I.

My Most Controversial Tweet

To introduce this section of the guide, I thought it best to retrieve a popular, and controversial, tweet of mine.

“It blows my mind that all newsletter writers with 10K+ subs, don’t have a $100,000 event business attached to their brand....

like, you built up the giant list of die hard fans just to sell them…

...powdered vegetables?

People want to meet you.

People want to discuss your writing.

People want to belong to something bigger”

Which is to say, if you have an email list with 10,000 subscribers and you’re not making at least $100,000 per year from it, you’re a nincompoop. The problem is, most people with a list that size are making zero dollars per year. Which begets the question—what are they doing with all those emails?

In my experience, half of them are building an email list because they’ve heard it’s a valuable asset to own (yet have no idea how or why it’s valuable.) The other half are building lists for the same reason that people accumulate followers. They’re doing it for vanity. They want thousands of people to read their work—but they never stop to ask themselves why?

This is a pervasive problem in the newsletter space, and is starting to creep its way into the community space as well. Organizers will boast that their community has 2000 members, but when you show up to one of their events, and it’s just 7 people sitting around a table, and you can’t help but wonder—what does 2000 members even mean? For most communities it means 2000 people signed up to receive emails. For other communities it means 2000 people clicked a button on meetup.com saying “Join Community”, and for others—and this is the group that I’m going to repeatedly try to convince you to join—membership means there was a real and tangible exchange of value.

II.

The five ways communities make money

The following is a highly biased account of the successful ways I’ve personally and professionally made money through communities. There are a few others I do not mention here—affiliate marketing, merch sales, etc.—because I’ve either failed at, or haven’t tried, putting them into practice. Despite my biases, rest assured, each one of the following methods can work very well. The limiting factor is your particular skillset and predispositions to workload. None of these methods are better or worse than the others, only more or less aligned with you and your mission.

A. Raising money

This is rare, although some people still do it. Raising money to start a community is deeply antithetical to the notion of community except in one instance—if you are raising money directly from the members of your community to get it off the ground. In this case raising money is actually an excellent tool.

One of my favorite communities, The Commons in San Francisco, was jump started in this exact way. About five years ago they raised a little over $75,000 in the form of a Kick Starter campaign. This helped them gather the funds necessary to purchase a co-working space. That space, is still their home-base all these years later.

In any other circumstance, raising money to fund a community is dubious at best. That’s because it’s the same mephistophelian bargain that startup founders make when they decided to take venture capital. They trade money now, for the incessant pressure to grow, spread, optimize, and sell in the future. None of those pressures are desirable, or frankly helpful, when building a true community. So please, reconsider this path if you are interested in starting a community.

B. Sponsorships

This is my least favorite, even more than raising money, and that’s mostly because of my own demons and shortcomings. The sponsorship game is one all its own, and it’s a game that I don’t know how to play well.

Here’s the gist. You create a community. You bring people together and have a jolly ole’ time. But in the background you collect a bunch of data on them. You find out how old your members are, how much money they make, what their favorite products are, how much money they spend on those products, etc. You keep tabs on everybody at all times—but most importantly you keep all this data collection stuff under wraps because it’s unsavory and will ruin the “wholesome community vibe” you’re working so hard to achieve. Then, when the time is right and you hit a critical mass of highly valuable members, you proposition a company with a large advertising budget to give you some money in exchange for access to your community. To me, this makes sponsorships feel very “timeshare-y”.

In my professional career I’ve only hosted one sponsored event ever, and it went so terribly that I ended up giving all the money back. Since then, I’ve swore off pursuing sponsorships forever.

But don’t let my individual account dissuade you. I know plenty of people who have cracked the code, and have become sincerely wealthy (and not to mention secured a long, prosperous future, for their community) through sponsorships. A great example would be, at the same time my community, Startup Social in San Francisco, was slowly growing from ticket sales—someone else on the other side of the country who was doing the exact same thing as me, was blowing my community out of the water with free events that were funded entirely by sponsorships. Millions and millions of dollars worth of sponsorships, as a matter of fact.

C. Pay per RSVP

This is where I suggest all community organizers start when they first decide to make some money. It’s an a la carte, pay to play, model for community participation. If person wants to attend your community dinner, they purchase a ticket. If they want to join your community workout, they buy a ticket. If they want to attend your seminar on advanced bouldering techniques, they buy a ticket.

The reason you should start here is because ticketing gives you clear insights into preferences of the people in your community. It also gives you a tidy feedback loop for iteration. You’ll learn quickly what kinds of events, products, courses, knowledge, and experiences the people in your community value—and you’ll also learn what things they do not.

Selling access to individual events is also a great training ground for your copywriting skill, which is an essential skill as a community organizer. Using the written word to get people out of their house, and into the world you’re creating, is the name of the game. It’s going to take you a while before you’re any good at it, but when you are, this is a healthy and sustainable way of making money from your community.

D. Memberships

Memberships create literal buy-in. They signal a long-term commitment to an organization. If you can swing it, I suggest making your membership period no less than one year.

I did this when I started The Rosedale Society—which is a members-only creative co-working space in Austin, TX. The way it works is, every member is given a door code to our private clubhouse. It gets them 24/7 access to the space, which includes: a full bar, coffee station, snacks, notebooks, pens, and access to our expansive library. Because of the size and nature of the club, membership needs to be high trust and high accountability. So in addition to a two-part application process, the minimum term for membership is 1 year.

The reason memberships are great from a business standpoint is, they create a predictable income for the organization. They also tie members to an inherently long-term commitment. Communities should not be something people join on a whim. It shouldn’t be something they’re “trying out” to see if it fits. Thats because communities only work if members stick around long enough to let them work. So try to create a compelling enough offer to rope someone in for a year—then treat them like family.

The best part about the predictable income is, you can start doing cooler things for your members. You can host higher quality events, you can hire speakers, you can pay your instructors meaningful wages, you can work on better branding (to attract higher quality members), you can create cool rewards, you can rent a physical clubhouse for your members, and on and on.

People seem to be passionately against money and communities. It’s an extremely common refrain that they should be free—but I’m telling you, when they cost even a little bit of money to join, the possibilities to serve your people expand only in proportion to your imagination. If you really want to do good, and serve people, go with long-term memberships.

