This week in community building — Issue 49

Startups Need a New Option: Exit to Community

From Nathan Schneider

Founders create startups for all sorts of reasons. Often, the motivation is a mix between the founders’ desires to do well for themselves and to do something worthwhile for others. Dreams of greatness might figure in there too. Rarely, however, is the overriding reason to build a company people want to get rid of. But that is what the startup pipeline is designed to produce.

Pivot to People: It’s Time to Build the New Economy

Zebras Unite

The most urgent human rights project of our time is reimagining business.

Cheating

From Seth Godin

In every community, on every team, there are people who believe that the only chance they’ve got is to cheat. Our systems persist only when peers in the community step up and insist that the cheater stop. Because being on a team that wins by cheating is ultimately self-defeating.

Community as a GTM strategy

From Stephen Wemple

The hype around community can be annoying, but it’s a symbol of a greater reorientation happening. Silicon Valley has long focused on growth above all else. This has shaped product strategies, company cultures, and resource allocation. Now, though, we’re shifting to a world where companies are oriented around value and retention. The rise of community is one manifestation of this shift.

What a Michelin star chef taught me about community building

From Patrick Woods

In the same way, so many aspects of a thriving community are second-order effects of long-term effort. You can’t game community growth by trying to make it grow, by creating the most beautiful website or the best designer swag or hiring celebrity influencers and hoping for the best. At least not for long.

What 1.2 Million Followers Taught me About Online Authenticity

From Carter Gibson

With large followings, you suddenly start asking yourself, “What do you want from me!?” It’s a negative, pervasive, natural head space when you’re put into a performative role.

And more community goodness…

• The Invisible Labor of Content Moderation — Gaby Goldberg
• The rise of audio communities — Erin Mikail Staples
• S3E10: Building Communities with Melanie Aronson — Everyday Startups 🎧
• Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media — Tarleton Gillespie, Yale University Press 📘
• Is it a newsletter? Or a community? The trend towards community... — Rosie Sherry
• Pools, Hubs, and Webs: Do we have enough humans for the communities we're building? — daniellexo
• The Social Architecture of Impactful Communities — Nick DeWilde
• Three Hopes for Online Community Building Post-Coronavirus — Carter Gibson
• Community Market Fit — CommChat
• To Kill a Community — DevBizOps
• The world is longing for 'community checkin' — Niklas Lohmann
• Creating Abundant Communities: And what happens if we don't — daniellexo
• Code And Community: Two Keys To Building An Open Source Winner — Glenn Soloman / Forbes
• CMX Summit — Call for speakers closing this week 🎟
• Food52's Culinary Community — The Digital Campfire 📺
• Belonging or Authenticity? Pick One. — Sharehold Team
• Episode #28 - Sid Yadav — Circle - Makerpad 🎧
• Level Up Your Community with Amy Jo Kim’s Principles of Game Thinking — Community Signal 🎧
• The secret sauce behind Mariah Carey’s fan community 🌟 Bree Nguyen — GetTogether 🎧
• How Startup Culture “Drowns” Belonging — Sharehold Team
• How did we build an online community from scratch? — Co-x3 Family 🤗
• Copying From Other Communities — Richard Millington
• Building a Digital Campfire on Substack — Sara Wilson
• The Loop, August 2020: Community-a-thon — Stack Overflow Blog
• 12: People are #1 — In Before the Lock 🎧

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