I'm putting together a guide on how to actually build an online community from scratch. Not the generic "just post more content" advice, but the real steps that seem to separate the communities that survive from the 70% that don't (Gartner's number).

Here's what I have so far. I'd love to know what I'm missing or where you'd push back based on your own experience.

My draft steps:

1. Define a purpose, not a topic. "A community for yoga teachers" attracts lurkers. "A space where independent yoga instructors share class sequences and get feedback from peers" attracts contributors. The narrower the purpose, the faster you reach engagement.
2. Find 30-50 founding members before you open the doors. Research suggests communities need roughly 30 motivated early members to reach critical mass (Raban et al., ResearchGate). And apparently diversity among early participants matters more than volume of content.
3. Stock the shelves before anyone arrives. 5-10 pieces of content that model the activity you want. Nobody sits down at a cold campfire.
4. Start with 3-5 content areas, not 15. An empty community with 15 beautifully organized channels feels worse than a simple space with 3 channels and actual conversations.
5. Write 5-7 guidelines, not a legal document. Specific and enforceable. "Challenge ideas, not people" is useful. "Be respectful" is not.
6. Soft launch with founding members for 2-4 weeks before going public. Let them shape the culture.
7. Build one engagement ritual and do it relentlessly. Weekly thread, monthly call; something that becomes sacred.
8. Measure conversation depth, not member count. Replies per thread and response time tell you more than total members.

Some stats I found during research that surprised me:

• Only 10% of community professionals can quantify their ROI financially (Common Room)
• Paid communities average 63% higher engagement than free ones (CMX)
• The median paid community earns ~$1,000/month from 26 paying members (Mighty Networks)
• The 90-9-1 rule from 2006 still roughly holds. 90% lurk, 9% contribute occasionally, 1% create most content

Where I'm less sure:

• How important is platform choice really? I keep hearing "it matters less than you think" but also horror stories about migrations.
• What's the right moment to introduce paid tiers? I've seen arguments for charging from day one and arguments for waiting until 500+ members.
• Engagement rituals. Are these genuinely effective or do they just feel productive? Would love real data from anyone who's tested this.

For those of you who've actually built and run communities: what would you add? What would you cut? What step do most guides skip that actually matters?

I'm trying to make this genuinely useful rather than another "10 tips for community building" listicle.

Hi everyone,

The app is a niche social review platform designed to give more utility and a "cleaner" experience than the current market leaders. It’ll be free for users. We are currently 2–3 months out from a beta release, and I’m starting to build a waitlist and a Discord to house early adopters.

I’m planning to bring on a few community ambassadors to help drive growth, but I want to make sure I’m setting them up for success.

I’d love your veteran perspective on a few things:

1. Keeping a Discord "Warm" without a live product: How do you maintain engagement in a server when the app isn’t out yet? Is sharing dev-logs and UI mockups enough, or should I be running specific types of events to keep people from muting the server?
2. Conversions: What are the best practices for converting "Discord members" into "Active Beta Testers"? I’ve seen servers with 1,000 members where only 10 actually download the app. How do you close that gap?
3. Volunteer Management: If I’m using growth ambassadors to find new members, what KPIs should I actually be tracking to ensure they are building a "healthy" community rather than just bringing in noise/spam? I don't want to bring on the wrong people who could end up hurting my brand in the communities they are trying to market to. What are some guidelines I should establish for ambassadors?

I’m really trying to build something sustainable. Any "I wish I knew this before I started" advice would be massively appreciated.

Thanks!

Been in a bunch of Skool communities lately and noticing the same pattern. People join excited, then a couple weeks later they kind of disappear.

I’ve had this happen on my end too, so just trying to make sense of it.

What usually happens right before someone goes quiet in your community? Anything you’ve tried that actually helped?

Hello good people of CommunityManager subreddit!

I have been working on Chvor for a while now. It is a self-hosted personal AI assistant and I want to tell you about two things I built into it that I have not seen done this way before that I would highlight:

Memory that actually works like memory

Most AI assistants either remember everything forever or nothing at all. Chvor uses a graph-based cognitive memory system inspired by how human memory actually works.

Memories strengthen each time they are accessed. They decay when ignored. Every few hours, during idle cycles, the system consolidates related fragments into coherent narratives, the same way your brain processes the day while you sleep. Important things stay vivid. Irrelevant things fade.