E. Non-profit

A non-profit is effectively Raising Money and Sponsorships rolled into one. The only difference is there isn’t a pressure to generate a return for investors.

The reason non-profits sucks, however, is for all the reasons everyone tells you they sucks. There are many, many rules. You must have a board of directors. You must spend an inordinate amount of time begging wealthy patrons to give you money. There’s additional paper work and additional government fillings—and for what? To pay less taxes? Because at the end of the day, thats what it all comes down to.

As far as I can tell, there are only three reasons you would want to start a non-profit. The first is, you don’t actually understand what a non-profit is or does, and you just want to inherit the social status associated with running a charitable organization. The second reason is, sponsors can give you money and deduct it from their taxes. This means if you have a hard time selling sponsorships normally, you’ll have an easier time through a non-profit container. The final reason you would start a non-profit is so that you don’t have to pay taxes on your revenue. Of course you still have to pay taxes on your salary, but the profit that your non-profit makes will not be taxed like a normal company.

There is nothing inherently noble or charitable about the tax structure of a 501(c)(3) organization. It’s just another way to categorize yourself in the eyes of the government. You can still go good without one, and you can still do bad with one.

It’s just about tax, and for that reason I seriously considered forming one. As a matter of fact, I have some very savvy business mentors who told me it was a stupid decision not doing so. But here’s the reason I didn’t.

When I was looking at incorporating ATX Writing Club, I started researching other writing clubs around the country to see if anyone thus far has been able to crack the monetization code for this particular type of club. Only two companies popped up that had any modicum of success. But what surprised me in my research, was just how many writing organizations had gone out of business. When I read through defunct websites, and old news stories, they all said the same thing: grant funding for the arts had dried up, it was too hard to cover operational expenses, donors were no longer interested in supporting them. I started reading their Form 990’s (these are the public tax reports all non-profits must file) and the picture became clear very quickly. These organizations became too donor focused, and not member focused.

In the end, I decided I would rather spend my time serving members rather than convincing wealthy patrons to give me money.

III.

How many members do I need?

When you first start a community, you need to find a critical mass of highly-aligned people. How many people depends on your goals, but I want to be concrete and give you some good rules of thumb to work with.

There is a natural progression that people make as they become aware of your community. It looks something like this: unaware > subscriber > attendee > member. So to understand how many members you need, you need to first start further upstream.

At this point in the essay I must reiterate my assumptions. If you are reading this you desire to start a community that will survive for a long time, and that you also wish to start a community that has the capacity to replace your full-time job. So through that lenses we can converge on some good, concrete, numbers.

First, how many members do you need to say alive as a community? This requires far fewer people than you’d think. You need 4-6 people to show up consistently to have a community. But in order to find them, you wil need 100 all-time event attendees. That’s because after you’ve built up trust with your attendees, and you have a brand formed around your community, you can expect somewhere between 4-6% conversion rate to paying membership. So 100 attendees equals 4-6 paying members. But unless you’re starting a yacht club, that isn’t going to pay the bills (and if you’re starting a yacht club, your bills are likely much higher than most.)

Second, how many members do you need to replace your full-time income? Let’s say a full-time wage is $66,000/yr (the national average in the United States). With that number we can work backwards in two different ways. The first is by deciding how much you expect to charge for membership, the second is by deciding how many members you’d like to have. I personally use the latter because it’s more indicative of the workload I’m going to take on as the founder of the community. For me, I can handle 200 members with relative ease. So we’ll use that for our hypothetical example.

What should membership cost?

Goal Salary: $66,000
Maximum Member Load: 200

$66,000/200 = $330
Cost of Membership: $330/yr or $27.50/mo

How many email subscriber do I need?

Goal Membership Size: 200
Email Conversion Rate: 5%

200/0.05 = 4000
Total Email Subscribers needed: 4,000

Now of course you need to factor in taxes and any potential expenses you’ll incur, but that’s the rough math. With two-hundred members you need to charge $27.50 per month, which is basically the cost of a large pizza. So you have to ask yourself: Can I create something as valuable as a large pizza, and can I do it for 200 people every month? My bet is—yes, you can.

But let’s fiddle around with the numbers even more. It’s the predisposition of most community organizers to try to scale their community as large as possible. This likely ties back into the fetishization of vanity metrics like I mentioned before—but I think this is exactly the wrong move if you’re interested in providing a high quality experience for your members. Instead, let’s contemplate doing the opposite.

What would happen if, for example, you increased the price of your membership from $26/month to $100/month? In my professional experience—everything would change. Price increases beget changes in community psychographic, demographics, age groups, and commitment levels.

New Math: What should membership cost?

Goal Salary: $66,000
Maximum Member Load: 55

$66,000/55 = $1200
Cost of Membership: $1200/yr or $100/mo

New Math: How many email subscriber do I need?

Goal Membership Size: 55
Email Conversion Rate: 5%

55/0.05 = 1100
Total Email Subscribers needed: 1,100

With the same revenue, you’d have two very different communities. One is a diffuse group of 200 people who are paying the monthly equivalent of a large pizza. The other is where you have a highly aligned group of 55 people paying a $100/month to be a part of your group.

Which community will be easier to manage?

Which community will be higher impact for all those involved?

IV.

Decide who your members are

It’s important to decide what kind of people you want in your community from the outset. You will not get this right the first time around, but it’s important to have a loose idea when you start.

Something all community organizers need to come to terms with is: this cannot become a cult of personality. It can’t be only about the organizer. Communities must be about members interacting with other members. So it’s your primary objective to make sure that the room is filled with the most aligned, and highest quality, people you can find. You cannot do this unless you know, archetypally, who you’re serving in the first place

I advise you to get real specific here: What age are they? What part of town do they live in? How much money do they make? Where do they work? What level of seniority? What do they like to read? Are they married? Do they have kids? What do they like to do in their free time?

The answers to these questions will inform important aspects of your community. For example, if your ideal member has young children, this inherently changes what time your events will take place. If your ideal member makes $1M per year, your events will look very different than if your ideal member makes $35,000 per year. So get specific about exactly who you’re serving, and what kinda of people you’d like to have inhabit your community.

For simplicity sake just use this simple heuristic. Reduce everything down to just one question: Who would I like to hang out with every week, for the next year?

V.

