Hey, Amazing Community Peeps

Recently I worked as a community manager intern at aviyel. Aviyel is a Bangalore-based startup with the idea of building & scaling FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) & COSS(Commercial and Open Source Software) by providing community insights and tools.

In this article will be sharing my learnings and experience I got through this internship as a community manager.

Introduction

I joined the aviyel community as a contributor last year. I contributed to the aviyel community by writing tutorials, guides, and articles for open-source projects available at aviyel. The idea behind aviyel is that, building & scaling communities by getting real community insights and tools.

Most of the open-source communities failed to scale because lack of support and not understanding of community needs and where aviyel came into the picture. Aviyel provides you with everything you need to build and scale communities. You can check aviyel onboarded projects from here!

How did It happen?

I contributed to the aviyel for more than 6 months. Then I got an opportunity to work with the internal team as a community manager where most of my work surrounded creating content and managing the community.

And it all started with writing blogs on the dev community platform. One day got a mail from the aviyel community to work with them as a creator then started contributing blogs and project tutorials on their platform and worked with open-source project maintainers & founders.

Responsibilities of Community Manager

The Community Manager role includes a mixture of things content creation, building, and managing the community, hosting community events and etc. and also it depends on what kind of community you're building.

I personally worked on content creation + discord community management + marketing a mixture of two or more things. On the marketing side, I try to reach out to project founders or maintainers and explaining them about aviyel and how we can help you out to build and scale their community and get them on board.

On another side, I have to connect with the content team to create and modify available content to push on the platform. It includes blogs, templates, guides, and newsletter stuff as well as replying to discord user queries.

Also, it depends on the community you're part of and the vision of the company. I also know community managers who are completely community-oriented and focus on product, community, and open-source contributions.

What I learned As a CM

1. Deadlines - Believe me if you're someone who is willing to work at startups then you have to consider deadlines highly important. At startup, no one is going to guide you on what to do next you have to take complete ownership of the work. How we can improve, How to scale, and how to figure out then you can successfully survive at a startup.

2. Track Everything - Everything means everything, Excel helps a lot and I suggest improving your Excel skills as more as you can. In the startup industry, everyone trusts results & proof and definitely it comes from data. While working try to track everything in Excel sheets to show the progress of work.

3. Complete Ownership - You're responsible for your work and you have to take complete ownership of the assigned task. If you don't have an idea how to done? then ask but don't make it complex for yourself.

4. Be a Fantastic Team Player - Everyone loves a person who knows how to work with others. Be polite and helpful to others and that's how teamwork. This skill helps you in the long-term game because it's easy to scale with support and it's not a one-man show.

5. Keep learning New Things - The more you know the more you grow and it's true at a startup because if know something or you have skills apart from your specific domain believe me it is worth it.

Closing Remarks 🎉

After sustainable growth, Aviyel is looking for more experienced people to work on the company's vision and then aviyel introduced a subscription model for communities. We launched our GitHub readme generator & Community Dashboard on a product hunt.

I did three months of work at aviyel and learned so many things and the most important thing is growthful connections. Learned a lot from Jose (Founder of aviyel), Pramit Maratha, Issac Jacob, and Ram Kumar.

What Next?

After working at aviyel, I realized Content + Development is something that excites me more as compared to any task, and then started exploring javascript framework, python, and fav one java in a more serious way.

Then got to know about the Developer Advocate role which is not completely similar but CM is also the domain of the Dev Advocate role. Right now I'm building projects and looking for junior Dev Advocate roles to join early-stage startups. If you're looking to connect with me then here is my Twitter profile.

Conclusion

In the end, I would like to encourage you all to work in startups once in a career because here you will learn the product, consumer, marketing, development, etc. things in a short span of time with amazing experience folks.

Note: Before picking to work at any startup do your own research as well as ask past their employees about the experience and working culture.

This is what exactly I want to share with you all. Share your thoughts in the comment section would love to hear from you all.

That's it! ♥