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How community-first entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses.

Hundreds of businesses fail every day. Those businesses were built by people who put their heart, sweat, and tears into making their dream come true. But after weeks, months, and years of hard work, these people had to give up on their dreams. The no. 1 reason why they fail is that they built something nobody needed.

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Most people approach business in the wrong way. The story usually goes like this: a budding entrepreneur has a great, revolutionizing idea. They go on to spend weeks and months building the first version. After locking themselves up in their apartment, they are finally ready to launch. The BIG day arrives when they finally release their making into the wild. But the success they were so desperately hoping for never materializes. All the time, all the money, all the hope -- gone.

Why community-first businesses survive

Don’t get hung up with your “great” ideas unless you know there’s a market need for them. The community-first approach teaches you how to build stuff that solves people’s most pressing problems.

Instead of building products first and then trying to create a market around them, it approaches business the other way around. First, you identify market needs by discovering critical problems within communities. Only THEN you go on to build a business that solves those problems. This drastically lowers the market risk.

How to build community-first businesses

1. Decide who you want to serve

Clearly define WHO’S problem your business is trying to solve. You’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs DO NOT exactly know who their customers are.

2. Find their communities

Find the online communities where these people hang out: Slack, Facebook, Linked In, Reddit, etc. These places are full of authentic people, having authentic conversations. Never in the history of humanity has there been such a rich source of information about real-world problems. Leverage this!

3. Immerse yourself and discover problems

Once you have found your communities, join them and JUST LISTEN. This is where so many entrepreneurs go wrong: they join communities and selfishly promote their products. However, all they needed to do is to shut up and listen. You want to get to know your community: what do they talk about? How do they talk about it and what’s their jargon? What problems do they have and what do they complain about most frequently? This should help you identify their most pressing problems.

4. Build products with and for them.

Become a valuable member of your communities by engaging with their members and helping them without expecting anything in return. This is crucial and NOT a waste of time!

Once you think you have identified a critical problem and came up with a potential solution, validate it with your community. This is the beauty of community-first: both co-creation and distribution are built into this method. For success stories that illustrate this approach, check out e.g. Arvid Kahl, Greg Isenberg, Paul Jarvis, Rosie Sherry, and Ben Orenstein.


Thanks for reading this! As you can tell, I’m super excited about this approach. That’s why I write about community-first business over here. If you have any questions, you’ll find me in the comments :)

  1. 2

    Hey Matthias, nice post! I love the audience-/community-first approach. That's why I've just recently started building a community on Twitter. But community-building is also hard, it takes a lot of endurance and only pays off in the long-run 🤷‍♂️

    Also, greetings to a fellow German 🤓👋

    1. 1

      Hey Dennis! Thanks for the feedback :)

      Yes, community-building takes time. And I def do not believe in "building community fast in order to make great business" kinda narratives. Building great relationships, which is at the core of building community, usually takes time. One should def be sensitive about this when building community. I'm super grateful to have learned this from Rosie Sherry.

      What I wanted to point out with this post is more the power of existing communities. One can embed oneself in those communities and learn a lot about the people one wants to build for. This doesn't require community- or audience-building but rather exploration and embedding.

      Just my two cents! Hope this helps clarify my understanding of community exploration/embedding and community-building.

      By the way, following you on Twitter! Would love to learn about what you're building.

      Greetings from the south of Germany :P

  2. 2

    Pretty cool, thanks! I've heard about audience first before, but wasn't sure what to make of it. I totally agree on the reason why so many businesses fail.

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