How to run a successful online community
Tips from On Deck, Lenny's community, and more
Hey The Discourse fam! Hope you're doing well. The newest consumer social app on the block is AirChat. In case you need an invite reply to this email, I have a few left, I can share with you. I’ll be writing about that soon, but until then let’s look at online communities. I’ve got a power-packed edition for you with a lot of tactical advice so make sure you read and share it.
With that out of the way, let’s get to today’s article.
Building and managing an online community can be immensely rewarding. It creates a space for collaboration, feedback, and engagement with your product or service to form a goldmine of insights. But it’s not easy to set up and cultivate. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Let’s look at the few things you can do right to create a thriving online community.
I've honed my community-building skills through leading communities with The Product Folks no-code community and participating in top online communities like On Deck, Lenny’s community, Foster, and several NFT projects.
I'll share insights on what distinguishes a flourishing community from a lackluster one, and offer advice on how to curate and nurture your own space successfully.
Benefits of communities
As we’ve touched upon, communities can have a lot of far-reaching benefits.
Source of feedback
It can be an unbiased source of feedback from early adopters and power users. These are likely to be champions of your product. But are also likely to have a high bar for quality, and hence tougher to impress. Yet, it’s a great way to get feedback.
Proof of concept
If you're building a product or service or a content creator, a community lets others see what your users/members have created or learned from your product or service.
For example, if you have a graphic design tool, you can let people show off what they have created using your tool.
If you're a newsletter writer, let people showcase their learnings from your posts.
In this way, members can increase their social status, and others in the community see the value of the product.
Midjourney — the AI image creator platform — did this brilliantly with Discord. In the free version, you could not create images privately. All images were public and everyone could see what people were creating with Midjourney. This created a show-and-tell effect where the proof was in the community. Only once you opt for a paid plan, you could create private images.
In the below example, I have shown the Discord of a graphic design tool called Kittl.
Distribution
A thriving community has shared goals and a sense of belonging. If you're shipping a product/content/program, you can look to your community to amplify an announcement on Social. On Deck did this phenomenally.
On major announcement days, a community call was held for all community members and the On Deck team. After the call, there was a request to amplify the official announcement on socials. This was effective in a pandemic and lockdown world, where people had more free time online.
Discussion
This is something that not a lot of startups who run communities get. They think the community should only be about their product/service. A community is not only for announcing features or for handling customer support. If it’s a community, there should be space for discussion related to the industry, while staying on topic.
That’s the only way a community is truly a community.
Look at Obsidian’s Discord, there's a section dedicated to broader discussion of personal knowledge management and other topics.
Revenue
Of course, you can use a community to increase revenue and all those other sweet metrics like engagement and retention. For instance, a member on the verge of churning, they come to the community, and get help from either the community members or the team, and that prevents churn, which increases retention and hence revenue — a good thing. You can also get people to upgrade their free subscription to pay through the help of community engagement.
With the benefits clear, let’s look at what defines the strength of a community.
Characteristics of communities
You can quickly figure out if a community is good by looking at these characteristics.
Bad Communities
A bad community is easy to spot. It's filled with irrelevant content, relentless link-dropping, low-quality interactions, spam, unresolved support issues, and lacks active participation resembling a ghost town.
Good Communities
On the other hand, a good community pulsates with life. It remains on-topic, fostering polite and valuable interactions. It's a place for learning, sharing, and support, a give-first mindset, often extending relationships from the digital world into the physical world.
How to build a good community?
Let's get down to brass tacks and look at tactical ways to create and manage a community.
What’s in it for the community members?
Before creating the community, understand the benefits for members to join, stay, and engage. Maybe it’s to learn, get help, connect with others, and improve their social status, belonging, or achieve a sense of purpose.
Curate, curate, curate
The first step is to be highly selective of who you allow into your community. This sets the tone and the expected behaviors of the community.
Yash Roongta, who runs a community called Alt Investors, said: “I run an active community on alternative investments, my learning is that you strictly need to control the quality of people that you let in because that drives everything.”
