The Community Building Masterclass

Hey friend,

I’ve spent the last 3 years in the community building space.

Founder friends ask me if they should start a community and my answer is always the same.

Probably.

If you run a newsletter, startup, or are looking for something to start, building a community can drastically change your trajectory.

I put this guide together to help you get ahead of the trend.

In this deep dive we’re going to cover:

• Where does community sit in your funnel?
• The different types of community you can start
• How some are quietly making millions
• How to use your community to build a better product
• How to actually start one

Let’s go.

🪜 Community is the new GTM

Community sits across your entire funnel.

People can discover your project, decide whether to purchase, and receive customer support all in one place.

People use community as a way to acquire customers, increase retention, and create brand ambassadors.

Here are the four variations of community you can start.

Community Type #1 — Product Community

Do you have a live product and an active user base?

Start a product community. A space where people can gather to discuss what you’ve built.

Product communities are where users share product feedback, ideas for features, get help with bugs, receive customer support, and connect with other super users.

This works for both hardware and software.

From companies like Hu.ma.ne and Adobe to small startups launched this year, product companies use community to create hype around their products.

The pros

• Users can solve each other’s problems as a “community of support” which will save you on customer success costs
• This can drastically decrease the time to PMF as you’re building closer with your users
• You can source ideas and feature requests from your community
• You can engage with your most active users
• You will create a feeling of co-creating your product with your users

The cons

• If you’re pre-product it can be hard to get people to stay around
• You will have lower engagement compared to other community types
• Your product might not be something people want to talk about

Community Type #2 — Creator Communities

Do you have an audience?

This is where your fans can interact with you and other fans of yours. It’s a good way to distribute content and give people a new form of access to you and your brand.

We see big YouTubers like Mr. Beast interacting with their audience via Discord. Think of it like a ‘kick-back’ where people can connect with each other instead of the parade that is happening on social media.

Audience is single-directional vs. community is nodes in-between. The benefit for a creator to launch a community is now people can connect around their passion, which is your content.

The pros

If you’ve created a valuable niche audience then your members will really want to interact with each other which you can potentially charge for. For example, Lenny started a community which people pay $300 a year to access. He has a small and valuable audience.

I’ve gone to a Lenny Newsletter meetup in Venice and met product people from A16z and Meta. People want to pay to have access to that high-quality network.

Compare that to YouTuber Airrack (10m+ subscribers) who started a Discord where fans can engage with each other. This audience would not pay to join that community as the purpose is to connect with other fans instead of networking.

A community can also help boost your content. For example, with Wonderverse you can give rewards for people liking your content and following you on platforms like YouTube and X.

The cons

• It’s another channel to manage
• Some creators don’t want to invest in a community manager or mods

Community Type #3 — Topic Communities

If you don’t have a product or audience but do know what niche you want to build in then start a topic community.

Topic communities are great for top of funnel for other products.

Examples

• A community around Facebook ads can lead into a course
• A community around AI can lead into a newsletter
• A community around newsletters can lead into an agency

I recently found a B2B marketer community pulling in roughly $3M a year because they curate discussions in a Slack community for $30 a month membership.

The key is to be hyper niche. The nicher you go the higher price tier you can go.

Don’t go with “business”. Go several layers down:

Business → Marketing → Email newsletter marketing → Email newsletter growth for content creators

Pros

• They can be faceless, so they don’t rely on a charismatic leader to run
• People are looking for expert communities to join
• There are countless ways to make money (ads, premium, products)

Cons

• They can be a commodity
• They have a cold start problem if you don’t already have people
• They are less defensible and slower to grow

Community Type #4 — Exclusive Communities

Do you have a network of high-quality people who should be in the same room?

Start an exclusive community.

People will pay to be in the room. That’s why people go to good universities, pay the doorman $100 to get into a nightclub, and go to $2,000 conferences.

People will pay for access to high-quality networks.

The idea is you upgrade your network. If you have a group of tastemakers in a niche this is a great opportunity.

Pros

• Low cost of getting started
• You can pay for acquisition

Cons

• As you scale the quality of the high-quality community degrades
• You have high-touch programming

💰 The business models

You can make money from a community. Or you can have it be an extension of your current product offering.

At The Hustle, Trends was our exclusive community. If you build an audience then you can create a community as an extension. There are a lot of ways to do this.

Pay for membership

Pay for membership is becoming increasingly popular.

The big oopsie of web3 projects was the one-time purchase of NFTs. They didn’t take the model of recurring monthly/yearly payments. This makes financial forecasting really hard and it now means you have to grow your user base to survive or you’ll run out of cash.