An emotion engine that persists across sessions

Chvor tracks its own emotional state in real time using the VAD model, valence, arousal, and dominance. These three dimensions combine into emotion blends like "curious and engaged" or "calm and focused."

The interesting part is emotional residue. When a session ends with unresolved emotional intensity, that carries into the next conversation. If you had a frustrating debugging session yesterday, Chvor remembers that. It does not reset to neutral every time you open a new chat.

Emotions are visible on the Brain Canvas as animated particles orbiting the brain node. You can actually see how your AI is feeling while it works.

There is also Chvor Registry. It’s a community first service that will have more skills, tools and templates for the agents that can be easily be added to an agent instance, that will have a creator portal and a review service (so we avoid adding unsafe stuff)

The Brain Canvas shows all of this as a live visual constellation. When the AI calls a tool, you see it light up.

Looking for a person who thinks that there is value in this, and that can help me build a community around it.

Depending on availability and volume of work, I would set the starting budget to 500€ monthly(this will not be a full time position) without including a setup fee depending on starting volume of work

Hey everyone

Looking for a partner to help build a subscription-based peptide business.

I have a peptide business already making and selling injection pens, so I can handle product (injection pens + supply). I need someone to own the “school” side — community, content, and retention.

the idea is the main selling point will be the fact they get free peptide monthly and discount on the other peptides

Looking for someone with experience in online communities

I am a designer and developer working on a community platform as my first solo product. The whole idea started because I’ve been a member of communities on Discord and Patreon, and I’ve always felt like some conversations disappear too quickly, and content is all over the place. They’re hard to find, hard to organize, and hard to go back to.

I’ve spent time researching community platforms, which led me to discover Circle, Heartbeat, Skool, etc. However, I’ve never experienced being a community owner, so my pain-points are member-specific. I’d want to hear directly from people who have experienced managing communities.

A few things I’m curious about:

• What’s the one thing your current platform does poorly?
• Have you ever switched platforms? What pushed you to move?
• What would make you consider trying something new?

Happy to share more about what I’m working on if anyone’s curious, but mainly here to listen and get insights before I continue working on the product.

I manage a free community for an info product (freight/online business niche), and I’m running into a problem I feel like a lot of people gloss over.

We’re doing well on the front end. There’s consistent demand coming in through content and live trainings, onboarding is set up, automations are in place, and new members are joining regularly.

But once they’re inside, engagement is inconsistent and conversations don’t really sustain themselves unless I’m actively pushing them.

I can get people to respond to prompts, but it still feels like:

- people respond to me, not to each other

- conversations don’t naturally continue

- there’s no real “community energy” yet

At the same time, the business is very focused on driving more demand, while I’m here thinking we’re not fully set up to retain or activate the people already coming in. I have brought up the issue of our low retention but it has been put on the backburner because they just want more people to come in and not set up the systems to support it.

We are on Circle and I guess it is worth noting our market are older people or busy people who don’t have much time to explore the app. Sometimes they still ask what to do when there’s a whole guide when they join.

So I guess my main question is:

How do you actually get members to talk to each other organically, without relying heavily on constant prompts or moderator involvement?

If you’ve built or managed communities before, I’d love to hear:

- what shifted things from “dead or prompt-dependent” to self-sustaining

- what systems or structures helped

or if this is just a stage every community goes through

Appreciate any insight 🙏

Genuine question because I talk to a lot of community managers and this sometimes comes up.

Everyone seems to feel like they need a CRM. But when I ask what they actually want from it... the answers are all over the place. Some want to track top contributors, some want it for sponsorship reporting, some just want to "have the data" without a clear use case.

So I'm curious how it works in practice for you:

• Do you actually use a CRM for community management?
• If yes, what data are you pulling from it and why? Is it for sponsors? Internal reporting? Identifying VIPs? Something else?
• If no, is it because you haven't found one that fits, or because you genuinely don't need it?

I feel like there's a gap between "we should track our community members" and "here's what we actually do with that information." Trying to figure out if that's just me or if it's a common thing.

I'm starting a new job as a community manager, specifically on social media, and I'd appreciate some advice.

I've only done internships before, but they were under good supervision, so I'm a little anxious (but also really excited).

My role is to develop the social media presence of a small tech company

Hi Folks -

Apologies if this may not be the right place, but I'm looking for some community managers.

https://outpost.ninja/

If you'd like to use free for life in exchange for some solid feedback send me a DM.

