Start with connection — 5 ways to get started with community without heavy investment.

Last week I was chatting with a founder who was super interested in exploring community and Community-Led Growth as a strategy.

They brought up The Community Club.

"Ah, I'd love to do what you've done with the Club, but we can't do that. We just don't have the resources yet."

As I was typing a response, I realized there were a lot of people with the same mindset of this founder, who could do with some advice.

To alter a well-known Chinese proverb:

The best time to start a community was last year. The second best time is today.

Yes, The Community Club has a lot going on.

We’ve got an active Slack group, a packed weekly newsletter, events big and small (stay tuned for this year’s big one ??), a mentorship program, educational courses, and so much more.

But we didn’t start with that.

We started as a weekly Substack newsletter called Community Chat.

Though calling it a newsletter at that time is kind of an insult to real newsletters.

All that other programming, hiring a team to help out, and the membership growth that followed happened over the last few years.

Good, authentic community takes time.

But that doesn’t mean it has to start with picking a platform and heavy investment from day one.

In fact, it probably shouldn’t.

The best advice I can give someone looking to start a community right now is to actually stay away from that approach.

(This isn't to say that you shouldn't invest in a fuller community strategy and hire a talented community manager at some point. There are so many great people looking right now, drop me a note if you're hiring and I'll connect you with some wonderful folks.)

Instead, start with connection and let that evolve into community.

Identify your ideal community members, and start with connecting them. Then, connect them with each other and compound into a community.

Here are 5 low-lift ways to start connecting people in the earliest form of community building.

1. Host a monthly Zoom

Start a Community Advisory Board. Bring together 10-15 of your ideal community members and host a monthly Zoom call to discuss what’s going on in your industry.

It’s not a webinar, it’s not a presentation. It’s a conversation and an excuse for those people to connect with and learn from each other.

2. Co-create content

Connect with experts in your industry who have opinions to share. I’ve found it often works best if you target those that have awesome ideas and thoughts, but maybe don’t have the biggest platform themselves.

Work with them to co-create content (blogs, newsletters, etc), and then provide them opportunities to connect and create with each other as well.

Bonus side-effect: it’s gonna level up your content game overall.

Done well, co-creation can evolve into an entire intentional program. We do this extensively through our Commsor Guild, which you can learn more about (and totally copy) here!

3. Host Ask-Me-Anythings

AMA sessions were the shortcut (or as close to one as you can get) when it came to growing the Community Club in the early days (from 0 to ~500 members).

Bring people together around an expert in your space and give them the opportunity to connect and ask questions. People love getting space to talk to and learn from those ahead of them in their careers.

4. Provide space for people to easily connect 1:1

One-on-one connections are one of the backbones of strong communities. There’s lots of ways you can easily connect people of similar interests, both manually and with tools (like Meetsy!).

If you want to evolve the basic 1:1 connection, you can explore launching more intentional connection programs, like mentor <> mentee connections.

A mentorship program was one of the early backbones of the Catalyst Software community (shoutout Ben Winn !)

5. Host a dinner

Book a table for 8 people, invite 7 people local to your city, and host a dinner. Couldn’t be more straightforward.

Bring some guidance and some structure to steer the conversation, sit back, enjoy your food and watch people connect.

I know a SaaS company that did this and scaled to 750 ‘members’ in just six months through dinners.

Only then did they launch a more traditional community. Hundreds joined right away, and many knew each other from the dinners. The ice was pre-broken.

You’ll notice that most of these ideas can be done with zero platform, zero tool investment, and without needing 100s of members.

They’re relatively small, and they’re hyper targeted.

Regardless of how you start building community, you should start with a few question (and no, ‘what platform should we use’ isn’t one of them).

Why do your target members want to connect? What are they hoping to achieve?

How can you help facilitate that connection?

Start there.

Start with connection.

Community will follow.