How To Build A Successful Online Community

Key Takeaways

so what's the hook to watch this video community it's the future it's actually also been a big part of the past of making sure that not only we find out what people need as business owners but what people want as business people inside our community so tom ross in my humble view is one of the best experts on community he i honestly personally have been asking questions for the last year and he's never not known what to do i'm personally building a community on discord so if you're watching this on youtube right now you can join that community we call it entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs tom is one of those entrepreneurs helping this evening you can join the community down below tom himself also has a community of people wanting to learn about communities so if you want to join that and i'm a member of his community group then please also click the links below we will put the links there to tom's community group which honestly i i think it's the reason our community is working so i i strongly recommend you you jump on to tom's community so if you have any questions about business we will help you you can visit the purposefulproject.com or any of the links below that give you content around mentorship information around how some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs have managed to do what they're doing so if you need any help around business then please do ask us and so um without further ado i'd like to welcome tom to the stage i guess um to whatever channel you're watching this on and maybe tom we could kick off by the first minute you could just explain to people who you are and what you do yeah first of all thank you for having me simon it's an honor as ever um an incredibly kind intro very quickly because i just want to be here and help people to be honest so very quick back story um i've always been an entrepreneur i've always loved community uh built communities and built online businesses from a very young age and currently i'm lucky enough to be the ceo and founder at design cuts a community of over 800 000 creatives and i'm so passionate about it that as you say i teach community in my spare time i have a community teaching community i've written a book about community and i just live and breathe it so yeah i'm really excited to be here with you today and try and help as many people as we can well thanks tom for giving up your time so one of the questions we had come in people want to understand what is a successful community and how do you build one from scratch yeah i think um i think really there is no one-size-fits-all and i get a lot of questions about community but the truth is the answer will be completely different based on your situation and your goals and so on so for some people uh they want to do a free community that they turn into a global movement and impact is the real driving force for them um such as in your case simon for other people maybe they're running a paid community and success for them looks like being able to you know pay their bills and be a little bit more financially comfortable in life and then of course there's overlapping ones where you know maybe some people want to earn a living from their community but also have a tremendous impact and connect with others and broaden their network so there's all kinds of benefits um but i think really it varies wildly person to person business to business organization to organization and then of course it's all about the members as well so you know how do you help your members achieve success what does that look like and i think member success is you know really the thing to hold up when we think about the value of our communities because like i say there's a lot of kind of tangible values of community but i think helping members reach their definition of success the reason they're in the community in the first place that kind of has to be number one right so by being part of your community members go from being at point a to point b what is that transformation how many of your members are you helping to achieve that i think that's a really good place to kind of start focusing on and something i talk about all the time is you need to get the balance of the two right because i i think you've got one camp of people where they're just so focused on driving value and success for their members they actually neglect themselves maybe they're burning out maybe they're not able to financially support their mission it's unsustainable for all kinds of reasons and then on the flip side you get people that are you know the contrast to that and they're kind of extorting money out of their community they're not really bringing any value they've got super high churn rates so i think the two need to operate in equilibrium where you as the community team or leader are getting sufficient value fulfillment and benefit and the members are equally getting sufficient value and reaching success and whatnot when you can balance those two things then a community really has longevity when they're out of balance then you're going to run into trouble eventually as for how to start a community um you know that's a whole topic in itself so without giving you a 30 minute answer i think allocate more time to the foundational work so this is things like defining your value proposition validating the concept on people and testing it starting with a minimal viable community so starting small rolling out to an initial group of members instead of trying to open the floodgates seed in a fantastic culture early on all of this foundational work is so crucial because what most people do is they swing the gates open they get as many members in as possible they haven't properly thought through what success looks like for the members of the community they haven't really got a plan and then it ends up being a big jumboard you know unclear mess and invariably fails it's a great tip so um for the 21 people presently on discord listening i'd be really interested at the end of this download from tom what you want to get out of this community so i'd love to ask a few of you to come and tell us in a minute um and i'd love to hear tom feedback on your needs too um and so if i may simon on that we with my company we also have a community of course we recently surveyed our members and that was one of the questions that we asked them and thankfully people were very aligned in