Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
Issue 1: the first 100 members and creating a magical onboarding journey
Hi, I’m Emilie, and I’m launching this newsletter, Connection Engine, to discuss reflections and lessons on community building in a digital world. If you’re a community builder or just curious about community work, you can join the fun by subscribing below!
We all know that feeling of belonging to something — comfort, happiness, peace. It feels like magic being in your place with your people and being able to play your role in the glue that holds that space together. Many communities capture these ephemeral, magical moments of the human condition and turn them into lasting, life-changing relationships. This is the magic of community.
It’s so magical, in fact, that you often forget about the man behind the curtain, the team creating the framework so this powerful and spontaneous force of human experience can seem to organically fall together.
In the early days, very rarely does a community just happen. In building one of my first communities, I spent hours and hours a day searching for people online and recruiting them to join. Going through LinkedIn profiles, Twitters, Reddits, blogs. Scouring personal websites for email or contact information. Reaching out, then following up, following up again. And when I say hours, I mean hours. But it worked. After those first few weeks of knocking on people’s virtual doors and proving my community’s value, it started to happen on its own.
But before that…your first 100 members.
The First 100
Remember the membership description in your community strategy doc? The first 100 members in your community are key. Why? They will overwhelmingly set the tone for the community (another part of your doc!) and play a pivotal role in how it grows. The first 100 are the seeds of your community’s garden — how you plant them is very important.
“Your first members set the tone for every new member who joins after them. So you want to get the right people in there first. You want people who will be genuinely invested, and will have a high standard for the content they contribute to the community. You want givers, who are bought into creating something new together.” - David Spinks
The great part is that you get to hand select these members and extend personal invitations to all of them. You accomplish a few things just by doing this:
Your first members know you, the human behind the community, the person behind the curtain.
You know your first members, who will be a part of your core team and teach you a lot about your community.
You have time to gain a sense of the pulse of the community and focus on learnings in a smaller group before the growth happens.
So…where do you find the first 100 members?
The internet is a gift. It makes it easier than ever to meet other people. And not just anyone — people with specific interests, expertise, hobbies, passions. You just have to be willing to put in the work (and also become a bit of a digital super spy).
You’ll quickly learn that building the foundation for a great community requires doing things that don’t scale. Your initial processes will take way more time than you think they should. They won’t be efficient and they might be effective, but I guarantee they’ll be worth it. At the very least you’ll know what didn’t work, which is a win in itself.
I built one of my first communities from five members to over a thousand by first finding people with similar interests and actively recruiting them to join. Good places to start doing this:
Twitter
Meetup
Substack
Facebook groups
Reddit (a true gem for community building and research)
Discord
Don’t blast spam to other online communities and poach new members for the sake of bumping your community membership numbers. Use these tools as research to thoughtfully find people you think would really benefit from what you’re building.
Community tip: I reached out to other community leaders in similar spaces and expressed how grateful I’d be if they joined and shared what I was building with their memberships. Almost all of them were sympathetic and receptive. Remember, community managers are people people, but they’re people, too.
Once you find members you’d be honored to have join your community, your work begins in convincing them why they should join. People are busy. Keep it simple and get to your point with your first message, which shouldn't be longer than a few sentences and have an intro, show some of your community’s value, and end with a call to action:
“Hi, _____! I’m reaching out because I came across your profile and love your contributions to ____. I’m growing an online ____ community and am looking for people interested in ____. As a member, you’ll __present value__ (example: receive invitations to our private events where speakers will discuss their own experiences and take live questions from our community).
Given your interests, I think you'd like what I’m building and I would be so honored if you joined as an early member! Let me know if you’d like a link to join.”
This is just one of many drafts you can use, but the takeaways:
Keep it simple
Keep it honest
Personalize, personalize, personalize.
Again, your first 100 members are going to be brought on by processes that don’t scale: personalized outreach, 1:1 calls, personalized follow ups, personalized suggestions, personalized emails.
Which brings us to the next part…onboarding.
Onboarding your first 100
So you’ve done your initial outreach, you have a few people who expressed interest in being early members, and you have the skeleton for your community. Now what?
Onboarding time!
A great onboarding process is really about personalization, especially when you’re just launching a community. Once your community grows are you going to schedule 1,000 1:1 calls? Probably not. But is it necessary in the beginning? Yes.
