How to start your own community from scratch

A serialized guide to bringing people together

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.

Insider Tip: Don’t Die

Go to Meetup.com, or any other event hosting platform, and do a quick search for the kind of community you want to build. It could bee a cooking community, or a walking group, or a dog-park meetup. Then search for the largest one in your city. This might take some time, but trust me it’s worth it. What I’ve found in almost every instance is that the graveyard of dead communities is overwhelming.

I remember when I lived in San Francisco, there were dozens of startup communities on Meetup with over 5,000 members—who hadn’t hosted a single event in the past year. This lead me to believe two things. The first was that, for any given idea there is a thriving underserved market of people, eager to participate. The second was that, you are not actually competing with anyone per se, but rather, you are competing against death. So early on I made a simple resolution with myself—you can go as slow as you like, as long as you don’t die. That’s really it.

If you can stick around longer than anyone else, it won’t matter how fast you grow or how quickly you monetize. If you can adopt a longevity focused mindset all of your decision will shift and become easier.

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.

Insider Tip: The Value of Local

Two years ago I met someone who would solidify this idea for me. He had previously worked as a writer for one of the largest newsletters in the world. The company had millions of subscribers, so they made money like all big companies do—they sold ads. After leaving that job, he started working on to the other side of the spectrum at an incredibly high value group, with just 1000 members. Instead of selling ads they sold memberships to their vetted community.

When I met him, he was still gestating on a thesis that, in the years following, both of us would prove out. The idea was, with a small hyper-local newsletter, a business owner could build a community capable of replacing their entire income. He was unsure of the potential upside, but he figured with no employees, a successful local community could generate around $500,000 per year (he has since found examples from around the world dwarfing that initial number).

But his thesis was contingent on one thing. It had to be a small concentration of highly aligned people, who met in-person. More simply, he believed that you didn’t need huge numbers of people to create a thriving business— so long as they live in the same city, and were all interested in the same thing.

In summary: Traditional media businesses make money by selling the attention of their customers in the form of ads. They need to have thousands, if not millions, of subscribers in order to do so. Communities flip this model. Instead of making money from advertisers, communities sell memberships directly to their members. This means they need far fewer customers to create a vibrant business with an added side effect of lower complexity, higher alignment, and higher satisfaction since they’re giving their members exactly what they want.

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.

Digression #1

A. Group Chats

I know of a community of roughly 1,000 members, that decided it was important to have a robust Slack group for everyone to communicate. What they quickly found out was that, once they created this offering, they had to deliver on it. Which is to say at any given time, when a member entered the Slack there needed to be some kind of entertaining or informative community related fodder for them to interact with. For the leaders of this community, keeping this group chat active was a full time job. As a matter of fact, they tried hiring someone external to do this for them and it turned to be the kind of job that paid over six-figures.

We think group chats are an easy way to give members access to each other. But I’ve seen time and again (through my own communities, through my professional work, and through studying other successful communities) is that managing an online platform is difficult and takes mountains of good judgment and time. Not to mention, people act differently online than they do in person. Do you really want to be constantly checking your group chats for spam, or porn, or politically divisive conversations that—and here’s the kicker—directly reflect back onto you, your group, and your reputation? I didn’t think so.

A decision I made early in my career was that my communities will be in-person all the time. Why? Because I don’t want to be on my computer any more than absolutely necessary. I also don’t want to create something complicated. I also don’t want to be a babysitter. And finally, I think it’s kinda bad-ass to say right from the start, “We’re not like everyone else.”

So please think before starting a community group chat.

B. The Catch-22

Remember what I said about how communities are peer-to-peer? Well, here’s the thing, people are going to organically start their own group chats. But don’t worry, this is exactly what you want. When members coordinate between themselves, this means you are actually creating a real community and not just an audience.

Now, this might make you feel uncomfortable. When people start their own chats you are no longer the ultimate administrator and you no longer have complete control. But the reality is, you don’t own your members and you don’t need control. To reiterate again, with community work all you’re doing is creating the container, the space, the story for your members to inhabit. The rest is them.

Despite these fears, you must maintain a resolve of knowing that what you do, as a host, is actually very difficult. The thing you’re creating, and the collection of people you’re bringing together is not something that can be replicated or stolen.

So let your members gather on their own. Let them chat all day and night on their own. It’s a good thing. It means what you’re doing is working.

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.

Digression #2

Be Decisive

As the leader of a community, ultimately people are paying you to make decisions. Decisions like: We are meeting at 9am on Sunday at the West 5th Coffee Shack. People appreciate this kind of direction because it releases them from the coordination hell they’re always faced with when trying coordinate large groups. Your members would rather not attend an event, then spend two hours, going back and forth, trying to pick the perfect time and the perfect place—only to find out that the perfect time is six-months from now.

That’s all for part one. If you’re interested in learning more
please continue to Part II

—Zac

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