their answers but i think often there's a problem if you ask that question at scale and you get 100 completely different answers that's maybe an indication that you haven't kind of properly defined the value prop for your community um yeah so so interesting and so there's a lot of platforms out there that people can use you know from again i guess platforms like circle which i know you use to discord of course the platform my company's presently using of course people have facebook groups and and so on and so forth are there any um i guess rules of thumb or insights on on what platform works best for what yeah there are and again it's definitely not one-size-fits-all i get this question probably more than any other which community platform is best for me um and i i can never turn around and just always recommend the same platform it's gonna vary based on your needs so i actually have a five point checklist which i think everyone should kind of hopefully go by uh number one where do your ideal members already spend their time because if you're meeting them where they're at there's going to be far less friction i.e if you're in the nft space and everyone in that world seems to be using discord it maybe makes sense to start a discord community because they're going to be able to jump over much easier than if you try and force and shoehorn them into a platform that they're more resistant to number two budget what's your budget because i might recommend circle for a forum because i love it but also it cost me 79 a month so if someone has zero budget that's not going to be a suitable fit for them otherwise if you have an enormous budget maybe you can look at even more of an enterprise solution and so on number three what kind of community do you actually run or want to run so is it asynchronous something more like a forum is it synchronous something that's more real-time chat based is it more events based again all of these key decisions of what you actually want to achieve and do with this community are vital in terms of picking a platform number four is how big is your community and how big do you want it to be because if you're running an asynchronous forum for example that's going to be quite a tough sell if you're looking to have i don't know a mastermind group with only 10 people in it and that's kind of your community because they're going to be bouncing around and it's going to feel like a bit of a ghost town in a forum set up so maybe something more asynchronous would be appropriate for that and then number five is do you need to tie into wider platforms or offerings what's your wider tech stack look like so are you having to kind of fit it into an existing company or platform that you run are you having to tie events in in different ways it's looking at the kind of wider pieces because often community doesn't sit in isolation it actually has to fit into an existing framework very good advice this is actually a question i i'm having as you're saying this is um do you think it's a good strategy to have multiple communities so for example right now i'm i'm live on instagram and tick tock giving information from you to my community but of course i've got my discord community which we'll do the q a in afterwards but do you think that's a good strategy or not i mean i'm i'm i'm just wondering i think it's a good strategy in terms of i hate to use the term but almost like a funneling awareness if you will and offering different things so for example i have my free communities which reach a bigger number of people raise awareness and let me help at scale often if people can't afford it and so on my closed community is a paid community so that's on a different platform it's gated off and obviously there's a membership fee and i think that's completely normal and fine what i don't like doing is when things are kind of on the same level and they're really scattered and disparate so this is why i love the platform circles so much we use it with my company and historically we'd be using zoom for certain hangouts crowdcasts for webinars over here a different thing for scheduling and posting events different place for chat and it was really difficult for my team to kind of maintain all those moving parts and it was confusing for our community and literally we would like go live on crowdcast and then say guys let's continue the conversation now you have to jump over here and and have all this friction and go to a different platform and i think that's inherently problematic so wherever possible i do quite like consolidation and due to new features on circle most of what i just described can now happen on one roof you can go live you can then chat about it afterwards continue the conversation host events and i think that's a really powerful and really beautiful thing but absolutely in terms of being on multiple social platforms to extend your reach and running respect to free communities there i think that is also a sensible option yeah i mean we we use discord i think because our community is there and and knows how to use that system we did try to use circle actually but we felt like we were always kind of trying to drag people over as opposed to just be a natural app on your phone um yeah so it probably fits your mission to be honest you could have perhaps a higher level of average engagement per member with a smaller group on circle but you're going for the big impact so it makes sense that you want to create something perhaps you know more scalable interesting yeah um what do you think about maintaining a community i mean you mentioned burnout earlier i think that's something to talk about actually because we you know you don't want people to burn out trying to look after their community and i have seen that happen for a few people but what's your you know your tips on on managing and maintaining a community i think it's a balancing act i actually did a live workshop for our community members earlier today and i was uh teaching a new acronym that i've made up called coma it's a very nice sounding acronym but c-o-m-a i wonder if we can guess what that is i wonder if anyone could actually hit it is anyone in the comments well have you got a guess about any of those letters um calm open mission awareness or something like that you know probably awareness was close so um this is actually putting the main uh tasks of running a community into buckets so it's easier to kind of think about them and keep them organized