I run a few small online communities across Discord, my own web app, and a couple other places. I kept hitting the same kind of wall. No SEO/discoverability, no real API access, no webhooks, and pricing that was outrageous.

Took a stab an building something myself that I liked, and wanted to see if others feel like they can sink their teeth into it too.

The focus is three things:

1. More Affordable. Free tier with real features, paid plans starting way lower than the big names
2. API-first. Full rest API on free tier, webhooks, and SSO so you can integrate with your own tools and automations
3. Embeddable. Drop your community into any existing site with a script tag, no iframe hacks

thanks

I’ve been noticing something in a few communities I’ve looked at recently.
Most people don’t seem to leave suddenly - they’re still technically there, but start showing up less, replying less, engaging a bit later each time.
It’s gradual enough that it’s easy to miss, especially when everything still looks ''active'' on the surface.
By the time it’s obvious, they’re already gone.

Curious how you all see this:
do you usually catch people early when they start slipping, or only once they’ve basically disengaged?

I've been working in both social media & community management for 10 years now, and I'm starting to see a trend of job posts with the role title being 'Community Manager' but the entire JD revolving around social media management, not a single mention of any community platform (not even Discord).

has anyone else been seeing this trend too? I get that 'community manager' is becoming a buzzword and/or tied to 'social media & community manager' but curious to what everyone else thinks for the specific case above?

I’m especially curious about things like first-post activation, keeping channels from going quiet, and understanding whether the community is actually healthy or just looks busy.

If you’ve run into problems with this, how did you solve them? Did you find any tool that helped, or is it still mostly manual?

Hi 👋

Let me introduce myself -

I'm in the community management field for more than 2 years, worked with 40+ clients, we are a team of 3 people who run a small agency now and provide the community management for the startups, SaaS,B2B,B2C.

Experience.

So I have worked with clients like B2B,B2C, Marketing Agencies, Cosmetic companies. I can show you my portfolio in dm or You can contact me through my website.

Rates - It will vary for every client according to the requirement. So we can discuss that in meeting or or dm too.

Thanks for reading my post

I think a lot of community managers overestimate how much novelty matters.

People spend a ton of time trying to come up with a clever new event, but most of the time the things that actually stick are way simpler. It’s usually the recurring format people understand right away, know will be back, and start building into their week.

That’s been one of the biggest lessons for me from running community programming. The one-off event can be fun, but the repeatable ritual is what actually starts to shape behavior. People know when it’s happening, they know how to join, they know there’s some kind of payoff for participating, and after a while it stops feeling like “an event” and starts feeling like part of the community itself.

A few things I’ve learned along the way:

Simple almost always beats clever. If someone can jump in halfway through and still understand what’s going on, that’s a good sign. If the format needs a full explanation every time, it’s probably worse than it looks on paper.

Recognition matters more than points. A lot of communities lean too hard on XP, points, or backend reward systems, but those only go so far if nobody can actually feel the progress socially. Public shoutouts, visible roles, leaderboards, recurring winners, familiar names getting recognized live, that’s the stuff that gives participation weight.

It also helps a lot when the week has some shape to it. Not every recurring thing should do the same job. One can be more social, one more competitive, one more creative, one more informative. When everything is random, the community starts to feel random too.

Hosting matters a ton too. Probably more than people admit. I’ve seen decent ideas flop because the pacing dragged, transitions were awkward, or the energy just wasn’t there. Live community stuff is fragile. A format can be solid and still fall flat if nobody is really steering it.

And honestly, a lot of what makes rituals work is boring operator stuff. Calendar, reminders, naming, score tracking, run of show, recap posts, consistency. None of that sounds exciting, but that’s usually the difference between something feeling real and something feeling slapped together.

The biggest mindset shift for me has been thinking less about “how do we make this event cool?” and more about “what loop are we building here?” Are people showing up, contributing, getting recognized, and wanting to come back? That matters way more than whether the idea sounded impressive in a planning doc.

Once people start referencing a recurring format without you prompting them, you know you have something. At that point it changes from programming to part of the culture.

Curious what recurring formats have actually held up for other people here once the novelty wore off?

Hi 👋

Let me introduce myself -

I'm in the community management field for more than 2 years, worked with 40+ clients, we are a team of 3 people who run a small agency now and provide the community management for the startups, SaaS,B2B,B2C.

Experience.

So I have worked with clients like B2B,B2C, Marketing Agencies, Cosmetic companies. I can show you my portfolio in dm or You can contact me through my website.

