Building With the Community

As Glasp grew from thousands to millions of users, we faced a fundamental challenge: how could we maintain the personal connection and community focus that defined our early days while operating at a much larger scale?

This chapter explores how we built a thriving community around Glasp and how that community shaped not just our growth, but our product direction and content itself.

Glasp Talk: Turning Interviews into Community Assets

One of our most successful community initiatives was Glasp Talk, a series of interviews with professionals, thought leaders, and interesting people from various fields. What began as casual conversations evolved into a cornerstone of our community strategy.

The genesis of Glasp Talk came from a key insight: the most valuable knowledge often remains locked in people's minds rather than written down in articles or books. Through conversation and thoughtful questioning, we could extract and preserve insights that might otherwise never be shared publicly.

Each week, we interviewed someone notable: entrepreneurs, writers, product managers, designers, and other knowledge workers. These conversations explored their work processes, thinking frameworks, and life philosophies.

While the interviews themselves provided valuable content, the true power of Glasp Talk emerged in how we integrated it with our product ecosystem:

1. Content multiplication: Each interview was transformed into multiple formats: video, podcast, article, highlights, quotes, and social media snippets.

2. Evergreen knowledge: Instead of chasing news cycles, we focused on timeless questions and insights that would remain relevant for years.

3. Community connection: Featured guests often became active Glasp users and advocates, introducing the platform to their networks.

4. Legacy focus: Every interview concluded with the same question: "What legacy or impact do you want to leave on the world?" This aligned perfectly with our mission of preserving and sharing knowledge.

Perhaps most importantly, Glasp Talk exemplified our approach to community building. Rather than treating community as a marketing channel to be exploited, we created genuine value for our community members while advancing our mission of knowledge sharing.

Email Newsletters: Old Technology, New Approach

In the age of algorithmic feeds and fleeting attention, we found tremendous value in one of the oldest digital communication tools: email newsletters.

Initially, we used Mailchimp to send onboarding sequences and product updates to new users. As our user base grew, the costs became prohibitive, reaching thousands of dollars per month for a startup with limited resources.

We pivoted to Substack, which offered free newsletter functionality. But the real unlock came when we realized we could automatically subscribe new Glasp users (with proper opt-in) to our newsletter.

This integration created a powerful growth loop:

1. New users joined Glasp and opted into the newsletter
2. They received curated content collections and community updates
3. They discovered valuable articles and highlighted them in Glasp
4. Their interactions guided future content recommendations

Our subscriber base first grew past 350,000 people, with open rates around 30 to 35 percent, far above industry averages. It has kept growing since and now stands at more than 550,000 subscribers, one of our most valuable community touchpoints.

The key to the newsletter's success wasn't technological innovation but curation. Every recommendation was personally selected by our team, focusing on evergreen content that delivered genuine value rather than trendy or clickbait material.

This reflected our broader philosophy: we weren't optimizing for impressions or short-term engagement, but for long-term value and trust. By consistently delivering content that helped people learn and grow, we built a newsletter that people actually looked forward to receiving.

Community-Driven Product Development

From the beginning, we involved our community directly in product development. This wasn't just about gathering feedback. It was about co-creating Glasp with the people who used it most actively.

Several of our most successful features emerged directly from community requests and observations:

• PDF highlighting: After seeing users struggle to save information from PDFs, we built a dedicated PDF reader with highlighting.

• YouTube transcription: Users were manually transcribing YouTube videos to save key points, so we built automated transcription and highlighting.

• Top highlights: When we noticed users highlighting the same passages across articles, we created a feature showing the most highlighted passages.

• AI summaries: Community feedback on our YouTube Summary with ChatGPT led us to expand AI summaries to all content types.

By watching how our community actually used Glasp, sometimes in ways we never anticipated, we discovered features that genuinely improved their experience rather than adding complexity.

