You're welcome! I'm glad you asked the question. It's something that a lot of people have been wondering about (not just here, but elsewhere), and it helped me organize my thoughts around it to explain to others too.
Honestly, it's ALL about niche communities and personal connections. It's how I've been able to stay in the freelance game for 15 years -- from getting new clients, being referred, getting stage speaking opportunities, and other really cool things that wouldn't have been available otherwise. If you just provide a great brand + customer experience, people are really quick to rave about you (even if they aren't customers lol).
In a world where people are looking to automate everything, that personalized touch can be a strong differentiator.
(And I have stories where I've landed clients because of how far I take this, and I'm happy to share my "secrets.")
I agree with you about the socialgraph vs interestgraph approach. Interestgraph has its place, but it's not the BEST way to connect and grow. I've found exponential growth with the socialgraph model because you can leverage entire communities.
I 100% agree with owning your brand assets.
I tell all my strategy clients we're focusing on email marketing immediately, even if that's not why they came to me initially. It's just common sense. And there are so many affordable tools out there, so there's no excuse to NOT prioritize this.
Also, I've heard far too many people talk about how Facebook is removing their entire group -- and people are running their paid memberships on Facebook, which means...they just lost their own business because a bot took down their group. (Good luck earning that trust back.) That should terrify people. Even if it were a FREE group to use as a lead gen tool, that's a lot of work to just have it disappear. I don't trust anything that much lol.
(Plus with free tools like Mighty Networks, Discord, and even Slack, there's really no excuse to not have SOMETHING growing off social media. Is it harder and slower growth? Absolutely. People are attached to social media, but it's way more sustainable and protected. Hopefully the norm around off-social communities change.)
That'd be really cool to build a tech solution to support community growth for creators, though! I find Mighty Networks does such a phenomenal job at this already (and now that they're connected with Convert Kit, it's even better), but their Mighty Network "marketplace" isn't as great as it could be, so creating a hub to FIND all these great communities across the internet would be such a valuable tool.
(Also, I've been brainstorming micro-SaaS ideas and this is one of them! I just have zero tech abilities, so even "no code" is above my paygrade, so...potential collab is in the air haha.)
Ha, discovery is a side of communities I've explicitly avoided because it's such a hard problem. What I've been able to find is directory sites for communities that are often tied to a specific tech. E.g. Slofile for Slack groups, and another site I forget now for discovering Discord communities.
I wonder if this idea of doubling down on the personalised touch & network graph extends for discovery as well? In my mind that's the only real way to bypass it. Otherwise you become tied to the platforms. And just because Slack and Discord aren't Facebook, it doesn't mean one is much safer in the end in terms of control and not getting arbitrarily banned.
I run a tech meetup/community myself: PHP South Africa. I've had discussions with many other meetup hosts about Meetup.com being such a horrible platform, but they all give me the same answer in return: "yes it sucks, but it's where everyone is, so yeah I'll shell out the $120 a year just to post events."
If people do succeed without these discovery mechanisms and go purely off of the tactics we've discussed, that's also not necessarily a scalable/automatable approach, like you say. So building SaaS for that might be tricky. Perhaps there's tools/features that can be added to ease that work, at least?
You're welcome! I'm glad you asked the question. It's something that a lot of people have been wondering about (not just here, but elsewhere), and it helped me organize my thoughts around it to explain to others too.
Honestly, it's ALL about niche communities and personal connections. It's how I've been able to stay in the freelance game for 15 years -- from getting new clients, being referred, getting stage speaking opportunities, and other really cool things that wouldn't have been available otherwise. If you just provide a great brand + customer experience, people are really quick to rave about you (even if they aren't customers lol).
In a world where people are looking to automate everything, that personalized touch can be a strong differentiator.
(And I have stories where I've landed clients because of how far I take this, and I'm happy to share my "secrets.")
I agree with you about the socialgraph vs interestgraph approach. Interestgraph has its place, but it's not the BEST way to connect and grow. I've found exponential growth with the socialgraph model because you can leverage entire communities.
I 100% agree with owning your brand assets.
I tell all my strategy clients we're focusing on email marketing immediately, even if that's not why they came to me initially. It's just common sense. And there are so many affordable tools out there, so there's no excuse to NOT prioritize this.
Also, I've heard far too many people talk about how Facebook is removing their entire group -- and people are running their paid memberships on Facebook, which means...they just lost their own business because a bot took down their group. (Good luck earning that trust back.) That should terrify people. Even if it were a FREE group to use as a lead gen tool, that's a lot of work to just have it disappear. I don't trust anything that much lol.
(Plus with free tools like Mighty Networks, Discord, and even Slack, there's really no excuse to not have SOMETHING growing off social media. Is it harder and slower growth? Absolutely. People are attached to social media, but it's way more sustainable and protected. Hopefully the norm around off-social communities change.)
That'd be really cool to build a tech solution to support community growth for creators, though! I find Mighty Networks does such a phenomenal job at this already (and now that they're connected with Convert Kit, it's even better), but their Mighty Network "marketplace" isn't as great as it could be, so creating a hub to FIND all these great communities across the internet would be such a valuable tool.
(Also, I've been brainstorming micro-SaaS ideas and this is one of them! I just have zero tech abilities, so even "no code" is above my paygrade, so...potential collab is in the air haha.)
Ha, discovery is a side of communities I've explicitly avoided because it's such a hard problem. What I've been able to find is directory sites for communities that are often tied to a specific tech. E.g. Slofile for Slack groups, and another site I forget now for discovering Discord communities.
I wonder if this idea of doubling down on the personalised touch & network graph extends for discovery as well? In my mind that's the only real way to bypass it. Otherwise you become tied to the platforms. And just because Slack and Discord aren't Facebook, it doesn't mean one is much safer in the end in terms of control and not getting arbitrarily banned.
I run a tech meetup/community myself: PHP South Africa. I've had discussions with many other meetup hosts about Meetup.com being such a horrible platform, but they all give me the same answer in return: "yes it sucks, but it's where everyone is, so yeah I'll shell out the $120 a year just to post events."
If people do succeed without these discovery mechanisms and go purely off of the tactics we've discussed, that's also not necessarily a scalable/automatable approach, like you say. So building SaaS for that might be tricky. Perhaps there's tools/features that can be added to ease that work, at least?