So… I Accidentally Built a Thriving Community Last Week

Before we get into it, let’s define the word community.

My definition: Community is a place where people can gather digitally, or physically, around a shared interest/experience/etc. Community is NOT your social media following.

Since Covid, I have been gaming with a group of people, and it’s become one of my favorite things. Funny enough, some of us met on LinkedIn of all places!

We have been talking about opening up our group to other gamers our age and older (we are mid 20s - mid 40s). For context, a lot of older people game. But depending on the game, there are a lot of kids too. So, it’s just nice being able to play with people that have shared experiences.

I’ve been building (or running) communities pretty much my whole career. One morning I decided that I was going to give it a go and what happened next blew me away.

The Past

I’ve done everything from creating/managing Discord servers, Slack communities, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, custom groups, to building in person communities. Between them all I’ve managed around 400k people. All of those communities were a lot of fun for me. But it felt very different putting this new group together.

The Accident

So, there I was, casually scrolling Reddit one morning, when inspiration hit — I wanted to make a post. Now, I have never posted anything on Reddit. I write comments here and there. Consume a lot of art, gaming and anime content. But that’s it. I didn’t know what to expect when I hit publish, but I went ahead with it anyway. The gist was simple—I'm turning 30 soon and I want to game with more adults who are into the same competitive game that I play (Valorant).

The response showed me that there were MANY others that wanted the same thing. A handful of people pleaded that someone create a place for all of us to gather. And a few others shared links to different Discord servers that fit some of the criteria I was looking for. So I joined them.

If You Need Something, Build it Yourself…?

At first, I wasn’t sure if I was going to create a group. Because if something already existed that hit all of our criteria we would have just joined that. Because communities are WORK! A few people commented on my post or messaged me directly with links to other groups. I joined each of them. And those groups were great, but they didn’t achieve everything I was looking for in a community. So we decided to build out our own.

If you’re looking to build a community of your own, what you’re wanting might already exist. It may be smart to just join something else or join forces. But for us it made more sense to capitalize on the attention and build it ourselves — two of us had experience running communities already.

Also, when you start something yourself people look at you differently than if you were just to join.

For example, I hopped in a voice chat with four others and immediately someone said “ooohhh, this is the guy that started the group!”

I’ve talked about it a lot in my business content. But when you are THE creator, people associate you with whatever result they get from your community. Success. Friends. Growth. Etc. You become a guide in their journey which I think is really awesome.

Now, here’s where it gets even cooler.

Building the Community

After the post started to pick up steam and people started filling out the form, I got to work on structuring our Discord server. Now, I'm not gonna lie; I'm not a huge fan of doing this stuff, but this time it was exciting! I couldn't wait to have more friends (yes, I cringed as I wrote that :P).

My buddy created a form for anyone that may have been interested in joining. We wanted to be able to control who entered and make sure everyone wanted to be there for the right reasons. I figured this would discourage a lot of people from joining.

It didn’t.

We still got almost 400 submissions. And we went through every single one manually. This allowed us to make sure everyone joining was in alignment. Some submissions were people that very clearly were out of alignment. Many submissions were perfectly aligned. And others were so wholesome, or really validated this community, that I want to mention them here.

• I want to have a safe place to game with me & my partner.
• I want to have good connections and a fun time as that is the most important thing.
• I have been looking for some peers/older folks to game with for quite some time now, since the younger players can be especially rude/toxic to female players. Just looking for some buddies to have fun with :)

We have had this going for a week or so, and people have offered to help make the server better or support us in other ways. Others have even spent money to help our server perform better.

Building Something Useful

If you build something useful, people are going to use it. For every community that I’ve built it was always a LOT of work to keep people engaged — especially early on. If you want to build a solid community then you have to give people a reason to be there and a reason to keep wanting to show up. They also have to feel safe enough to show up.

I like the way that Heather Parady explained community in one of her videos, “building an engaged community is like being a good party host.” You can get people to the party, but do they want to stay? As people started pouring into our server, I could tell almost immediately that this would be different than anything I’ve ever done. People were talking. Sharing their wins. Asking to hangout. They were having conversations about their jobs, work life balance, their kids, relationships, their hip replacements, and so much more. All in a video game group. Without any prompting or much effort from us. It just happened organically. All we did was provide the structure and the place.

One of the members in the community even posted this after a few days…

Just wanted to say I love you guys. You made the game fun again.

Monetization isn’t on our Minds

My friend that I started the group with just happened to be in Denver for a speaking engagement this week. Over coffee we were discussing how a part of why this feels so magical is because it’s just something we both love and everyone else in the group really loves it too. Both of us were grinning ear to ear watching as people interacted in our new community. There is no need to monetize and it has nothing to do with either of our businesses.

Could we monetize it eventually — sure. But that’s not the point.

Lessons

Writing this newsletter I was reminded of one of the first videos I ever made. I talked about how running guilds — a community within certain video games — as a kid taught me how to build stronger communities. My main point was that a strong community needed the following items.

1. Good leader/s. They don’t have to be the smartest, most talented, or (fill in the blank). In my case I am not the most talented gamer within this group. Neither are the people that started the group with me.
2. The Skilled. These people are really good at what they do (or just better than the average player in their group). They can teach others and give people something to aspire towards. This group of people deeply believes in the mission and the leaders.
3. The Super fans. This group of people really believe in the mission of the group and are just happy to be there.
4. The lurkers. This group of people don’t talk as much. They are just there lurking, deciding if they want to participate.
5. Now that I’m older, and wiser, I would also add a 5th point. Communities need an agreement. A commonality in which everything is formed around. In our case, it’s being 25 years [or older] and enjoying Valorant. This can be anything, but it’s the glue that holds everything together and tells people “this is a safe place for me.”

From there I explained how it’s a cycle. As the group grows, more lurkers and super fans enter the group. Some lurkers become super fans. Super fans put in more work and later become very skilled. And everyone that comes in from the outside sees this ecosystem and it becomes a lot easier to grow.

I still think that is true today.

Our group exists now because of me and my friends. But it’s so fun mostly because of what I just outlined above.

When I think about having more fun. Living a fulfilled life. Not burning out as a creative. A big part of that is doing things that we are passionate about. And you know what’s even more fun than that? Doing things we are passionate about, with humans that share that passion.

So if you’ve been thinking about building a community, maybe now is the time.

Side-note: I am looking to work with a few more B2B Creators looking to scale up in 2023 and beyond on a 1:1 level. Schedule a discovery call with me here.