In this video, Enrique Lopez Lopez, Creative Community Specialist at Freepik, shares how Freepik builds and nurtures vibrant creative communities, both online and in-person, in the heart of San Francisco. He discusses strategies for engaging users, addressing AI fears, and creating events that genuinely connect people.
Transcript
Thank you so much, Katie and Yurii for an incredible and insightful conversation about community and your experience. I think that this is a great case study of an early stage community, being built here in San Francisco, the challenges that we're facing and also the successes that we're facing. So I'm very happy to be sharing some of our experiences here in the city. My name is Enrique, I'm the Lead of communities here in San Francisco, but my background is in sociology, so I really appreciate your your background story on history and how useful that can be for connecting those dots that you mentioned Katie also the idea of curiosity and finding patterns and asking the questions and and being interested and observant on how dynamics are being played and how you insert yourself nicely into those being strategic into your connections. So please if you have any questions while I'm talking please just raise your hand. I love being interrupted all the time. So I come from sociology. I joined Freepik as a researcher, but very soon my team realized that I was very good talking to people and building relationships and selling a brand in a very gentle, smart, strategic way, not just in your face, you should use Freepik. So I'm very grateful that I was able to transition in my short time in Freepik, a year and a half, going from research into marketing into now being the community lead and using all my background and curiosities and experiences to be part of this team. So if you're not aware, Freepik transitioned from being a stock visual asset company to being an AI suite for creatives. Very different user bases. When we decided in 2022 to move into AI world, we fastly realized that a big part of that stage was to transfer users that were very loyal and were familiar with the Freepik product into a whole new different world of AI, that was very unknown, very intimidating, especially for creatives, because our tool faces creatives directly, and because creatives, for very good reasons, have a lot of anxieties on how AI and how technology is being integrated into the work. It was Freepik's job to understand those fears and address them as best as we could through our products, through our communities, through our events. Freepik is an old company. We've been around for over 13 years, I believe. In the US, we've been here for about two years, two years and a half, I believe. This is the first event that we're hosting in our new office. I don't know if you're familiar, but we moved about a week and a half ago from our smaller space to this much larger, which is, I think, a reflection of how beautiful the community is growing and how impactful we're seeing these events to be for communicating our ideas and our products. This is going to be our official event space. Now we have an office in the back, and now it's not just everything mingling and everything overlapping. So we're very grateful for that. So I'm just going to tell you a little bit on our strategies and how we tend to connect with our community and how we're building it. Again, it's an early community. I think Katie talked about the chicken and the egg. You build it and they'll come, or you want to be more strategic. I think we went with you build it and they'll show up. But we're very grateful that thanks to a solid product that we have, we were able to build interesting events with some cool people and some cool profiles that were interesting. And people started showing up, people that are here tonight. And once we started seeing that reaction, we realized that the community in person was very important, especially in San Francisco, where connection is spare and where creativity…it's a root of the city and a root of the culture that's around us. But other than in-person events, we also host a very strong Discord community. We have an in-suite community in our AI suite, social media, of course, and events. Events are the most fulfilling to me, the ones that bring me the most joy. But we're going to start first with Discord. In the last six months, we've seen a lot of those interactions that Katie talked about, where the community is answering each other's questions. And our role as administrators and as leads of the community has been diminishing and is taking a backseat role and a more observant role, always knocking on doors and being smart in how we interact with them. But it's been beautiful to see how our community has grown 50% in the last six months by very intentional posts and activations. I was talking to someone about activations earlier today. But seeing how those things are effective in engaging online communities. We also have an in-suite community. We are an AI suite where users are able to generate images and videos using different models. And they're able to share them within our suite and have their own profile and post. And you can interact with them. You can like them. You can follow them. That's also very strong. But between those two worlds, we have what we call the AI partners, Freepik AI partners. It's also important to mention that Discord is very important for our community to feel special and to feel seen. So when we have launches, they mostly go out first on Discord, letting them know what's coming. And they have a little insight on what's coming. And that makes them feel very…as part of the team, as one of us. and they're able to also give us some feedback on what they're expecting to see. And listening to that has been very important for us to understand our path and grow on that. But when we talk about AI partners, they're top creators around the world that have an interest in using Freepik and have experience using our platform and are comfortable navigating it. Our AI partners community has been growing exponentially the last six months as well by the visibility that Fripping is getting nationally. Before the event started, we were on the back watching our CEO talk in NBC Live and national TV, and it's a beautiful thing to see how our growth, and that's all thanks to our partners and our users and creators that are using our tool. Our partners get VIP access to our beta tools, so things that are not released yet, they get to play with it. We get to hear their feedback and their comments also on Discord and their private channel, where they get to discuss about it. We're just snooping and putting our ear to the wall to see what they're saying and how we can improve it. They also get a huge benefit