Day 544 - Growing a community slowly - https://golifelog.com/posts/growing-a-community-slowly-1656382032031
New lesson about growing communities: Grow slowly.
Fast growth is like the holy grail of the startup world. But that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes fast growth can backfire. Especially when it comes to community building. Just learned this the hard way from growing the 5am club for creators.
What happened - I took more than a year to grow the Telegram chat group to 100 members. Because I posted my 5am wake times on Twitter every day, people would discover it occasionally, and 1 or 2 new members would join every few days or so. It was drip growth. A slow growth approach for sure.
But as it grew, I also realised people started chatting more. The first 6 months was just 90% me posting. Soon after, it started to have more discussions. More sharing of wake times and all. Promising!
Then all that engagement got wiped out when my article about the 5am club went viral on Indie Hackers in April. There was a rush of new members, and within 1-2 months I doubled the size of the community to near 200. It was nice and all to grow so fast, but the influx created a lot of ‘low value’ or spammy messages (like notifications of people joining, welcome messages etc), which probably turned off the regular commenters, or got them to switch off notifications.
Engagement plummeted even though membership rose like a rocket.
And after the viral growth spurt, it’s like back to a quiet room, again with me posting through April to May. Only recently in mid-June did the conversations start coming back.
So which was better:
An engaged community with slow growth, or
A disengaged community with hyper growth?
I’m leaning more to option #1 now. In fact, I’ve stopped tweeting my wake times on Twitter to intentionally stop growing for a while, so that we can refocus on the community again, and give it some breathing space to pick itself back up again.
Sometimes slow growth isn’t just a ideal that lifestyle businesses favour. It can be for very practical reasons too, like this.
This made me reflect on growing this community here too on Lifelog. I like the growth rate so far. The revenue is dismal yes, but we’re having new people in at a rate that’s not spammy or noisy. It still feels small and cosy, where everyone knows everyone. I value that experience way more than growing it fast, to be honest. People join for the writing, but stay for the community. The relationships and the interactions are what matters.
Fast growth is like the holy grail of the startup world. But that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes fast growth can backfire. Especially when it comes to community building. Just learned this the hard way from growing the 5am club for creators.
What happened - I took more than a year to grow the Telegram chat group to 100 members. Because I posted my 5am wake times on Twitter every day, people would discover it occasionally, and 1 or 2 new members would join every few days or so. It was drip growth. A slow growth approach for sure.
But as it grew, I also realised people started chatting more. The first 6 months was just 90% me posting. Soon after, it started to have more discussions. More sharing of wake times and all. Promising!
Then all that engagement got wiped out when my article about the 5am club went viral on Indie Hackers in April. There was a rush of new members, and within 1-2 months I doubled the size of the community to near 200. It was nice and all to grow so fast, but the influx created a lot of ‘low value’ or spammy messages (like notifications of people joining, welcome messages etc), which probably turned off the regular commenters, or got them to switch off notifications.
Engagement plummeted even though membership rose like a rocket.
And after the viral growth spurt, it’s like back to a quiet room, again with me posting through April to May. Only recently in mid-June did the conversations start coming back.
So which was better:
An engaged community with slow growth, or
A disengaged community with hyper growth?
I’m leaning more to option #1 now. In fact, I’ve stopped tweeting my wake times on Twitter to intentionally stop growing for a while, so that we can refocus on the community again, and give it some breathing space to pick itself back up again.
Sometimes slow growth isn’t just a ideal that lifestyle businesses favour. It can be for very practical reasons too, like this.
This made me reflect on growing this community here too on Lifelog. I like the growth rate so far. The revenue is dismal yes, but we’re having new people in at a rate that’s not spammy or noisy. It still feels small and cosy, where everyone knows everyone. I value that experience way more than growing it fast, to be honest. People join for the writing, but stay for the community. The relationships and the interactions are what matters.