• 4 min read

🔥 Building communities

As brands we talk about community building but it's often some ethereal magic that we can't see. But what does community building mean in our work?

When people love our product, is that a community?
If we have a lot of followers, is that a community?
What about great reviews...community?
I say no.

Google "community" and you'll find so many definitions. My favorite is Wikipedia's:

A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with a shared socially significant characteristic.

This definition leaves it broad enough while keeping these two terms clear: humans + shared.

If we are simply broadcasting, it's not a community. To me, community means sharing a space, being vulnerable in the interest of helping each other grow in ways we could only do together.

And through the digital lens, it's not just some posts and likes. It's a set of tools, processes, and workflows that make it easy for people to connect and contribute.

Over the past year I have launched and tested multiple platforms to this end. Here is what I've learned:

Skool (community)

Pros: Great for getting a curated community into one place. It's very easy to sign up and use, assign moderators on my team, and connect people around common interests.

Cons: It's impossible to tier folks into specific interest areas. Group DMs and chats are not features so all convo is either 1:1 or in a Reddit-style post forum. Engagement is hard because we can't have group dialogue.

Teachable (course platform)

Pros: Great for course management and easy to upload curriculum. You can see leaderboards and where students are in their courses so if someone seems stuck it's easy to email them to offer help.

Cons: Difficult to customize (needs too much code to drag and drop, but not flexible enough code-wise to do whatever you want). Zero ability to bring students together in a group so it's very solo study. High fee ($159/mo).

Canva (content creation & recording)

Only pros for this feature: Originally I was creating slide decks in Google or Keynote then doing a recording in Loom. Then I discovered that by creating slides in Canva, and then going to "Uploads" then "Record Yourself" you can have a unique little recording for EACH SLIDE. I love this because if I need to change content in one slide (text or recording) I just redo the ONE SLIDE and not the entire deck. This has been a game changer for me.

LinkedIn Groups

An absolute ghost town. I think Groups have become such spam boards that no one pays attention anymore and my guess is LI will eventually sunset this feature.

The good stuff.

What all this has led me to is a new set of tools that brings people into one place:

Gumroad: All my courses, sponsorships, downloads, and call bookings are in ONE place and easy to access. I can still see all the progress of students in the platform, with a more intuitive user interface that was so easy to integrate into my website navigation. I'm so excited about this platform in conjunction with....

Ghost: This is what I built my website in. I was able to stand up an MVP pretty easily with my frontend dev. It has templates but I wanted something custom so I designed each page in Figma and handed over to him to input the code. The analytics are amazing, I'm able to set pricing tiers for premium content, and share Google Analytics data across Ghost and Gumroad.

Circle. This is where I will be moving members from the Skool community over the next few weeks. We will be sunsetting the Skool platform at the end of July and

using Circle exclusively. Want to watch the mess as we set up? Get in early here!

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What to Know This Week

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💁‍♀️ 10 things I learned in 10 years as an agency founder.

😬 We don't advocate for ourselves because we're afraid of judgement from others. But when you think about it.. who TF cares? The things I have, I asked for. I advocate for myself. Do people make fun of me? Of course. But they also did when I started "my little agency" and now they apply to work here. F 'em.

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