Single-speaker YouTube presentation (Kyle Ford) asserting that community is the top business to build in 2024–2026 and beyond. The speaker lays out a causal chain: platform-enabled "extraordinary engagement" leads members to form relationships and new habits, which produce better results; those results drive organic word-of-mouth growth, lowering dependence on paid ads and constant content production and creating recurring revenue. The talk cites Mighty Networks features ("people magic", "people explorer") as examples of technology now ready to deliver these effects, and mentions member experiences and monetization levers (paid events, onboarding "book drops", badges).
Chapters
I'm going to make a provocative statement here, which is I believe that community is the absolute number one business to build in 2024, 2025, and pretty much at any point in time hereafter. Why? Well, the technology is finally ready to create what a community business needs to be successful. And that is the following. Extraordinary engagement. This means that you're able to bring people in and because they're able to find and build relationships with around the things that are most important to them, that they keep coming back. That creates recurring revenue for you, but more importantly for each and every one of your members. It means that they are much more likely to get the results that your community promises them. I like to call results that you're able to create. How do you build the best year ever for your clients, for your members? So as you are able to get people extraordinary engagement and they keep coming back and they start making friends with the other members of your community, find valuable relationships, but they also then start building new practices. They get great ideas for new things that they can incorporate into their professional lives, into their personal lives, into the things that are most important to them. Then what happens? Well, they get results. And as they get results, first of all, it's so much easier to get results when you're doing it in a community of other people. It takes all of that self discipline that you need to have if you're trying to do it on your own. And it turns it into something that is easy, it's fun, it's expected, that you do things a certain way. And that's the power of building new practices and building new habits in the context of a community. So as you are able to get your members more and more and better and better results, guess what happens next? They talk about it. They talk about it to people who are not in your community, about how amazing your community is. And when you can get your members to talk about and recruit or nominate or invite in other members. First of all, that is free member acquisition. That means that you're not out there building expensive paid ad funnels. You're not setting up, you know, webinars that you have to do all of the time. You're not sending an endless stream of emails. You're not trying to build a social media following through adding videos every two hours across five different platforms, which is exhausting. Instead, you are focused in on how you can create extraordinary value and extraordinary engagement for the members that you bring together. And as you do that, they then become the people that, that recruit in and bring in your new members. So your business is growing, you're getting people amazing results. They're actually having a lot of fun doing it. Guess what else you're not having to do at this point? Build a lot of content. And all of that time that you've built content, or all of that money you've spent on paid ads, now you can actually invest in things that are important to you in your life. But also, if you want to invest back in your community and you can create absolutely incredible experiences, you can build magical first experiences for your members where you're able to offer them a book drop when they first join, or you're able to organize events that they actually pay for over and above their membership fee. And you're able to do things like offer them badges or even organize a scavenger hunt. All of these things become really easy and light lifts to do. All because you have focused first and foremost on extraordinary engagement. So why doesn't everybody do this? The technology really wasn't ready until now. The folks that say community is hard, they've been building community on platforms that were all built for people who already know each other. And when you build a community on a platform for people that already know each other, or brand new platforms, upstart platforms that actually haven't been able to build very sophisticated things because they're just trying to make chat work, that's okay. But you're not going to be able to stand out in a sea of sameness with a community built on those platforms. You just aren't going to be able to do it. So at mighty, what we've done is because we already have all of the basics in place, we've been able to really invest and spend time on what's that next level of, of extraordinary engagement. So we call that people magic. And people magic shows up in a mighty network as a people explorer. So when your members join or when they are a part of a new program, they actually have the ability to explore all the members who are in that particular program or in your community at large. What happens when people can see more than just the people who are chatting? They discover new and cool people that they're stoked to meet and that who are stoked to meet them too. And as you do that and folks can actually understand who else is there, guess what happens? They have more people to talk to, they have more people to learn from than just you and your content. And anybody who tells you that this isn't possible isn't paying attention. Anybody who tells you that a community is just too hard and that you can't get engagement isn't paying attention. And anybody who tells you that creating a successful, profitable six, seven, eight figure business today, in 2024 or 2025 or after, they are living in the past where they don't want to believe that technology actually can make the biggest difference in your digital business. They don't want to believe it because they want you to pay for their content system. They want you to pay for their course. But the truth of the matter is that the absolute most valuable digital businesses from here on out are going to be based on a community. It is going to be a business that creates relationships amongst people that you're bringing together, and it is going to create progress and creativity and innovation in ways that have simply never been possible before. That is why community is the number one business to build in 2024,2025,2026 and beyond.