so c is content this is creating the materials the resources the events creating all that stuff that your community get to enjoy o is for operations that is the behind the scenes processes the tech stack the automation setting up the application flows all of this kind of stuff that ensures things run smoothly m is for management and events so that is responding to posts connecting members onboarding members basically all the the face time that you get with your community members and a is acquisition how are you going to find members to join your community and have that steady influx of new members to offset churn and ensure that you grow and said to your question of how do you maintain a community i think it's about getting the right balance of all these things and you have to because if you completely drop the ball on really any one of them you're going to struggle right if you're incredibly inefficient because operationally you're a mess you're going to hit a ceiling and not scale if your acquisition is not working again you're not going to grow if your content's not compelling people are not going to enjoy the community and perhaps they're going to churn and if you don't manage people correctly you could get a terrible culture in the community people might not enjoy the experience and it just becomes like the wild west other interesting i made notes that feels like a t-shirt right there i mean when i taught my members this they're like i like that because i feel like if i get it wrong i'm going to end up in a coma or yeah your community will uh yeah yeah that's fascinating it's great stuff and so i saw a post in the community group that i'm a member of your community group i'm a member of that i really liked the other day which was basically um you know don't uh don't necessarily go and answer all the questions yourself as the community manager and and let the community answer some of the questions and it was really fascinating to me because when i saw that message that tip from you there was lots of questions in my community that i was about to answer all of them and it was amazing to me um i didn't do it i resisted and watching the community answer it frankly better than me a big shout out to quite a lot of people in the audience right now um roders and uh aj um alex uh oscar you know people in in the community that went and gave these answers that were very thorough and very useful and and i actually you know first i want to say thank you for that tip and secondly you know what other you know nuggets of gold like that have you got what's the best strategy to build i guess audience engagement and and and and allow the community to you know to engage so that was like gold i really again thank you but what's your view on this i'm so glad to hear that first of all and it really works right because i'm the same as you i'm a natural helper all i want to do is serve my members and help my audience and so on so the same as you i see a question 10 seconds later i want to jump in and give the most thorough robust comprehensive answer i possibly can but what that does is other members look at it and say well i've got nothing to add right it's already been addressed and so by staying quiet i've started to invoke this rule of leave at 24 hours and if it still has no answers then i can jump in and what normally happens is same as you other members jump in and not only are their perspectives often better but it's the variety of perspectives because that's community right this is not group coaching this is not sign up and listen to simon or sign up and listen to tom it's the power of the collective it is two heads better than one or two hundred heads definitely better than one and i think you know these different angles that people come at a problem from um are just incredibly fascinating and it really is speaking to the power of the collective what we're talking about i think in terms of engagement probably my biggest hack my biggest tactic would be turning private into public this is what seems to work the best for me and everyone that i i try and you know share this with so um if you just sit back and expect people to engage most won't if you reach out to someone one-on-one have a conversation and say hey what are you struggling with right now what are you working on how are things going more often than not they won't just ghost you they will tell you and they might say it's going well but i'm kind of struggling with this and then the trick is you say okay i would love to help with that and i think i've got a great answer to help you but do you mind posting that as a question in the main public community that way you can get help just not just from me but from your fellow members and in our conversation giving you help it's also going to help other members too who may be going through something similar um that's been gold for me you know you've just reminded me i had um nine dms today in my instagram asking questions um and i answered them all with a voice note which was kind of i thought i was being clever because that's that's i got back to people and the voice note was a good hack for me but i i should have got them to come onto the community and ask the questions because some of the questions were really good questions that a lot of other people in the community might not have thought to ask you you should and i actually like the friction of that because you're not trying to sell them anything and it's kind of like a filter right it's like well if you can't be bothered to sign up for a free community and get help from me you know and you're an accomplished entrepreneur your time really has value if they can't be bothered to sign up in 30 seconds and post it there they're not serious about wanting help you just you just reminded me of something there actually i i i made me think of a very important i'm i'm replying to those messages every day on different channels and and uh i guess part of me resists doing it because like you say i don't want to seem like a funnel like oh you know i'll answer that if you go into my community for your free community that's helpful yeah but sometimes it does feel like that doesn't it feels like we know we'll just jump through this one more hoop and then i'll answer your question and um but but i think i get it yeah but but it's you know it's the wrong mindset i've got there to be honest i think it's um i think it's just it what i've just what i feel is once they're