A guide to building a Minimum Viable Community (MVC)

👋 Hello, this is the first of a series of guides on important topics for community builders.

In the product and startup world, the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is well known, or should we say, it's impossible to escape from. It's just common sense to not build too much without some form of validation that you are on the right track.

In community it makes sense to do the same — don't build too much without knowing you are on the right track. The biggest mistake I see, time and time again, are people not only launching into the void but also spending a huge amount of time and money on 'launching' a community that just won't work.

🙏🏽 Stop doing lots of planning upfront and instead embrace small scale experimentation.

What is a Minimum Viable Community

An MVC is the smallest action you can take to bring people together. An MVC is not necessarily a community, yet. The intentions and vision are probably there, but the community may not be.

An MVC is not about the tech behind the community — it is more about the ability to test whether people are interested, or potentially interested in the vision of your community. It is also about bringing understanding that specific software does not make a community — the people do.

If you can't bring people together in a small scale environment, how are you going to do it in a larger one?

An MVC is not about having all the pieces in place for your dream community. It's about experimenting with the foundations. Finding out what brings value. Building relationships and trust. In a manageable and not too overwhelming way to help you find your path with the community you need to build.

An MVC is about creating the dots that you will need later to connect the community.

Why build a Minimum Viable Community?

Everyone wants community these days. It is hot. And to be honest, whilst I fully support it in whatever way I can, it's a bit of a worrying trend. There are lots of people, products and companies scrambling to lure people in with the promise of community.

MVCs are a perfect way to get started with community. Not only to understand if building the community is right for you, but also to understand what it is people actually need from the community.

We must also not forget that part of the validation of building community is whether people want to join in with whoever leads it. Just because you want a community doesn't mean others will want to follow you into it. MVCs are great ways to test out whether people will get behind what you want to build.

MVCs help you avoid the lure of big community, tools and processes. To instead focus on building relationships and understanding between one another. To break down the walls. To do people research.

Starting small is perhaps the only authentic way of doing this. And authenticity matters if you want people to open up with the truth and to share what it is they are really after.

Starting small means you start to build trust. A community without trust is one that will likely not survive.

Starting small means you start to really learn about what people want, need, love or struggle with. This means you can build these learnings into building your community and the conversations you co-create.

Starting small means you can be mindful of the culture you are creating, through your own behaviour and of those that you invite in.

Starting small is less risky. It gives you the freedom to experiment and trial things out and just being ok with whatever happens.

Starting small means you focus on the outcomes and learnings rather than the metrics.

Minimum Viable Community is a mindset

Of course, it's not just about 'starting small'. Minimum Viable Communities is all about the mindset of being open minded and experimental.

Just like you can pivot in a business, you can pivot in a community. You may go in thinking that the community needs a certain thing, to only then discover that that is not what will help them with their goals.

To build community you need to listen to what your community is not only saying, but what they are doing. What people say can be a slippery slope to rely on. What people do is safer to place bets on.

We can take the MVC mindset into our community building work even with an established community. MVCs are also great for building blocks on your community flywheels.

Infact, I'd go as far as saying that if you don't keep experimenting with new ideas your community may end up becoming irrelevant. And irrelevant communities just don't survive.

Examples of Minimum Viable Communities

Practically, what do we mean by Minimum Viable Community?

It's about doing things that don't scale, but with a community mindset of doing people research and building up relationships.

Here are some ideas to get you going:

Newsletters are easy to start, harder to maintain consistency. However, they're also pretty easy to adapt over time. The magic with newsletters is that they can feed into invites to events.

Audio

Audio spaces or social audio is a great way to connect and converse with people. Players atm include the likes of Twitter Spaces, Discord Stages, Clubhouse and Racket.

The magic is that you can start small with these things, really you only need to be willing to have a conversation with one other person, everyone else is a bonus.

Hashtags

Social Forums

These are public places like Reddit and Facebook groups. You can consider either joining one that already exists or starting your own.

They are easy to start, but longer term it is hard to control the outcome as you don't own the data, the eyeball competition is much harder and you are at the mercy of algorithms. Of course, if you have a MVC mindset, none of this is a problem. You can stick or ditch these in whatever way feels best.

Take notes together

Think: Google Docs, Google Sheets, Miro, etc.

I'm a big fan of note taking! Coming together to take notes is fun, productive and creates a valuable outcome. It also helps to create connections between the contributors and generate new ideas.

The comments section

A forum is just a post with the ability to add comments. Of course, this is a simplified take on it, however when you do choose to look at it this way you can start to see the value of comments everywhere.

Make use of and encourage comments everywhere. In your newsletter, blog, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, forums...anywhere.

If you can't start conversations in these circumstances, how will you cope at a bigger scale?

Small events, meetups and 1:1 chats

This was how I got started in the world of community!

Nothing ever replaces in real life stuff even when most of us have become accustomed to virtual events. Both are valid approaches and both can create connections and potential value for life!

In my humble rosie opinion, the best way to start events is small. Of course, some events can get big pretty easily and that's fine. However, going into events with the expectation of them being small creates reasonable expectations for community builders.

Often I tag on 1:1 or small meetup invites on to newsletters — you can start to see how MVC efforts can build off of one another.

Memes

Yes memes. We can tap into our shared knowledge, spur on discussions, inspire and educate one another. Memes are a great way to practice understanding who your people are, especially when you can get people to 'feel seen'.

Erin and I have had much fun curating memes over the past few months. We co-created a Miro board full of them, but have now taken it a step further with a Communimeme Twitter account.

Merch and Swag

We all love a bit of swag, though these days we should become increasingly mindful of the environment (please!).

Things like stickers and t-shirts can bring real visibility and connection to people. It's so much easier to start conversations with people when you know you have something in common — swag can show that thing in common that you have.

Podcasting

Often people don't see podcasting as community building, however when you look at the foundations of community as being conversations then it becomes easier to see how podcasting can help create community.

Podcasts are great for amplifying voices and ideas of the people you want to connect with in a deeper way. It also has the long tail benefit of bringing people together over a long period of time.

When to use Minimum Viable Communities?

As mentioned, I believe MVCs are more about the mindset of constantly experimenting. You should be doing this all the time, no matter the size of your community.

I'd definitely recommend it when starting out, however before actually going ahead I always recommend people do their research. Creating an MVC shouldn't be the first step in building a community, these days I recommend Community Discovery or the art of studying your people — this will help you get going on the right track.