I am excited to announce the launch of the third FREE eBook from Meylah. The eBook is targeted at creatives and features a series of articles on how to sell effectively online. Reading through the articles, I am sure everyone (creatives or not) will benefit from them. This is part of Meylah’s efforts to build their community.

Meylah has been building their online community almost an year before they launched their service as part of their CommunityFirst! initiative. It has worked out well so far when you look at their Twitter or Facebook Fan Page or even their Alexa Ranking.

You can download the eBook for FREE here ( close to 5MB – so please ensure that you have a high-speed connection )

Here is a quick interview with the founders (Ram Dutt and Jason Dirks) of Meylah about their CommunityFirst! initiative

1. Raj: What is building community before your product?

Ram and Jason: Wouldn’t it be nice to have eager customers the day you launch your product? Let me take the example of Apple. Every time they introduce a new product or ever newer version of their current product, customers line up, wait for days to be the first to own the new shiny product.

If you breakdown why this behavior is expected, there are three key ingredients that enables this excitement namely

1. Consistency,
2. Innovation and
3. Value.

Apple is very consistent with product quality and experience.  Their products always innovate on status quo and the long term value of their products is unmatched. Apple in fact has established their brand and expectations before they talk about their products or services.
This is what I mean by building community before your product.

2. Raj: Why did you choose to build your community before product?

Ram and Jason: Like many startups, we do not have the luxury of brands like Apple. We are inspired by what they do and “how they do what they do.” In our own way, we wanted to take some steps towards how they build their community before introducing their products and services.

So, we decided to build our community one person, one organization and one institution at a time.

While we were building our product which was based on research, validation and input, we set out to build our community so we can establish our credibility and value to our  future customers.  We also learned so much more while building our community that it helped us shape our product and product roadmap.  We also were able to build relationships with many community influencers who eventually became our ambassadors to our product.

It was a WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN for us, our community, our ambassadors and last but not the least our stakeholders.

3. Raj: How did you go about building your community before product?

Ram and Jason:  We had lots of help.  We had help from people who understood social media, built communities before and always thought of a WIN-WIN deals.  Social Media was the basis for our community building.  We started our blog (www.meylah.com/meylah) and what we realized is that our community needed help with understanding the essence of social media and how to go about to get best results.  Not only did we dig deeper into the social media and community building aspects but we also created step-by-step tutorials for anyone to follow, learn and implement their own community building strategies.  We also used our own platform to share this information so everyone got familiar with the product/solution and we got plenty of feedback on the user experience.  We also had presence on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn and many other channels to engage with our community.  It takes time, patience and consistency to build and grow your community.

We just celebrated one year of our blog, we have published three eBooks and we have in-depth content on social media, SEO, blogging, selling, online marketing, online tutorials and much more. Check us out and give your feedback.

Disclaimer: I am a mentor to the founders of Meylah and my brother Prasad has his store setup using the Meylah Platform (Prasad’s Gallery).

Bonus: Meylah is giving away 1 year of Premium Membership ($240 value) if you or anyone sign up before the end of the month. Please use the code: MEY1YF when you sign up.