in my community or anyone listening perhaps who's got a community if your community is going to bring value actually them going across and answering the question in public is going to give them like you said a variety of answers not just mine mine might be wrong for that matter because i've got my own view doesn't mean i'm right and so it could be useful to have other people's view and um yeah i would say actually on discord that one of the weaknesses is you can't do voice very easily to people so what i do like about instagram is i can literally see the question and instantly reply i do find i have to type it out on discord but the value is that the community itself can also help so um so yeah another great a great point which i've made a note for myself i'm learning a lot in this uh you can um you can also do it through lives and this kind of thing and and events so for example my friend christo he has a very big following and he gets questions every day and it is unscalable and unrealistic for him to help every single person one-on-one so he's got a bit of a like short coded response that basically says here's your two options you can either book me for a consultation but it's like 1500 quid an hour or if you want some help for free i host twitter spaces on these days at these times and if you join i'll invite you up on stage and i'll help you for free so again it puts the onus on the person and what happens invariably is 99 of people don't bother which is crazy because you've just had someone offer their time for free all you have to do is show up but for the people that do they can get the help for free they participate in an event where the answer will help them but also hundreds of others and and i don't want to rant on this too much but it is crazy to me that people don't seek that help for free like can you imagine if social media didn't exist in real life if some of the biggest entrepreneurs in your industry said hey i'll give you my time and help you for free you just have to come by my office at this time and you're like nah i won't bother like it just doesn't make sense to me i know well yeah i mean it's um it is lots of reasons sometimes what people don't isn't there i think but it's it's it's it is amazing to me too we we do these webinars every week now and i think about for example yourself just how much knowledge you have and how hard it is to even get a meeting with you because you're so busy um and and so yeah but it is always surprising to me when people don't take advantage of it but it is it is also very heartening when people do and people double down on those people yeah exactly and and you can you can't control the people that don't turn up right so but it is fascinating it's an interesting psychology too and that's when the people that say all free has no value win the argument because they said it was because it was free but frankly i've i in my past career i have run paid events where people don't turn up as well so i think it's just sometimes the way life is isn't it i know life can get in the way though i want to be empathetic to that as well no exactly yeah yeah we we did a pr event with andrew block who basically does all the pr for the apprentice and his lord sugar's kind of pr guru literally he charges about 10 000 pounds an hour and we did an event with him and we had 460 people sign up and then that night it was sunny outside so 112 people turned up um out of you know the the huge number we had originally signed up and it was simply because it was sunny you know so people probably thought i'll get a sun down that's better than 10 yeah i could get my career on the right path but also this on youtube later you know it doesn't it doesn't the sun doesn't shine in england very often so maybe you know there's a reason evidenced by my incredibly pale face right now sir yeah as well meter got a very bright light on me to try and help but um but look um one more question from a community that asked these questions before we actually go to the actual community um and answer any questions anybody has so if anybody wants to come up on stage in a minute on the discord community put up your hand now i'll bring up on stage in a minute make sure the technical stuff's working put up your hand now and then if you want to come up and talk about what you're trying to get from our community the purposeful people community this community entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs i'd love you to put up your hand to come and tell me and tom and i just love to have tom here what you think um about this community and please come up and all say the same thing so tom doesn't think we've got a displaced community no pressure so one last question for you tom um i guess this is a subject very close to my heart as you know but i i wanted to understand how you make sure of it from a community perspective and that is purpose the purpose of the community the goal of the community you know how important is it i think i know what you're going to say there but more importantly how do you perhaps determine what that is that's a huge question to be honest um it's very important so i think too many people leap in without that clarity without the foundations i think determining purpose needs to be done as a proper exercise again it kind of speaks to that leaping in i think a lot of people just have an idea or expect that lightning bolt moment and go yeah i guess that's my purpose let's get going um and actually i think it it works to sit and map it out properly right to work shop it to plan it like you would with any other big project or strategy and what could be bigger than your purpose again i feel like people just feel like it's something that lives within them and maybe it does but actually getting out on paper specking out detailing it figuring out what aspects resonate with you and which don't and i think to an extent as well it's kind of meeting the market where they are or where they're going so sometimes we can have a purpose that feels really true to us and really right but it kind of falls on deaf ears and often i'll refer to it as tweaking the dials but often you'll just tweak it a little bit and suddenly you feel like you get in this case community market fair or product market fair or mission purpose market fit whatever it might be just tweaking it a little bit or coming at it from a slightly different angle it's still going to remain true to your values and your purpose