「Internal Work」Series Vol.01 From Zero to Community: My 10-Year Journey Building a Startup Hub in China (Using Minimalism!)

Preface

Hi everyone! As I enter my tenth year as a community builder in 2024, I've had the opportunity to operate two international technology communities in Shenzhen since I returned to China, bringing together stakeholders from Shenzhen and the world for learning and interaction, including entrepreneurship, innovation, and tech leaders. Over the past ten years, we've organized over 100 community activities, held 200+ in-depth interviews with guests from all aspects of entrepreneurship and tech, and continuously thought about how to sustain a high-quality, cohesive community that provides value to the innovation ecosystem. Now, I'm preparing to share my ten years of experiences with everyone, as both a form of self-commemoration and as a resource for organizations and individuals who may be interested in the Chinese or Shenzhen market and building communities here. If you're planning to bring your brand to China in the future, I hope my experiences can provide you with some insights and guidance.

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About This Series

This is the first update of the CBL series in 2024, which is titled "Internal Work". This phrase accurately describes the purpose of my upcoming articles, which is about how to apply the principles of minimalism and long-termism with patience to embark on a sustainable community-building journey in China, focusing on and fostering the inside instead of external factors.

The articles will first introduce the background of the series: Who we are writing for, why we are writing, our own experience in building a community, especially a non-commercial international tech&innovation community in China, and the experience accumulated in repeated experimentation, laws, and effective measures through over 100 community activities and nearly a decade of continuous operation.

The reason we call it 'Internal Work' is because we feel that the main themes in this series are all related to 'time.' The techniques, methods, or tips mentioned in the articles always need time to be tested and validated, and they can't be immediately implemented, nor are they magical.

As a reader, if you are solving some challenging and urgent problems at the application level, this series may not be the most appropriate source of information for you. Recently, at the Startup Grind Shenzhen 2023 Community Partners Party, a guest mentioned that our approach to community building is like traditional Chinese medicine. Like low-temperature stewing, it's a slow burn that takes time to figure things out. I don't know if it truly cures things, but ten years of experience is definitely worth giving ourselves an update.

In the first article, we will share what a non-commercial community is, as well as the challenges it faces.

Part 1/4 Partially Commercialized Communities

In recent years, community or social media group operations have become a popular field of study, and there are many books and methods regarding this subject. Commercial community operations tend to emphasize the relationship between brands and users, focusing on how to increase user activity in the community, expand and maintain brand influence, and eventually generate sales.

However, "partially commercialized communities" are also much more prevalent in every individual's life, learning, and work scenarios. For example, a publishing company may want to enhance its relationship with readers and build a community of readers around its publications; a public sector innovation department may want to establish an organization for the exchange and communication of all stakeholders in the ecosystem; a technological company, such as Google, might establish a community and learning platform for developers to better exchange and use its development tools; and communities like Coding Girls, which are driven by values and aimed at promoting the development and mutual aid of female programmers, are established and operated by individuals with a social mission and not necessarily with the goal of immediate financial gain or promotion of sales.

These communities may or may not be initiated and operated by commercial institutions and may indirectly or directly promote commercial partnerships, but the direct purpose is not necessarily to generate immediate profits or promote sales. They serve to promote the establishment of the institutional brand, but also meet the spiritual needs of social groups, generating social meaning.

While there is no shortage of detailed explanations for commercial community operations, there are relatively few real-world case studies over an extended period of time for the latter, especially for those without sufficient time, resources, and methodology support, to achieve sustainable and high-quality operations. "Community Building Lab CBL" aims to provide a solution and solution path for this group of people.

Part 2/4 Challenges

Building communities that are not fully commercial in nature is a challenging task. Throughout my 10-year practice in community building in China, I have met many peers and friends in the industry who share the following characteristics:

1. Virtually no one is a full-time community builder, and it is more likely that their main job is in another field, with community development duties being performed on a supplemental basis. Sometimes, the lack of adequate institutional funding prevents this role from being a full-time position.
2. The community is not focused on sales, and its results are often difficult to translate into short-term benefits, sometimes being part of a larger brand-building effort.
3. If the community is initiated by individuals and motivated by values or personal interests, these communities are not aimed at profiting in the short term. Instead, those communities are often run by individuals who have a full-time job and run the community during their spare time.