Going from 10,000 subscribers to $100,000 per year

This was my initial tease, so it’s time to make good. Hopefully at this point you have the tools to figure this part out for yourself, but if not, that’s okay. I got you. Here’s the exact math breakdown.

How many members will I need?

Subscribers: 10,000
Email Conversion Rate: 5%

10,000 x 5% = 500
Total Members: 500

How much must my membership cost?

Goal revenue: $100,000
Total Members: 500

$100,000 / 500 = $200
Membership cost: $200/yr or $16/month

That’s the math. So the first question that spins out from that is: Can you build an email list of 10,000 people who live in your city who care about one particular topic? If you’re starting a running club in Atlanta, or LA, or New York you’ll likely be able to do that in a month. If you’re starting a yacht club in Oklahoma City, it might take considerably longer. But if I had to bet, for most ideas, you could build an email list of 10,000 subscribers in three years if you really put your mind to it. The absolutely non-negotiable part of this is, everyone on the list must be interested in the same thing and they all must live in the same city.

The second question you must ask yourself is: can you handle 500 members? The odds are you can, but it will be a full time job. If, however, you can’t or you’re not interested in working full-time on a community, you can always raise the price and reduce the total membership load.

The final question is: can you create a membership offering that is worth $200 per year? You almost certainly can. Think of all the stupid shit you spend $200 per year on—surly you can create something better, more valuable, and more impactful than that?

Now, obviously it’s not the ability to do math that delineates between those who make money with communities those who don’t. Its about providing repeated value to members, its about sustainable and long-term event programming, it’s about branding, it’s about alignment, it’s about copywriting, it’s about actually being able to convert at 5% of your audience, and it’s about fostering relationships with other community builders in your city. That’s what the future sections of this guide will cover—but hopefully now you see the path forward and you see it’s attainable and something you can do if you’re interested.

That’s all for part three. If you’re interested in learning more please LIKE THIS ESSAY so I know that this is a topic worth pursuing further.

—Zac

Footnote: None of this was written or edited with AI. So if you find errors or em dashes, please excuse my humanity.

For this addition of How to start your own community from scratch, I’m just gonna tell you how to do it. I’ll give you the whole thing from start to finish. I’ll lay out every major step you need to take, with minimal context, for those who are too busy for nuance. This guide is focused on starting the kind of local community that has the capacity of becoming a full-time job. If you are not interested in taking your community seriously, or setting your community up for long-term success, please feel free to skip this section. Not all communities need to be serious. Some can just be a fun, flash-in-the-pan, and that’s totally fine.

What I lay out below, however, is the community builder equivalent of saying, “With a balanced diet and consistent exercise, you can achieve your ideal beach body before summer.” So while everything below is factually correct, the real secrets obviously lie in the details.

A step-by-step guide to create your own community from scratch:

1. Come up with an idea for a community that you yourself would like to be a part of.

2. Create an idea for an event that would serve that community.

   1. Make sure it is the easiest possible thing to host, and it costs you nothing. (Book clubs are free to host, writing clubs are free to host, running clubs are free to host).

   2. Give people a way to gather that will cost you nothing and won’t be a headache.

   3. Do a quick google search to see if any other groups like this already exist in your city. See how they’re doing it. Make it your own.

3. Build an event page for the event you want to host.

   1. I like to use www.luma.com, but there are all kinds of services that are similar.

   2. In your event description, include the purpose of the gathering, what people can expect, and a very simple schedule of arrival, programming, and departure.

   3. Decide where and when you want to host the event.

   4. Make sure the hosting platform gives you access to all the email addresses of people who sign up for your event. If they don’t do that, don’t use them.

4. Share your event

   1. Post it on social media, send it out to people on your email list, and personally message it to your friends.

   2. Do whatever you can to get at least 20 people to attend this first one.

5. Host the event

   1. Remember people’s names as best as you can. Focus on connecting people above all else.

   2. It’s normal to feel nervous for your first event, even if it’s comprosed of just a few friends. Trust me though, it’s all gonna work out and you’re gonna do great.

6. Have your next event page ready and queued up for distribution.

7. Send an email to everyone who went to your first event.

   1. Send them a follow up email thanking them for joining, and then inviting them to the second one.

8. Repeat steps 3-7 until you have 500 total unique attendees who have joined your events.

   1. This step may take up to a year, possibly longer.

   2. This is where most people will give up, or get impatient and start moving on. If you proceed too soon, you’re toast. You simply haven’t put in the work necessary to succeed at the following steps.

9. Start sending out a weekly newsletter to everyone on your email list.

   1. This is different than the invitations you’ve been sending out thus far.

   2. The newsletter is designed to disseminate culture and norms of the group.

10. Create an instagram page for your community.

    1. Do not get sucked into the social media game. Your instagram page is a mood board, not a bulletin board. Update it infrequently.

11. Hire a photographer.

    1. Find a young, hungry photographer to work with. There are plenty of college students eager to build their portfolio for under $300 per photo shoot.

    2. It’s okay to stage photos here, but the real deal works best. If you can get pictures of your real community in action thats amazing.

12. Invest at least $1000 of your own money into branding.

    1. Work with a designer and get a really beautiful website up and running.

    2. Look at what the other groups around your city are doing, and do the opposite. You want to stand out here, but you want to do it in a good way.

    3. Pull inspiration from cool brands that you like that are in no way associated with the community you’re trying to build.

13. Create one event that you charge admission for.

    1. This should be an elevation of the normal event you’ve been hosting on repeat. The elevation can take many shapes and forms, but try to keep it simple and keep the cost of the event under between $20-100.

    2. You should be net-positive on this event. Meaning, you should spend some money to host it, but you should still make a little bit of profit.

    3. If the event sells out, or has very high demand, host another one. If it doesn’t, tweak the idea. Keep tweaking until you create a paid event that is irresistible for your email subscribers.

14. Host more of the paid events and less of the free events.

15. Offer a bundle “membership” to your community where they can get access to all your paid events for an extremely reasonable price.

    1. If you’ve been hosting 4 events per month that cost $25 per event, offer a membership that is $25 per month and gets you access to all 4.

    2. Make the membership offer a total no-brainer.

    3. Determine how many total members you’re capable (or interested in) hosting. I advice less than 200 members for every person on your team. If you’re a solo organizer, 200 members is a good limit.

