Ten True Regulars

To build a successful community, you don't need 1,000 true fans.

You need ten true regulars.

This may contradict what most people imagine about communities-- spaces with hundreds or thousands of people actively contributing and forming relationships where everyone is engaged and involved.

In reality, only a small percentage of your members will actively participate. If the 1% rule is accurate, then 99% of your community will remain passive.¹

This dynamic is evident in the open-source ecosystem as well. In one study, shared by Nadia Asparouhova in her book Working in Public, researchers found that less than 5% of developers were responsible for over 95% of code and social interactions in over 85% of open-source projects on GitHub.

For those building a new community, this is an opportunity.

You don't need a lot of active members to get conversations flowing; you only need the right few.

When new members join your community and see dozens of new posts and hundreds of new comments every week, they won't know if all that activity is coming from ten people or 100 people.

Ten great regulars can have a positive impact on hundreds or thousands of members. The scalability of community is truly remarkable.

However, getting to ten true regulars is not easy. My recommendation:

Start with three.

Get to the point where you have three members who are coming back every day (or most days) and posting and commenting.

You probably already know the three people. A lot of successful communities have the same founding story: "It was just me and a few friends in a group, and it slowly grew from there."

Who are you already talking to about the topic of the community? What three people would you would text first with a question? You've already validated that they're motivated. They could be your founding members.

Ask them if they'd be interested in joining a small group of friends who are interested in the same topic. Once you get them together, start conversations, discuss interesting articles, and share learnings.

Be yourselves, the same way you would in a private text conversation. Be weird, tell jokes, have fun. It's that kind of organic, quirky core that can spark a thriving community.

Slowly invite more people, but don't invite too many at once, or you'll smother the flame. Be selective and keep curating.

New members can significantly influence your community’s vibes while it’s still small, so choose wisely. You're building a cultural core that future members will observe and conform to. This is also why it's important to build with diversity in mind from day one. By starting early, it becomes woven into the fabric of your community.

When you see someone new to the group becoming more active, make them feel included, message them, thank them for contributing, tag them in posts, and write jokes that include them. Make them feel like "one of us." Each time you add another true regular, your community core is strengthened.

How will you know when you have ten true regulars? There isn't a perfect formula. Here's one option I'm testing out with a client who's launching a new community:

Total number of members who post or comment in the community on at least three days of the week, for four weeks in a row.

Try it out. Or choose whatever metric you want as long as it's tracking consistent contribution over time. Looking at total active members won’t tell you if any of your members are becoming “regulars”. You need to know if your members are building a habit of engagement.

tl;dr: Instead of trying to get hundreds of people to engage in your community, focus on getting ten true regulars.

Caveats:

1. The size and needs of a community can vary widely depending on its purpose and goals, and it's possible that some communities may need more than 10 regulars to thrive (eg. a two-sided marketplace needs critical mass to work)

2. A community that is heavily dominated by a small group of regulars may discourage others from participating, so balance the engagement of your power members with creating a culture of inclusion as you expand your membership

1. The 1% rule isn’t so much a rule as much as a useful way of remembering that most of your community content will be created by a small percentage of your users