Klára Losert is a young entrepreneur who together with Roman Nguyen is building a digital platform for building and managing communities – Talkbase. As she says, she is mainly targeting the US market, where big companies are working on building communities and are willing to pay for it. In 2022, Talkbase raised one of the largest ever early-stage investments in the country, totaling 50 million. CZK.

What gave it the biggest boost? And what is Talkbase all about? That’s not the only question we asked Klára.

1. What exactly is Talkbase about? What is its uniqueness?

Talkbase is an analytics platform for building and managing communities. Talkbase helps community teams measure the impact of their activities on both the community and the business. In addition to analytics, our platform offers event creation, ambassador program management, task management and CRM with contacts for all community members. One of the biggest advantages of Talkbase is that you have everything you’ve been intricately doing through various spreadsheets, forms and emails in one place. Overall, community managers currently spend most of their day organizing work and have little time to talk to community members. Talkbase automates and facilitates their routine activities so they can focus on the essentials.

2. What are your biggest challenges in building and managing communities? How do you gain insight into what specific communities need?

The biggest challenge in building and managing communities is scaling and measuring the impact of the community on the business. Communities are great brand-wise, but if you don’t know their impact, it’s hard to justify the activities you do as a community. Beyond that is gaining insight into what specific community members need, what they enjoy, and which programs work best.

3. You mentioned in an interview that the European market is not a priority for you. The US market is the main target for you. Can you tell us why?

Talkbase focuses on technology companies because innovation in how communities are built and used often comes from them. These companies have VC funding behind them and need to grow extremely fast. We’re talking about companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Yelp, and MongoDB. When you look at the current Forbes ranking of the Top 100 Cloud companies in the world, the vast majority of them have huge communities behind them and are actively expanding their community teams. That’s why Talkbase is focusing on the U.S. market, where the company is based and where companies are willing to pay for tools to manage their communities.

4. Could you tell us what has disappointed and “kicked” you the most during your journey with Talkbase?

One of our investors gave me a great piece of advice that immediately came to mind when I asked this question; don’t try to convince those who don’t believe. Invest your energy in those who could become your cheerleaders. This helped us often when we were fundraising, but also when we were recruiting people for the team.

5. What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you first launched Talkbase, and how did it affect your approach to business?

How important it is to talk to the right people. In the early-stage startup phase, we often talk about how important it is to talk to potential users and gather their feedback. But few people talk anymore about how important it is to talk to the right people who are actively feeling the problem we are trying to solve with our product. It used to happen very often that we talked to the wrong people, and that directed us to build a different product than the one we believe in.

6. What’s your advice to get it all done?

I think “don’t quit”. When building a startup you have many more hard days than good ones and you need to not get demotivated and keep going for your vision. It’s a ride 🙂

Thank you so much! 😉