Guess the dollars? Uncommunity #4
4 minutes read time
Hi there,
Don’t get too stressed out. You deserve a treat for all the hard work you’ve been doing building & growing a community. Treat yourself icecream. ;)
Our 2nd episode with Shreyas is live. We chat about developer communities, open-source contribution and remote opportunities. Shreyas is my go-to person and has been there for me as a mentor, and a friend since I started my community journey. Listen to it here.
In today’s edition:
- Building paid communities through newsletters
- Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool
- Communities and Scale means disaster
Learn from your mistakes. Build a great community. Don’t fail.
This is a very controversial topic. Do we build a community first or product first? I would love to hear your thoughts. Reply to the email.
If you are building a community tweet to us here.
Guess how much they paid for the domain name community dot com? Tweet here
From audiences to communities
By now, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of viable membership-based newsletters. Of those thousands, a number of them serve as sources of original ideas, news, and analyses that are incredibly valuable to professional ecosystems. It’s the synthesis of these ideas that has the greatest potential impact. If education is priceless, we are entering a new era of value creation. Imagine an Enlightenment-era coffeehouse.
In the Age of Enlightenment (1715-1789), a European could gain entry into a coffeehouse by buying a drink. But the drink was just the price of admission, the conversation was the attraction. It wasn’t solely the conversations on matters of sociology, economics, and law that drove the age forward. Sometimes, patrons would overhear concepts that would fill gaps in their own thinking. Other conversations would solidify pivotal ideas, directly or indirectly.
Read how Web Smith build 2PM his exclusive paid community and the inspiration behind this was the coffeehouse. 2PM has investments in some of the very interesting DTC brands including the very famous Fast.
Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool
To me, “community” implies users regularly engaging with each other, a criterion which indicates that the “regular crowd” at neighborhood joints or local skate shops are much truer communities than most online brands. Nevertheless, brands are now much better at directly engaging current and future customers through social media. This merger is clearly happening.
Each pairing of verticals has produced some of the most interesting companies and media projects of the last few years. But what’s happening now is that all three are coming together in a new way, fusing to form a completely different type of business: paid communities. Check out the full piece by Toby Shorin here.
Why you need to hire a Chief Community Officer (and why “community” and scale are often opposites)
Community is an elastic phrase, something that exists in the ether between groups of people, a feeling, something with lockdown we’ve learnt very clearly this year that we seek out and require. Communities form, evolve, grow and halt all around us, all the time, and some of us have made nurturing these communities part of our professional lives.
The venture capital model creates portfolios of funded startups in the expectation most will flame out, a few will be sustainable and one will become exponentially huge. One will scale. There’s a tension between what scale demands and what most, if not all, communities need. Simply put, the strength of community is usually (if not always) weakened as the number of people in it grows.
Read why the organizations should and will have the Chief Community Office.
In real life!
That’s the name of an app. It’s called IRL. It’s your social calendar. It syncs all virtual events that are happening on Zoom, Meets, even TikTok or Spotify Live events. Not just this. If your favourite team is playing Football, Basketball, Baseball it will notify you when’s the next match. It’s mindblowing.
You should definitely explore and check it out.
We added new jobs, community experts this week. Go to Uncommunity.club to find out about the latest tools and jobs.
That’s it for this week. If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, smash that like button or consider sharing it with friends.
thank you ☕
for joining us in our journey. We both have full-time jobs and we have built Uncommunity in our free time as we have been exploring ways to give back and support fellow community builders in their journeys.
If you are enjoying our curation and want to express your appreciation, please feel free to spread the word, buy us a coffee, or let us know your thoughts/feedback.