In today's digital world, businesses are increasingly turning to in-app communities to engage with their users and build brand loyalty. It can provide a space for users to connect, share information, and collaborate on projects. They can also be used to provide customer support, gather feedback, and drive sales. 

The idea of community-led growth comes with certain thoughts, most important of all is “Should we build the community features in-house or use a third-party SDK?” This question determines how your upcoming engineering and product roadmap for the next quarters (or even years) will look.

We have made a list of factors that you should evaluate before deciding to build community features yourself or use a third-party SDK.

Let’s understand what each of these factor signify:

1. Scalability and performance:  It is important to think about the size of the community that you expect to attract. If you are planning on a large community, you will need to choose a solution that can handle the traffic. You will also need to consider the types of features that you want to offer, as some features can be more demanding on resources than others. 

For instance, let's take the example of WhatsApp. One of its features is the implementation of a local database that stores users' conversations and media files. This local database enables users to access their chat history even when they switch devices or reinstall the app. Other features that affect performance when you scale are presence (Online/Offline), read receipts, etc.

Implementing such a feature requires efficient data management and storage systems to handle the growing volume of data millions of users generate. 

Another example can be found in Instagram, a social media platform known for its visual content. One of Instagram's features is the auto-play functionality for videos in the user's feed. When a user scrolls through their feed, videos automatically start playing, which enhances the user experience and encourages engagement.

However, this feature demands a robust infrastructure capable of streaming and delivering videos seamlessly to users, regardless of the number of videos being played simultaneously.

Hence you need to consider scalability and performance requirements from the early stages of development, such that your in-app community platform delivers a seamless and enjoyable user experience, even as the community grows in size.  

2. Reliability: The reliability of an in-app community is important for ensuring that users can always access the community and participate in discussions. You should choose a solution that has a good track record of uptime and that offers a reliable support team. Some of the examples that relate to reliability are messaging on low data.

For instance - A retry mechanism ensures that messages or updates are successfully delivered even in the presence of network issues or temporary failures. Implementing a reliable retry mechanism requires careful design and development to handle various failure scenarios and ensure message delivery.

Secondly, let’s say implementing features like data compression, offline caching, or optimized network protocols can enhance the reliability of messaging in such situations. 

3. Time to go live: The time to go live is a vital parameter for business and growth teams. It enables them to plan marketing strategies that may include feedback cycles, allocate resources effectively, and ensure a successful product or service launch. 

Considering the complexity of the community and the availability of the engineering workforce is essential in determining the timeline for going live and maximizing community engagement.

‍4. Customization: Every community has its DNA and every community product should capture the essence of that DNA, which means it becomes very important to have the flexibility to build custom features and you may need to add a custom business logic within the community (eg. if you want to have “upvote” or “support” instead of “Like” feature). Alternatively, if you need to implement custom permissions and moderation settings, you will need to choose a solution that offers a high level of customization.

5. Cost: The cost of an in-app community will vary depending on the size and complexity of the community, as well as the features that you choose. Initial costs would involve hiring a workforce for product, engineering, and QA to get the community. Then, social features like chat and feed which utilize real-time resources,  can significantly impact server costs, which directly affects the running cost of the project.

It is crucial to carefully evaluate the costs associated with both building and buying options to make an informed decision that aligns with the available budget and financial resources. Evaluating the costs includes not only the initial investment but also ongoing expenses such as maintenance, support, and any licensing fees associated with a pre-built solution.

The saga of features: too little or too many

This is a question that becomes a major hurdle while building a solution in-house. Let’s suppose you want to set up an in-app chat community, the first iteration of the product roadmap would be enabling real-time communication, message reactions, file sharing, push notifications, etc for the community but when you take these requirements to the engineering team, you would see change in the timeline. This is primarily because feature building in different stacks, requires different efforts, because of the libraries available or the capability of the framework/language itself.

For instance, the team is not able to decide whether you want threads in chat or not, to build it. After building you launch this to market and then realize, this is not working for you. This whole process will be very expensive in terms of engineering hours.A pre-built (buy) approach would help you to quickly customize the features as per the engagement metrics you see.

Which approach is right for you, Build or Buy?

Ultimately, the best approach for your in-app community feature will depend on your specific needs and requirements. If you are on a constrained budget and need to go live quickly with a scalable product, then buying a commercial solution may be a better option. 

You should thoroughly consider all the buying options available to you while looking at the customization offered by various commercial solutions, as it may vary largely.

Get Ahead Of The Line And Launch Your Community Right Away!

If you are ready to launch and scale the community within your app, without exerting the engineering muscle, we are here to help you integrate community features into your app in just 15 minutes!! Keep the users engaged with your product instead of relying on 3rd party platforms.

Our in-app community infra offers a scalable, quick go-live solution with 100% flexibility on the UI and a wide range of offerings, including:

- Real-time chat

- Pre-built widget - eg: Polls, Forms, Quizzes

- Custom Widget

- High customizability

- Support over slack

- Easy Integration

- Message Reactions

- Group chats

- File sharing

- Push notifications

- Webhooks 

- Analytics Events

- Moderation tools and many more…

If you're looking for assistance in building or buying an in-app community, we're here to help. Reach out to us and launch your community right away!