I’m going to start by saying something that’s probably not what you want to hear.
In the beginning, your goal should not be to grow the community.
In hindsight, we totally botched this for Launch Awesome.
Our goal right out of the gate was to build the biggest community we could for Product people. Our motivation for starting Launch Awesome was ultimately to increase awareness for LaunchNotes — we should invite everyone we know from day 1!
Terrible idea.
The founders of LaunchNotes and I invited all of the PMs and PMMs from our network. Over the first few months we were able to get ~ 200 folks to join.
Fast-forward a year later, and of the 200 that had joined in those first few months, only 10 of them had posted or replied to anything in the previous 6 months.
Pretty dismal retention 😢!
If you don’t have the onboarding and an engaged set of users in place, opening up the doors to everyone is going to result in a ton of unengaged community members.
This post gave me the words I’ve been looking for as to why this happens.
An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth. It can be like a village and be five people, it can be like a village and be a thousand people.
In this context, the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.
(cut a bit for times sake)
It’s important to understand what makes a village a village, and what kills the village.
The central thesis is that what these villages can’t tolerate is a sustained large influx of strangers. A stranger in this context is an nothing more or less than an unfamiliar face(…..)we’re all simultaneously villagers and strangers in various social circumstances.
A slow trickle of strangers is tolerable, a brief large influx is fine; the strangers’ average interaction is eventually stabilizes and biases toward the a stable group of members, and they quickly find shared values and become villagers too. They become familiar faces, and undoubtedly make their mark on the shared culture. That’s often a refreshing and welcome thing. It’s still a village.
When sustained growth is too large, the strangers’ average interaction is with other strangers, and even if this would have eventually stabilized into something like a village, there are yet more strangers to prevent this from happening. Everyone stays strangers, and a sort of stranger-culture emerges where guards are up by default because there are never any familiar faces.
It’s no longer a village, but something like a train station. The default mode of being is passing through. People come and go, and there’s no real sense of belonging.
This is what happens when you try to create a giant community from scratch. You don’t actually create a village. You create a train station.
You get a bunch of people that briefly pass through.
Instead of blowing it out of the water in the first month of your community, soft launch with 20 folks that fit the description of an ideal community member exactly. This should match your company’s overall ICP — work at the right kind of company, right company size, they’re the exact right role and seniority level.
And if you’ve already launched your product, they should be customers as well.
And one more, they should be people that self-identity as actively wanting to join a community of their peers for the purposes of doing better at their job. Some people just don’t want to participate in communities — they’re not super engaged in their job for whatever reason and their not actively looking to get better at it.
So build a list of ~ 50 people that you think are perfect fits and say “Hey I’m starting this community…this is what it’s about. Any interest in joining us?”