chapter 5

Attracting your first members

Imagine turning up for a party and being the only person there. How long would you wait for others to show up? Probably not too long.

No one wants to be the only person at a party. This is true on the web too.

The first few people to a community are like the first few people to a house party. The promise of a great party might keep them there for a while, but if things don’t pick up quickly they will soon be gone. This creates a problem. If each new person leaves before the next arrives, it’s impossible to build a crowd that sticks around and keeps newcomers engaged.

It’s a classic ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma. No one wants to join a community which isn’t active, but how do you create an active community if no one wants to join an empty community?

This is the core challenge of launching a community from scratch. It’s a lot easier to get newcomers to stick around once you have some momentum and a decent number of people actively engaged. But until you have reached that tipping point (where more discussions beget more discussions and your members attract more members), you’re in a fragile state.

This tipping point is called critical mass.

Critical mass is a term borrowed from nuclear physics. It describes the minimum amount of fissile material needed for a sustained chain reaction. In community parlance, we use it to mean the minimum number of active members to ensure steadily growing levels of activity.

When you launch a community (the moment the website goes live to your audience) you have a relatively short window to reach a critical mass of activity. If you don’t reach a critical mass of activity quickly, the community momentum quickly peters out.

In this chapter, I’m going to share a practical method for quickly getting to a critical mass of activity and avoid becoming a costly ghost town.

How many members do you need to reach critical mass?

In 2018, I decided to investigate how many members a community needs to reach critical mass. Using data from almost 200 communities, I looked for differences between communities which did or didn’t sustain an upward trajectory of activity. The data varied considerably, but I was able to establish some general rules of thumb.

The communities which succeeded generally achieved three key data points within three months. These were:

1. One hundred contributing members per month (i.e. members starting or replying to a discussion).
2. Three hundred monthly posts (or about ten posts per day).
3. Ten new registrations per day.

Even for smaller groups, like those on WhatsApp or Slack, getting at least 10 posts per day seems key. If you’re just launching a community for colleagues or a hobby, you need to aim for 10 organic posts (i.e. not posts created by you) per month.

Communities which failed to achieve enough posts from enough members generally fell into one of two categories. They either became a ghost town devoid of any meaningful activity or they became a ‘life-support community’ propped up by occasional blasts of activity from an increasingly desperate community team.

The ‘big bang’ launch

The obvious way to reach a critical mass of activity is to do what most people hosting a party do – tell everyone to arrive at the same time. This is known as the ‘big bang’ launch. You launch the community and then try to drive as many people to it as quickly as possible. You can focus all your efforts on having the biggest launch day possible.

This approach does make sense intuitively. If you need 100 monthly participating members and you have an audience of 10,000 people (customers, employees etc.), you can probably send a mass email and reach that number in a matter of hours.

But there are two major fallacies in this approach.

1. Members can’t see each other until they participate. The empty room analogy still holds true. Do you really want to send 10,000 people to an empty community and hope they spontaneously start participating? You only get one chance to make a good first impression and an empty community is the worst impression you can make. Visitors won’t be aware of each other unless they participate and they won’t participate unless they know others are there.
2. Members don’t stick around. Even in the rare cases where you do manage to drive a huge amount of activity upon launch, this becomes a spike of activity rather than a sustained level of participation. Our data showed many communities had an initial spike of activity at their big bang launch. In almost every case, participation quickly dropped back to life-support levels.1

Even if your big bang launch succeeds, are you ready for that level of success?

Can you respond to hundreds of questions a day? Can you check these hundreds of posts don’t contain anything abusive to other members or anything which would pose a legal risk to you? Can you deal with dozens of members asking you to reset the passwords they’ve forgotten (yes, even though that’s a feature on the website) or resolve countless petty disputes? Going from 0 to 1000 can be as worrying as failing to gain traction at all.

Therefore, instead of launching big, I recommend launching fast.

The fast launch

This is an approach I’ve used with clients for over a decade.

Instead of sending thousands of members to your community when you launch, you stagger your promotional efforts over time, continuously improve the community, and cater to each group individually. You don’t launch big, but you start small and move fast.

In this approach, you begin with a core group of founding members and grow rapidly to establish momentum. This ensures each new member has a slightly better experience than the last, but only the founding members will have the empty room experience. The difference is these founding members want the empty room so they can found the community. They are prepared for it. They want to do the work of filling the room.

When you launch fast, instead of launching big, you expect to get just a handful of contributions in the first week. But two posts soon become four, four become eight, eight become sixteen etc.

When you launch fast, you devote your resources to ensuring every single member who joins the community has the best possible experience. You have the time and resources to answer questions quickly and with empathy. When you launch fast, you can ensure your first few members feel a part of something new, exclusive, and special. You can nurture them to become top participants.

