Shopify Minds, a new community for our customers

Did you know that we launched our service back in 2015 after growing a Shopify merchant community on Facebook to 2000 members? I was a merchant at the time, working on my Shopify business, from a co-working office. My assumption was that many people were working alone on a Shopify business, hungry for contact with like-minded peers. That assumption ended up being correct. When we launched, you could count the number of Facebook Groups for Shopify users on one hand. Now there are over 600 last I checked. In that first year, the community was small but very vibrant and exciting. I curated and shared content everyday for months. It didn’t feel like work, and I didn’t realize I was laying the groundwork for the next years of my professional life.

Posted 2 years ago by Jonathan Kennedy

Very early, I realized that my 10+ years of experience (and mistakes made) online were very valuable to others. It felt natural for me to jump in and offer help to others who were just getting started. HeyCarson was born from this experience, and this community. Some of those people we helped ended up being our first customers. Six years later, we have a bigger team and business, but I’ve continued to help with merchant questions in the community every day since.

This Facebook community is now at 116k members, and while it’s still an amazing resource for the greater community, we don’t find our customers using it as actively, therefore not benefitting from it. And if they do, we can’t easily identify them from the crowd. Partly due to the group’s size, limitations with FB group features, and also because of how Facebook has changed their reach algorithm. The community is also free, and I believe it has impacted the way people perceive it and engage within it. It’s still the largest online Shopify community – not managed by Shopify themselves. We’re proud of that. But it’s time for us to evolve.

So… we’re launching a fresh community on Slack, specifically for our active and valued customers. Our goal is to found the community with fifty of our customers. We may eventually open it to Shopify merchants in the greater community, but with a very strict selection process, and a membership fee, to ensure conversations stay rich and to ensure membership is valued. For our active and preferred customers at HeyCarson it will always be free.

Our goal has always been to add value to the greater community, then finding ways to enhance value for customers who choose our service. We help with one aspect of your business – we know you’re juggling 20 other things at the same time. In all of those areas you probably have questions. We feel a strong community is a great way to close the gaps, growth faster and make less mistakes along the way.

We hope you join us in this new community initiative. 

Jonathan
Founder – HeyCarson