With a hat tip to Desmond Shang for his forum post, and another to Kamilah Hauptmann who brought this to Desmond’s attention in the first place, there’s a very interesting blog post from Eric Ries, who has been involved with IMVU regarding listening to your community. I’ve touched upon this before with the example of how Champions Online rectified a situation over limited discounted subscriptions, but Eric’s post is probably a better example because it took IMVU a bit longer to figure out the harsh realities of not listening.
The crux of the issue is that IMVU didn’t listen to their community, made changes that as far as they could see would only have an impact for 0.1% of their community and that everything would be fine. However things weren’t fine, people whom IMVU hadn’t even considered would be interested in some of these policy changes were concerned to such a degree that IMVU was losing both revenue and customers on a scale they hadn’t imagined was remotely likely. Continue reading “Listening To Communities”