Pre-launch

There are three phases to reaching critical mass; pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. The pre-launch phase begins before you even begin developing your community platform and ends when the platform is live for other members to join.

The purpose of the pre-launch phase is to seed the community with the right people and activity before you launch. You want the community to look active to newcomers. If you’re using tools like WhatsApp or Slack, where members might not be able to see past discussions when they join, you can simply stagger your invites over time and initiate fresh discussions each day. If you’re using a white-label or enterprise-style platform, you want around 20 active discussions and a handful of founding members before inviting others to join the community.

There is a relatively simple process to reach this number:

1. Ask (and answer) questions yourself. Once the platform is ready, post the first questions in the community yourself (or invite colleagues to do it). The best questions are typically those which you (or your organisation) hear most often. If you can’t get a list of these, you can also find relevant questions by searching on social media for terms related to your topic.

   Post a handful of questions (usually five to ten) in the community and ensure they are answered. You can answer these questions yourself if you need to (i.e. ‘This is a common support question we get ... here is the answer’). Or, even better, you can rope in a few colleagues to provide them. This ensures several people show up as active in early discussions.

   It should only take a week or two to create and respond to these discussions. Once you have a few of these you can invite your founding community members.

2. Invite and engage your founding members. Founding members seed not just the initial activity, but also the culture for the community. Because future members are most likely to adopt the behaviour of current members, whichever behaviours and traditions you establish at the launch of your community will be perpetuated by others indefinitely. This makes selecting and working with the right founding members a critical part of the process of launching a community.

   If you make it a social norm to thank those who answer a question, this norm will trickle down through each new generation of members. Likewise, if you make it a social norm for responses to questions to include screenshots and bullet points, this tradition is likely to continue as the community grows. These social norms should match the norms you created with your remarkable rules from the last chapter.

   While it is possible to change the behaviour of members after you’ve launched, it’s a lot easier to shape the behaviour of members before you’ve launched. The only way to do this is to work closely with an initial group of founding members.

Once you have identified around 30– 50 founding members of the community, it’s time to invite them to your platform (already seeded with a few discussions).

It’s a good idea here to start a discussion based upon topics they have already told you they’re interested in and invite them to reply. Use your surveys and interviews to guide you. You can also reach out individually to your founding members and invite them to start a discussion on a challenge they’re facing or something that’s on their mind. You should be able to add another five to ten discussions during this process without too much difficulty.

Founding members must feel like they’re founding something

It’s critical founding members do genuinely feel like founding members. If you’re not giving them any input or control over the decisions which are being made about the community, they will soon figure out that they are FINOs (founders in name only).

You must give founding members the ability to shape the community you’re creating. They want to know they have made an impact in the community. If members have signed on to become founding members, by implication they have signed on to do actual work which helps grow the community. Give them work to do!

Unlike a marketing campaign, this audience doesn’t want to be passive recipients of information, they want to be an indispensable part of the process of getting the community up and running. They can’t take pride in something they haven’t had any real impact in creating.

Luckily, there is plenty of work to be done when you’re founding a community.

One of the easiest things to help them feel they are founding the community is to ask them questions about the kind of community they want. You can ask them what events you should host or what kind of features they’re interested in.

One of the best questions you can ask your founding members, as we learned in the last chapter, is about the kind of culture they want to see within the community. You can ask whether the community should focus upon high-quality, low-noise discussions and ruthlessly moderate those which fall below the quality level. You can ask if the community should endeavour to help every member resolve their problem regardless of how noisy it gets. Every option has pros and cons and you can let your members lead the way.

You can also ask your founding members about the traditions and social norms that might be powerful within the community. Then work with them to create those traditions. You might start a tradition of showing gratitude to the person who answered the question or thanking people who ask brave questions. You might celebrate member birthdays or invite members to share their best achievement in the last month.

You can also ask what kind of content would be useful to founding members and what roles they might like to take within the community. There are an infinite number of unique roles founding members can assume within the community. You can even create a shortlist of areas where you need help and call for volunteer moderators, give someone responsibility for specific topics (initiating new discussions and events within that topic), or have people as greeters. You might also host polls and invite members to vote on issues which might be relevant to the future of the community.

As a general rule, the greater the level of ownership you can transfer to your founding members, the more they will participate.

You should also consider creating a badge (we’ll cover gamification soon), solely for founding community members. As the community grows, this will be the most scarce badge in the community. No one else except founding members will ever be able to earn it. However, only award these badges to the founding members who remained active through the pre-launch spell. If you give the same badge to highly engaged founding members as you do to those who never contribute, you will completely devalue the badge.

By the end of the pre-launch stage you should be able to rely upon 15–30 weekly active participants who are excited and interested in participating in the community.

