I’ve been writing lately about the different Expertise Paths available as you grow—and the design choices that come with each one. Catch up on the other pieces here.
If the Gatherer business model, with a community or membership, is part of yours, these ideas are for you.
You’ve signed up for a community.
You excitedly log in, expecting a bustling town square…
… and it’s like a deserted Wild West town with tumbleweeds.
Where is everyone?
Where’s all of the community you were promised?
Here’s what usually happened: someone opened a Circle or Mighty Networks, uploaded their trainings, added a few Q&A sessions, and called it a community.
But a library isn’t a community. A course with a comments section isn’t a community.
Community is a deliberate business model, and should be designed as such.
I used to think of communities in two ways: communities of transformation and communities of practice (aka communities of peers).
But I’ve now decided there’s a third type: communities to practice.
And increasingly, I think practice is what turns the other two into actual communities.
Transformation gives people a reason to join.
Peers give people a reason to belong.
Practice gives people a reason to come back.
Communities of Transformation
In a “community of transformation”, the transformation is the point.
We’ll help you reach six-figures of revenue.
We’ll help you become a Part Time YouTuber.
Get better with money from the inside out. (Money Healing Club)
These communities are usually anchored around a specific curriculum, methodology, or journey. Even when the content is delivered asynchronously, it grounds the programming, the Q&As, and how members actually move through the community.
Some have live sprints.
The best transformational community I ever joined was Jay Acunzo and Mel Deziel’s Creator Kitchen (RIP). Every month, we’d work on one part of our creative practice—premise development, for example—supported by training, live feedback from Jay and Mel, and examples.
Some are cohort programs with a community extension on the back end.
And others are “always on,” supported by a robust roadmap. Here’s an example from Tom Ross’s community I just joined (I always want a sneak peek inside what other community leaders are doing!).
The risk?
The value can remain concentrated in you, the community leader.
People come for your knowledge and access to you, not necessarily for the peer group.
That eventually became one of the (perceived) challenges with Creator Kitchen. New members needed foundational programming that existing members had already completed. Existing members increasingly just wanted access to Jay and Mel.
Instead of a peer-to-peer experience it was a hub-and-spoke setup.
That’s hard to maintain over time.
The mistake?
Mistaking a content library for a transformation.
If I have 75 trainings but no idea what to do next, or no way to mark progress, I don’t have a journey. I have a Netflix subscription.
And once members have watched what interests them, is the value of new content compelling enough for them to stay?
Communities of Peers
The primary promise here is different:
Be surrounded by people like you.
Be surrounded by independent consultants. (The Upside)
Learn from our world-class community of creators. (The Lab)
Be part of a community for creatives, artists, freelancers & small business owners who want support connecting with their values, sharing their work, and making (more) money without social media. (The Interweb)
These can be huge communities of 100+ people or intimate peer masterminds of 10.
Either way, the goal is for members to get support from each other: asynchronously through conversation, synchronously through calls, and increasingly through offline gatherings.
When we tack on “peer community” to what's really a course library we often see an empty forum plus some weakly attended Q&A calls.
Done well, communities of peers intentionally engineer relationships.
- Monthly member matching.
- Curated masterminds and small groups.
- Offline events.
- Introductions between people who should know each other.
Community leaders also establish the culture by posting, responding, connecting people, and encouraging members to do the same.
The risk?
It all runs through you.
You’re the one with the relationship map in your head: who should meet, who gets tagged in the comments for a specific question. Without systems and structures, you’re holding the relationships together, which gets harder as the group grows.
The mistake?
Assuming people will find each other.
Once the culture exists? Maybe.
But especially in the early days, cultivating relationships between members is often an unscalable labor of love.
Communities to Practice
This is the addition to my thinking.
Beyond content and individual relationships, there is a reason to gather together and do the thing.
Every week in the Deeper Foundations Membership, we have our Sacred Sales Hour and Weekly Planning/Tending calls. Monthly, we have other opportunities to practice the work together.
There are plenty of other versions:
Weekly rituals around the New and Full moon. (Wild Woman Underground)
A structured process to get your authority-building writing published, through first draft ideation, deep writing, and peer editing. (Writing Practice)
These communities may still have curriculum and frameworks.
They may still build relationships between members.
But the transformation and relationships happen through practice.
You write. You plan. You sell. You gather in circle.
You do the work alongside other people who are doing the work, too.
Sometimes that happens through focused sprints or challenges. Other times it happens through weekly or monthly rituals.
Practice doesn’t have to be live calls. A community could have an asynchronous recurring ritual—Friday wins, monthly reviews, daily writing threads, accountability check-ins.
Either way, there is a specific, recurring reason to return.
And I think this is what’s most often missing from strictly content-led or peer-focused communities.
A library doesn’t necessarily give you a reason to come back this Tuesday or engage with any other members.
Access to 200 interesting people doesn’t necessarily give you a reason to log in this week.
A recurring practice does.
The risk?
The practice becomes a routine without progression.
You show up and do the thing, but doing it on repeat isn’t the same as doing it better. Without a way to deepen the practice, it’s just a standing appointment.
(Sometimes “better” isn’t the axis. You don’t get better by gathering at the new moon. But even then, there’s continued devotion to the act.)
The mistake?
Assuming the same practice will serve (and retain) members forever.
Sometimes repetition is exactly what people need. But once the core rhythms are embodied, what keeps someone engaged?
Maybe the practice takes new forms—or people still come for the relationships they’ve built elsewhere in the community.
The best communities have all of these elements
Transformation gives people somewhere to go.
There’s a clear journey and enough focused programming to help members progress or deepen their skills over time.
Peers give people someone to go with.
You intentionally create relationships between people walking a similar journey instead of hoping they magically find each other.
Practice gives people a reason to return.
There are recurring rituals where members actually do the work—not just consume another training or show up when they have a question.
And they reinforce each other. People arrive for the transformation or the peers, build relationships through the practice, and the practice moves them toward the transformation. Eventually the community itself becomes part of why they stay.
Community isn’t a passive business model.
There’s this belief that creating a community means opening a Circle space to your audience and expecting it will flourish without a lot of additional work from you. The primary work is new member growth.
But that’s not the case (as my own membership is far from passive).
The Gatherer model requires you to constantly pay attention to how the community is working.
- How am I supporting legacy members in continuing to deepen their work and their relationships?
- How can I improve how new members find their footing?
- Are our rituals still useful—or are we doing them because we’ve always done them?
- Where do I need to take the lead, and where can the community increasingly sustain itself?
But, for the right temperament, it is SO SO worth it.
Because eventually, you log in and the town square isn’t empty.
People are answering each other’s questions. They’re making introductions. They’re showing up for the rituals. They’re continuing conversations you didn’t start. They’re building relationships that have very little to do with you.
The community has a life beyond the community leader.
But that doesn’t happen because you opened a forum and invited people in.
You have to give people somewhere to go, someone to go with, and a reason to keep coming back.