    4. If you see that membership is creeping over that number, increase the price.

16. Once a critical mass of people (60-100 people) become members, then make all your events member-only events.

17. Start making community merch.

    1. You will likely not be able to make any money on this, but it’s not about money. It’s about doing cool things, and giving your members cultural artifacts of the group.

18. Keep increasing the price of membership until the amount of people who leave is slightly less than the number of people who join.

    1. This price might be significantly higher than you initially anticipated.

    2. If people keep joining your book club at $80/mo, maybe it’s actually worth $90/mo, or $100/mo. Who knows?

    3. You are not a good judge of what membership to your community should cost. The market is.

19. Run paid Meta ads.

    1. This is how your community will grow very quickly.

    2. You want to make sure you have regular and steady money coming in before you start burning cash on the kind of experimentation necessary to succeed at Meta Ads.

    3. If you do not intimately understand your ICP, you are going to waste mountains of money here.

20. Create a super-premium membership option.

    1. This membership will be inclusive of everything you’ve created thus far, plus other unique benefits.

    2. The primary thing you’re selling for super-premium membership is access to other super-premium members. Serious authors want to be around other serious authors. Serious athletes want to be around other serious athletes. By creating this type of membership you’re putting the right people, in the right room, at the right time and providing a valuable service for your people.

    3. Price this membership 3-10X more than your normal membership.

21. Create an event that costs $500-1000 to attend.

    1. People jump the gun on this step often, and when they do they get burned. If your members aren’t used to spending money with you, then there’s no way you’re selling an experience this expensive.

    2. Be patient and build up to your more expensive offering only after you’ve dialed-in your membership price.

22. Start asking your members regularly to host events for you.

    1. Start with the die-hards. The people who have been to all of your events and know your culture, and are agreeable, and kind people should be elevated to host status.

    2. Reach out to members you’ve come to know personally and tell them you want to highlight their expertise. Create a bespoke event around them. Make them the star of that event.

    3. Find the members who stand out in this respect, and give them an entire event series. Multiple events, multiple weeks in a row.

23. You now have a community machine!

    1. You have now laid all the groundwork for a beautiful community to flourish.

    2. By creating a steady machine, you are now have enough cash and enough time to start really letting your creativity fly. You can design better merch, host collaborative events with other communities, host retreats, fly in guest speakers—the possibilities are limitless.

    3. At this point you also have the resources to elevate and support your members. This could be financially, or through marketing their work, or empowering them to start their own communities.

If you follow this guide to the letter, you’ll hopefully have somewhere around 200 members paying you $100 per month. That’s $20,000 per month in membership revenue, or $240,000 per year. Then you’re likely be hosting a quarterly event that costs $1000 to join, with 15 attendees for each session. That’s an additional $60,000 in gross revenue. So with this setup, and not doing anything fancy, you’re looking at roughly $300,000 per year in annual revenue. It should take you somewhere between 2-5 years of dedicated work to get to this point.

Please keep in mind, this is not how much money you will be taking home. You’ll need to pay a shocking amount of money on software, platform fees, transaction fees, and event expenses (especially associated with your premium event offerings). You’ll also need to pay your hosts and the people who help you. Not to mention the endless venues fees. Remember in Part I when I said, you have to treat community like a business? This is why.

The limiting factors to your community’s growth are your copywriting, your branding, and the quality of your events. Another major limiter is the nature of the community you decided to create in the first place. If you start a book club, your potential upside is smaller than, say, a Porsche club, a yacht club, or a startup club.

The point of this essay is to illustrate how easy it is to say: do this, do that, and do the other thing. But actually putting any of this into practice is significantly more difficult. The subsequent sections of the How to start your own community from scratch guide are about helping you put the specifics of each step into practice. I’ll also be diving deeper into the mindset one would need to adopt to make any of this possible.

If you thought this essay was helpful, please leave a comment so I know that this is a topic worth pursuing further.

—Zac

Footnote: None of this was written or edited with AI. So if you find errors or em dashes, please excuse my humanity.

In part two of How To Start Your Own Community From Scratch, I’ll be doing a deep dive on members. Members are the building blocks of any good community and there’s a a few things people get wrong when trying to define them. First, they think members are customers. While this can be true, your members are most importantly the stewards of your culture. So to begin, let’s start with what makes a good member.

A good member should be a generative and net-positive contributor. They should give more to your community than they take, and for now we’ll let this suffice as a workable definition for member. As this guide progresses, I’ll go deeper into what it actually means for someone to become a member of your community.

At the ground level, a community is just a collection of people. Therefore, if the people suck, than the community sucks. This is not the socially acceptable thing to say, I know, but I think we can all agree—some people just suck. They suck the life out of a room, they suck the joy out of experiences, they suck your time and your knowledge and your resources and they do it all for their own personal gain. As a community organizer it is your mission to eliminate all the people who suck from the group. And If I might offer some advice in this arena—eliminate them before they even join. Here’s how to do that.

I.

Two ways to vet members

A. Money

The first is through money. This avenue is complicated, and libel to open a can of worms if we let it. But we won’t let it, because we have a lot of ground to cover. Money is a good (not great) tool for vetting members. People with more money are, in general, less financially vulnerable. People who are less financially vulnerable, have the capacity to be generative and contribute more and require less. Not only that, but people who have financial security don’t need your community to do anything for them right now. They don’t need you to change their lives, or bring them job opportunities, or elevate their craft. That’s because people who are financially stable are capable of playing the longterm games necessary for real communities to thrive. Not only that, but people who are financially secure often have more free time to participate—and participation is key.

Money, however, is an incomplete vetting criteria. The list of exciting, kind, and creative people who at some point in their lives were dirt poor (me a decade ago working at Pita Pit, paying for gas in loose coins, and buying bulk “hamburgers” from Walmart for dinner) is extensive. But when I think about the tightest periods of my life, my capacity for new people and new friends and new opportunities was very small. I needed to focus on digging myself out of the hole I was in, and therefore, would have been a poor addition to any kind of group of club.

Now I’m not saying that access to your community needs to be expensive. It just needs to be more than zero. That’s because charging for access has some extended benefits—namely greater attendance. People who pay for things are far more likely to show up to them. When people actually show up, and participate, they elevate the experience for everyone. Not only that, but someone who pays to attend a gathering, inherently brings a different quality of mind than someone who is just passing through. With time and experimentation, you’ll land on a price that makes sense for the kind of community you’re trying to build. I would recommend starting somewhere between $5-100 per month (pricing will be an entire section of this guide, but for now trust me on this initial price range.)