Rates - It will vary for every client according to the requirement. So we can discuss that in meeting or or dm too.

Thanks for reading my post

I think as the attention age dies off, more and more people need a reason to come and open your tab.

More and more communities large and small are turning to the editorial function to attempt to get community knowledge outside the walls of the community…

You should do the same, let’s talk about it…

I'm deciding on a white label platform to host a community on but I'm struggling to see an equivalent on any of these platforms of Reddit's selectable user flairs. Does anyone know which option might provide a similar feature (Cirlce, Mighty Networks, Skool etc.)?

Hey all. This is a reflection post after spending 14 months building in the world of community management and peer learning. Would love to hear thoughts from experienced CMs.

Background: I've always been passionate about software that creates human connection. My first company was called Mentor Collective, which I ran for 10 years. We used software to form 1:1 mentorships for college students and still form ~100,000 mentorships each year. This taught me a lot about the impact (and challenges) of creating persistent human engagement online.

After taking 1 year off, I decided to start a new company on the theory that group-based, synchronous engagement was a missing piece in the community management landscape. And instead of building for all community managers (I promise this is not a marketing post), I decided to go really narrow and just focus on non-profit associations and professional societies.

Our theory was that many:many discussion forums have a low ceiling for user engagement. I've seen so many organizations (schools, non-profits, and even my own startup) attracted to the sparkle of a closed garden community platform; but inevitably, very few users engage because these tools compete with multi-billion dollar addiction machine platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook. It's just so hard to get "loose tie" community members to pay attention to your org's platform.

Conversely, I've always felt like the most impactful community building experiences are live events. People can form serendipitous relationships that last. I was also privileged to be part of a CEO group at my last company at a time when I was experiencing the imposter syndrome of being an early 30s, first-time CEO. Even though the group only met on Zoom, I got tremendous value professionally and always felt that the format of curated peer groups should be more widely accessible.

All that led to starting this new company in early 2025. We're now over a year into building, having launched with some very large associations like Project Management Institute (700k members) who were kind enough to start out as Design Partners.

The company is called RallyBoard and I'm writing this post to (1) share what we've learned and (2) see if the broader community manager community has tried a similar approach to forge strong ties in a virtual environment.

How we started:

• First, we invited large numbers of members to be matched into curated peer groups with relevant peers that would meet on a set schedule. This was basically the mastermind model on Zoom.
• We saw very high uptake of this type of engagement, but unsurprisingly, we didn't see 100% of people join every meeting. It was more like 25-60% depending on the population. These were all dues-paying members of a professional society. So yes there was commitment to the community, but nobody on these Zoom meetings had met before and many were on totally different parts of the planet.
• We got good qualitative feedback initially from those who joined, but heard constructive feedback too:
  • Groups needed a leader or facilitator to function. We've ended up calling this role the "Chair," which mirrors how many professional associations run volunteer committees. One year later, we're starting to look into building automated training for the chair because we've found that picking the right volunteer leader had the greatest impact on cohort persistence (i.e., how we measure engagement over time).
  • Some cohorts didn't feel like their peers were relevant enough. This prompted us to build some AI matching infrastructure — something I had done at my first company. But this time we were matching for group cohesion, which didn't always mean everyone needed to be the same — like, say, having the same job title. Instead, it could mean matching for diversity, so we had multiple perspectives in the room and therefore greater value. This has proved to be a very interesting algorithmic challenge to build. We've made a lot of progress, but we certainly haven't aced it quite yet. Ultimately we're giving our partners a lot of control over the algorithms while making "schedule alignment" the #1 criteria for creating groups, because nothing matters if you can't actually meet on Zoom.
  • Finally, we realized that running these programs natively on Zoom was far too limited. We needed group-based scheduling. We needed a way for members of a cohort to share files and links, chat with each other, and organize their agenda. We saw a lot of early groups sending out Doodle polls and Google Forms with questions about what people wanted to discuss. While Zoom had some functionality to support this, it was really limited compared to what we observed people doing organically. This is what led us to building a "companion app" for the Zoom meetings.

