Community Stories

Yaro Bagriy is the creator of Playgroup, a new-age community-building platform. He previously started a community for newsletter enthusiasts called Newsletter Crew, which later got acquired. In this episode, we discuss growth and engagement strategies for communities, the ideal size of the community, and why we should build paid & private communities.

In this bonus episode, Paras and I pick topics and discuss how to start a career in community building, why is building a community for a brand/business different from creator and what should be the ideal community platform to hosts communities.

Kim Johnson, Head of Community at Geneva talks about her time at Glossier building community ambassadors program and other initiatives which created experiences to celebrate people. She talks about challenges a community leader can face and how you can balance scale and growth with true community and connection. She discussed her ideal community-building platform and shares 3 pieces of advice for new community builders who are just getting started in their journey of building communities.   

Emily Pik and Tom Guthrie, co-founders of Propel - a cohort-based private community join me on Community Stories to talk about their day to day operations of running a paid community and why it's good to have a paid community, defining north star of a community, how to select members for the paid community by learning their motivation, how not to define a community and what's the difference between having an audience vs having a community.   

In this episode, Ian talks about how status works in online communities and dive into community-building platforms like Discord, Reddit and explain why is Discord winning. Discord won by building 10x better spaces for communities. By selling status, they have also managed to capture more value from those communities than other platforms.

Link to Ian Vanagas Twitter

Arvid Kahl joins me on Community Stories to talk about the audience-first approach, building relationships and his latest book The Embedded Entrepreneur, prev Audience First. Audience-first means exactly what it sounds like: you start with the audience. Arvid shares his lesson building a bootstrap business, how he leveraged the audience to write his first book Zero to Sold and why he is writing Audience First. This book will teach you how to build a business the right way from the beginning: with an audience that you want to serve and that will serve you.

In this episode, John talks about building communities, newsletters and how all that he does like sending a daily newsletter, engaging with the audience on Twitter, engaging with a community on Indie Hackers is intentional and aligned with his business objectives. He explores the topic of creating YEN.FM.   

In this episode, KP shares the story on building the leverage on the internet by building multiple products and creating Cuppa: a 1-1 virtual coffee platform with talent sourced from Twitter. He is currently working as a Program Director of On Deck No-Code Fellowship.

In this episode, Tara talks about brands building communities, the intersection between marketing and communities.   

In this episode, Christina shares her story behind creating ContentUK community to gather content marketers in the UK and why she decided to pivot from free to the paid community.