B. Applications

The second way to ensure member alignment—which is ultimately the purpose of vetting—is through applications. This method is much more labor intensive than just jacking up the price, but it’s significantly better at finding the right kind of people for your group. What most organizers get wrong about applications is they must be used to vet for culture and alignment. You’re looking for people who are: bought into your mission, who give more than they take, and who play nice with others. Everything else (education, age, income, status) is simply a vanity metric, and a distraction.

Remember, your members are the entire value of the group. While it would be cool to have a Nobel Laureate in your community, if they’re an asshole, then it’s just a matter of time before your community erodes from the inside out. Find people who are aligned with your values and mission, who are fun, who live in the area, are thoughtful, and who are welcoming to newcomers. That’s the real purpose of an application.

II.

How do you find your first 100 event attendees?

I’ve done this in two different ways: with an audience and without an audience. I’ll focus on the latter because it’s harder, and likely the place where most readers are starting from.

When I first started out I didn’t know anyone in my city relevant to the community I wanted to create. So I began posting on Twitter. Why Twitter? Because I sought to create a startup community, and at the time, that’s where all the startup people were at. The principle I believed was: go where the people are. If you want to create a fitness community, Instagram and TikTok make a lot of sense. If you want to create a writing community, SubStack and Twitter make a lot of sense. If you want to start a baking club for grandma’s, Facebook makes a lot of sense.

Go where your people are and start posting related things. Don’t post random shit. Don’t tell people what you had for breakfast, or wax on about your daughter’s dance recital. Just post about your community and things related to your community. This doesn’t mean everything needs to be an advertisement, but try to be intentional about what you’re doing. Social media, for business owners at least, is not a fun creative exercise. It’s not about airing your personal laundry online, or sharing whole heartedly. No, social media is literally a malicious and addictive advertising platform. See it for what it is, and use it as a tool to advance your community, exclusively. Your mission is to find people on social media, and get them off of it as fast as possible.

All that said, no one will care about anything you say online for a very long time. Trust me. But keep doing it anyways. Teach yourself the in’s and out’s of the tool you decide to use. A lot of these platforms have geographic search which will help you find people in your area that fit a certain archetype. Search for Writers in Austin, or Painters in St. Louis, or Swimmers in Raleigh and then start a conversation with those people and let them know what you’re planning on doing.

The other thing you should do right now—after you have your first event on the calendar—is hound your friends to come. All of them. Not just the ones who are a good fit, but everyone. Then ask them to invite their friends too. Leave no stone unturned because the way communities actually grow is through word of mouth. You’re trying to get people to talk about your club when they’re out to dinner, or at a mixer, or at work. You want it to come up organically in conversation as often as possible. Your friends are a great place to start.

How do you determine a good member from a bad member?

The answer to this question relies heavily on your particular goals. I’ll give an example. I have a friend who is creating a community for startup founders in Austin. This community, for him, serves two functions. The first is, he retired a few years ago and misses the fun, dynamic, conversations he used to have with successful entrepreneurs. The second is, he’s seeking to create a small community of highly influential business owners in Austin. Given this information we can start to make some assumptions about how he is vetting his community. Here’s what he does:

First, to be a member of his community it costs $1,350 per month. In this way money is a great tool because it very quickly finds entrepreneurs who are, at the very least, successful enough to pay over $15,000 annually to be a part of the community. The second thing price does is, it vets for people who actually value community. After all, there are plenty of entrepreneurs who can afford the $15,000 per year, but would never pay that amount for a group of friends. The third criteria is, everyone who joins must have a certain job title. You must be either a business owner, founder, or C-Suite executive. This again vets for a certain kind of person—someone who is high agency, ambitious, a leader, and maybe even a creative. The final step to become a member is you must interview with the organizer personally.

Now let’s take a look at the other side of the spectrum. In Austin there’s another startup community that is very different and serves a very different group of people. This group is much larger, and it is focused on founders who are just getting their business off the ground. This community makes money through sponsorships instead of charging their attendees directly. So a good member for them is basically anyone with an idea, and the gaul to call themselves a startup founder. Do their members need to have a real company, or have any real employees? Do they need to pay money to be a part of the community? Do they need to interview with anyone? No’s, all around.

The difference between a good member and a bad member is not something I can neatly sum up in one sentence, or even one section. That’s because your group is a highly specific entity, and your aspirations for said group are equally unique. So even if you’re in the same field, or on-paper doing the same thing, a good member for you could be very different from the club down the street. That being said, one universal criteria we should all strive for is finding people who are respectful, put others at ease, and are not prone to ego or grandstanding. We want to find people who make others feel comfortable and welcome in our community.

III.

Add some friction to join your community

When I talk to people who are working on their first community, I often hear the refrain “everyone is welcome”. This is because, when you’re early in your career, you’re so desperate for anyone to care about what you’d doing, that the barriers you create are set to zero. Free events. Open to all. Come and go as you please. Try before you buy. These are all bad ideas.

I have never observed a real community that operates without some level for friction to join (if there is no friction it is likely an audience, and not a community.) You must create hoops for people to jump through. You must create some kind of difficulty for them to overcome. Because ultimately your members must cross a threshold—from attendee to member.

A. Insiders and outsiders

There must always be an in-group and an out-group. Effectively, as a community organizer, cultivating this is your whole job. You're creating a world for your members to inhabit. A world that has an imaginary bubble around it. This structure may sound fictitious, but it exists at every level of society. For example, the demarkation around New York is entirely imaginary. It could be two more miles south, or two more miles north—but it’s not. If you live two miles to the south you are no longer a New Yorker, but rather a Philadelphian. If you live two miles to the north you are no longer a New Yorker, but rather, a Canadian. And with those two miles, your entire identity shifts. But it’s not really the two miles. Instead it’s the stories these imaginary boundaries contain, that shape our communities and ultimately our identities.