We see more individuals creating communities around their personal brand. A space where they can get access to the creator and other members of their community.

Customers get access

I’ve seen the gating of community membership for customers to be part of pricing tiers. The premium plans get you access to the community for example.

This is a “value” of the premium tier and can lead to more product conversions.

Free, then sell products

If you’re a topic community and you don’t have much to offer yet, make it free then sell the member’s products. Think of the community as your top of funnel which leads to your product.

Build products for your community

If you run a community of experts, you will start to see patterns of problems to solve. This is great for startups. It’s some of the most useful user-research you can get and you have a built-in first user base.

🧱 Platforms to use

Now it’s time to build.

Let’s get into how to build your MVC (minimal viable community).

People spend half their time wondering what platform to use. They end up not starting the dang thing. Let me break the curse. There is no perfect platform. Here are some of your options.

Discord

If you’re over 22 it might be hard to understand Discord. However, people underestimate what a cultural impact it has.

If you’re tech-savvy enough to figure out Slack, you can figure out Discord.

For startups that are B2C, I recommend Discord.

Slack

Slack seems more professional. Everyone uses it for work so it’s logical to use it for your group right?

If all of your community members use Slack, go for it. However, it is going to cost you more than Discord.

Facebook

I was part of a project that built a community on Facebook. The advantage is Facebook has a lot of built-in users. Some people don’t use Facebook. It’s okay to say it’s not for them. There are a lot of other niche community platforms but those are harder to get usage than what is already in someone’s routine.

Facebook has the advantage of knowing how to keep people engaged in your community and keep them on a platform where a lot of the ‘platform communities’ struggle.

If you’re going for a topic-based community this is better so people can discover you.

Telegram

Can be a great way to build a community. I’m in LA crypto chats and this and that. When they hit a ton of users it’s hard to scale but in general, it can be a great platform and is easy to build on their API.

Circle

This is for people who want to have more of a white-label experience.

The trouble here is getting retention. If people are not already MAUs of the platform you’re using, you’ll be fighting for long-term community retention. But you will have more control over the user experience.

🏆 How to make your community a party

Okay, so you’ve picked a platform, now what?

Your community should feel like a party. You are the host making sure people are having a good time.

Throw scheduled events

Events are great for customer retention and building warm and fuzzy feelings around your project.

If you have 1,000 people, maybe 50 show up. Those 50 people will now have a deeper affinity towards your community (assuming it was a positive experience).

Do this enough times and you will have a movement of brand ambassadors.

Super user trainings

If you have a product community, do product trainings. Some features that people might not know a lot about.

This can also be an onboarding tactic where you invite new users to onboarding sessions.

Reward your top members

Imagine if you never got grades in school. Or when you go to work, they don’t pay you. People are incentivized by rewards. You should give rewards to your most active members.

You can have leaderboards for engagement, give out “micro-payments” for desired actions, and give product discounts to your most active members.

The ways to make your community a “party” are infinite and for each community, they are very particular. Experiment, learn, and improve. Just keep partying.

How to soft launch

Now we’ve gone over a lot. Maybe it seems like too much of a commitment. Here’s something you can do today to start testing if building a community is right for you.

Most people are worried that they will start a community and no one shows up.

Or worse, you get a couple of people to show up and you have to continue the momentum even if it isn’t worth your time.

Here’s how to hedge your bets and ‘test’ launch a community.

First, send out a community application via email. You can use Typeform or Google Form.

Ask several questions to gauge interest and member quality. For example:

• What is your Twitter?
• What would you contribute to the community?
• What do you hope to get out of it?
• How can we contact you?

From here you can see how much interest you have, and what the general quality of community could be.

This process can last 1+ month if you need as you slowly gather more applications.

Slowly build, then you will see what they really want and launch when you’re ready.

The main thing is to start. One connection will turn into two, two into four. Before you know it you’ll have a vibrant engaged community and that network isn’t something people can steal from you.

More community building resources

• April has a brilliant newsletter on community building that I can’t recommend enough.
• The Culting of Brands is a great read.
• Madam Cult Leader is a good Twitter follow for community content.

Thanks for reading, friend

Want help with your community building?

My team built Wonderverse which helps with building, growing, and monetizing communities.

We are also taking on 2 companies who want full-service community help. Just shoot me a reply telling me a bit about what you’re building and I’d love to chat.

I appreciate you.

Onwards and upwards,

Adam