Onboarding your first 100 members is going to be very arduous and time-consuming — but just for the community manager, not for the members. Here’s the truth about onboarding: if you do a great job with it no one should realize it. It’s the harsh truth, but it’s a bit like product design. If it’s intuitive, simple, and requires little extra effort to know the gist of what’s going on, congratulations, you’ve designed a smooth onboarding experience!
As the person behind the curtain, your job is to design a magical welcome journey for each member on the other side and create a delightful adventure while also making it easy for the member to engage from the first interaction with the community.
“Great experiences produce an appetite for value, set expectations, and get you there easily with gratifying results.” - Jono Bacon
There is no one right way to create a delightful onboarding experience, but I’ll share a few tips that have worked for me.
1. 1:1 Calls - Meet the human behind the mission
Schedule 1:1 calls with as many of your early members as possible. They get to meet the person behind the curtain and you get to know your earliest members — win win! These calls don’t have to be super technical or serious. The point is to get to know the human behind the username, or in some cases, the person behind the NFT pfp.
I chatted with community leader Jerod Morris recently on the importance of these calls. He said something that has proven so true in my experience: having those calls early on creates an intimacy that makes it easier for members to provide honest feedback and help you improve upon processes down the road.
You’re setting the bricks down for a foundation of trust and building those relationships from the ground up. When the time comes to ask for feedback, it’ll be easier to do so with people that know a bit about you outside of the community context.
2. Create a simple, yet informative welcome flow for each member type
Any new members in your community should quickly know how they can best find value and contribute to the community. The challenge comes with translating all the awesome parts about your community into a digestible package that is clean, clear, and provides glimpses of magical moments with little to no friction. No biggie, right?
Always make it clear how to get started and what the next step is. If it’s confusing or too difficult at any point, you’ll lose potentially awesome members. I’m a fan of step-by-step welcome flows that show progress. Personally Typeform has been a favorite for this.
You also have to consider the onboarding process for each of the member types outlined in your strategy doc. Will an expert need the same kind of information as a beginner? Probably not. Will some members require more of a white-glove service approach? Probably. Personalize, personalize, personalize.
Some cool onboarding tools for inspiration:
Discovered through startupy.
3. Provide more thorough documentation
While it shouldn’t be a main focus of your onboarding (if I received a five-page FAQ guide when I first joined a community I’d be mega stressed), you should have some onboarding documentation drafted should your members want more.
Imagine you’re joining your community for the first time. Walk through your flow and ask yourself any question that might come up. Put those questions into your document — there are no stupid questions and it’s important to reiterate this to your community.
You can link to this in your community as a resource and also send it to members if they want to learn more. When things pick up, you’ll be glad you took the time to do this.
Bonus: I love how Water & Music, a research DAO, does their member onboarding.
Onboarding at every stage
So you have your first 100 members, created a delightful onboarding experience that welcomes your members without overwhelming them, and drafted documentation. Now what?
Onboarding is an ongoing process.
Onboarding happens to some extent at every stage of a community member’s journey. Humans aren’t static, so communities aren’t static. You’ll be introducing new members, new activities, new events, and new updates to your community — and you will have to bring your membership onboard.
“Many people think of onboarding only when a member first joins a community, but onboarding happens every time a member re-enters a community space. Communities should always be onboarding. Onboarding is the process of providing members with the context necessary to function in the community. It is needed because context changes constantly.” - Ian Vanagas
Your onboarding process will likely undergo a few changes as well throughout your community experience and will definitely change as your community grows. You also need to think about onboarding in terms of your member types — personalized approaches apply at every level.
As you probably know at this point, community work is a lot of experimentation. There’s no formula for people, and the magic of a great community is often the result of many iterations and testing from the person behind the curtain. See what sticks, and make it as delightful as you can.
Congratulations! Creating a magical onboarding is no easy feat. Things that seem effortless to members are actually the result of lots of strategy and work behind the scenes.
In the next issue I’ll introduce my version of the community building cycle. We covered strategy, recruitment, and onboarding. Up next: engagement and what, in my experience, is the most important quality in community builders.
Until then, thanks for being a part of Connection Engine!
About me
I’m Emilie Kormienko, community designer at startupy. Why am I doing this? To share my learnings on community work, to learn more myself, and to make new internet frens :)
Want to read more? Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my newsletter here.
Have a community question for a future issue or just want to chat? Email me at ekormienko@gmail.com.