The 93% Rule That Predicts If Your Community Will Succeed

There are things that I have observed that content creators tend to do when thinking about or starting community that gets in their way from being successful and scaling. When you come out of the content world, you think in followers and audience. I talk out at you, you talk back at me, but no one's talking to each other. That is going to be a very difficult road if you're trying to take that model of an audience and just like slap it into chat or slap it into an activity feed or slap it into even a course. It just doesn't work that well. My definition and our definition at Mighty of community is bring a group of people together who are navigating the same transition and I'm introducing them to each other and I am giving them things to do that they can go and apply in their life. That model is actually more similar to, say, public speaking or a specific brand of content, which is not about an expectation that your audience is just going to consume it, but rather your members— just listen to the difference in the language— that your members are going to apply that thing in their lives and then come back and talk to each other or do it together with each other in pursuit of results and transformation that they can't get on their own. So what I have observed is that content creators take what they know, being kind of the center of attention, being the place for expertise, and they try to shoehorn that into a community or a membership where it's still about them. And then the only way that they can make it about them is if they start offering more and more of themselves to paying members. So now you actually have the worst of all worlds where everybody wants something from you, and now you've actually asked them to pay you and you've given them the option of coaching or the option of my exclusive content. You're now having to do more and more and more and more stuff for them. That is not the goal. So you can love content, you can love public speaking, and if you build a community that is about how your members are finding and building relationships with each other, it should not be a drag on you. Now, what do creators say when I say that? They're like, but Gina, you don't understand, my members are there for me. My response to that is, when you are building the culture of your community, you want to build it explicitly so that they are able to see the value of each other. They are finding and building relationships with each other. And if you can create that dynamic, it will not be the drag on you that it will be if you're offering coaching and you're offering brand new exclusive content absolutely every week, and that it's about you having to create it all. We have a billion data points at Mighty Networks. Like, we are a platform that actually has scale in the world of community and courses and challenges and events. We can predict with 93% accuracy whether a community will succeed or fail based on one factor alone. It is the number of relationships that have been made or contacts that have been made between members. And so what that means is that you can absolutely create something really valuable in a membership that can scale. But if you make it about yourself, you are absolutely gonna be exhausted. And if you make it about the transition that your members are going through and that that's the reason they should join. And that the way that the community will be structured is so that they have their own groups that are applying your concepts in their lives and sharing their stories, experiences, and ideas with each other in pursuit of their best year ever. That is where you can create a really compelling business. That is where you are going to be able to have something that is sustainable and that you can go write a book, that you can go travel the world public speaking and decide if you just wanna spend your time making content for social media. All of that is great. You don't have to rely on brand deals, but you also have a community or a membership for brand deals, and we see a lot of folks. A lot of folks who are able to get premium brand deals because of the community of 30,000 members they have. So things that you can get as a content creator by having a membership beyond the revenue stream and the revenue diversification that it offers is just profound. And so Kind of coming back to where I started, if it doesn't feel right, don't do it. But if I could offer one way of doing it successfully, or at least trying it successfully, is don't set yourself up as the hero in your community or the most important person. Offer, well, if you join, I'm gonna give you unlimited one-on-one coaching, or even like 3 hours of one-on-one coaching every month. You will blow yourself out and it will make it so you're not actually that stoked about people. The nice thing about content is that it can be very clean and predictable and people are messy. But when you set people up with each other as the main reason that they are there, they are there to navigate a transition with each other, then it's really fun and really energizing. They're stoked you've brought them together. But they're not— it's not about you. It's about what you are creating and facilitating for your members to meet and build relationships with each other. And that is where the value is. How are creators using AI in their day-to-day systems? So the first and most obvious one is content production. And I think this is certainly true for creators at large. And in a community, content production is everything that you think it is. It is how are you coming up with new courses and course outlines? How are you writing articles and being able to use ChatGPT or Claude to be able to help you write articles or help you structure your framework? Another example is how do you take your basic course or your basic structure or framework and make it personalized or tailored to individual transitions or use cases. So your ability to use AI to take fundamental concepts and personalize them in smaller or more narrow ways, really powerful, and we see it all the time. Now, here's the downside of this. When you use AI for content production, a lot of it is really mediocre. So one of the things I think is so important if you are creating content for a community especially is that you are not just trying to produce a bunch of content and like pat yourself on the back because you posted your article for the week or you did your email newsletter for the week. It's so clearly written by AI. You just don't wanna do that. The second bucket, which is probably more interesting because it's increasingly happening and it's very popular across Mighty, is AI video avatars. So this is somebody who has lots of content and is like, if I can create a more personalized experience for my members because they can ask my AI avatar questions and AI avatar will answer them and create something that's like a special moment that is also super popular. There's a number of different providers. We embed all of those AI avatar providers into a Mighty Network. And then there's the unique and probably the most nascent as well, which is what we call People Magic. And this is what we do uniquely on Mighty. And it's all around how do you connect members to each other? Like, how do you play the role of amazing host without hiring a community manager or multiple community managers or having lots of VAs out there in the world? Well, People Magic is that software as well as a strategy, but the software that is connecting the most relevant members to each other. So taking questions that people are answering in your community and using natural language to connect people to each other based on how they answer those questions in your community. So being able to show similarities and suggest things that are pretty personalized to that person around starting a conversation. So this ability to see similarities, see also other members who are similar to that member that you've started down. I call it the daisy chain. So this ability to see this daisy chain of new and interesting members to explore, the ability to see a little mini bio of somebody and have more and more people in a community have those bios because we've helped create a little small little thing, but it makes a huge difference, which is answer 3 questions and AI helps create a bio for you. This is, in my opinion, and certainly the data that we see at Mighty, incredibly important for members joining and immediately seeing value from your community as members are able to make connections with more and more relevant people and learn more about those people than they can on other platforms. We want and need to build software using AI, but with a twist. And the twist is software and AI that is only there to help people meet and build relationships with other real human beings. That ultimately ends with AI helping us bring together a mastermind or a meetup in person in a location where those people would've never met other than from that digital community. So digital to in real life. Content production is just the beginning of the impact of AI on being a creator or a community builder or entrepreneur, certainly. But the true magic and value of AI is what we are going to be able to do in terms of creating new communities, wholly Guacamole. That is the future. Scaling real relationships and nurturing those relationships to a level of results and transformation you just simply can't get anywhere else. So with that, this is People Magic. I'm Gena Bianchini. And until the next episode, woo!