We fostered this collaboration through several channels:

• Slack and Discord communities where users could share ideas and use cases
• Regular user interviews to deeply understand workflows and pain points
• Public feature requests where users could vote on priorities
• Beta testing groups for early access to new features

This created a virtuous cycle. Community members felt ownership in the product's evolution, which made them more likely to stay engaged and invite others. Their input led to more useful features, which attracted more users, who brought fresh perspectives and ideas.

The Power of Use Case Amplification

One of our most effective community strategies was amplifying creative use cases discovered by our users. When someone found a novel way to use Glasp, we highlighted their approach through case studies, social media, and the newsletter.

Some compelling examples:

• A PhD student who used Glasp to research collaboratively with peers across universities
• A book author who gathered and organized research materials through Glasp highlights
• A language learner who saved and reviewed vocabulary and phrases from online content
• A journalist who used our YouTube transcription to quickly extract quotes from interviews

Showcasing these stories accomplished several goals at once:

1. Educated existing users about new ways to use the product
2. Attracted similar users who faced the same challenges
3. Validated our users by celebrating their creativity
4. Generated content that strengthened our SEO and social presence

It also shifted the relationship from company-to-user to a collaborative community where users inspired each other. Glasp wasn't just a product; it was a platform for a wide range of knowledge workflows.

Open Source Knowledge: Sharing Our Technology

As our AI tools gained popularity, particularly the YouTube Summary with ChatGPT, we made a decision that seemed counterintuitive from a traditional business perspective: we open-sourced key components of our technology.

This aligned with our core mission of open knowledge sharing. By making our code accessible, we enabled:

1. Developer adoption: Technical users could integrate our tools into their own workflows
2. Community improvement: Users contributed enhancements and bug fixes
3. Educational impact: Students and self-taught developers could learn from our implementations
4. Trust building: Transparency about how our AI tools worked increased user confidence

Open-sourcing wasn't just philosophical. Developers who used our code became advocates in technical communities. Educators built tutorials around our tools, extending our reach into programming and AI learning communities.

We believed the value of Glasp wasn't in proprietary technology but in the community and knowledge ecosystem we were building. Sharing our implementation strengthened our position rather than compromising it.

Maintaining Authenticity at Scale

Perhaps the greatest challenge of community building is staying authentic as you grow. With 100 users, personal relationships are natural. With millions, there's a temptation to automate and depersonalize every interaction.

We addressed this with clear principles for community engagement:

1. No growth at the expense of trust: We refused manipulative engagement tactics, even when they might drive short-term growth.

2. Value first, promotion second: Every piece of content or communication had to provide standalone value, whether or not it converted users.

3. Transparency about mistakes: When we made errors or hit problems, we shared them openly rather than presenting a perfect facade.

4. Continued direct engagement: Even at scale, we kept direct connections alive through interviews, calls, and personal responses.

5. Mission reinforcement: We consistently tied product decisions and communications back to open knowledge sharing.

Rather than seeing community as a resource to be optimized, we treated it as a collaboration between people who shared our vision for more accessible and connected knowledge.

The Community Flywheel

By the time we reached several hundred thousand users, we had created what we call the Community Flywheel: a self-reinforcing cycle where community engagement drives product improvement, which attracts more community members, who contribute more knowledge and insights.

The flywheel worked because each element strengthened the others:

• User-generated highlights created valuable data that improved recommendations
• Community-identified use cases informed product development
• Shared knowledge collections attracted new users with similar interests
• Public profiles and social features connected like-minded learners

Once this flywheel gained momentum, growth became increasingly organic. New features and content still accelerated adoption, but the community itself became a powerful acquisition channel as users invited colleagues, shared highlights, and created content about Glasp.

This approach requires patience. Community flywheels don't generate immediate results the way paid advertising can. But they create sustainable, compounding growth that doesn't disappear when you stop spending.

When building for the long term, investing in community isn't a nice-to-have. It's a strategic advantage that creates defensible network effects and reduces dependency on paid acquisition.