How to leverage and empower your community
In the future, your most valuable asset will be your community
In my last newsletter, I shared how Karisma went from developing or purchasing a physical coliving space to hosting pop-up colivings around the world. The idea wasn’t just to take on less risk, have more flexibility and launch faster but, most importantly, to first build an epic community and gain experience before going back to the original plan of opening and operating our own spaces.
This made sense considering the community is a coliving’s biggest asset. After all, people join and stay mainly because of the people within the community and a community is considered valuable because of the people within it (and its chemistry). This decision was made back in August 2021 right around the time I entered the glorious Web3 rabbit hole. Oh, boy!
After going deeper and deeper, I quickly realized two things: Web3 has community at its core and Karisma was unintentionally following a bigger trend pioneered by the Web3 space. This trend, which will spread to many other non-Web3 industries, has the potential to (and most probably will) completely change the way companies are built and run.
Before we get into how you can take your community-building to the next, this is what I’ll be covering today:
The rise of the Minimum Viable Community
The impact of communities in the businesses of tomorrow
The benefits of building around your community
The power of the community
Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder of Reddit, predicted in The Room Where It Happens, a business podcast co-hosted by Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom, that 90% of the next wave of successful startups are going to start with a Minimum Viable Community (MVC). You’ve probably heard about the Minimum Viable Product but what the hell is a MVC?
In The Lean Startup, Eric Reis popularized the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP). The term relates to early software releases that startups use to learn from and build upon. By starting small and developing while gaining user feedback, the company can end up with a product well-suited to their customer’s needs.
The idea can also be applied to online communities. Rather than focusing on the final version of their space, community builders should create a minimum viable community (MVC). They can then add functionality based on member feedback. It’s a less daunting way of thinking about building a community.
(Thank you for that, Forbes!)
With the help of no-code community platforms, like Discord or Slack, it’s never been easier to bring people together, coordinate a large groups and collaborate within large scale online communities. In 2021, especially in the Web3 space, we’ve seen small communities take the world by storm and grow into very valuable organizations changing today’s culture or business landscape.
Interestingly, the most valuable asset of these Web3 projects, whether we’re talking about a NFT collection or a DAO (aka Decentralized Autonomous Organization), is the community. When valuing one of these projects, two of the most critical things to look at are the size of the (Discord) community and the level of engagement. In the extreme case of DAOs, where random people from the internet come together to collaborate on a shared mission, the success depends fully on the members and their commitment to the cause.
Platforms, like Discord or Slack, are big enablers for these communities but it is truly a powerful ethos that is driving this Web3 revolution. In short, people are so hyped about Web3 because it allows users of the online platforms to not give up their content and power to centralized platforms, like Facebook or Google. Web3 allows creators and users to own their content, brand or piece of the platform they’re contributing towards. What would YouTube, Instagram or Twitter be without all the users and creators? Nothing.
The benefits of being community-driven
While spearheaded by Web3, this community-centered ethos is rapidly spreading to many other areas. Take The Room Where It Happens. Greg and Sahil, who are both very familiar with Web3, launched TRWIH in November 2021 and created in parallel a Discord to let fans interact with each other and discuss the different episodes while building a relationship with the audience and gathering valuable feedback. As of February 2022, they have been rated the top 5 podcast on Apple Music. This is just one example of many upcoming projects integrating the community into their growth and brand strategy.
Once this (in my opinion) inevitable trend became clear and I realized that there’s not a business that’s more community-oriented than a coliving, I knew that something had to be done. At the end of 2021, we decided to launch our online community on Discord in parallel to running the pop-up colivings to take the community-building to the next level. These are some of the reasons why:
The community shouldn’t depend solely on the actual space or experience to flourish
Community members should have more opportunities to connect and grow alongside other Kreators (aka members of the Karisma community)
Having all members in one space not only makes it much easier to coordinate them as well as reach them more effectively but also provides you with much more direct valuable feedback
Giving them a say and letting them decide over certain topics gives them a sense of ownership and increases loyalty to the brand (in my last post, I gave an example of how we let the community vote over a specific issue we were facing)
Onboarding new members considering there’s a lot of people who are probably going to be interested in attending but can’t during that time or wanting to stay up to date with Karisma
The Discord, which is a world of its own that is still trying to be figured out, is part of a bigger plan. As a business, Karisma’s mission is to become the most community-driven and empowering coliving brand, giving the community an opportunity to contribute to Karisma’s vision and benefit from Karisma’s success through shared ownership. That’s where social tokens and NFTs come into play, but that’s a post for another day.
We have very ambitious goals for the future, striving to revolutionize the way we live. We believe, however, that the best way to achieve them is collectively. Together, we can accomplish more. At the same time, we know that whatever level of success we reach will be thanks to every single person who helped along the way, supported the vision since day 1 as well as promoted and trusted our brand.
Let’s face it. As a coliving brand, a key part of your offering is the community, the people who use and live in your space. Your people should be recognized for that contribution and rewarded accordingly. On top of that, implementing this ethos can help you create a stronger community for your members.
As an existing coliving, coworking or basically any organization, you can leverage it to give your members a more personal experience and an opportunity to interact with each other. If you’re just getting started, you can bring people together around your vision and immediately create your Minimum Viable Community on Discord.
This community-centered approach will not only add more value to your community but also come back to you in form of loyalty, word of mouth, better chemistry and more overall satisfaction. Your community is your strongest weapon!
(Once I master Discord and know how to properly run an online community, I will let you know. If you know anyone, however, who might be able to help me with it, please let me know 🙏 )