There are a few levers you can pull to create insiders and outsiders for your community. You can create physical walls, like a physical space, that only your members have access to. You can require a certain level of accomplishment to act as the barrier. Maybe you have a community for published authors, or first-time parents, or marathon runners. These are all concrete—yet entirely arbitrary—lines drawn to delineate between in-groups and out-groups. You can also lean on the location of your community. Writers in Hyde Park. Runners in Tangletown. Painters in Beacon Hill.

But always remember the purpose of pulling these levers is to create a world, and an identity, for your members to inhabit. By drawing these lines you’ll begin architecting truly important and impactful experience for your members. But be mindful when doing so. These decisions will ultimately shape the content and direction of the group at every level.

B. Buy-in

When people experience friction, and subsequently brave the hurdles you impose upon them, they are significantly more bought-in to your community. When they’re more bought-in, they show up differently. When they show up differently, they elevate the experience for everyone around them. Here are two examples of buy-in:

I host a writing feedback group in Austin. For this group, I hire a local community college professor to act as our mediator. He is a consummate professional and I pay him over $100/hr for his work. Could I foot the bill for this work myself? Yes. But instead I charge the members who choose to attend between $300 and $500 for group. I do this because, when people pay to have their work reviewed by others, they are more likely to take the experience seriously.

People who pay money for this feedback group, actually show up. After all, feedback groups don’t work if people don’t do the reading, reflect on it, and leave a thoughtful review. I cannot make this point more strongly—your biggest obstacle as a community organizer will be getting people to actually show up to your events. Selling tickets is a great tool to encourage this, but again, it is imperfect.

When people pay for our feedback group they bring a different level of attentiveness and commitment to it. They arrive well caffeinated and dialed-in. They do the readings. They put more effort into their work. They’re more diligent and more consistent. And by doing those things, not only are they showing up for themselves, but they’re showing up for everyone else in the room.

Another example of buy-in comes from a company I used to consult with. They had thousands of members, and a key part of their community onboarding process was an over-the-phone interview. This was a brilliant use of friction, and helped us find people who were committed, from day one. That’s because, if someone made it all the way through the marketing funnel, and then decided to book an interview, and then actually showed up to the interview—you could tell, without even talking to them, that they would be a good fit for the community. They were committed before they were even allowed inside, and that was made possible through friction.

IV.

What does it mean to be a part of the community

When someone joins your community—whether that’s by having an application approved or by paying a fee—they’re committing to the world you've created. They’re agreeing to play within a set of rules, and interact with a set characters, and ultimately contribute to your community’s overall story.

For this reason, crossing the threshold from outsider to insider should be difficult. If you’re creating a real community, then the people you let in directly shape the culture of your group. It should be hard to do that, or at least harder than zero. These people—your members—will carry influence. So make no mistake, everyone you allow in, alters the course of the community ever so slightly.

Contribution and Transaction

A member of your community must contribute something; their time, their money, their attention, their thoughts, their insights. Ideally they’ll be contributing more than one of these things.

People have a very hard time understanding what it means to be a member of a community because modern consumerism has beat the natural impulse out of them. So they’ll say things like, “Why would I pay $1,200 a year to go to a coffee shop to meet other writers?” What’s implied in this (real) feedback I’ve received is that: If I give you money, then you must give me something in return. If I give you money, you must give new skills. If I give you money, you must give me better job prospects. If I give you money, you must give me status, or love, or more money. The notion of paying for belonging or camaraderie or access to people who care about the same things that you care about—is something modern consumerism hasn’t trained us for.

These kind of people (usually men in my experience) may never understand what you’re trying to build. As a result, they will leave your community because you didn’t uphold your end of their perceived transaction. The truth is, however, they never wanted to be a part of a community in the first place. What they wanted was to purchase a better life. Unfortunately, that’s not something we can give them.

What’s the difference between an attendee and a member?

Okay so here’s it is. The key sentence, left all the way down at the bottom. The threshold from attendee to a member is a sense of identity. It’s when someone actively adopts the persona of community member.

This threshold is crossed when they start answering questions for new attendees instead of directing them to you. It’s when they start proposing new ideas for the group. It’s when they start advocating for the community in their free time. It’s when they start printing out their own club stickers, or when they start talking about the community to strangers.

The difference between an attendee and a member is the difference between someone who goes to church on Christmas and Easter, and someone who is a Christian. Money and applications and interviews can help bubble the right people up to the surface. But no action you take will ever push someone over the edge. Only they can do that. In this way, membership is an identity, and the chasm must be crossed under the power of their own volition.

V.

Make it easy to leave your community

After a year of running Startup Social, my community based in San Francisco, I determined an important thing I needed to do was get everyone aligned on the purpose of the group. Unlike so many other startup communities in that city, I wanted to find members who also valued the social, relational, and active parts of their lives. I was not looking for more heads-down, hustle culture, nerds. Instead, I wanted to find people who worked in startups, and also valued romantic relationships, and hiking, and family, and creativity.

This alignment initiative was an interesting challenge. The central question I asked myself was: How do I make sure, when someone attends my events, they’re surrounded by the right kind of people—and not the typical startup guy you expect when you think of San Francisco?

I determined it was imperative to start producing, and disseminating, written propaganda. This took the form of a weekly email newsletter. When someone joined us for an event, I would take their registration email and put it on the newsletter list. Then I would write an essay exactly the opposite of what they came to expect from a normal startup group.

Each time I did this, dozens of people would unsubscribe, and that was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to find all the people who were culturally aligned with the purpose of this community, and the easiest way to do that was by sifting out everyone who was not. My essays proved to be a kind of cultural distillery. If you stuck around after reading 10 essays on the bullshit of working your life away for a company that doesn’t give a rats ass about you, you were probably my mind of people. After enough time, our events became a potent group of people who were culturally, financially, and geographically aligned.

In the years since, I’ve pulled this propaganda move a few times for different communities. It is the single best way I know to get huge groups of people culturally aligned, and to do so very quickly.

If you decide to adopt this method, I encourage you to be polarizing. Not for polarity sake, but rather, to effectively weed out the types of people who are wrong for your group. You can do this in so many ways. As a matter of fact, I’ll have entire sections in this guide on branding, positioning, internal communications, and emails. All of which are—spoiler—designed to attract the right people, and repel the wrong people.

But for now suffice it to say, you want it to be incredibly easy for someone to leave your community. You don’t want to hide your unsubscribe link, and if someone wants to cancel their membership, make it easy and clear to do so. Remember: hard to get in, easy to get out.

