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Unreal Collective has been acquired by Smart Passive Income
Unreal Collective, my paid community and virtual accelerator, has been acquired by Smart Passive Income. I'm stepping in to lead Community Experience.
jayclouse.com
I believe @DavisBaer was asking on Twitter recently about paid community acquisitions.
My take is that community acquisitions are much trickier than SaaS or even media company acquisitions.
Acquirers are similar to investors. When they buy something, they're typically looking for future growth. Unlike SaaS, however, communities are tricky to grow, because their very nature changes with their size. A community that works well at 100 people may look very different with 1000 people. In fact, most communities are structured in such a way that growth (after a certain point) degrades the experience rather than improves it. Typically, you have to parlay a community into a very different type of thing in order to scale it.
There's also the human connection. The value in communities comes from people moreso than the container they're meeting in. So acquirers typically need to bring along the community's owners (in SPI's case Jay, in Stripe's case me and @channingallen, in AngelList's case @rrhoover) to make things work. If the owners are volatile, e.g. if they immediately quit, the community might just die. Or if the community members don't like the acquirer for some reason, they might leave en masse. Yikes.
Obviously, this all makes investing in communities from a purely financial perspective very risky. So community acquisitions are often strategically motivated rather than financially motivated.
For example, a community might plug a hole for the acquirer that they weren't able to plug themselves. Or in my case, Stripe has enough resources to eat the risk, allow me to be autonomous, and bet on the small chance that I can grow IH into something much bigger. It's a move with high upside and little downside potential for Stripe, and therefore a good bet.
Agree with everything you've said here, @csallen!
We hosted the Unreal community on Slack. And because of that, I never allowed the community to exceed 150 members because I didn't think we'd be able to keep the same level of connection with more members using Slack as a platform.
This is one of the reasons I'm bullish about Circle, which is what we're using for SPI Pro. I think the forum tools are much better equipped to handle scale.
The excitement for me x SPI is that because of my focus on connection in Unreal, and my familiarity with community building, I have a lot of ideas about how you can facilitate connection alongside growth (utilizing a forum tool as the underlying platform).
SPI has a huge audience, but I didn't. So I couldn't really test those ideas.
Together, we think we can accomplish quite a bit.
That's our bet (our challenge) and my priority.
Congratulations man and wish you the very best at SPI!
I agree with @csallen about inverse relationship between community bonding and scale. At 100, you know everyone else and it's a family. A t 1000, you only know the regular posters and at 10,000 it feels like a new year party - everyone is enjoying the performer without connecting with each other.
Will love to see how you scale while maintaining the excitement and togetherness of a small community.
Thanks for the mention Courtland 🤓
Yep, just tweeted about community acquisitions:
Interesting. Agree that Indie Hackers need "structure to thrive."
I just posted https://www.friendclub.xyz to the Indie Hacker community based on the same idea.
And if anyone wants to read the Tweet thread...
Thanks so much for sharing this, @rosiesherry! It's certainly been an exciting end to the year!
A big congrats to @jayclouse. 🥳
Not only is he celebrating being acquired, he also got engaged recently. 💍
i really like pat. +1 to this.
Congrats @jayclouse
I also recently sold one of my private communties due to lack of time.
Looking forward to your future!
Thanks Yaro!