Community in the Spotlight

Oct 30, 2021

Timeline

October 2021 — September 2022

A large part of the folks that listened to music together on Discord using the Lishash Bot ported to the app, while also bringing in other indian indie music lovers from other Discord servers. It was with them that our first users came together, and who we built our holistic social music experience with.
The first impression of new users usually revolved around how the people on Lishash are music lovers who are warm, kind and helpful. People often wondered if the users knew each other outside of the app too, which was hardly ever the case. Users called Lishash their second home. With these experiences, it became clear to us that the listening together experience, driven by community is one of the most important product propositions of Lishash. Hereon, we focused on improving the community experience on the app.
At one point, when users from across the world started entering the app, with no connection to any existing member, we observed two major things:
- With anonymity and no connections, behaviour that threatened the community vibe started occurring. A particular instance where a new user, let’s call him Joffrey, met some members on the app in a session and was intolerant and vocal about it, of the different tastes in music.
- Due to the initial community that had already formed, some new users felt left out, either because timings of sessions didn’t match, or because the conversations weren’t always in a language they were well averse with.

Designing in — app currency: Licos to serve as a moderation tool. It ensures that it weeds out and blocks access to detractors, while rewarding the ones that add value to the community (by hosting sessions, sharing music, inviting friends).

Going invite only to keep out users like Joffrey, and maintain the quality and ethos of the community: based on respect for differences in preferences of music of members. Did this by allowing users to generate invite links + introducing forms that determine access.

We decided to target users based on
- demography: India first
- psychography/behaviour: passionate about the indie music scene [attend gigs, follow indie artists and publications, share music on social media]
by inviting indie artists and targeted outreach.

Invite only as opposed to remaining open access, led to a rise in word of mouth as well as retention.
On introducing a monthly licos subscription, users started inviting friends more, scheduling more sessions and giving Lishash reviews on Playstore.
Despite introducing a random queue, hosts often put in the effort to put their own songs in ‘up next’, playing it first. This created an anti — communal experience and it was with licos that we solved this problem. We placed a cap of earning only 5 licos per song queued by hosts but more if another user’s song plays. They started being much more inclusive and playing everyone’s music in their sessions.
The community has large inclinations of being self — driven: meetups of users that met on the app were organised without intervention, community events like Secret Santa are organized by community members and they also speak about Lishash on other platforms.

Every member feels a sense of belonging and attachment to Lishash, but especially the community, or, as they call it — ‘the Lishash fam’. This happens because before making large decisions users are involved in decision making, and they do determine the shape of the product.

An irreplaceable part of building a community is that users feel that the space is theirs. These are 2 things that help do this:
1. They feel like they are meeting people who are fundamentally similar to them in that they are extremely accepting people and are open to all genres of music.
2. They know that they are building the product and community with us.
Users keep returning to Lishash, even if they take a hiatus. They don’t return only for music discovery and listening, and neither just for the people. Rather, they return for the harmony of the two.
Communities work on learning by osmosis. People see others do something — scheduling sessions, talking about Lishash on social media, etc, and they do it themselves. A large part of the behaviour we want our community to exhibit can be designed if we figure a way to get the ball rolling.
Licos are an extremely powerful tool to design this behaviour, to moderate. As soon as we started taking access away based on a low licos count, users took the time out to understand the different ways to earn licos and started exhibiting the “good behaviours”.