leave a video note using Loom. We also maintain some overlap of work hours across teams to make sure we're not blocking any other team member.

So far, the remote work is working out well for us and we're looking to continue this model.

We hired people driven by the idea of community across product, engineering, design, sales, and people & culture. Currently, there are open opportunities in Marketing, community management, and engineering.

Shape the future of human connections wherever you are!

$7.5M Seed financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV

Back in June 2021, we announced the close of seed financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV. We also have the backing of marquee investors such as Inovia Capital, Path Ventures, Garage Capital, Bogaroo, Tribe Capital Partners, Golden Ventures, N49P, and PrimeSet.

We believe that software, when designed and informed by human interaction best practices, will play a key role in creating communities with delightful social experiences. This belief is now reinforced by the seed funding led by the world's top investors.

The reason why we raised capital is tied to the core pillars of Tribe, i.e., customizability, extensibility, embeddability, and scalability.  We listened to an enormous amount of feedback, evaluated our goals, looked at the market landscape, and made a decision to rebuild the Tribe Platform.

This is where we utilized the learnings of the first version of Tribe to build a more robust platform. The subsequent section has more details on this.

New and improved Tribe

We launched the new version of Tribe on 1 June 2021 with a focus on the following core elements:

Customizability → Businesses are empowered to create unique online communities without any coding knowledge with the help of themes, hand-picked color combinations, and configurable community components.

Extensibility → Tribe enables community admins to bring their ideas to life by adding new functionalities to the community with the help of custom apps built by developers.

Embeddability → It is now easier to embed the community or certain components of the community into apps and sites. This is a seamless way to add community touchpoints where your customers already exist.

Scalability → The performance of one community component (e.g., feed, file upload, analytics) doesn't affect the other components. It allows us to add new features at a faster pace.

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These core elements make Tribe, truly a community platform, i.e., a set of software and ecosystem that allows others to build solutions on top of Tribe. This set us apart from any other community solution.

Since June, we have released a range of new features and platform enhancements. Here are the important ones:

Improvements to user experience, engagement, and community structure

This update was released in the last week of December 2021 to set the stage for the unique features we're looking to roll out in 2022. It covers everything from an improved layout and new customization capability to gamification and user experience improvements.

Developer Portal: Bring Your Community Ideas to Life

Extending the capability of the community with custom functionalities is important because each community is unique and they have special requirements to achieve their goals. That's why we built the Developer Portal. It is designed to empower developers so they can help community builders bring their ideas to life.

Zapier integration

The Zapier App instantly converts your community into automated actions and connects your Tribe with potentially 3,000+ apps. Create your own personalized, code-less workflow automation to combine and sync a variety of apps.

Custom Code Snippet App

The Custom Code App provides a powerful option to add additional functionality to your community. You can easily insert custom scripts to the public pages of a community with this app.

Cookie Consent Manager App

This app enables Tribe communities to remain compliant with data protection and privacy laws such as GDPR. When installed, it requires members to opt-in to informed consent before storing or accessing the information on members' devices.

Google Analytics integration

Paired with Tribe's Analytics, Google Analytics expands the possibilities for data measurement by collecting a wide range of web analytics for the community.

Amplitude Analytics integration

This integration combines Amplitude Analytics with Tribe to capture the member properties and actions at a granular level. You can leverage the data to create different member segments, analyze conversion funnel, member stickiness, and retention.

SSO Providers: Auth0, Okta, WordPress, and more

SSO (Single Sign-on) eliminates password fatigue, improves identity protection, and offers an easy login experience to the users. You can also bring these benefits to your online community through any of the SSO providers supported by Tribe.

If you are looking to charge a subscription fee to the members, you can use SSO integration with Memberful and Outseta.

There are many exciting improvements planned for 2022. Check out our public roadmap and stay updated by joining the product updates Space.

Resources for our community

Apart from improving the community platform, we have also started offering resources in Campfire to help customers build thriving communities. Oh, and in case you didn't notice, Tribe's customer community is called "Campfire".

Here are some key initiatives:

Industry expert webinar series

We bring experts in the community management field in this webinar series to share insights on some of the challenging topics and provide a platform for customers to get their questions answers. These webinars are posted in the Community Insights Space in Campfire.

Here is a link to the recording of a webinar we hosted with Richard Millington.

Building with community

Tribe's co-founders host a webinar series to interact with the customers, collect feedback, share future directions, and answer any questions they might have. This webinar series is called - "Shaping the future of Tribe".

Tribe's product team has also started engaging with the customers via monthly webinars to get a deeper understanding of the pain points and share product updates.

Tips & Tricks Space

Apart from the knowledge base and resources on community management, we have created a dedicated space to share the best practices for building a community with Tribe. It helps community admins discover ways to get the most out of the Tribe Platform with examples and guides on community setup, customization, and integration.

Next up: 2022

There is a lot to be done in 2022! We'll roll out unique features based on the strong foundation we have built for the Tribe Platform in 2021. We're also going to double down on the efforts to create resources for building successful communities.

It's quite humbling to experience what we're building is touching millions of people across the world.

Here’s to all of you! May your communities reach their full potential. We’d be thrilled to help you achieve that!