Not all companies can do this, but you can set the tone with the first users.
Set values, not just rules
Define a set of values you want the community to live by and the actions and behaviors can be the outcome of those values. It can be anything you choose in your community to live by. For example, On Deck has a spirit of service, confidentiality, gratitude, and family as its core values.
And with each opportunity, the core values were reinforced.
Set rules
Values set the vision, but rules govern the day-to-day. Lay down rules for posting, DMs, harassment, and others. Vishwadeep Tehlan comments: “In my opinion, it's important to set some community rules to not let people digress from relevant topics.”
Lenny’s community has a no-spam link policy in most channels, except one (which we’ll get into in a bit), and the channels are closely moderated to ensure that conversations are happening in the right channels. You can also set and maintain rules against discussing politics or divisive topics.
Onboarding form
For any community, you should have an onboarding form to identify the right people. Start with profile-related questions and social media links, then ask about the value they seek and will add to the community.
Introductions
This is an important part of the mix. You don’t want people to join the community and not introduce themselves. Create and share a common format for new members to introduce themselves.
You can set up reminder bots or onboarding checklists that include this as an important part of the onboarding process.
Welcome
When new introductions come in, they should be welcomed and replied to by the team or community ambassadors to the extent possible. Imagine going to a house party and no one welcoming you. You’d feel unwanted and unlikely to stay.
You can record a Loom video from the founders and send it to each new member through automated DM (and add to the welcome section) — adds a personal touch, but at scale.
Seed discussions
It's important to seed discussion initially. Don’t expect people to come in and start engaging directly. Instruct all employees and ambassadors to start discussions and keep people engaged.
Identify team members who would take turns engaging and ambassadors and influencers to engage.
Fewer channels than needed
At the early stage, it’s tempting to keep creating new channels for each new topic. But in a community's early stage, you want to funnel most engagement where most people can see.
The reality is that many of the topic channels will get less engagement and die out. At that point, you should periodically remove dead channels.
Of course, if the community is super popular and engaged, then this shouldn't be an issue. But at the early stage, it's better to have fewer channels.
Dedicated promote yourself channel
To reduce link dropping in each channel, keep only one channel where people are allowed to share their links to avoid making each channel a link dump. For example: Lennys’ paid Slack community and Level’s Telegram community.
Community moderators - ensuring things are on track
Use AI to moderate most interactions to reduce spam. There are LLMs that allow you to do this now. Otherwise, create tools and SOPs for moderation by firstly the team and then chosen community members. Always allow people to contest moderation to correct any false positives.
Engage
Community managers should have the skill and knowledge to connect people with others in the community.
For e.g. hey you write on mental health, and there is another writer who also writes on mental health, why don’t you two chat? Here is their Discord/Twitter/LinkedIn.
Have weekly prompts to encourage discussion and improve engagement.
Reward the community members Organize community-only events/giveaways/perks.
Organize weekly or monthly community calls on Discord would be another fun way to engage the community.
Rituals
NFT communities did this well, almost as a cult — where they would have their rituals — like gm, gn, and other things specific to communities. Creating that shared memes/lore/lingo will go a long way.
AMAs
Call on external experts to do text or audio/video AMAs for the community. It can be within the platform or a Zoom/Meets call with only community members getting access.
I’ve taken part as an expert in one of the AMAs hosted by The Product Folks.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, the backbone of a successful online community lies in the delicate balance of vibrant interaction, shared values, and strategic management. A community thrives when its members find consistent value in engaging with one another, and when they truly feel part of something greater.
By embracing the tactical advice shared here—from careful curation to active engagement and rule-setting—you can cultivate a space that resonates with its users and stands the test of time. Remember, the most vibrant communities are those where every member's voice adds to a harmonious chorus, echoing the collective purpose and passion.
That's it for today, thanks for reading! What do you think of creating and managing online communities? Reply or comment below.
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Talk to you soon! Follow me on Twitter @kavirkaycee
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