On the business of trust

Four years ago, we started building a WhatsApp community for women. Today, there are over 10,000 of us, across multiple groups and communities. We’ve built it 100% organically. People have come in through conversations, referrals and recommendations. It’s a great place to be part of, though I might be biased :p

Over time, it became a place women found useful enough to keep coming back to. Naturally, that has also attracted brands and businesses that want to reach them.

Which brings me to a request we get every so often.

“Can we collab on the community?”

Often meaning: would you folks be interested in sharing (selling) some x product or service to your community? For a commission on sales?

Like most things, the answer is a bouquet of nuance.

One. The business.

Decoding Draupadi is a business with a community. We are not a community business. The community exists to serve the women in it.

We want Decoding Draupadi to be a successful business. We work with brands, we sell advertising, we create experiences and we intend to do more of all of it.

But the community is not simply another sales channel. The trust and attention of the women in it are not ours to sell.

That is the litmus test for everything we do.

Two. The big T. Trust.

This community has one job, which is to be useful to the women in it. That only works if they trust what they see here.

When we send something to the community and the ladies show up for it, we want them to know it was shared because we thought it was worth their time.

Karthik Srinivasan once wrote that his words are not for sale. We feel the same way about our recommendations to this community.

And since many of you reading this are part of it: this one’s for you too.

We didn’t build this to befriend you and sell to you later. We built it as a place you come back to when you’re looking for your next step. An opportunity, some help, an answer to a question. Sometimes just the right person to speak to.

That’s what we built this community for.

Three. The bar.

Most of what we share is job opportunities and things that help women move ahead in their work + life. Some of it comes from our team, some from members and some from friends who send it our way.

Every week, someone also asks us to share something else. A brand launch, a film, a conference that needs to sell tickets.

Each message we send out creates 10,000 pings. If someone wants us to “float” a message, it needs to earn each one of those.

So before anything goes out, we ask ourselves three things.

• Would we share this even if nobody had asked us to?
• Is it genuinely useful to a working woman’s work or life right now?
• Would we be comfortable putting our name next to it?

And then there’s the part no checklist covers.

We’ve spent four years in this ecosystem, listening to what women ask about, complain about and go looking for. That has built an editorial muscle.

Sometimes something ticks every box and still isn’t right for the group. There are things you only learn to recognise after doing this for years.

We don’t always get that judgment right. But it’s our responsibility. And that call stays with us. No brand, partner or commission gets to make it for us.

So, to answer your questions.

Will we share your launch for a commission on sales? No. That’s a hard no, every time.

Will we promote it, spend an hour finding a community-collab angle, help you spread the word? Probably not. Unless it is a no-brainer hell yes 🙂

Here’s what is open.

If you’d like to create something with us, built for the women in this community, let’s talk. Decoding Draupadi can come on board as a community partner. We can build something useful together – and if it’s a paid collaboration, we’ll say so.

What we won’t do is promise you access to the group or a recommendation simply because we’re working together.

If you’d like to advertise, Decoding Draupadi works with brands on our Instagram, newsletter, podcast and events.

Anything sponsored, on any of our pages or at any of our events, carries a sponsor tag. We will never slip a paid post in quietly.

The distinction, to us, is simple. You can pay us to work with you. You cannot pay us to change what we think is worth recommending.

No hard feelings. It’s just not our kind of business.

And if anything we share ever doesn’t sit right with you, write to me at ak@c4e.in.

Anshika Kushwaha
Caretaker, Decoding Draupadi