Messy and fragmented paid communities

Covid has brought on a new wave of focus on building communities. Alongside this is a strong interest in paid communities and how to make them work.

Communities are cool again and everybody wants to own (a profitable) one. The talk out there is that the tools exist to make them happen. And they do, but they get messy, scattered, and fragmented pretty easily. 🙈

Messy and fragmented, oh my!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and I try to think about how it makes me feel. The words fragmented, messy, scattered, overwhelming, and chaotic spring to mind.

There are tools to build paid communities, I’m yet to come across something that manages it all well.

What this ends up meaning is that different tools are used for different purposes. They end up kinda getting duct-taped together. Then before you know it, you have a bunch of things, managing different aspects of a community. This is messy, from a user’s and an owner’s perspective.

Often different platforms are used for different things. For example, someone may have a Substack newsletter and a Slack for discussions. This makes a community fragmented. With different users, data, and discussions to maintain on each side.