- The team is doing a great job
- Have deeper conversations in our Discord server
- Toxic people will always be removed
- Sustainability
- Being a community to help local businesses
- Website improvements
- Continuous testing
- Events
- Thank you for being a part of this community
As our community has been going through various teething problems of growth, I haven’t had time to write for a while. Now feels as good a time as any to share a long overdue update on matters.
The team is doing a great job
One of the happier things to share about is that now have moderators to help moderate the community and I’m sure that everybody will agree that they’re doing a great job keeping the community safe and well-organised. I’m also grateful to our local Subang coffee roaster (Supernormal Coffee Roasters) Kevin Justin who was helping with moderation work for a while, though he now needs to focus on launching his upcoming cafe in Wisma UOA opposite the Subang Jaya LRT station.
There are a few more members who have been helping me on various aspects of the community, whether it’s with understanding the importance of videos, making technology and business suggestions, and many other aspects, and I’m very grateful for all this help.
It’s also important for me to take a moment to acknowledge the hard work of everybody on the team for putting up with me. While it’s easy to talk to me in a casual setting, it’s actually rather tough to work on the same team as I am. So I’m very grateful for everybody who is willing to work with me, despite my working style.
Have deeper conversations in our Discord server
If you’re enjoying our community and want to have a deeper conversation with our community members, do join us on our SubangFood Discord server. Our conversations there are more casual.
Toxic people will always be removed
While the growth of the size of our community has been good on the surface of things, I always keep an eye on the dynamic and culture of the group, and in that sense, if the growth is too sudden, it’s not always a good thing. The most obvious downside is that we’ve had a sudden influx of extremely rude and toxic people. We ban people when we see any toxic behaviour in our group, though even those few minutes of toxicity have been proven to cause some good community members to leave.
We do our best to ensure that our community is a safe space to discover new food and exchange ideas. I believe we’ve done a relatively good job of achieving that to date, and we’ll continue to protect the lovely community that we’ve built.
Sustainability
The sustainability of keeping this community at this level of quality will need to be addressed soon, as the time cost of everybody involved in the operations has been increasing steadily. Whether it’s moderating, exploring food in our community, fact checking, and more, the team’s discussions regularly run from early in the morning till midnight and beyond, which takes up almost as much time as a full time job. What saddens me the most is seeing that everybody on the team volunteering their time and effort for the maintenance of our community without any compensation. I will have to do my best to ensure that the community is well taken care of, but not at the personal expense and detriment to the team.
A minimum level of revenue will be required in order to allow this community to be sustainable and further improve with some of the projects I have in mind, especially improvements to the website. Thus some level of paid activity together with local businesses will need to be implemented. The challenge for me will be to find the correct balance of such activity that benefits the community, but doesn’t take away with the authenticity of the activities within our community. Mistakes will be made as I test things, but I hope the end result for the community will be the effort.
Being a community to help local businesses
One of the main rules of our Facebook community has been to prohibit self-promotions. The reason behind this was simple, we understand that every business wants and needs to do marketing and promotions in order to raise awareness of their business for sustainability, the issue is that due to the large number of businesses in Subang, if every business was allowed to post their marketing activities, our community would be overwhelmed with marketing posts.
Over the months I held on tightly to the “no self-promotion” rule without remembering why I implemented it in the first place. After some of my friends who operate F&B businesses in Subang kept reminding me to re-look at the matter, I did manage to take a step back and remember that one of the goals of this community is to elevate the food scene in Subang, and if the rule and community is too rigid, we will end up stifling business that do require help from the community, whether it’s because they’re a new venture, or they’re facing a other challenges that we as a community can solve.
If I stubbornly held on to the rule against allowing promotions in the community, and that caused a negative effect to the F&B businesses in Subang, the community itself is the one that loses, because for every F&B business that goes out of business, we have one less option for food. That mode of operation would have been detrimental to everyone (our community, the businesses, myself, the team), and I believe I can evolve the direction enough to ensure that we all have a collective win.
On a happier note, I’ve realised and accepted that my previous aversion to videos was too much of a personal preference, and relevant videos are now allowed in the community. So that’s some minor improvement for me too.
Website improvements
One of the biggest sore points to me has been the SubangFood website. It was quickly put up so that I didn’t procrastinate too long on it, but as I was busy with other things, and Jenxi (who is an important part of the SubangFood team) was getting married, we didn’t have time to do the necessary housekeeping and improvements on the website. There are quite a few things that need to be cleaned up in the SubangFood project, but the website is one of the things I hope to get done soon.
If you haven’t joined our mailing list yet, I’d really appreciate if you subscribed to it now.
Subscribe to join over 50,000 members stay up to date with the best food in Subang.
Also do join our SubangFood conversation on our Discord server.
Continuous testing
As there aren’t many groups that are run well and sustainably for me to use as a model of operation on, with the Entrepreneurs and Startups in Malaysia community being one of the rare exceptions, expect this community to be in a mode of continuous testing as I regularly make adjustments to move this community forward. It’s may not be the smoothest ride for now, but I hope the destination will be worth our effort.
Events
The last proper gathering we had was in March, and it’s been a while since I organised a proper gathering as it’s very tiring for me to arrange. I hope to do so again soon. Will keep everybody updated via the SubangFood newsletter.
Thank you for being a part of this community
As always, I’m overjoyed to see the members of our community sharing experiences of food and getting to know each other better. Thank you for making our community a better place.