Is community building a hype?
I remember back in 2018 everyone suddenly started installing Telegram app which I was using for years. And people I knew were installing Telegram for Blockchain, ICOs & Crypto. Crypto was on the bull run. Price increasing every day.
They were saying Blockchain this, Blockchain that. Crypto is amazing. Now, those people don't even know lot of Blockchain because they left when crypto prices were decreasing. Others were finding ICOs as scam.
And today, I see only few of them still working on Blockchain related projects or investing in Crypto. People who are in right now are truly involved and want to make a change. It's a long road for them and it will yield results.
I've learned a lesson here. You can't get in just because it's famous and everyone is taking interest in it. You need to be committed and be in it for the long term.
If you are building a community you have to be committed. You can't just start because everyone is starting in it. You can't just do it because there is a hype around it. You can try things but have a goal and commitment to run it for longer period.
Think it like a business. Founders see a business. They find something missing in it and build a product. They raise funding for a runway of at least 18 months. And cycle goes on. (I'm not saying raise funding. Just an example)
We as a community builders should think exactly like that. We should see what's missing around communities. Create one, bring people together and have a plan to run for at least 18 months.
What else do you think should we do to avoid burnout to build and run communities for longer period?
☣️ For us, building/being a community was almost accidental and a result of the current pandemic.
🍸 We've started our journey with an IRL dating service where curated people would book tickets for to meet other curated people at monthly events (cocktail parties, film screenings, boardgames afternoons...).
🌹 Then COVID happened and we needed to switch to online rendezvous and suddenly became a community of 400+ members (with a monthly subscription) vs the previous 2000+ consumers (on a pay-as-you-go basis) we had.
This is a perfect scenario and I love it at least in the beginning you aren't sure whether you are building a community. It just happens and it takes you by surprise.
Wow! Great number you have there with 400 monthly subscriptions.
Most of the communities I've seen was started with IRL/ Offline meetups. It's one of the best ways to go about building a community.
That's how we started back in 2018, but again, it was not a community per se. At least not an engaged one.
I think better / more connection is key. Coming together in ways that go beyond just typing. And then if you are doing remote things (as we all have to these days) having better methods of interacting over those (let's be honest, kind of tedious) zoom calls might make a community more fun to be in. This is kind of what my side project is aiming toward, so I have a particular interest.
I'm curious, do you have methods or tools for keeping the human-touch connection in the communities (other than say just large chat channels) especially now that everything's remote?
Yes. Building relationships is key to building a community. And in the beginning, we have to do things that don't scale which is making personal connections with the first 500 members in the community. Knowing the names of 500 members. Trying to facilitate the connection between the members.
We can't hack relationships or automate the human touch. It's very difficult and maybe impossible.
But would love to hear how are you trying to tackle this challenge with your project?
I guess the idea is to have a few barriers of entry like a paywall or a selection process (like we have at LVRSNFRNDS) would help as you'll end having only (or close to) the most active/passionate/motivated members.
I mean yes.
When you have something paid then the barrier to entry in a community is high. So it becomes easier for a community builder to facilitate conversation or do something because member pays a fee to be in the community and they expect to gain something out of it.
True, they (the members) need to understand the value (or ROI) behind paying for a membership.
Agreed. Seems like there's no technological substitute for deeper 1:1 or 1:few human relationships, and I'm not sure there really ever can be (at least not with the level of tech we have now).
So for us, we're working on an interactive presentation tool that lets audiences actually participate — eg. if you're going to display information (think like a ppt pres) to a group, at least you can bring your viewers in to the picture and let them be a part of the conversation. You can check us out at https://slideswith.com/ if you're curious. We're pre-launch but the MVP is live & works pretty well, and you're welcome to play around. We're definitely looking for early feedback!
Overall, our goal is to make that remote connection / interaction at least a little less onerous for communities and groups. Because I totally agree with you, creating a larger community is a huge undertaking, and needs to be respected as such. I think the future of online interactions will be in these niche communities, so the people making them now are kind of on the forefront of the new web.
What I read/took away from your post is that there are often lots of things you could focus on and plenty of new distractions, hype, and it's important to choose a marketing and sales channel that you can commit to really working for a sustainable period of time. You don't want to try a different marketing channel every couple of weeks or switch to doing whatever everyone else is doing because it is the new fad. Figure out what could work for you to find customers or reach whatever goal you are striving for and work that marketing channel for a long time. Longer that you think you'll need to work on it.
If you think building a community is a good approach great, but it means you'll need to give up on something else for now so make sure you know it will work for you.
That is a great connection, Ryan. But at the end of the day if you are building a community you have to try different things as experiments and double down on what's working.
What I meant to convey was community building is long term game. We create a community today and can't expect to have 1000 members in a community after a month which is engaged and active. Some communities might be exceptional and it could be due to luck.
But generally, community building is hard. If we want to see the results of our efforts it will take months of work.
Startup when they raise the money they have a runaway of 18 months. So they have a deadline before they run out of money. And they work hard to avoid all the tough situation they have to go through.
In our mind as an individual or a brand, building a community we need to have a plan to accomplish our goals knowing that we wouldn't see the results at least for the first 6 months.
I hope that makes sense.
not hype.