Struggling with your community? You only need to do these three things to get unstuck
The three things are: 'atomic network', choosing 'one experience', and the art of applying 'muscle'
The three things are: 'atomic network', choosing 'one experience', and the art of applying 'muscle'
Most people overcomplicate 'community'.
And it's no strange thing.
Platform choice, mission, tons and tons of stakeholders, growing your member base, finding money to sustain your effort. Ouch! 😬
This often leads to two 'community illnesses':
🤒 platform paralysis. The builder gets stuck in comparing platforms when there is not one single perfect platform out there. Not even haaartland... 😎
🤒 over-dreaming As the Buddhists say - "take care of the present moment, and the future will take care of itself". Yes, dream big, but then go to work. Every snowball started with a tiny snowflake. Get busy with real stuff in front of you.
But with what? And how big is the elephant of work?
Get going and keep these three things in mind
atomic network
choosing one experience (and keep at it) 🎉
muscle
Let's pick them apart for you:
atomic network
The “atomic network" is a concept coined by Andrew Chen in his book The Cold Start Problem. It refers to the “smallest possible network that is stable and can grow on its own" It is the smallest unit you can use to seed your community.
In my experience, having observed 100's of communities succeed on haaartland, the atomic network is a very critical thing to keep in mind. All successful communities build on this.
There will always be that set of two, three, or four people who raise their hands early in your community. They just show up because they vibe with what you do. Many builders miss this nugget. They don't invite these first "hand-raisers" 🙋🏿♀️ 🙋 into a conversation and the atomic network never forms. Engage with these guys and you have the nucleus for your community.
To add more proof to this reasoning. Consider this Linkedin post by community guru David Spinks (pop up the image to see full text)
So the formula is simple: Identify potential the hand raisers 🙋🏿♀️🙋 , reach out 🤝 and 💬
Choose one experience - stick with it!
Choosing one experience ties well into the question - how do I engage with the people in the atomic network?
This is a typical fork ⤵️ where I see many builders get lost: many will try to impress people to death (producing content en masse).
Typically what works instead is inviting people to meet and have conversations.
about baking, martial arts, or handling T1 diabetes (whatever topic unites you)
about what this community could be (what could we build together)
then
keep having the conversations at fixed dates (so that people can make space in their calendars)
Do nothing more than this.
Don't write
Don’t post
Use your community platform to run these recurring events in the community, or go hybrid, meet up in a cafe, or at someone's home 🙂 Whatever is more convenient.
Don't use other features in whatever platform you are using.
Focus on people and conversations
Slowly the atomic network will grow in size. It will start to get network effects
Network effects by definition means - increased numbers of people or participants improve the value of a good or service (in your case community)
So, tick box:
✅ You now have your atomic network
✅ you have your first experience nailed.
Do you sense it?
You have a core. A verified core. People and a recurring conversation 🙂🥇.
So finally, what about 'muscle'?
When the core is there. When there is an atomic network that has started to grow. When you have figured out what the growing network likes to talk about. Then...You need to apply 'muscle':
When I refer to the art of applying 'muscle', this is built on the following principle
Volume negates luck
I say it again
Volume negates luck
If you apply enough pressure in many dimensions break-through will happen
Quality and core alone (the core we established above with the atomic network and the first experience) won't solve community growth.
Yes, it is a magnet, a center of your community universe, a source of word of mouth that slowly pulls people in. But remember David Spink's excellent post above?
researchers found that less than 5% of developers were responsible for 95% of the code and social interactions in over 85% of open-source projects on GitHub
The majority of your members won't engage in the open.
And these people will need way more stimuli to join and stay. I know, this might have you feeling exhausted, even irritated at this group 😅
But are the unengaged unimportant?
They are not unimportant at all 🙂. From the ranks of your unengaged members, engaged members emerge filling the shoes of the previously engaged. Life and engagements change.
Also, the volume builds momentum:
3 people in the initial atomic network
5 people in the atomic network, 95 people somewhat engaged
50 people in the atomic network, 950 people somewhat engaged
Now, after a certain point, something happens. The sheer size of say 500, 900, or 1000 people generates network growth, people start inviting friends, and those engaged get triggered by the size of the movement that is getting born. So, yes every member is important in the community. Because we all provide momentum.
So, how apply muscle?
I copy a part of an email where growth specialist Loes Gellisen analyses the importance of applying muscle and the capacity to control attention this gives you.
You’ll learn everything you need to know about failure in business - by looking at the volume of attention.
Elon, Dan Martell, Tiktok, Guillaume Moubeche, Kylie Jenner, Joe Rogan, Google have all built amazing businesses because they’ve mastered the art of controlling attention.
she continues:
Now you’re probably thinking that they’re influencers and their process shouldn’t apply to your little [community]
But let me redefine the following mechanisms & you’ll see that they’re doing the same thing as you, they’re just doing it in a more leveraged manner:
A video = an outreach message
A tweet = an outreach message
An instagram post = an outreach message
A story = an outreach message
An email = an outreach message
A platform to consume their content = an opportunity for you to consume their outreach messages
What? 🤯 I can already hear two objections to this
Isn't this too much for my members? Well IMHO - no. They are already subject to the "information garden hose called the internet”. They long for relevance. They like being part of a winning team. To see the community mentioned on other platforms if you are already an insider, a member, is way cool. So, no.
How on earth do I apply all this muscle? Well, you get a system. And it goes somewhat like this:
Use Mailerlite (or a similarly clean and simple email tool). Export your current email list from your community list, and tweak it to match community color so they feel at home. Send one message email about events in the future, the next just about to happen, and summaries of what was covered in the last events. That has the email channel covered 🙂
Use buffer or similar tool to start scheduling posting on Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, etc from one place, cross-using posts. Repeat good-performing posts.
(Option) Start a YouTube channel and TikTok. If you feel up to learning videos.
Put it in an Outreach Calendar. Get to work.
Make sure to keep your volume high. Arnold-high
These are my 10 cents about the fastest way to get a community going having observed hundreds of communities on haaartland. How big you want to grow determines how much muscle you put in. But it all starts with a small atomic network of about 3-5 people and one single experience.
Please let me know what you think about this 🙂
Cheers! Niklas 🙏
🐣 I am super-excited about starting a second substack just for start-up founders. How start-ups can leverage community to unstuck their growth. Just like Airbnb, Notion, Lemlist, almost all of web3, Salesforce, Lululemon and others have done.
Its called Community Growth Secrets.
You can group subscribe here (since they are very much complimentary) 🤝