How to Find your Community Wedge
A framework for differentiating your community in a noisy market
It’s never been easier to start a community.
Just click “launch” on Slack, or Circle, or [insert platform here] and you’ll be smashing humans together in no time.
The result? There are more online communities than ever before.
That could lead you to believe that you shouldn’t launch another one. “There are already 100 communities about AI, should I build another one?”
The short answer: Yes!
Today I’ll show you how you can find your “community wedge” and create a unique community in a noisy market.
THIS EMAIL WILL TEACH YOU:
(in 10 minutes or less)
✔️ Why people love to community hop
✔️ How community benefits evolve over time
✔️ Community framework: The Five Community Wedges
✔️ How five real communities found their wedge
✔️ 30-min exercise: Find Your Wedge (+ FREE worksheet)
Let’s get cookin’…👨🍳
WHY PEOPLE LOVE TO COMMUNITY HOP
A recent Reddit study set out to discover why people participate in multiple communities focused on the same topic.
What they learned was members derive one of three benefits from each community (reworded for clarity):
🤝 Connection: form relationships with similar types of people
👀 Consumption: find specific types of content, discussions, and information
👨🎨 Creation: find the largest possible audience for their content
The study found that these three benefits are in conflict.
“…the more a community provides one of these benefits, the less able it will be to provide the other two. A single community might provide two of these benefits, but almost never all three.
This, my friends, is known as a “trilemma”.
Because it’s difficult for a single community to offer all three benefits, multiple communities form to fill in the gaps.
HOW COMMUNITY BENEFITS EVOLVE OVER TIME
Let’s play this out. Say you join a newly launched community focused on tacos called The Tacollaboration. 🌮
That’s right, you’re a Tacollaborator.
🛎️ DING!
STAGE 1: 🤝 CONNECTION 📈
It’s the early days and it’s still small. Everyone’s basking in their love of tacos and feeling each other. The vibes are immaculate.
You get to know a few of the other members and become friends, or “Guacamigos” as it’s known in the community.
But soon people start to catch wind of this little taco party you have going on and they want in.
The community grows.
🛎️ DING!
STAGE 2: 👀 CONSUMPTION 📈 (CONNECTION 📉)
As more people join, the depth of connection isn’t what it used to be. It’s getting too big to know everyone.
But you now have even more people to learn from. The content is rich 🤌. It becomes the go-to spot for taco news and information. Word spreads.
The community grows.
🛎️ DING!
STAGE 3: 👨🎨 CREATION 📈 (CONSUMPTION 📉 CONNECTION 📉)
Who loves consumers? That’s right. Creators. With content consumers rushing to the community, the tree of reputation is ripe and ready for harvesting.
It’s great because you start gaining a following as a taco expert, and your newsletter, “The Taco Times”, is growing fast.
But the vibe changes. People start dropping dope taco memes to get more likes. There’s a lot more noise. Content quality goes down.
The range of topics also expands. Some members start talking about burritos and quesadillas (blasphemy). You’re no longer building new relationships and it becomes harder to find the specific taco information you crave.
You start looking for a new community where you can feel connected again.
🛎️ DING!
The cycle starts over with a new community.
—
This is the evolution of communities. They’re never static. And there’s always a window of opportunity to come in at the connection level and eat the existing community’s tacos.
⧨ COMMUNITY FRAMEWORK: THE FIVE COMMUNITY WEDGES
The Reddit study gave us a window into how to differentiate your community, but not a complete list.
In my experience, there are five wedges you can use to insert your community into an already busy market:
Size - Because when the other communities go big, you go small (or vice versa)
Benefits - Because the other communities can’t be good at everything
Flavor - Because ain’t nobody got your specific style and voice
Identity - Because every identity has infinite sub-identities
Format - Because people get tired of Yet Another Zoom Call (YAZC™)
Look at the communities that are out there and figure out which of these wedges you can use to create something novel and exciting.
FIVE REAL COMMUNITIES WHO FOUND THEIR WEDGE
CMX went big and global with a conference when all the existing community events were small and local (size and format). We also created a brand voice that was more innovative and relatable (flavor).
Sales Hacker focused on providing quick “hacks” for how to improve your sales (benefit) and their culture was all about being experimental (flavor). It appealed to a unique group of salespeople who had more of a hacker mindset (identity).
Tech Ladies saw that a lot of communities focused on women in tech were only for engineers. They went broader by focusing on all women who work at tech companies (identity) and providing a job matchmaking service (benefit).
Hampton saw existing players like YPO charge a premium but members had to self-organize their groups, and the vibe felt old and stuffy. So they created a community where members get put in groups facilitated by professional coaches (benefits) and created a distinct brand that felt modern and exciting (flavor).
The Dinner Party found that all the existing support groups for people who lost a loved one drew an older crowd and didn’t feel super cozy. They designed an experience that focused on people in their 20’s and 30’s (identity), welcomed dark humor (flavor), and hosted it in members’ homes, potluck style (format).
30-MIN EXERCISE: FIND YOUR WEDGE (+ FREE WORKSHEET)
Click here to get your free “Find Your Wedge” Notion worksheet
Let’s put this framework into action.
Choose a community in your market from whom you’d like to differentiate
In the second column, describe what their community is doing for each wedge
In the third column, write down how you might do things differently
Duplicate the table and repeat the process for any other communities you want to analyze.
A vision should quickly start to form for how your community can stand out in your market.
The wonderful thing is you don’t need to use all five wedges. Even using just one can be enough to set your community apart.
A hypothetical example:
Say you wanted to launch a community event for startups and tech. SXSW is a community you want to differentiate from. Here’s how you might fill out the worksheet:
I can already start to see the wonderful community you’re going to launch. SXSW won’t stand a chance 😉
HERE’S WHAT WE COVERED TODAY:
✔️ Why people love to community hop
✔️ How community benefits evolve over time
✔️ Community framework: The Five Community Wedges
✔️ How five real communities found their wedge
✔️ 30-min exercise: Find Your Wedge (+ FREE worksheet)
…happy wedging! ⊿
Your explanation on how communities evolve is spec-taco-ular! I imagine you can stop that evolution if you want, right? For example, you can cap membership, like Jay Clouse has done. Or, you could have exclusive sub-communities within your bigger community, right? Like shoving wedges into your larger community evolutionary ecosystem. But I guess those are luxury strategies. For someone like me who can't recruit enough community members to fill a couch, better find myself a better wedge.
Interesting to know that there's also a trillema on community. Was thinking it's only a blockchain issue😄
These are great perspective you've laid out here David and I look forward to testing them out