Communities Are Organisms — No One Organ Is More Necessary Than The Others
Ecosystems, Not Services
When we first started Maxwell we kept on changing our mind on what was most important — was it investing in one regular monthly event everyone really wanted to come to?
Should we go all out to make sure an average member was in the space once a week?
Or was the important thing that members were able to use the space for their own hosting and that they felt empowered?
Should we make sure our members had a place to go for their most important “special moments,” i.e. New Years Eve, Halloween, etc.?
Was it the small intimate dinners where people had real convos that were important, or was it the once a year big retreats, or regular co-working days.
Should the dinners be more focused around interests or more focused on getting people to be vulnerable and connect in an emotional way?
Interested in learning more? Apply for the next membership cohort!
We kept on changing our mind because we kept on thinking of it like we were trained to think about DIGITAL social networks.
The famous example of this is Twitter’s realization that if they got you to follow 20 people right when you joined it massively stimulated engagement.
They drove everything to a single KPI — followers.
Because everything was downstream from that single metric.
We kept on hearing similar stories of how other IRL membership organizations hung their hat on a core experience that was THE REASON people joined.
The club of a relative of mine spent 50% of their budget on the yearly Christmas party and made it so iconic that people kept their membership every year despite not even having a clubhouse.
Summit series had great initial success focusing on big events like Summit at Sea and even bought a ski mountain to throw retreats every weekend.
Organizations like YPO, EO, Hampton and Chief have had success running monthly small cohort dinners that are very interest/career based.
Annabelles in London is known for 5 super elaborate can’t-miss parties every year.
We were looking for our equivalent, one metric, one structure, an overarching KPI that is a north star that is the underlying community driver.
What was THE REASON to join!
But recently we’ve realized that thinking like this is a massive red herring.
Communities are more like bodies than tech platforms.
And a body can die for countless reasons linked to the failure of simply one of their interconnected parts.
No one goes “if we just make sure the heart is healthy we don’t need to worry about the brain.”
We understand everything is interconnected and the failure of any one of those parts can lead to death.
Community is all encompassing so your strategy for building community needs to be as well.
Retreats have their place to massively accelerate bonding.
Weekly rituals help develop habits and a sense of place and home.
Quarterly traditions & yearly special moments help re-engage the members in crazy times of their lives, the ones who just had a kid and need a bit more than “Friday happy hour” to rationalize getting a baby sitter.
I think the clubs that hang their hat on one or two things often become more services than true communities.
When you pay for a membership to a club that throws one yearly party you are basically just paying a yearly party subscription.
Summit Series ended up having to sell their mountain because at some point retreats weren’t enough to sustain a community.
Monthly meetups around specific interests, like YPO, tend to become more group therapy, mentorship and networking than real community.
But the communities our parents used to enjoy weren’t just one thing.
Your local church had Sunday services, Christmas mass, bible study groups AND bible camp.
The Italian American Mens club had it’s weekly drinks at the club but also the yearly heritage festivals.
Communities are ecosystems, not services.
And counterintuitive to most startup advice, when you are building them that means you have to actually focus on more than one thing at the same time.
If you want to learn more about the organism/ecosystem we’re building at Maxwell, apply for membership, our Spring cohort is wrapping up!
David, Joelle & The Maxwell Team