Acknowledgements: A huge thank you to the Hive team and the many community builders who have shared their wisdom with us over the years. This post is an attempt to synthesize those lessons. Special thanks to Therese Veith, Gergő Gáspár, Sam Chapman, Sarah Tegeler, and John Salter for reviewing this post. All mistakes and oversights are our own.

This post walks through some of our key insights from building Hive, a global community for farmed animal advocates, and other communities within and outside of the EA space. We walk through a three-phase approach to community building, and extensive notes in the footnotes. In short:

1. Phase 0: Solve a Problem, Don't Just Start a Group. Before you build anything, a specific group of people needs a compelling reason to gather.
2. Phase 1: The Cold Start Problem & Initial Growth. Obsessing over your first users, doing unscalable things to provide value, and [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) TL;DR:

(01:58) Why Were Writing This

(02:42) Phase 0: Solve a Problem, Dont Just Start a Group (Before you launch)

(04:28) Phase 1: The Cold Start Problem & Initial Growth (Months 0-3)

(07:19) Phase 2: Scaling, Setting up Systems, and Navigating the Messy Middle (Months 3-12)

(11:19) Phase 3: Maintaining and Supporting the Ecosystem (12+ months)

(14:28) Knowing When to Stop or Sunset

(15:44) Common Pitfalls to Avoid

(18:07) Share Your Journey

(18:49) Appendix: Quick Start Checklist

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.