B2B Prototyping part 5: How to scale your prototypes

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Hello!

We’re now halfway through this series on Prototyping, and I hope you’re finding it valuable - I’m enjoying seeing people share it on LinkedIn and in other newsletters. Today’s newsletter is all about how we build a relationship with our audiences as our content formats scale, so I’d love to get some feedback from all 2,000 of you as we hit the halfway stage. Are you finding this series useful? Is there anything else you’d like me to cover in the series? Are you making a prototype that you’d like some advice on?

Hit the button below or the link above to send me an email. I promise to send you a link to my favourite ever prototype in response. It’s delightful!

To recap - this is where we are in the series right now:

- Create space in busy schedules to build and test prototypes
- Collaborate with internal and external partners on prototypes 
- Test these ideas with your internal and external audiences 
- Create metrics to measure attention and engagement
- Scale ideas from prototypes into full projects (that’s this post!)
- Know when to stop or kill and idea, even if you love it
- Demonstrate how prototyping saves your company money and time
- Build a sustainable workflow and culture for prototyping in your team

THE PROBLEM

Congratulations! You’ve made a prototype that you think has potential. You’re having fun doing it, the people you’re testing it with give you great feedback, and more importantly, they want more of it. So now you’ve got a problem - how do you scale this?

The weird thing is, in my experience, scale is a something that a lot of people find scary. We don’t normally say this directly, but when I work on projects with clients, I get a lot of questions in the format development stage that are essentially about the problems of scale. What will it cost to do more of this? What happens if we don’t have time to respond to audience feedback? How are we going to make more episodes without burning ourselves out? My response is to point out that they’re essentially worrying about having a successful format, which is a lovely problem to have. But it is still a problem.

THE INSIGHT

I think there’s something a bit deeper going on though. We all want our content formats to be a big success, and we love seeing the numbers go up and to the right. But scaling a format inevitably means losing a bit of control. We’ve spoken a lot in this series about how to find out where you fit into the lives and habits of your audience, but if you’re successful at this, you do actually become part of their lives. They will build habits and routines around your format, and their expectations will rise as they make your content formats part of their regular media diet.

As you scale, your audience turns into a community, and I think it is this - managing a community - that a lot of us are really scared about. It’s a lot easier to think about audiences as just numbers than it is to actually engage with them directly.

Nearly all the challenges and problems caused by scaling a content format are linked to the challenges of building a community. This is partly because over the last few decades we’ve outsourced the community management bit to the social platforms. But this has meant that we don’t really own that direct relationship with our audiences, and changes to the platform or algorithm can grow or take away our audiences in ways we can’t control. Now the trend is for publishers and marketers to build direct relationships with audiences around their content, so they need to have a plan as their audience grows into a community. Scale is now our problem, not the platform’s problem.

THE ACTION

Scaling a format and the community around it needn’t be scary. You can absolutely do it on your own terms, if you plan ahead. Here’s three things (and one fantastic book) to help you do this:

1 - Make a plan for 100, 1000 and 10000 subscribers
We’ve talked before about setting ‘north stars’ in your audience metrics, and this is even more important when you’re scaling a prototype. Your relationship to your audience will change as you scale your prototype, so step back and come up with an plan for what you need to do at key stages of community grows. For each level you scale, ask yourself these three questions:

- How will our relationship to our audience change when we reach this level?
- What might we have to stop doing at this level?
- What new value could we create for the audience at this level?

Having a plan for different levels of scale will help you make sure you’ve got the resources and support in place when you need it.

2 - Create a sustainable way to talk with your community
I’ve been involved in running online communities for decades, and one of the biggest mistakes people make is to open a space for conversation that is always on and unsustainable to manage. We are social animals, and the last few decades has shown both the good and bad things that happen when you create empty boxes on the internet for people to type into.

So don’t just open a space for responses or conversation - make them part of your format. Ask questions, create polls or quizzes, open live chat sessions - whatever works for you. But make them time bounded and with clear rules - if you don’t decide how your community will work, they will do it for you.

3 - Use seasons to give you time to reflect and plan
We’re huge fans of creating content formats as seasons at Storythings. Running something every single week without a break (like our Friday newsletter, which has been running for over 12 years now) is a hell of a commitment. Whereas here on Attention Matters, we started with a short season to share our Scroll Stoppers research report, and we’ve used seasons ever since.

Seasons give you the opportunity to change things up, attract new audiences and get feedback from your community. So my number one tip for scaling your format is - make seasons. If it’s good enough for Stranger Things, it’s good enough for your formats.

4 - Learn how to build a community from the experts
Hopefully I’ve helped you realise that you can scale your format and build a community in a sustainable way that works for your business goals. If you want to dive deeper into how to build a community, I absolutely love the book Get Together. It’s produced by People &, a group ofexperts who have run communities everywhere from local groups to Instagram (and who were then bought by Substack to lead community building there). The book is based around a nine part model for how communities grow that is really easy to understand, and really practical to use on your own projects. I regularly use this framework in our client work at Storythings.

Thanks again for reading this episode. I originally started with a plan to go into different challenges around scaling prototypes, but then as I was developing the structure, I realised they all ended up being about audiences and how we manage them. So I made that the focus, and I hope it was useful. I’d love to help you think about how you scale your prototypes, so if you’re making something you’d like to discuss, hit the button below!

Next episode, we’ll look at the hardest thing that you have to do with prototypes - killing the ones that you love, but just aren’t working.

See you next week!
Matt