That’s all for part two. If you thought this essay was helpful, please leave a comment so I know that this is a topic worth pursuing further.

—Zac

Footnote: None of this was written or edited with AI. So if you find errors or em dashes, please excuse my humanity.

Four weeks ago, in a kava and coffee fueled frenzy, I wrote 25,000 words on what it takes to start your own community. This topic, which has become increasingly popular and increasingly meaningless over the past few years, is something I’m a bit of an expert at.

If you know me personally, then you know a few years ago I created a community in San Francisco called Startup Social. After moving to Austin, I did the same thing for writers and called it ATX Writing Club. When I attempted the former, I was an amateur. Yet by the end of my time doing so I was consistently hosting weekly events that would generated between $3-5K. The latter community however, I designed much more meticulously. It has come to replace my full-time income. Between these two experiences, I worked as the Global Head of Community for a venture backed startup called Base, which was attempting to scale communities all over the world. All of that’s to say, for the past six years I’ve been deeply ensconced in the fields of gathering and human connection.

The problem with writing 25,000 words in a week—concerning everything I learned and everything I know—is that, at that point I was damn near to writing a book. With a book comes all kinds of expectations that can stymie my ability to release ideas out into the wild. So instead of making this something bigger than it needs to be, I thought it best to serialize my knowledge so it can be immediately helpful to those seeking to replicate what I have done.

The impetus of this project stems from dozens of conversations I’ve had with people interested in starting their own communities but have no idea where to start. My hope is that with this knowledge you can go out and start your own baking club, or painting club, or walking community, or mom’s group—and in doing so make some new friends and have a more fulfilling life. My second aim with this guide is to help those who are inclined to do so make a living from this kind of work.

In this serialized guide I will try to abstract out larger concepts for applicability to all groups and all communities of all sizes, while also delving deeply into specific topics. I will also include deviations, side-quests, and pet peeves for those interested in understanding my particular mindset around the profession.

I.

What you can hope to achieve by following this guide

If you follow this guide you will have all the tools needed to create a successful community from scratch in your city. While everyone’s reasons for starting a community will be different, by following the rules I outline over the course of these essays, you will be able to use your community to build strong friendships and connections. You can also use this information to switch careers, generate a full-time living, or build a community for a company you work for to increase sales, reduce churn, and foster greater brand loyalty. Regardless of your goal, the information stays the same.

What you will learn how to do

• Host an event

• Build an email list

• Sell memberships

• Write a compelling newsletter

• Build a story-driven community

• Grow beyond your first 1000 attendees

• Make a full-time living from your community

• Promote your event and get hundreds of people to sign up for them

II.

The two goals with communities

When I started my first real community, called Startup Social, my intentions were very clear. I moved to a new city and had no friends. I was also unemployed. So I wanted friends and I wanted a job. For me, creating a startup community was a beautiful win-win. If it succeeded, I would put myself in the right rooms, to have the right conversations, with people who could hire me. But if that failed, at the very least I would make some friends along the way and be a little less lonely in a new city.

The reason I love community as a business is because even if you fail financially, you will have a significantly fuller life than you did previously. As opposed to so many other businesses, communities have the opportunity to fulfill your social, emotional, and romantic relationships—rather than just your financial prospects.

So I encourage you to think about all of your activities this way. Be honest with yourself about what the selfish goal is, but make it a win-win, so no matter what happens your efforts will bear fruits.

Do I have to run my community like a business?

Yes, you must—but let me qualify that. If you’d like your community to run smoothly, and provide a stable income for you and your family, and if you’d like your community to have a long prosperous future where thousands of people can be positively impacted by your work—then yes, you need to run it like a business.

The biggest hinderance to the success of your community is needing it to do something for you right now. If you need your community to start making money within the next week, you’re toast. If you need it to have thousands of members by next month, you’re toast. If you need it to help you make friends or meet the love of your life in the next year, you’re toast. Get it? Toast.

So the most important thing you can do is run your community like a business, which means managing resources. Money in, money out. Time in, time out. Be careful and prudent and don’t put pressure on something that, at base, should be fun and fulfilling. The people who succeed at community are those who aren’t asking anything from it. At least, not with any hard-and-fast timeline.

How do I determine what kind of community I should start?

This is very simple—start a community that you want to be a part of. It has always confused me when entrepreneurs start companies and create products that they themselves would never use. People who are in good shape, who start junk food brands. Young single men, who drop-ship maternity clothes. Couch potatoes, who sell cycling gear. It makes no sense to me, but it happens all the time.

I suggest you start a community that you would like to be a part of mostly because you’ll have to attend so many gatherings in that first year that you’ll want to blow your brains out if you don’t love the people you’re surrounded by. That, plus the fact that your involvement will feel entirely inauthentic if you are not a bonafide member of the people you serve. People will pick up on the dissonance immediately—and then they’ll leave and seek out the real deal.

Now don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to be Lance Armstrong to lead a cycling community. You don’t need to be Elon Musk, to lead a community of startup founders. In fact, it’s probably better if you’re not. I find it best to shoot for the gracious host archetype, instead of the expert. You shouldn’t be a guide, or a coach, or a teacher, but instead you should exist on the same level as your members. This allows you to participate right there beside with them. You can also elevate those in your membership who are more experienced than you, into positions of leadership. Hell, you don’t even need to be the best host in your community. The only thing you need to be the best at is consistently showing up over and over and over again.

III.

Start local and go deep

Community, in the truest sense of the word, is a tactile and personal experience. It’s a face-to-face connection that, by definition, is centered around gathering. But something happened over the past two decades, where the word “community” got commandeered by big tech companies trying to take advantage of people’s predisposition to connection in order to sell products.

I think we can all intuit that a conversation in a Facebook group is lower impact, and lower resolution, than a chat over drinks at your local bar. Which means a community of 100 people who gather each week in Kansas City, is significantly more valuable than a “community” of 1000 people living all over the world, who meet exclusively on a discord server.

It feels weird that I even have to make the case for this. But I think we’ve gotten so lost from our human-first roots, that I have to make a stink about gathering in-person. People act differently face-to-face. They share their thoughts differently. They’re more honest and less self-interested. In-person gathering is all about trust and reputation. Which is the life-blood of any real community.

