The Hidden Pattern Of Community Building
Pattern recognition is a special kind of superpower
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Pattern recognition is a special kind of superpower.
When you see something happening time and time again, with always the same outcome, and are able to identify the elements that led to success, you're almost able to predict the future.
But recognizing the patterns of the game you’re playing takes time.
Lucky you, I’ve played the community game for quite some time now.
And I’ve started recognizing a couple of patterns allowing anyone to grow and get engaged members in their community.
Let me share with you my favorite one (and the most efficient).
1 | Recognizing The Hidden Patterns
Lionel Messi, the famous soccer player, is one of the best at pattern recognition.
He's famously known for walking for the first five minutes of each game, and pretty much do nothing but look around. He analyzes his opponents, recognizes a pattern, and then acts on it - making him one of the best players ever.
And, not to compare myself to a legend, but after years of building communities and recognizing the ingredients, I myself started being able to assemble recipes.
Recently, I've noticed a new pattern.
One that is extremely powerful and that goes something like this:
Hack → Community → Work Toward A More Ambitious Goal
First you have a Hack, something very specific that you've proved worked for yourself. Then you build a community around this hack. Then, you and your members all work to improve the hack, spread it, and tackle more ambitious challenges.
Allow me an example to support my point here.
Notion, the productivity tool, has created an ultra-engaged community around its product by doing nothing crazy but following this exact pattern.
Step 1: They introduced a Hack (their software), allowing anyone to organize their life 10x more easily than before.
Step 2: They built a community around their hack, allowing members to create, share and find new templates to better leverage Notion’s tools.
Step 3: Finally, the entire Notion community worked together toward the mission to make it possible for every person, team, and company to tailor their software to solve any problem and take on any challenge.
Fascinating, isn't it?
Or take Oatly, a oat milk company, as another example.
Step 1: They introduced their hack to the world - a delicious milk made from oats - supposedly much more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Step 2: They gathered people interested in their hack into a community.
Step 3: They leveraged their new members to work on more ambitious challenges and launch several initiatives with their members - allowing them to have a real environmental impact on the world.
First you find a Hack, then build a community around it, and finally tackle more ambitious challenges.
Here's the recipe for success.
And sure, said like this, it seems pretty easy.
But it's actually far from being the obvious path that most communities follow.
2 | A Community For X
No, most communities, instead of following this pattern, build what I call:
A Community for X.
A Community for X is one trying to gather people around a common passion.
It’s community builders fan of, say, Harry Potter, that try to find other fans to hang out in a Discord.
And that's great, really. We need this kind of community.
But you have to understand those are like online book clubs.
They might be very relevant for a small group of people but shouldn't have the ambition to grow tremendously or have an impact at a larger scale.
And unfortunately, many ambitious founders or brands looking to grow try to scale their community by building a community for X.
Spoiler alert: they rarely succeed.
Because building a Community for X or following the pattern I told you about are two completely different approaches to community building.
On one hand, you may have "a community for musicians" with music fans hanging out in discord and sharing some news about what's happening in the space. But there’s no call-to-actions, no reasons for members to start being active in the community beyond a few conversations.
On the other hand, you have Naspter, one of the biggest music communities (back in the days), who follow the pattern I told you about, step by step:
Finding a hack: building the infrastructure to stream music freely worldwide.
Building a community: where members upload new songs to the library.
Working toward an ambitious goal: to make music accessible to anyone.
See, in the second example, there's a real reason for people to join.
And that’s the major lesson you have to remember from this article:
In the absence of a hack, the community is just another community, never a community that comes alive under a shared goal.
That's why, if your goal is to scale, you HAVE to find a hack.
There's no other way around.
Now for the good news:
Your hack can be anything, really.
It can be a software like Notion or Napster, a physical product like Oatly, or anything you've tested and found helpful for the persons in your niche, like a way to leverage AI to make money, for example.
Some other examples of great hacks:
If you write an essay daily for 30 days, you'll grow your audience (Ship30for30)
If you sketch your ideas, they'll come across more easily (Vizualize Value)
Implement a continuous auction model and you’ll get fundings (NounsDAO)
If you drink some RedBull, you'll get energy all night long (Redbull)
There's, in reality, only one rule to see if your hack is good, and it's to ask yourself:
Is my hack more than just a hack now, but a superpower that drives a meaningful culture around it?
If the answer is yes, then you should pour all your effort into building a community around it.
3 | The Creator-First Approach
Once you start seeing this pattern, repeated again and again in the communities around you, you'll start changing your approach to the game.
Because once you see this pattern, you'll start realizing your main goal is not to build a community anymore…
But find a hack and spread it in every corner of the internet.
As shown above, a community starts with the intention of a leader, with a hack, and only then grows from the autonomy of its members, building on top of the first building blocks.
So my best advice would be:
Get away from the idea that you're a community builder.
And get into the shoes of a creator.
Curate a worldview and rally people who share the same vision.
Entertain and educate your people.
Spread ideas and raise the collective consciousness around a topic.
(yes, all that)
Expanding on one of my previous examples, Dickie Bush, the founder of the Ship30for30 community (who now counts 5,500+ members) did not start by launching a community for digital writers.
Uhuh.
Dickie started writing every day online for himself, accumulating views and growing awareness around the possibilities that writing online daily unlock.
And only after he gathered people who felt aligned with his ideas did he build a community, allowing those people to be accountable for each other for writing daily online.
See, the script is flipped.
Creator first.
Community builder second.
Closing Thoughts
Being able to see the patterns helps you get a clearer vision of the actions you need to take.
And as a community builder, your first goal isn’t to gather as many people as you can in a Discord server.
It is to plant ideas in peoples' heads.
Hopefully, leading them, then, through the community you'll have created, to immense changes in their life.
Speak soon,
- Eliot
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