Why you should build a community

Building a community of active, engaged members around a specific niche is, in my opinion, the biggest underrated hack to up-leveling your customer development & audience engagement out there currently, and most brands or aspiring thought leaders could benefit from this.

Here are just some of the benefits I've gotten from growing my community, which is focused on female ecommerce founders:

• A sense of connection & support
• A meaningful project that I can work on at my own discretion
• A sense of impact in connecting these women with each other & with useful resources
• Extremely valuable feedback that has informed my vision & roadmap for my startup
• Early adopters of free & paid offerings we've produced for my startup
• A group of advocates eager to help me build Makelane and help nurture the group
• Wonderful new friendships with like-minded women who inspire me

How to build your community

There are as many ways to do this as there are ways to drive growth for anything online but I get asked about this regularly enough that I want to offer what's worked for me over the last year of growing Commerce Club.

🔍 Find a unique niche

If you're creating a community that isn't easily available elsewhere, you'll have a much easier time attracting members. I started Commerce Club because at first I was growing my first business, Potion, and just wanted to connect with other ecommerce entrepreneurs—but almost ALL of the communities I could find were dominated by what I would call, for lack of a better word, "ecommerce bros" 😅

In other words, these other groups had a culture more focused on sharing "hacks" to make a quick profit than on building meaningful & authentic brands, which didn't resonate with me. I also noticed that most of the women I talked to tended to share my goals of infusing their brands with meaning and authenticity, so I decided to start a group just for like-minded women to support each other & share actionable advice with each other.

To this day when members of Commerce Club give me feedback they say they're so glad they found a community that not only addresses their specific business needs but that also provides a supportive space for them to connect with like-minded women.

I think the true work of building an active & engaged community begins even before you start growing that community. It begins with picking the right niche—one that provides people with something they can't easily find elsewhere and adds value.

📈 Growing your membership

This is where things get creative. My community is now (as of May 2020) about 820 members and it took us 16 months to get here, so it certainly has not been an overnight process. Part of this is attributable to the fact that I only started really prioritizing growth recently but it's true that in general I've tried to be deliberate about growth. Given how many people apply compared to how many I accept into the community, if I had been less discerning about accepting applicants, we'd probably have double the membership today.

I've intentionally chosen slower growth, though, because I know that the long-term value of the membership is in the quality of its members and discussion, not just in the sheer numbers—so I am very selective about who I allow in.