Reinvent and Re-energize

Communities need to foster continuous innovation to grow

Launching a community in many ways resembles launching a startup. There are many more unknowns than certainties. There are never enough resources. Getting to product-market fit is a winding journey.

Communities and startups are also similar in one very important way. Steve Blank, the tech startup entrepreneur and godfather of the lean startup movement, coined this definition of startups over a decade ago:

“A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”

It also applies to what it takes to build a community from the ground up. You are experimenting, testing, learning, and implementing on a continuous basis so you can reach a repeatable and scalable community. In other words, building the community flywheel.

I share more about the community flywheel in “Community-in-a-Box”, but I want to share a bit about the last part of this flywheel because it is the most important of part. Many communities suffer from a disease called same-itis. This is where every event is the same template repeated over and over again without variation. While there is some value in a repeatable and dependable model, in time your members start to grow bored with the lack of spontaneity. As mentioned when discussing the flywheel, part of what keeps members engaged is building novelty into the content…