IV.

Audience vs Community

The word community is hot right now, because for some reason companies have determined that community is the thing that will save them from the AI revolution. In a way, I agree. But I think most companies are not building communities. Instead they’re building audiences—which are nice, but not the same thing.

The best way to understand the difference between an audience and a community is this: an audience is when you, an individual, are speaking to a group; a community is when the members of a group are speaking to each other. The quintessential audience dynamic is that of the cult leader or the influencer. There’s a single person at the top, and below them are disciples waiting for instruction. Conversely, a great example of a community is an organization like YPO (you should study them intently).

YPO, short for Young Presidents’ Organization, is a group of business leaders that formed in 1950 and has been humming along ever since. Today YPO reports to have more than 38,000 members worldwide—and the most amazing thing is, it’s entirely member-run. As in, all the events, all the gatherings, all the speakers booked, and all the presentations hosted, are designed by members for members (Fun fact: Membership to YPO costs anywhere from $9,000-15,000 per year. Do the math. Communities can scale, and can be incredibly lucrative when they do). YPO also has all kinds of quirky community-focused rules like, “You must respond to another members email within 24-hours” as a way to enforce their values at scale.

But I think we need to be honest here. The organization you create will likely be a mixture of both community and audience. That’s because it’s incredibly hard to extricate yourself when you are the founder of a group. Believe it or not, there will be people who join your community just to get the opportunity to talk to you. As someone who considers themselves an introvert, this made me uncomfortable for many years. It wasn’t until I remembered how much I love when—during a fine dinning experience—the Chef comes out to my table to see how we liked the meal, that it clicked. That moment is such a treat. So I’ve come to accept it as part of the job, and you should too.

But you should always be asking yourself: How do I remove myself from the equation? And after that you must ask yourself: How do I facilitate real, genuine connection, between members? And finally: How do I empower members to take action to serve each other? This is how you inch closer to a community.

Why audiences aren’t as robust as communities

The reason you’re shooting for a community is because they are, in general, a less fickle cultural container. In medieval times, and in the present day business world, this is called a moat. It’s the thing that protects you from competition, trends, and ultimately the entropy that erodes all organizations. A real community acts as protection from the undulations of time. People do not renounce their religion during economic upheavals, they also don’t renounce their sports team. In good times and bad these groups have a strong hold over their members and that’s because they’re a source of identity and meaning. An audience doesn’t have the same attributes.

To reiterate: an audience is a relationship of one to many—a community is a relationship of many to many. You may be in the audience of people who watch Game of Thrones, but you are not however, an active participant in the shaping the direction of the show.

But with the right guidance an audience can transform into a community, and then it becomes robust to the effects of time. Virtually all religions are excellent examples of this. They start with an individual, they build an audience, and after enough time the individual dies or leaves the group. It is then up to the members to form into a community and keep the spirit and teachings alive. Once stewardship passes from an individual to the group itself, a community is formed.

The problem is that most audiences never cross this threshold. Or, more likely, the leader of the group keeps their audience intentionally dependent on them as a way to maintain relevance, importance, and control. This ultimately makes the leaders financial prospects greater in the short-term while undermining the longevity of the group as a whole. You might notice an irony at this point. Many organizations believe that communities are their moat—and the loyalty and identity it engenders will protect the from the forces of uncertainty in the future. But out of fear of losing control over every aspect of their group, they are never able to cross from the audience-to-community threshold. So they spend all this time and all these resources creating an audience and calling it a community, only to find that when the hard times hit, they’re no different than any run-of-the-mill influencer.

Now let’s get one thing straight—what we’re talking about is both aspirational and definitional. You, me, and the vast majority of community organizers will never reach the pure community that I’m describing. So the best we can hope for is a hybrid. One where a visible and active leader is needed to fight the natural entropy of a group, but at the same time, strive to have members of our group host things for each other. We should push our members to take on additional responsibilities, and teach them share stories and lore unprompted as a way to maintain the culture we laid down at the beginning. We may still be needed, but our work will hopefully be one with a lighter touch.

V.

Why you must host events

Events (or gatherings, I use the two phrases interchangeably) are the main way people spend time with each other. Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas mass, or even a causal beer after work—it’s all the same. Events can be large and formal, or small and impromptu and everything in-between. All that matters is that people are coming together, for a set amount of time, and for a set of discrete reasons. In this way a baby shower could be an event; but so could a marathon, a writing class, a photoshoot, or even just a walk.

When you’re starting a community, events are the single most impactful way to get things off the ground. Without them, you will have a much harder time rallying people around a set of values and standards and shared beliefs that are at the bedrock of all real communities.

The problem with events is that, they sometimes reenforce the audience dynamic that we’re trying to avoid. This is where one person is the face of the organization, and everyone else is there just to listen. You see this with influencers, athletes, brands, and business guru’s. At the same time, it has also grown fashionable for such people to refer to their audiences as communities (the Skimms community, the Mr. Beast community, the Nike Run Club community etc.). Now is a great time to reiterate my central point. If Mr. Beast leaves the Mr. Beast community, and never talks with or engages with the members of his community—if he and his team no longer plan events for them, or post on social media—what happens to the Mr. Beast community? It disappears. The entire thing is contingent on a single individual. But this is not the case with a real community.

Which is to say, events have a natural tendency to place the person who is facilitating at the top, while everyone else is just a participant. The community event model is an attempt to right-side this imbalance.

So why must you host events? Because people want you to. People want face-to-face interaction with other people. But they don’t just want it with random strangers. They want to be connected with people they have been unable to connect with thus far. So it’s your job to create a system where you find all the writers, or swimmers, or potters, or business owners in your city. Then you bring them all together, and step back. Of course you set the rules, and the time, and the location—but when you remove yourself as the linchpin and figurehead—things start to get interesting.

I’ll dive much deeper into the structure of a good event and how to host them in further sections. For now, suffice it to say that as you attempt to get your community off the ground, you will be hosting many of them. The reason I say you must is that, I have never, in all of my personal experience and research, found a single example of a real community that does not gather in-person with some regularity.

That’s all for part one. If you’re interested in learning more please leave a comment below so I know that this is a topic worth pursuing further.

—Zac

Footnote: None of this was written or edited with AI. So if you find errors or em dashes, please excuse my humanity.