but that little tweak is going to be what ultimately gives it traction but yeah personally i don't know if there's a one-size-fits-all framework of like if you do these 10 steps you're going to have a purpose at the end of it i would just say do your due diligence and again pay attention to the the market fit i hate to speak in terms of businessy terms in terms of something that is so you know important and kind of ephemeral and holistic but i'm also practical with this stuff and i've seen a lot of people that kind of rant about their purpose and no one gives a crap and i i think if you can get the sweet spot of both you're winning just out of interest oh well this is a deep subject as you say um i find purpose can come over time and your your people will say your purpose doesn't change i don't i think that's not true like i i i when i was younger i um i i i was a struggling entrepreneur and found it really hard it's only later in life i realized that you know my purpose now is to go and help that younger me but i didn't know that when i was younger you know like i didn't have the experience either to go back and do that so sometimes i think people want purpose in their 20s and some people have got that you know greta hilberg clearly got her purpose young but i think not everybody's got that uh that ability to find it young right so uh i don't know i think the other thing is is how you execute your purpose like my purpose is to help people start and grow a business for free and right now i'm doing that you know through youtube for tick tock for instagram but eventually i want to build an entrepreneur bank a bank for entrepreneurs i want i want to build entrepreneur house we can stay for free so these are later these are products that i'm going it's a purpose and delivery of purpose it can have different things you know do i want to be the owner of a bank not really do i do i crave the power of of of being a financial institution definitely not but do i think that that tool is required to help people for example get microfunding to start a business yes because there's not none of it out there to help people so um yeah yeah it's an interesting one though it is an interesting one yeah it definitely is and i i think you're kind of speaking just to the execution of trying stuff and having patience deploying time against it and what i often notice with purposes that your previous experiences will actually inform what your purpose ends up becoming but you can only connect the dots retro retrospectively so what i mean by that is over the years i've had all kinds of stuff that now informs the work i do today it's the communities that i ran for fun as a teenager that i had no idea if that would you know be what i i did later in life but they've been a tremendous foundation for what i'm doing now it was the silly videos that i made with friends um which now allow me to you know have some level of creative aptitude making content uh it was the podcast i did for years so that now i feel comfortable speaking on these things all of these things kind of converge and at the time you you don't really know where you're going but as you start to lean into clarity on your purpose you're like oh yeah it's kind of all been leading here the whole time um but you only realize it and i think the best visual i've ever seen of this was a previous mentor of mine and he said people expect it to go like this it goes in a straight line from point a to point b and then he drew this giant spiral and said actually it's more like this um you know you slowly hone in on it and you get closer and closer but it takes bloody ages and it ends up being a really long line to get there because it's never a direct line it doesn't work like that that's so true i mean the other thing i mean i could talk about this subject forever i think we'll move over in a minute to people's questions on discord so please put up your hands if you have any questions for tom but one you know one thing i'd say about this time and i don't know how you feel about this is um if you're not sure what your purpose is um you can hang out with people that have purpose because it's quite infectious actually and and i i i've been involved in people who have a purpose i fall in love with their purpose and that's that's driven me to learn something that eventually i can use for my purpose um and so you know if you i i think if you haven't yet discovered what your purpose is perhaps don't build a community unless that community is about finding your purpose it could be interesting but you know or just build one and don't weigh your whole you know life's hopes and dreams and that level of pressure i actually think much like starting companies you're not trying to build the greatest company of your life with the first company you start you're just trying to learn the ropes and if it fails that's fine i had so many failed communities growing up yeah it's all part of the process i totally agree i was going to start getting controversial then and say i think mark zuckerberg if he'd actually let facebook fail we'll probably have a better company today and the fact that it didn't fail that's probably why they've got trouble you need that experience of failure to understand how in his case important community is and when you start not looking after that community properly the trouble you end up in but unfortunately so well funded it pushed through the pain of the community not being served but anyway politics aside before we get blocked on youtube um look i i wanted to move over to discord uh and and now answer the questions that maybe some of the community have got there so i don't know if you need to shut this computer down and move over or you you could do on a separate computer but i might end the recording here and we'll move over to discord if that's good for you yeah and if if i take a minute or two it's because i'm inept technically so i will be over there rest assured and otherwise i'll call you on mobile to let you know but it should be fine all right okay everybody thanks for listening and please uh subscribe wherever you're listening this list to this to and if you want to learn more about what tom does his links are below and thank you so much for listening and please do join the discord community entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs again link below and you can be asking tom these questions yourself see you soon thanks for listening see you in a sec