“When you work in community, you get to be the person who thinks about the customer all day long, who thinks about people, who thinks about how they connect.” - Cindy Au

Cindy Au set out for a career in academia but soon found herself as employee #9 at Kickstarter. Back then, the community team would review and help write each project submitted to the site. Later as their VP of Community, she oversaw the evolution of Kickstarter as it grew from 50,000 users to 10 million.

After her experience at Kickstarter, Cindy launched the first community program at Zagat, the restaurant discovery platform. Now she’s the Director of Community & Engagement at Brainly, the world’s largest peer-to-peer learning community.

Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:

Cindy used the insights from her PhD in English to define the undefined space of community.
Walking in the shoes of the user--how Cindy launched a Kickstarter campaign with her sisters and published Canine Chronicles
Celebrating subsets of niche users at the Kickstarter Arcade
Thinking like a newspaper--creating leaders in categories of expertise
A side project (DimSum Club) that sent a signal to other DimSum lovers and was a catalyst to a new role at Zagat
How Brainly is gamifying and incentivizing natural competitive instincts of students

👋🏻Say hi to Cindy and learn more about her work.

📄See the full transcript

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