by networking with each other. Creatives love other creatives, and it's important to make those spaces accessible to them and easily accessible. We also like to feature their skills into our platforms and events. This is an example of Jared Lou, a creative out of New York that uses many platforms, but one of his top favorites is Freepik. He was here earlier this year giving an in-person workshop to some creators on how…on his workflow and how he uses the Freepik tools to generate his own content. And sharing skills, sharing different workflows is also a beautiful way of sharing knowledge and including others into your creative mind. And yeah. So now in-person events. We've been here in San Francisco for about two years. In those two years we have held about 32 events with 55 speakers and over 1,200 attendees in our very small office in the past that got very hot and very loud and also very cold during the winter. It was beautiful. We hosted a lot of beautiful things and beautiful connections, so we're very grateful for that. We hosted about an average two events per month of different types because Freepik is t's a tool for creatives of all types. We have realized that it's important to create events for designers, for influencers, for investors, for early career designers, for universities, and that just opens the door to many types of events that we can host. We do demos. We work tomorrow. I'm going to the Swiss embassy because they're bringing some journalists to learn more about integrating AI into the workflow. So I'm lucky that I'm gonna be able to show them how to use Freepik into journalism and how they work with it. Collaborations like this one, different panels with different experts of the industry. We do hackathons at universities, not three-day hackathons. I think that's just insane. I don't know how you'll do it, but a few hours, maybe a a full day. I think that's good enough for us. And just social meetups, just spaces for people to connect and not just around Frippig but around creativity. If you have a good product and you bring people together, you don't really have to sell that product that hard to them. You just have to put it in front of them and if they like it and if you're doing a good job, they'll pick it up by themselves. And I think that's the best compliment that we can take from our users. We were very early. Our first office started because we wanted to billboard on top. So we wanted to put a big billboard of Freepik on top. But part of the deal was you can get the billboard if you rent the office on the bottom. We were like, OK, we'll just get the office. It was a bit of an accident. But the billboard really didn't do much for us. It was the office that we accidentally rented at the bottom that started giving us a lot more juice and is starting inspiring us a little bit more. So we said, let's stop with the wheel boards. Let's just focus on events and be more intentional about who we talk to, who we invite. And yeah. upskill.conf was, I think, is a beautiful example of the success that Freepik and the community that building is having in San Francisco and in the US. Upscale.com happened in March, May, in May this year, I believe. It was a two-day conference with over 700 people going from creative designers, artists, industry leaders. We have amazing speakers. The turnaround was beautiful. We had our first upscale in Malaga, Spain, where our headquarters are last year. It was a good turnout, so the company said, why don't we just do that in San Francisco, where we have another office, and where is the AI and creative hub of the world? We did it. It was beautiful. We had a great quote from Emily Nash from Pre Magazine, "Creativity is evolving with technology, but creativity itself is still deeply human and deeply communal." And that was the highlight of the whole event. It was not just showing our demos and telling people how to use our tools and the best outputs you can generate with each model. The highlight was people connecting with other people. And I think everyone from the Freepik team can agree that that was just not unexpected. We were hoping for that, but it was a beautiful surprise that we got. And a lot of feedback that we got was just the workshops, the people that showed up, the connections that we were able to make was what made the event a highlight for a lot of people. In a similar vein, Paola Vivas, our head of marketing in the US, she's unfortunately not here tonight. She's in her headquarters in Spain. But she said somewhere, I just asked chat GPT for some quotes, and Paola Vivas, our head of marketing, a quote popped up. So I was like, oh, this is perfect. She said, with our community, you don't have a tool. With the creative behind it, your tool means nothing. I think this speaks to the stigma that AI is carrying in the creative spaces. This idea that AI is humanizing art and creativity. AI is changing a lot of industries very, very fast and there's not a lot of question on how dehumanizing that aspect is for people that are working in stats and in science, their benefit is instant and there's not a lot of social threat, social threatening to livelihoods or to their careers or to their creativity. I think creativity is in a very weird position with the AI and I think we have to navigate it very carefully in how we present it and the alliances that you're making with the community to not lean into this dehumanization aspect of it, but having this in-person events and humanizing the tools that humans are creating and are using it to be even more creative in different ways. Yeah. So what's next? This is our first event in this office. We're hoping to continue growing and continue having a stronger presence in San Francisco. With you all here, we hope to see familiar faces. I already see some faces that I've seen before. We have an event coming up at the end of the month with Rachel, who is the host of Creative Mornings. Just positioning ourselves in places where we want to be and with the people that we wanna be with and play nice and reminding creatives that AI, it's just an extra tool for the human creativity as not here to threaten, but to make the work a little bit easier or different or faster. But we're happy to have those conversations as well because those fears are very real and those anxieties are very real and we need to have those conversations. So that's a little bit what Freepik is doing in the community side. I know it's quick, it was just a quick case study. I'm very happy to talk to anyone who has any questions about what we're doing and the future and the vision that we have for Freepik in San Francisco and beyond. So yeah, very grateful for you all to be here and break the space with us.
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