I started a community where you get kicked for inactivity

Rosie Sherry
16 replies
As a community builder finding people who will really participate in a community is hard. I'm a member of many free and paid communities. I don't participate in most of them, even if I have paid. And even when I have good intentions to do so. Building a community in the pandemic feels even harder. People are distracted. And have huge choice. People love the idea of participating but rarely commit. Community builders feel forced to keep trying to pull people in. Find new interest. Yet it is almost like a vicious downwards spiral — the more inactive members you bring in ends up making it a worse community experience for those who truly want to get value out of it. The more members there are, the harder it is to actually build relationships. Whilst we love content and benefit from sharing ideas, deep down many of us want to connect a deeper level. We've never had access to so many communities, we are lonelier than ever and the value of most communities are just not there anymore. So I started a community for indie founders where people get kicked if they don't participate within a 30 day period The community has purpose for me, I want to connect on a deeper level with indie founders. Once an indie founder always an indie founder! Here is how it happened: - First I tweeted about the idea of kicking people out of a community - I wrote about the idea of community debt and that it's ok to clean up your community - Within this post I decided to launch a pre-order for the community. I emailed it out to my newsletter and I tweeted about it too. - Within about a week I got my first 20 pre-order subscribers. I've been experimenting with pricing 🤣 Launch price was $9 — lifetime membership (as long you participate) ⬆️ I raised the price to $19 after the first 20 orders ⬆️ After setting up the Discord Server and inviting people in I increased the price to $49 🤔 I think I will probably continue nudging the price up as more people join 💰 I realised it was easy to set up affiliates with Gumroad, so paid members can make money from it too. There's no pressure, but as indie founders, this is fun! 🥳 We've had one affiliate sale so far. ❌ I'm not interested in monthly memberships, lifetime makes it so much less stressful for me to manage and people churn so much more with monthly/yearly subscriptions. My goal is to keep people staying. 🤑 I've made $586 so far from 32 sales It's not life-changing money, but it's a start with good intentions. Will it ever provide enough as a full time income? Probably not. Will it lead to other things, other money opportunities, deeper friendships? I'm 100% sure of this. It's the most fun I've had in setting up a community in a long time 🗓 Two weeks days after launch - 32 people have signed up, and virtually everyone has participated. 📈 Engagement can often be a vanity metric, but in situations like this, it's such a nice experience (for me and the members) to have people showing up. Wanting to participate. Connecting. Getting to know each other. And putting in requests on things we can do. 💜 I am showing up to the community and landing into active conversations. The pressure of instigating conversations is not there. This is something I've never experienced before as a community builder — there's been virtually no effort on my end to start conversations. I'm loving it. 🥳 Of course, it's early days. BUT people are down for the experiment. Everyone who has signed up understands the deal. We are there together. And it just feels so good. 😬 I don't look forward to kicking people But it's also part of the fun, it's almost gamifying community building. The fact that I don't want people to leave will force me to reach out, connect, support and pull them in. Tech Stack: 🥳 No email list 👾 Discord 💰 Gumroad 💜 Orbit 🐦 My personal Twitter. I hope y'all find this helpful and interesting!

Replies

Miriam Dorsett
I'm in a community like this - it def adds extra pressure
Jill Salzman
The Founding Moms Community
The Founding Moms Community
Super appreciative of you sharing this - what a novel idea! I hope to be like you when I grow up and kick folks who don't participate.
Osman Erdi Balcıoğlu
Cool place! I wanna join too! If you open a website, you can add live-chat for free running on Discord server :D https://webchatwidget.com/
Greg Fragin
@imsabakarim has done this very effectively in his slack community (albeit a free community) he purges inactives once a month
Alexandre Durand-Chabert
Thx for documentating this. Priceless. 🙏
Very interesting model - would love to join but I'd end up not participating somewhere else. All the best with the community! :)
María Fernanda aka Fer (she/her)
Hey Rosie! Thanks for sharing. I relate in that I too belong to a bunch of communities but usually just consume passively or lurk around the chats, for a variety of reasons, but also mainly because it feels difficult to dive in conversations with big groups (communities over a few hundred are the death of me). I think the kicking out part mixes great with a yearly membership, if it was a monthly / subscription based thing it wouldn't even work because you might as well just let it expire or stop paying. Would also love to hear what techniques you have in store to keep people engaged and actually participating? (maybe more than techniques, dynamics? activities? dunno - just curious)
Andrew
I have joined a few communities and I rarely contribute (or even remember I joined)! The problem is I only want so many tabs open, and once I close it, it's basically erased from my memory. I wonder if there's value in the community tools exposing an API. I know the main social apps love a walled garden so you have to use their site/app to interact, but maybe for smaller, dedicated communities, it'd be better as a combined feed or single site you can browse.
Greg Fragin
@andrewwhacks @mdorsett thanks for the mention @mdorsett @andrewwhacks you are right on point. Loop gives you a unified inbox where you can see your different slack workspaces together with your emails, teams etc. (discord soon) filter the unified view as you wish (dm's only, threads you are active in, @ mentions) or see anything specifically addressed to you on your daily agenda view check it out @ loophq.com
NotesbyHugh
Great write up! Love the insights into the process and journey so far. How are you measuring participation? One message per month in discord allows you to stay in? Do you plan to cap the total number of members long term?
Rosie Sherry
@hugh_dawkins Yeah, pretty much one message per month keeps you in. It's small, but intentional. I use Orbit.love to track the activities, it has an integration with Discord that makes it super easy.
Veronique - SideMeet
Hi Rosie, When you explain this, it seems so easy to start and manage a community. But you also say that it's far from easy. Maybe you can give some tips where we can source good community managers for our recent startup Sidemeet? https://spaces.fundingbox.com/c/...
Rosie Sherry
@sidemeet I would start with trying to look at who is passionate and a great connector in your industry.
Great work for coming up with this sort of plan, and honestly I was initially surprised at the price hikes to match the interest in the community but I'm thoroughly impressed that it worked out the way it did and you've succeeded so well. Inspiring and interesting "statistics" you've shared with us :)
Hopoosucs
I’m gonna be honest this sounds terrible. To much pressure, and on top of that, it’s pay to access.