Thread by @jmikolay

If communities are the new scarcity, then knowing how to build them is valuable.

A distillation of what @rosiesherry said on Clubhouse this week:

Yesterday Rosie announced she's stepping down after two years @IndieHackers as Head of Community.

She's one of the most thoughtful and effective community builders on the internet, and this thread demonstrates why.

People like to overcomplicate things, but building a community isn’t rocket science.

It comes down to simple things.

Everything has become data driven, marketing driven, and business driven.

We’re all driven by numbers and money and capitalism.

I like to go back to the roots of being human.

There are a lot of ways to build communities.

Doing it in the right ways just means bringing people together in meaningful ways.

These days we underestimate that, and we don't appreciate it.

We’ve almost forgotten that in every community there are human beings.

Communities can change lives, and they can be valuable to people no matter how big or small they are.

What’s not to love about that?

It's hard to balance giving a damn about other people and looking after ourselves financially.

But it's possible to build a real community with a business mindset.

First, take steps to validate your vision:

🔷Meet people and have conversations
🔷Put yourself out there as a professional
🔷Find out where they hang out and study them
🔷Know the whole ecosystem

Remember, these steps can take years.

Some people start building a community without thinking about the ecosystem.

Before you decide to build anything, get to know people. Maybe they don’t need another community, or maybe you’re not the right person to build it.

Once you know the community, and you've spent the time educating yourself and participating, you then become an expert because you're one of the few people who’s done the research.

Once you do that, the answers start coming to you.

You don't need a platform to get comfortable having conversations with people.

Build relationships. Make small efforts through a newsletter or events or a blog.

Communities are based connections, and it’s impossible to build connections unless you know who you’re serving. That's what people forget.

People want the numbers.

They go to an audience and wonder why people aren't coming back.

They forget to put themselves in other people's shoes and ask, “Why would they come back?”

You can measure growth and user numbers and activity and comments.

But it's hard to say a community is succeeding on data points alone.

The human stories get ignored.

Success is measured by whether a community is being served in the right way.

If there's no vibe, something’s wrong.

Again, it’s not rocket science.

Most of the tactics that work come down to just trying to help people (and sometimes it’s about helping other people help people).

To help people, you need to understand them, and to understand them you need to listen to them.

You can help people by helping them answer their questions. Then go further.

If someone needs help, and you don't have the answer, tag someone who does.

Then that person helps and it goes from there.

Find the spark in people.

Looking out for people who want to be seen and need opportunities, but perhaps don’t yet believe in themselves.

Find good people who can help the community grow – and give them opportunities to do that.

Encourage people to speak at conferences.

Give them speaking gigs and hosting gigs.

Looking for people who have more interesting things to say than you do.

The world is so driven by what we’ve achieved.

Sometimes people forget to look at each other and see what they’re capable of.

If you apply for a job, you have to go through hoops.

I never cared about any of that.

I look more at the people and interesting things they say or write. I look for ways to lift them up.

Randomly pick people who participate and promote their product.

That’s a lot of fun, especially when it comes as a surprise. It promotes them as a person and it helps them experience what growth is like.

It educates them through experience.

Share things from people who contribute.

Tweet about them and quite often they will tweet back the results.

That’s a nice flywheel: people sharing stories of growth together.

250 people join @IndieHackers every day.

When I first joined, I was worried I’d get shot down because quite often tech communities aren’t very friendly. But Indie Hackers isn’t like that.

Everyone has always been supportive.

As a community grows, it's easy to lose touch if you don't have grassroots stuff.

Speak to people. Have conversations with no agenda. Don’t quiz people about what they want. Go in with an open mind and new ideas will come.

You’ll learn what's actually needed.

It takes a lot of experimentation.

Some things work. Some don't. Sometimes you just need to get to the next phase of things.

Some people who have audiences call them communities.

If you’re gathering around the fire, it depends which way you turn the chairs. If the chairs are all facing the front of the room, that's an audience. If the chairs are facing each other, that’s more of a community.

It comes down to, “Are you enabling conversations between people?” Or “Are you trying to own all the conversations?”

As a community, you want conversations happening between people as much as possible. You have to find ways to make that happen, and the ways that happens change.

Show respect to people that you’re serving, and start by respecting their time.

If you're inviting people to speak at a conference, pay them.

If you’re asking someone to write an article for you or do workshops. Pay them.

Communities don’t just run themselves.

Sometimes people think they can just grow, and they naturally flow into different stages.

The reality is different.

There always needs to be a leader.

Things don't naturally happen on their own.

There's always people in the background keeping an eye on things, seeing what's working and what's not happening. Moving with the times.

And it's hard to keep figuring things out.

Try being hands-on and practical instead of trying to be too theoretical.

A lot of it isn’t theory-based, it’s validating your vision.

Don’t get fixated on a specific outcome.

There’s nothing worse than building a community you're not truly into.

A lot of it is being inspired and happy with the direction you're personally going, because you’re going to have your head down for quite a long time.

Stick with a loose vision, and work with people to figure out what is working.

Figure out how to execute on the smallest parts and make progress.

It's not easy to get people to show up, but the more you do it, the less work you have to do to keep it going.

Sometimes it takes a while for people to come around.

But the more you do things, the more people see you do them, and eventually people step in and participate.

Things keep going for as long as they need to, and lots of new things can come to a natural end.

That's okay.

It annoyed me that the testing world was so boring and bland.

I developed a vision for changing it, and I ended up changing it more than I thought I would.

For me, that’s humbling.

Follow @rosiesherry for more terrific observations (she's building a course on building communities!)

And learn more about future Creator School classes here!

https://twitter.com/gumroad/status/1365379433868107780?s=20