As a general rule, if you’re struggling to reach at least 15 active participants in this phase, you might have to rethink the community concept before launching the community. This could be an early warning signal that either your members are very difficult to reach or the concept of the community itself isn’t enticing to your target audience.

This phase should only last three to four weeks. If it’s any longer, founders are likely to lose interest and drift away. By the end of this phase you should feel a sense of momentum and excitement for the community.

Launch

Congratulations! You’ve now got a good number of excited founding members raring to build your community. You’ve also got a good number of discussions. Now it’s time to launch the community to the outside world.

There are some very good and some very bad ways of doing this. The best way is to promote your community to small groups of prospective members at a time. This process can last weeks, even months. Using this approach, you can give each group of members a terrific personal welcome, resolve any technical issues early, and ensure that momentum is constantly growing as more people arrive.

If you’re using a tool like Slack or WhatsApp, you can directly invite people with an email link or from your phone. Add a few people to the group each day and watch it grow. As each person joins you can give them a good welcome. If you’re working on behalf of an organisation or using your own mailing list, you should segment your audience into several groups and send an invitation email out to different groups over several weeks. You might even want to split-test approaches (i.e. promote different benefits or features of the community) to see which is the most effective at getting people to register. Most mailing list tools make this simple to do.

You can also drive traffic by placing a link to the community on your organisation’s homepage if you have one (and are able to do so). Remember you don’t want a flood of traffic at this point. So consider beginning with a small link outside of the main navigation menu and gradually increase the prominence of the community on your organisation’s website as you grow. Likewise you can mention the community in more social media channels, newsletters, and any other avenue.

Post-launch

Now that your community is live, it’s time to move fast to reach critical mass.

You need to steadily ramp up the promotion to build momentum. It’s critical here to have all of your promotional assets ready to go before you launch the community.

You probably have more methods of promoting your community than you might expect. You can divide these into two categories. Existing audiences you already have access to and external audiences you can promote the community to through specific channels.

You can see examples of these below:

Promotional plan

Create a promotional plan which details every communication you will send to your audience and through which channel. You can use our template at www.feverbee.com/buildyourcommunity. A typical promotional plan might look like the below:

In this phase you should see a steady increase in three metrics:

1. Active participants. The number of members participating in the community should rise steadily each week. You should also notice one or two top members emerging.
2. Number of discussions. The number of discussions initiated by members (i.e. not by you and your team) should also be steadily increasing each week.
3. Organic search traffic. If your community is public and searchable, you should see around a 10%–15% increase in visitors arriving by search traffic each month.

If you’re not seeing growth in these metrics, it’s likely you’re either struggling to attract enough people to visit your community each week or you’re struggling to keep them engaged.

If it’s the former (look at the number of weekly visitors if you can), check if your announcements about the community are still reaching the same number of people as before. You can always target more people in your promotional messages and tweak the messaging to highlight different benefits. As a general rule, try to keep the messages as short and as direct as possible.

If it’s the latter (i.e. members aren’t participating), it’s either because they don’t have problems to solve or they don’t feel confident asking questions in the community. Speak to them directly to find out which. You might need to change the concept of the community (focus on the broader industry) or create a special place for newcomers to ask their first questions.

You can see the entire process illustrated on the following page:

First contribution

Once members have registered, it’s critical they make their first contribution as quickly as possible. The odds on someone participating decline sharply with every passing hour between registering and making a contribution. Most newcomers either participate immediately or never at all.

However, not all contributions are equal in keeping members engaged. In our data, we discovered members who start a discussion (as opposed to replying to one) are 7% more likely to make a second post and 8% more likely to make 10 posts. A small difference like this, compounded over several years, can have a big impact upon the overall level of participation. Therefore, you should invite newcomers to start a new discussion at their first contribution as opposed to replying to an existing one. But starting a new discussion in a community isn’t always an easy thing to do.

Helping newcomers ask questions

Imagine walking into a crowded room full of strangers and asking for help.

You wouldn’t know if the question you’re asking has been asked dozens of times before, whether you’re going to sound dumb for asking an obvious question, or whether colleagues you respect are going to be in the room and suddenly realise you don’t know as much as they thought you did. Worse yet, what happens if you don’t get a response? What would you do if no one replies to a question?

Newcomers face this experience every day.

One way to help is to create a specific ‘newcomers corner’. This is a place you direct newcomers to join (or automatically enrol them in the group) and solicit their first questions. Ideally, you want a mentor for this group who will also take the time to answer these kinds of questions. This ensures members are getting an empathetic response rather than a variation of ‘read the manual!’ or ‘research this question before you ask it!’, both of which can be common in established communities (notably more technical communities).

A huge benefit of having a newcomer or ‘getting started’ area is that you can separate expert-level discussions from the basics. An infamous problem with building communities is your top members will inevitably spend the majority of their time answering repetitive questions from beginners. This can get tedious for everyone pretty quickly.

