Building a Community That Lasts

I tried to run a marathon once. The longest I had ever run was a 10-mile (16 km) course in Philadelphia called the Broad Street Run. I like to push hard though, so I set my eyes on the big goal.

My guide was this old marathon training book that a few of my friends swore by. While the advice was useful, I felt the schedule was too slow. I ditched the book and accelerated my training. I was feeling strong up until the day I went the farthest I had ever run, 12 miles (19 km).

The run started fine enough on a pleasant and not too warm early summer day. I had gotten through most of the run until my ankle felt weird. I pushed through my run, though, got home, showered, and then noticed something strange. My ankle was very puffy.

Soon my ankle swelled to three times its size. I downed pain killers and wrapped my ankle with bags of ice. The doctor said it was a strain. The swelling went away, but when I tried to run again, both my ankle and my enthusiasm said nope, ending my marathon dreams.

Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start, says getting started is the hardest part. I disagree. Starting is the easy part. We don’t have a start problem. We have a keeping up and finishing problem.

We know this to be true because of New Year’s resolutions. Every year, people commit to start a new endeavor or achieve a goal for the year. Some are health related like being more fit or eating healthier. Some are goals like learning a language or completing a house project. The one thing they all have in common is that they are all ambitious in scope.

Success is hard to attain though. Depending on the study, anywhere from 43% to 80% ditch their New Year’s resolution by February. Four out of five people that sign up for gym memberships in January quit by the fifth month. Only 8% follow through on their resolutions to the year-end.

One reason often cited is that people often take on more than they are able to handle initially. Instead, you have to start slow, then build up over time as the new habit takes hold. That was my issue with the marathon. I overtrained to the point my body was not able to handle the strain.

However, I think the real reason is that we are impatient. We all want immediate results! Whether it was lose ten pounds in one month or become fluent in a new language in a few weeks, we desire the results, but we do not desire the hard work, time, and sacrifice required to achieve the results.

After my startup, I started to attend a lot of events and meetups. I wanted to build up my network and visibility within the NYC tech community. People started asking me about good tech events to attend. Some were excellent like the NY Tech Meetup which was well organized, had great demos and speakers, and attracted relevant people in the tech community. Most other meetups however were questionable in quality and consistency. A surprising number of groups stopped meeting after a few events in what I called, “the Valley of Meetup Death.”

When I started my own community some years later, I took these observations as lessons to guide my strategy. I started small, inviting only people in my network. I focused entirely on the content and set a high bar for guest speakers. And the one thing I stuck to religiously was that our events would always be at the same time and day each month.

The meetup grew quickly. We did little promotion other than a few social posts. Growth was through positive word of mouth and early members promoting the community in their own networks. In a year, we had two chapters in NYC and one in Boston. Two years in, there were 24 chapters across the globe.

What was the driver behind this fast growth? While consistency was important, it was not main factor. Plenty of communities host events on a consistent basis, yet never grow. Digging deeper, there were two ideas foundational to creating a thriving community at scale; the 50-500-5000 Principle and the Community Flywheel.

The 50-500-5000 Principle addresses the fact that communities that scale exponentially have distinct moments or steps in growth. Social networks are the most visible examples, such as Facebook, which grew first across Harvard, then IVY League schools, then any student with a .edu email domain, then everyone across the US and world. Each distinct step in growth brought new insights and change.

The numerals in “50-500-5000 Principle” do not represent specific numbers but rather magnitudes of each step, as explained below:

• “50” Level – You focus only on a small number of your most supportive members that you trust to contribute content, engage others, and establish the cultural norms of the community.

• “500” Level – You expand to bigger but similar groups. By “seeding” content in the previous level, new members know how to get involved, giving you more insight on community dynamics.

• “5000” Level – You open the community to anyone in your key member profile. Organic growth becomes viral as more people create more value at a greater rate.

However, you also need a way to kickstart growth so that the community can build towards these steps. I laid out part of the process in a previous post on launching communities. But there also needs to be a catalyst that builds momentum so that the community can be self-sustaining.

This is the Community Flywheel. The term flywheel originally comes from mechanical engineering to describe a device that remains in motion by storing energy it generates through its own momentum. It has become a term adopted by corporations to describe business models that foster continuous growth.

A community also exhibits a flywheel effect when the community creates content, hosts events, and fosters peer-to-peer connections to enable the community to build upon itself:

• Content is the value that is built over time in the form of discussions groups, newsletters, forums, etc. which attract and keep members involved within the community.

• Events build anticipation in current members, provide opportunities to promote the community, and create the excitement that draws new members in.

• Connections is what creates trust and authentic communications by having members meet one-on-one or one-on-few, and converting the non-engaged into engaged members.

When each of these components is in place, they support each other to build momentum. High-quality content creates value that feeds into high-quality events. Events draw in new members, which sparks conversations at the events. In building bonds, attending events, and consuming content, some of these new members become more involved and inspired to contribute their own content and volunteer for events or become future leaders in the community.

For startups that embark on building communities, the 50-500-5000 Principle and Community Flywheel are critical concepts to understand early on. Much like my aborted mission to run a marathon or meetup groups I saw become abandoned, many efforts by startups to launch and scale communities stall. Founders will often cite lack of initial traction, too much time commitment, or that it distracts from other priorities. But more often than not, there was never a plan to go from launch to ongoing growth.

With a bit of planning upfront, you will find more joy and results in your community efforts. What has been your experience building community? What is one thing stopping you from launching one?

Mark

Do men and women pitch investors differently? That was the opinion of one angel investor in a recent LinkedIn post. In his analysis of emails to investors from female founders, he observed that their messages were “longer and less assertive than their male counterparts”. He further noted that “the focus was more on impact and less on the investment opportunity.”

I am skeptical of this analysis mostly because it is a small dataset and there is little scientific process upon which to make such sweeping generalizations. However, there is research that cites bias in the fundraising process from VC’s towards female founders.

In an article from the Harvard Business Review, the authors noted that VC’s posed different types of questions to male and female entrepreneurs. Men were questioned about the potential for gains (promotion orientation questions) and women about the potential for losses (prevention orientation questions). This question framing was observed across male and female VC’s.

In a perfect world, VC’s would assess and analyze the investment opportunity between male and female entrepreneurs equally without bias. Unfortunately, these biases are deeply ingrained in the industry. Asking for the industry to change overnight or to speak the language of women is simply not realistic for female founders that are raising capital right now.

Instead, female founders should be aware that the biases exist, to navigate the biases to turn prevention questions to promotion answers, and to focus the investor conversations toward the strength of your business and the story of why your startup is the best investment opportunity.

We will be taking a few weeks off from the newsletter for the summer to relax and recharge. There are a lot more topics we plan on diving into next month including the current state of Generative AI, technical mistakes startups make, and guest contributors sharing their startup insights!

I am still out in the world however helping founders this past week and next week. I had the chance to attend the AWS Generative AI Uplift Demo Day in Hong Kong on Thursday to judge the pitches from the 11 finalists of the program. There were some real standouts including beNovelty (FabrixAI), Space Tutor, and Artosa.

Next week I will be in Taipei for the AWS Summit and speaking at the AWS Startup Day Taiwan on Tuesday. My talk is “Unleashing the Power of Generative AI on AWS: How Founders Can Surf the Wave and Stay Ahead” at 2:20 PM. If you are in Taipei then, please to join us and register using this link.