Saying you have a community is sexy. No doubt. Having a community is amazing. No, sh*t, Sherlock. Creating a company based on a community is the next big thing. Yup.
Building communities as a business model is the new gold rush. Many early birds, adventures, and entrepreneurs are being attracted to the promise of unexplored land, full of riches and opportunities.
It’s well known that the travel will be harsh, dangerous and many will die on it. But the upside is so huge it’s worth it. After all, how many times does one see a new [market/industry/model?] unfolding under their own nose.
Success stories are growing exponentially and exponentially fast: Dream, Mr. Beast, and Jaime Altozano are just three examples on Youtube. WallStreetBets could be defined as a community-based, decentralized hedge fund, as Chamath Palihapitiya would’ve said it. And you could name all those creators building companies based on their communities with the help of Patreon, Gumroad, and other amazing platforms.
Other actors are pushing the growth of this [market/industry/model?]: Lolita Taub and her Community Fund is one example, and the recent On Deck Community Builders Fellowship is another one. Every day more and more relevant actors, specialists, leaders, and innovators are entering the arena and pushing outside the boundaries of the “niche”.
Yet, despite all this good news, the trend is so hot it exudes buzzwords and can be easily become noise in the system. It’s no news there are so many great content creators saying they have a community, but it is actually not that true. Usually what they have is an audience. And that’s ok.
For me, this is not deceptive marketing, but a paradigm shift that demands a new framework to understand what are we talking about.
Four steps of community development:
Mere Transactions (e.gr. sales) - they are not a stage for community building proprie dictum, but it is important to address that a transaction is not a relationship
Audience/Followers (e.gr. Twitter, Facebook, fans) - it’s formed by passive followers who receive value from the following. The constitutive elements that allow the formation of an audience are:
Content over publicity
Multi-channel consumption of the content (physical, digital, mixed)
Network/Marketplace (e.gr. LinkedIn) - it’s formed by close related individuals with similar interests and/or needs who gain value in a quid pro quo fashion. The constitutive elements of the network/marketplace are:
Management-based: that’s why CRMs and similar software flourishes in these kinds of environments
Mutual benefit: the bigger the benefit between two or more “nodes” the bigger the value of the relationship
Similar interests, relatedness filtered by affinities
Community (e.gr. wizdem1, Discord, Clubhouse?) - they are created by participative individuals who grow value by contributing their work and/or resources
Conversation-based: conversations can be asynchronous or synchronous, text-based, audio-based or video-based (or any mix of the above)
Trust: members expect to create an impact on the community, and their feedback to be honoured (think of the successful Mr. Splashy Pants or the infamous Boaty McBoatface gaffe)
Self-actualization: needs, hopes, and expectations are fulfilled by the community itself
Society (e.gr. city-states, countries) - are groups of diverse communities and, usually, they leverage all the above to maintain cohesion. They depend on the health of their communities to build and maintain global health. Distribute value by allowing the building, growth, and reception of value in many ways.
Several communities: societies are a cluster of like-minded communities2
Co-ownership: members discover their role in creating value for the other members…
Common good: …and the members receive value to the extent that the other members create value themselves.
(Almost) Finally, I believe these are compounding levels of evolution and also non-linear steps, but more like a gradient, or a spectrogram: you can have high peaks on content and trust, but big lows on self-actualization; one can discover a community with enormous peaks of co-ownership and confusing chasms of mutual benefit.
Finally (at last!), a quick note on power:
A couple of days ago Matt Wilson pointed me out the need to consider power and its dynamics to better understand this array. How does power work on all of these? I honestly need to think more and better about it.
Yet I didn’t want to leave the question unattended and came to this: power as a measure of energy (potentiality to do, to create things) should follow the most effective (shortest) path, as all energy in the natural and social realms.
And, although it is very easy to leverage power via an institution, it is very ineffective (you need tons of energy to move the lever); communities [crowd or movements] are a much harder way to leverage power, but a much more efficient one.
If we were to understand the relationship between power and the process of community building, we would need to unveil:
Why and how power behaves as a current
Why power is not ended
How does the ratio between power and influence develop in a community (as a flow state)
How do some values shape how power is executed
And, of course, the works by Moisés Naím and Jeremy Heimans will be of the most relevance to this endeavour.
Disclaimer: I’m the founder and CEO of Wizdem
Maybe this is why when we face a hyper-global world the traditional societies seem to be broken: some members of a society may be closer to a distant cluster thanks to the immateriality of the digital world