Last year we had a client facing this exact challenge. Experts were becoming increasingly frustrated at repeatedly having to answer the same questions. The beginner-level questions were crowding out the advanced discussions our experts enjoyed. In turn this was causing experts to be increasingly intolerant of newcomers – often to the point of driving away new customers through their cold, rude responses.

Our solution was to create a separate place for newcomers to engage with one another. But this solution was with a twist. Instead of just asking community newcomers to join a newcomer group, we instead invited all new customers each month to join a private cohort group just for them. The magic of this approach is now newcomers no longer feel they are going through the experience of learning about a new product (or topic) alone – instead they have a safe place to ask basic questions and learn how other customers in their precise position resolved those same problems.

Each group had two volunteer mentors who were eager to help new customers get started, answer beginner-level questions, and ensure these customers had the best-possible experience. This not only resolved most of the questions newcomers had, it also kept the rest of the community from having to answer the same questions.

At the end of each month each cohort ‘graduated’ to the main community where they could engage fully with other members and harness the full knowledge of the community equipped with the knowledge of the product to contribute effectively and with an established group of contacts. At the time of writing, the retention rate of our cohort groups is 21% higher than those customers who were not invited to join retention groups.

What if members don’t have any questions to ask?

The problem with inviting newcomers to ask a question as their first post is many simply don’t have any questions to ask. It doesn’t matter how nicely or persuasively you invite people to ask a question if there isn’t any information they feel they need.

Many communities use welcome threads for this group. Welcome threads are more effective than you might imagine. In 2019, I looked at data from 522 welcome threads identified in 14 different communities. I then identified members who posted in one of the welcome threads within their first 30 days of becoming visible in the community and analysed how long they remained active compared with those who made their first contribution elsewhere.

The results were clear. Members who replied to a non-welcome discussion as their first contribution created an average of just two discussions in the community and posted an average of nine comments in total. Members who replied in a welcome discussion in their first action contributed an average of 7.7 discussions and created a remarkable 149 comments.

In summary, you should invite your members to do two things when they join the community:

1. Start a discussion. Ideally a question or challenge they could use help with. This should be the primary call to action in most communities.
2. Reply to a welcome discussion. Ideally a discussion which lets members share something interesting about themselves.

Both of these will help members unlock immediate informational or social value from the community on their very first visit. Use your welcome emails, direct messages, and onsite notifications (where possible) to guide members to take one of these two actions when they first join a community.

What keeps members hooked?

In the rest of this book, I’ll share plenty of strategies to keep members hooked. However, for now it’s important to learn what keeps members hooked in a community. The most obvious answer is to satisfy their motivations for participating in the community in the first place. A 2004 study examining hundreds of members from 27 unique communities found the following core reasons for people participating in a community:4

While friendships and social support are important to any community, online communities are unique. Their prime value lies in providing members with access to information. The majority of people will keep coming back to the community as long as they feel they can keep gaining valuable information.

The problem with focusing too much on information, however, is the majority of members often visit only when they need information. That might not be very often. This is where we need to abide by a key principle. To keep members hooked you need to surpass their expectations by providing them with incredibly valuable information they didn’t even know they needed. For example, someone that visits looking to solve a problem with their iPhone might also see related discussions and articles giving incredible iPhone productivity tricks or photo editing advice.

Likewise, an engineer visiting the community of a software product might see an opportunity to participate in an upcoming live chat with the CEO or product engineers. The more scarce and useful information is, the more members keep coming back.

You might also share resources or news in the community members are unable to get anywhere else or host live problem-solving sessions where members can engage directly with experts and one another. Some communities offer trial versions of the product to founding members. Sephora (a client) runs a large programme giving away samples of their products to top members.

You get a very short window to make a good first impression and create a sense of momentum. Don’t waste this incredible opportunity. But even the information-packed communities can’t retain members forever. Due to competition, changes in policies, or your members going through life changes (having children, starting a new job etc.), your community has a natural churn rate.5

It’s perhaps best to consider community members as similar to employees in an organisation. Some will be there for a matter of months, others a handful of weeks, and a tiny number for years. The key is to extend the amount of time they spend in the community and do everything in your power to ensure they give and receive the most value to and from the community.

The longer members remain as members, the more knowledgeable they become and the less likely they are to seek information (and the more likely they are to provide information).6 These members sometimes might visit the community less often, but contribute more posts each time they visit.7 But length of membership alone isn’t a strong predictor of whether people contribute.8

What truly matters in ensuring members proactively share information is (a) whether members feel they can make a unique, useful, contribution to the community and (b) whether members feel a sense of psychological ownership over the community. In the next chapter we will discover how to create a powerful sense of psychological ownership amongst your community members.