Welcome back to The Community Strategy Podcast! 

Today’s guest is Mathilde Leo. She’s the Head of Community and Customer Education at Circle, an all-in-one online community, program, and course platform for entrepreneurs, startups, and nonprofits.

She’s been building online customer communities from scratch since 2021.

As the first community hire and employee #11, she was instrumental in crafting and implementing Circle’s original community-led strategy. This strategy helped onboard, activate, and educate 10,000+ customers, building some of the most innovative community businesses on the planet. 

Before Circle, Mathilde co-founded MakingJam, the leading European product professional conference. It was a side project she turned into a thriving community business. 

With 10+ years of experience in product and community management, Mathilde is passionate about helping people meaningfully connect through technology. 

Community builder by day and a Thai boxer by night, Mathilde’s favorite forms of self-expression are sports, travel, and languages. Born in the French Alps, she has lived and worked in diverse cities such as London, Bangkok, and Salvador. She’s now based in Lisbon, Portugal.

At the beginning of her career, Mathilde faced imposter syndrome. She worked as a product manager for other startups in London. Questioning if she was doing things the “right way,” Mathilde was unsure about communicating with her team.

She worked with the co-founder and Head of Design to host a conference for online product managers from companies like Spotify, Strava, and Facebook. The idea was to bring them together to share stories of career navigation. The experiment was a success! 

One event led to another, and over time, a community was formed by accident, with thousands of online product managers gathering in person. That’s when Mathilde said she realized this was her next career adventure! 

When Covid began in 2020, it was time to move this community online. Before becoming the Head of Community at Circle, Mathilde was a customer. Hosting digital events and bringing the conference members into the online community. 

At the time, Circle was a new startup and hired Mathilde early in the development process. The all-in-one online community platform for creators and brands gives builders the tools to host events, courses, and memberships, bringing discussions together and the ability to monetize. 

Mathilde said her challenges when starting with Circle included people seeking online belonging during COVID-19. Her best advice for fellow online community managers and hosts is to have a realistic view of engagement, participation, and membership growth. 

The reality is that people join, participate, and discuss topics online in their own way when it’s convenient for them. It doesn’t make sense to compare online community platforms like Circle to social media because online community platforms off social media are different. 

Mathilde shared a few tips for community builders, including taking a deeper look into the community. You might find passive learners or potential active members who still need to do something. 

Questions for hosts: 

• Are members connecting online? 

• Are members in an online course creating study groups?

• Do you have passive lurkers? 

According to online sources, approximately 90% of online social members are lurkers. If you haven’t heard of the term, lurkers are individuals who consume content but don’t respond. Many online marketers know this as the 90-9-1 rule.

One of Circle’s best features is an Activity Course, a tool for helping hosts measure member data, including engagement, connections made, group chats, and direct messages. 

Mathilde said the community strategy changes constantly. Her priority when starting with Circle over three years ago is the same today: teaching members to use the platform to build and grow their online communities. 

In the early days of the customer community, we used the customers to provide a feedback loop to figure out what was working well, seeking advice from active members about new product features, and co-creating a vast resource library for current and future hosts. 

The platform recently succeeded in launching 100 features within the past year. Directly sourced from the customer community feedback, customers adopted the changes to the platform. The learning continues for Mathilde and the customer community members. 

In the future, Mathilde said Circle will focus on scaling online communities in mass. The customers bring valuable experiences and now share best practices and what’s working inside the customer community. Now, we want to put the learnings into frameworks that will help as many community builders scale, whether they are Circle customers or not. 

Circle’s best feature is the ability to tag topics and content that works with the existing internal architecture and navigation. We are still working to improve live streams with customer feedback. 

An upcoming feature for Circle is the ability to gamify a community strategy so members and hosts can have fun and keep it interesting. Mathilde said Circle creates the conditions for customers to help each other build communities. 

Some community builders usually overdeliver to members and learn how to scale back. Work with top members and develop a super user program or a champion group. 

Check out Circle’s Product Updates!