Barriers Are Beautiful
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love a long process
A few weeks ago the sports writer Joe Pompliano wrote a post on LinkedIn about how hard it is to become a member at the golf course Augusta. Membership is limited to 300 people and only opens up when someone gives up their membership or dies, and they apparently just accepted 3 new members, Eli Manning and the CEOs of CBS and Amazon. Rules include no backwards hats and if you play the course you must play with an existing member. Even Tiger Woods, as only an “honorary member” cannot use the course by himself.
There is the obvious reading of this — people always want what they can’t have, to get past a velvet rope.
But in building Maxwell we’ve realized that velvet ropes aside, the best communities have high barriers to entry that go past psychological tricks. It’s not just about having high degrees of curation or costs — erecting barriers works to create a vibrant community in unsuspecting ways.
People Value Things They Work For
I’m sure that for a membership to the most prestigious golf club in the world there were 100 other equally famous names to Eli Manning vying for the spot. Hell, he isn’t even the most famous Manning. But I’d bet that after years of having to ask favors to get onto the course he found some way to be top of the list for the next openings.
Having to work is a feedback signal for quality — you not only value your membership more, you will use it more.
High costs are not a substitute for this — apparently the LA County Golf Course has a 250k initiation fee whereas Augusta has only (*only*) a $40k fee. But August is way more prestigious.
Recently we increased the umber of member interviews required to get into Maxwell from 2 to 4. We realized that even when WE knew that someone was a good fit immediately it wasn’t a good idea to just immediately green light them.
Psychology is a bitch — if something comes easy very often we don’t value it.
Working For It Increases Usage
Whether or not it makes logical sense, loss aversion/sunk costs are a real thing — if you’ve paid a lot of money for something you will try to utilize it. If you’ve gone through 4 interviews to gain access to a community, you are more likely to use it, and you are less likely to drop it quickly if you don’t get instantaneous satisfaction — it was a bother to get in, so I’m going to give this thing a go.
If the quality of the product depends on usage, or repeat interaction, this is extremely important. If people expect to get community after a dinner party or two they are going to be sorely disappointed — community requires repeated interactions over extended periods of time, and mutual investment from all parties. A many-to-many network’s value is derived from the engagement of the other people in the network, so making sure every node of the network is bought in is particularly important.
Working For It Means You Aren’t Special
If you’re joining a community you don’t actually want be special — you want to join a community of peers, not a community where you are by far the coolest person there.
It’s why I’ve always found it funny that clubs clamor to give out free memberships to celebrities. In my view they are basically admitting that the celebrities are special and that this ISN’T the standard person they get at the club. It’s a trick to get normal people to clamor to join. And it only works because the celebrities are also promised that no one from the “community” will bother them/talk to them.
Like any new business the urge is to grow as fast as you can. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’d LIKE for things to move faster. But we’ve realized that the levers you want to change shouldn’t be to make it easier for members to join — we do everything we can to increase top line demand (email marketing, instagram etc.), but we’ve realized that making it harder, not easier, on an individual basis to join is counterintuitively the best way to build a solid community of amazing people.
If you’d like to work for it, membership applications are open.
And follow along on Instagram for regular updates.
Cheers,
David, Kyle & Joelle
Fair points.