- Day Job Detox
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- Growing a Community: Why, When & How
I left my comfortable 9-5 job 5 weeks ago. I had a few weeks of vacation “following my bliss”, making my new Lisbon apartment a home and helping my parents move out of my childhood home. Now I’m back from summer break and ready to start things up again.
Some of the questions I’ve been asked since I started telling people I’d work for myself include:
Won’t it get lonely?
Who are you going to talk to all day?
How will you have fun if all you do is client work?
How will you make friends if you’re not hanging out with colleagues?
Aren’t you worried about moving to a new country and not knowing anyone?
These questions make sense and I know they come from a good place of genuine concern. But I think there are hundreds of solutions once you start imagining your ideal life outside the day job dynamic.
For an introvert such as myself, that’s hinged on building an online community.
Why Should You Start a Community?
Over the last few weeks I started gathering people together on X (aka New Twitter) interested in joining a marketing community. Here’s how we work together:
We host a weekly X Space around marketing, where members can share their marketing expertise with the rest of the community
We’re about to launch our weekly accountability calls where we give a status update and present current challenges while soliciting advice from the community
We give each other feedback to help make better content, so we can grow together
We also just hang out together!
I’ve been on dozens of calls the past 2 weeks. Some of these calls felt more like work than others - but they all felt like the social interaction I need in my weekly routine.
But that’s just like any other workplace: you start by doing the work and you make friends in the process.
When Should You Grow a Community?
Speaking from personal experience, I didn’t realize I needed a community until I started it. And the only reason I started was because I had a new goal and didn’t know if I could do it alone.
That new goal was to join weekly X Spaces on marketing. The main reason I didn’t think I could do it alone is because I find it hard to find relevant new Spaces. The app doesn’t make it easy!
That’s why I decided to start my own Space! But I’ve seen a few Spaces start with 3 or 4 people and I didn’t have it in me to speak mainly to myself for the first few weeks. That’s when one of the key tenets of Web3 philosophy hit me…
“I should start a community!”
The realization hit me like a ton of bricks.
I’m not sure I’d ever thought that before in my life. But I now had a clear reason to start a community. Rather than starting an X Space with 3 guests, we’d start with a community of 5+ people and everyone would invite 3 people.
This math is why our first Space had 30+ people tuning in!
I’d never hosted a Space before and I’m not sure if people were even that into the subject matter (SEO and content marketing). But it felt like people wanted to feel like they were part of something, so everyone tweeted about it and invited their friends.
I love that we made it happen! We’re a community of Space hosts and speakers, but we’re also helping each other grow beyond X.
How Do You Grow a Community?
I’ve been growing the Growth Nodes community for about a month now, so I’m still early stages. In the past 4 weeks, I learned so much about the process that I never thought about before. Here are my key takeaways
Start with a Clear Purpose
The most important tip I can give you so far on growing a community is to find a clear purpose.
We started with marketing Spaces. We’d arrange weekly Spaces within the community and make it easy for community members to share their expertise and get consistent experience speaking in public.
I’m not sure if we would have grown as quickly if we hadn’t made it clear our focus was on regular Spaces around marketing.
From there it’s evolved and become something new based on feedback from the community. After all, the Spaces brought everyone together - but once we were together, we realized there were other ways we could help each other.
Grow with the Individuals
It’s not really about serving a big group of people. Joining a community is more like building relationships with individuals within a group.
After all, two people can be in the same community but never have interacted with each other (which is especially true in giant communities). And I’d argue these two people are no more than strangers, regardless of their community affiliation.
If you’re not actively meeting and engaging with others, it quickly becomes “You vs Them”. But in a community, we’re really going for an “Us” mentality. That’s how we stop being strangers and start benefiting from all the perks of a community.
This reasoning is why I jumped on 10 community calls last week. My goal was to meet everyone who had ideas for the community and understand how we could build the best community for everyone.
I got some great ideas that we’ll be implementing over the next few weeks. And I’m 100% sure I wouldn’t have had half of these ideas if it weren’t from my interactions with other community members.
If it was just me leading us sans feedback, I’m convinced our community would have remained a dry place where people initially meet up for weekly Spaces, before eventually tapering off and I was again left to my own devices.
But by engaging with the community I’ve shown that it’s not just me. Everyone can have an impact on the community.
Get Organized
We started our community off simple - with a single Twitter group chat. I guess you could say we were testing if we had product-market fit. If people didn’t want to join a free Twitter group chat, then we probably didn’t have a great offer.
But once we started getting traction, a few new members per week, I knew we’d need a better way to get organized. After all, people are not big fans of Twitter’s internal legacy tools.
That’s why I took on the task of setting up a Discord server for our community. I’m not trying to build something revolutionary with the community, I’m trying to solve actual problems that our community members already mentioned.
That’s why we now have a specific channel for:
Listing upcoming Spaces
Brainstorming Spaces together
Brainstorming other content ideas together
Reviewing each other’s content
General chat
And much more on the horizon
The point is to encourage community interaction without overloading everything in one group chat with a poor UX.
I’ve been so excited to see all the great progress in our first few days on Discord.
Decentralize with Delegation
Perhaps the most important aspect of growing a community is becoming decentralized. My goal with the community is to eventually remove my authority from 90% of all processes.
Of course, I’ll still continue to be a member of the community and contribute where I find fit. But I want to stop feeling like the founder as soon as possible, and start feeling more like a valuable community member.
That’s why I’ve started to delegate responsibilities to members who’ve shown interest in specific topics. For example, Beba has helped organize the Discord while Charlotte managed the Notion templates we use within the community.
We also have a few other upcoming features that I don’t want to give away just yet, but just know it’s coming - and we’ll have more very capable people managing our processes!
Reach out today if you want to get involved. We’re always looking for more people passionate about marketing to get involved with our knowledge sharing community!
A Fun New Idea
Now since you made it this far, here’s the fun new idea I had this week!
This all started from the fact that Elon is moving away from purely text-based content and making X a multi-format platform. So what does that mean? It means that having more images and videos will benefit your content!
And since I’ve already started using Canva and various AI tools to create images, I started asking myself: “How can I make relevant videos for my X audience?”
The SEO Roast is a web series I’m creating where I give folks a free audit for letting me roast their current SEO set-up. I’m hoping to launch the pilot in early September and see if people are interested in that style of content.
Watch this space or follow @SEORoast to stay tuned! And feel free to reach out if you have a site that needs roasting!
Join me again next week to flush out the 9 to 5 with your weekly dose of Day Job Detox!
Yours truly,
HoboMojo