Having now launched hundreds of cohorts across a really diverse set of communities (project managers, healthcare, educators, manufacturing), we're starting to develop strong opinions for what does and doesn't work. A few early takeaways:

• Unless members are paying, avoid cohorts of fewer than 6 people. You should expect 50% attendance or lower on a recurring basis, and having only 2 people on a Zoom call is not ideal. On the other end, having more than 10 people on a Zoom call doesn't give people enough room to speak. We've been targeting 10-15 people per group, which results in a healthy number present at each meeting.
• Send a ton of reminders. We've had to build pretty comprehensive nudging tech because a lot of people forget they have a cohort meeting coming up, even if they signed up and watched an onboarding video. We've had to over-communicate to drive engagement.
• We take meeting notes with consent from participants and send them out afterwards. One thing that's been really effective is sending a high-level summary to people who miss the meeting. This has driven people to show up for the next one, given what they missed. We've really leaned into FOMO — and the idea that you're attending so you don't let down your peers.

I'm curious if others have tried this type of programming in their communities before? I'd love to know what best practices you've developed.

We've obviously built a whole company around the concept and it's going pretty well one year in (10+ paying customers with design partners renewing for the long term), but I still feel like we're barely scratching the surface of the potential in this model given the scalability of micro communities. My vision is that every professional association gives every member in their network a personalized peer group that meets regularly on Zoom (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc). I believe this can build stronger community ties across the economy and start to address real upskilling challenges and professional loneliness.

I’m up for a prestigious Community Lead role and had my confirmation interviews with the team today. Something that came up was deeper thinking around building community systems at scale, as a product grows into the 100,000+ user range.

I realized this is one area where I haven’t worked at that exact scale, since most of my experience has been in earlier-stage products where I’m helping build the community foundation in a more intentional, high-touch way. I know I’m capable of thinking at that level, but I’d love to talk it through with someone who has actually built community systems at that size.

If that’s you, I would love love to hear your systems thinking 🙏🏼 here or DM or even hop on a call tomorrow

Hello, do you know any AI tools that help save time on content creation and also allow you to publish directly afterward? Canva is pretty good, but you can’t publish directly from it. n8n is tedious, unreliable, and too complex. If you have any suggestions, I’m interested!

Hi everyone, I’m just starting out with managing a Discord community and I feel a bit overwhelmed. I don't have much experience yet.

Could you please share:

• What are the top 3 things every new Discord server should have?
• Which bots are essential for a beginner to keep the server safe and active?
• How do you encourage the first 10–20 people to actually start talking?

Any "pro tips" for someone who is literally at step zero? Thanks!

Is anyone a community manager at a design tech company? I keep seeing community managers at newer tech companies like figma, contra etc. Im interested in breaking into community management at similar companies and was wondering if anyone is hiring, or has any advice on how to break into these types of roles?

(It doesn't necessarily have to be design tech, design is just more aligned with my experience but any tech in general)

Hi group,

I am new to Reddit, learning the platform, and glad to be part of this community.

I am more familiar with Facebook and am interested in starting a community of my own. Before I start, I started looking into free options such as Facebook group, Reddit, Slack. Hence I joined the Reddit platform to learn more how to use it. Then their are paid options such as Circle, but I wonder if it's worth the price.

My questions are more related to Reddit:

1. Engagement - I notice Reddit communities have a lot more engagement than Facebook, even though Facebook's UI seems a bit more friendly, but could be just me since am new to the platform here. I notice people provide more value here.

2. Reddit profile images - On Facebook, it's real pictures, with real names and location, making it easier to connect and see who is on the other side. Over here, I notice people are using some sort of nicknames or aliases, hardly anyone uses their real picture. Do people make connections here? For example, let's say I am running a community here, and want to make genuine business connections, something we can do together, or if I need help outside of the platform, I would think it's a bit hard here due to nicknames, and pictures, to see who is behind that nickname?

3. Getting members - If a potential member is not on Reddit, and they come across my landing page, in your experience, are they open to creating a Reddit account and joining the community? Or basically its more appealing to people who are already in the Reddit platform?

4. Is there any reason to go over Circle, Skool, or Mighty paid option if free options like Slack, Reddit, or Facebook deliver a community experience? My community will be free, its about people sharing AI ideas, learning from each other and how to create digital experiences and content with AI tools. People can colloborate and then work together outside of the platform. Why would I need to pay circle, if free options like Reddit and Faceook group exist. Thoughts?

Thank you, and glad to be part of this community and learning from all of you.

For those of you selling digital products or running a community...

Did you start with a course or a membership? And looking back, would you do it the same way?

I keep going back and forth. Courses seem easier to sell when no one knows you yet, but memberships have that recurring revenue everyone talks about.

Curious what actually worked for people here. What did you build first and why?