The challenging part for all of these individuals is that they do not have a lot of time to dedicate to their community building duties, lack a well-developed and time-tested method to effectively manage and sustain their communities, and often do not have access to abundant resources or channels to support their social or interest-based communities.

Part 3/4 A Common Misconception for Beginners

Sometimes, whether we are a corporation or an individual, we often have good motives and intentions when it comes to communities. We might want to do something beyond our daily work that realizes meaning and purpose, but we may start out by "creating a WeChat group" and eventually end up with "disabled messages".

In the monotonous city life, we all think that a good, active, and value-added community with collisions is an important component of our mental and corporate culture. But why is sustaining such communities so difficult?

I believe that a key reason is that many community builders initially want to do too much, and set their goals to have more and more participants, high WeChat group activity, and frequent activities. However, given the limited resources of communities that are not fully commercial in nature, as mentioned in the previous section, such "community operations" can be difficult to sustain, which may lead to a feeling of frustration and eventually to delayed or halted community activities, causing the community to effectively end its operations.

Part 4/4 My 10-Year Journey

As the Director of a Startup Grind community in Shenzhen, I've had the opportunity to work as a technology reporter in Chicago before returning to China in 2013, out of curiosity about the industry. Since then, I've been involved in the operation of two international technology organizations, the Shenzhen discussion group for YCombinator's startup classes and Startup Grind Shenzhen, with all personnel, including myself, being volunteers. We organized activities on a weekly basis and eventually moved to monthly events. During this time, I regularly held public events to share the methods and principles of our community development with anyone who was interested in the topic. I also participated in a series of events organized and held by the activity host and internal trainings held by large corporations.

In 2018 and 2019, the Startup Grind Shenzhen community that I led as Director was awarded the title of "The Most Cohesive Community in the China’s Greater Bay Area" by one of the major ticketing paltforms Huodongxing in China. In 2019, 2020 and 2023 the Tencent WeStart awarded the organization with the title of "The Best Partner". Additionally, I was named “2021 Startup Grind Community Lifetime Achievement Award” by the Startup Grind headquarters. One of our events was included as part of the class content by Harvard Business School.

Yet, awards aren't the most important milestone. I frequently share this in my presentations:

if we consider community building to be a track, only when the number of people running on it continues to increase will the matter be done better and better, the community in our daily life will play a more and more valuable role. If the track only has a handful of well-performing communities, the track will narrow, and ultimately, it will no longer be a track because nobody cares about it anymore.

Therefore, as I enter my 10th year as a community builder, I want to share my 10 years of experience, learning, and methodologies in a series, especially for those who are interested in community building and in need of guidance. Without regard to your origins or the motivations behind your efforts, if some ideas, tips, and tricks can guide you in the sustainable operation of your community, this journey will not be in vain. In the next post, let's discuss what minimalism is in community building, which is one of the underlying mentalities behind sustainable community development.

In my next article, I will discuss what is minimalism applied in community building, and how it became a powerful tool for the healthy operation of communities.

About Community Building Lab CBL

Community Building Lab (CBL) is a brand dedicated to exploring the meaning and value of community building, promoting community's role in innovation ecosystems and good living, sharing sustainable community development methods, and nurturing the next generation of community builders.

CBL aims to reach out to potential beneficiaries such as commercial and non-commercial brand institutions, public sectors, individual interest groups, and novice community managers who may have limited resources (time, manpower, finance, and experience) but are interested in enhancing their community building skills.

The brand seeks to apply the principles of social enterprises in its institutional development, and embraces an open and symbiotic attitude in exploring community building, technology innovation, talent growth, and city living in a wholesome and sustainable manner.

I regularly share my posts in Mandarin Chinese on the WeChat Public Platform (ID: hicommunity) and Linkedin. My WeChat handle is yueyegeng and you can also reach me by email at [email protected] ?.

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