Community
Would you kick out 11% of your membership?
In 2010, Soho House purged 500 members from its first Manhattan outpost.
When you consider at the time that was representative of 11% of its local membership, that’s quite a big deal. First there’s the revenue hit, and then the impact it would have on that community.
Former CMO Jamie Caring tells this story in the most recent Stanza podcast1 as well as sharing his decades long experience on what it is to build community.
Community’s a funny one in startup land.
For many, it too often ends up trying to be a silver bullet. And then you get the examples, as rare as hen’s teeth, of brands really nailing it well.
Back in the early internet days, when forums were still a thing, many brands would try to create their own message boards.
I remember the late 2000s the internet was littered with mostly empty web forums owned by brands to let their ‘community’ discuss. The reality was what most brands had was customers, not fans or community members.
Then you would get the occasional breakthroughs. Lego launched Ideas, its community platform, ten years ago and it’s been a continual success since then.
Rapha launched the first iteration of their Cycling Club (photed above) community in 2014, one that has now grown into hundreds of thousands of active members.
In 2017, Monzo solidified how anti-bank they were by launching a successful Community. Can you imagine doing that with Barclays?
“It was the strongest sense of product market fit we had”
The goldrush of community though seemed to create a groundswell during covid.
When I was running Wine List, we saw a community organically evolve.
At first we launched Zoom tastings for certain guests and would see customers social distance with friends and family in their gardens armed with wine. Later, we evolved the Zooms into YouTube Lives and noticed the same people return month in month out. At one point, 15% of our customers were watching a live tastealong and interview with the winemakers. Lockdown was over by this point and it was one of my strongest sense of product market fit we had.
At that time, Finimize (full disclosure, now a client) was revolutionising how to use WhatsApp on a community basis. It was something that we wholeheartedly ripped off at Wine List, alongside influence from the Rosieland community.
At that time, I looked to Duolingo, who saw their members host their own member meetups to learn languages together. The year prior to covid, there were 600 events held every week.
That’s not per year. That was 600 events per week.
Sadly and oddly, by 2022, that was all over.
There’s an emerging adage in marketing that by the time the case study has been written, it’s no longer relevant.
But while community has had various moments in the sun, it’s never been the 0 to 1 exponential rocketship that, say, viral growth mechanics have been. Nor the money printing machines of early Facebook. Community done well has always been rare.
Who is your anti-customer and anti-community member?
Jamie Caring describes creating a community like creating a garden.
“You have to plant the right seeds and then be diligent enough to care for and tend the seeds, fertilize them, water them, be patient, see what you get.
[You] watch various parts of your garden grow.
Some parts of your garden you have to cut back and in others, you might need to plant a bit more.
And over time the garden gets stronger and taller and more beautiful and you think, you know what, all the hard work was worth it.
But I didn't just go into the garden and throw a load of stuff into the garden.”
This is important.
Communities need to be curated. And that doesn’t mean by choosing the right type of furniture. It’s about ethos, programming, events, who you invite to your community, and perhaps more importantly: who you turn away.
Or as Soho House did: who will you ban even if they’ve already come through the door and are producing you huge amounts of short term revenue.
I’ve spoken a lot about anti-customers before.
An anti-customer is the profile of the customer who you’d turn away if they came into your shop.
One of the things that Gymbox have always done well is be laser focused on their anti-customer2. They know the type of person they don’t want in their gym.
Sure in their later days they’ve softened the angles (no longer is it illegal drugs references, but late night wings snacking), but the strategy remains the same. If there’s a venn digram with clubgoers and gymgoers, Gymbox are in the centre of it and they don’t care if they don’t get anyone outside of it.
But we want to be for everyone
Anti-customers are a tricky concept in marketing.
If you’re a startup founder, you’ve been trained to think in total addressable market terms. You’re trained to think of entire populations as your market.
The smartest founders, in early days, will concentrate on small subsets of markets. But even so, they still have late-stage ideas mingling in the back of their minds.
Brand marketing teams count reputation amongst their KPIs. And by excluding people, you bring reputational risk.
And growth people are driven primarily by the making their core metric (maybe acquisition volume or subscribers) as large as humanly possible.
So by design, in companies, we often fall into habits where choosing an anti-customer is difficult.
For community to work, you need to weed out the people that don’t fit
Humans are predisposed to favour in-groups.
A community for everyone can’t exist. It’s not the rules of the game.
If you’re serious about community, you need to be garden
When this is done right, the members themselves bring others.
“You want the community to be such a draw in itself that the existing members bring in more prospective members and you have this organic level of applications and most clubs don't achieve it.”
While Jamie’s talking about physical member spaces, the same is true of lots of virtual community routes as well.
I hear of lots of startups talk about community.
“Welcome to our community”
“An invite to our community”
“Please join us at a community event”
But these are mailers that go out to everyone. What is the draw for me to go if I don’t understand who it is for. Why is it for me? And why don’t you want the anti-me there?
For Soho House in 2010, it was bankers they kicked out. And in hindsight, that looks like an easy decision. But a lot of teams I know would struggle to turf out 11% of membership (and I imagine more than 11% of revenue) based on who you want in your community.
Community can be incredible for your brand. When nailed perfectly, it brings its own members along. It proves product market fit. It solidifies retention. And it will acquire new customers. (Good, sticky customers too).
But it’s not something you can go dip your toe into. It requires a lot, and at the heart of that is knowing what types of people you want, and who you want to say no to.
