Nick HutchisonFounder and CEO, BookThinkers

How can you efficiently build an online community?

16 Nov 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:00

In this segment, Nick Hutchison outlines four essential factors to consider when building an online community. First, you must be genuinely passionate about and resonate with the audience, as sustaining a community requires love for its members. Second, start with a small, well-defined niche that can be deep and later scale, following the principle of being "an inch wide and a mile deep." Third, assess whether the audience has a propensity to pay, since monetization will eventually be necessary. Fourth, ensure ease of access to the target market; without the ability to reach and engage the audience, community growth stalls. These criteria serve as a practical framework for evaluating and launching successful online communities.

Chapters

4 things you need to know. One is, am I passionate about this audience? Because creating a community, as you guys know, you guys have a massive following on Instagram, is a long labor of love, right? If you hate an audience, you won't be able to sustain. You genuinely won't be. There will be times it will get harder, especially when you turn it into a business. You'll just get irritated. So one is, do you love this audience? Do you vibe with it? Are you passionate about this audience? The second thing is, is it a small niche that will eventually grow into something bigger? It's important to start small, like Nail it and then scale it. Be an inch wide and a mile deep. The third thing is, do they have a propensity to pay at some point at least? Like, if you have to monetize your community, you can't make it free forever. And the last one is ease of access. Now, you may be in the largest market, like we were targeting first manufacturing and construction and oil and gas, massive markets at the time. But when we started going to those events, we couldn't vibe with them. We couldn't even get anyone to talk to us. There was no ease of access.