This story starts a year ago. At the beginning of 2020, I went to Uganda with a good friend, as we both decided to help a friend there build a much-needed school. We are not construction professionals nor non-profit people. But we still felt we could help, leveraging our somewhat more accessible knowledge of digital marketing and crowdfunding via friends and family. We wanted to create a viral YouTube video to help crowd-fund the school. Neither I nor my friend had any kind of real audience which was somewhat of an obstacle, to say the least.
We are both pretty optimistic people so we decided we would grow an audience for my friend Mansur (which I totally recommend you follow. He is hilarious!) a perfect fit for such a project — a world traveler who likes to create videos. All this without really knowing what we were doing.
We decided to try and build him an audience via YouTube, so later when he has more subscribers, we could publish the viral video in order to help the school. Sounds great on paper, but it’s, to put it mildly, pretty fucking hard.
Constructing a school in rural Uganda isn’t easy either. On top of all the usual problems like figuring out prices and helping physically move concrete and other materials, we had to use our own money to get things done. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret it at all! I am just sure that even x2 the amount of money would have produced more results, especially after seeing how things work and what they cost. We managed to gather some of our own money and some from friends which was used to construct a beam for the roof of the school! This was a small success.
To be frank, the school isn’t complete yet, and we are still planning to finish it. Without a big audience for Mansur it will be hard to get people involved in the project. In our case, a larger audience could help children get the education they need. On the bright side, a year later, as of today, Mansur is posting videos somewhat regularly and has gotten more than 900 subscribers, not a lot but still a significant amount we intend to harness towards building the school.
Creating a Micro-Community accidentally
COVID-19 hit and the whole fundraising idea was delayed (we will still push for it, don’t worry). But more importantly for our story, this whole saga got me thinking about my own audience, how important it is, and how I like to write (which I neglected in the last two years). Not to mention the constant barrage of much-needed encouragement from way smarter people telling us how important an audience is. Here are just some examples from Trends.vc, @channingallen from IndieHackers.
I started thinking about tackling this problem, as I usually do, systematically. I wrote ideas for communities, newsletters, and things that I can bring to the table — they all felt uninspired for some reason, with no real market fit or viable go-to-market.
Still, as an optimist (or, some would say, a fool) I started working on some audience and community ideas. A daily developer aggregation newsletter that was doomed from the start, a Facebook group for developers that want to create a startup that also didn’t blow up. I also created a slack community that didn’t gain much traction. I spent a month trying to create a developer-centric Instagram page which resulted in the amazing milestone of… 0 followers. And these are just the examples of ideas I actually pursued and didn’t quit the same day. You get the idea.
While feeling like I was stagnating, I remembered an old quote I like: “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”, which got me thinking. Why not gather a few friends who also want to create an audience and start getting more immersed in this topic, learning from each other and making progress together? After all, there must be some people I know who are pushing toward the same goal. Creating a small group is easy with chat apps. Zoom is great if we need to talk. It sounded like a sensible thing to do to get me going.
I started by creating a list of people I thought might be a good match and I sent them a message along the lines of:
“Hi <name>, what would you think about joining a group I’m starting, to talk about audience building, where we can share ideas and grow together. If it becomes boring you can leave, no hard feelings ❤️”.
Four people joined(!) I’m still not sure if they joined because I’m such a charmer or because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings :) but it worked! We were four people with the same agenda, talking about it. Back then I didn’t realize the goldmine I hit — compound interest is indeed a hidden wonder.
Something I didn’t quite realize when I tried to create a large audience is that value is created when you or others really need something, not when you work on creating an audience only for the sake of it.
And this was it — real value.
These four people are people I really admire and like to talk to, but more than that, they are people who share the same wave-length on the subject of creating an audience.
Some of the most impactful members were people that joined via friends of friends. One example is Snir, who joined via a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend(!) He is doing an amazing job growing his long-term investment audience. The investment niche on Twitter and YouTube is highly competitive and is usually held by widely known investors, not a CTO turned long-term investment expert. He started with 320 followers on Twitter and today he reached more than 1300 followers! He has done an incredible job, which we as a group had the pleasure to hear about every step of the way.
Mind you, there is no way I would’ve met him any other way — this still boggles my mind! Take a moment to imagine you had the chance to meet other successful people and be a part of their journey. This includes taking part in brainstorming content and strategy ideas, helping each other grow, and acquire other perspectives — the ROI is almost immeasurable.
A year later, we’ve grown to be 11 highly active members (which is no easy feat), we’ve met virtually more than 15 times, we all shared ideas, helped each other, and progressed toward our goals — we have created a thriving Micro-Community 🎉
During my journey toward creating my 5k community, I discovered that creating a much smaller community — a Micro-Community — was immensely valuable. If I still wanted to pursue the 5k community goal, this Micro-Community would be an essential asset to get there.
What is a Micro-Community exactly?
So, how do I define a Micro-Community? Good question!
I’d say a Micro-Community (or MC for short) to a big community is like what an intimate BBQ with friends is to a food trade show event.
A BBQ with friends is a closed event with people you know and (hopefully) like where you share a common love for food, share stories, and have quality time together. Maybe you even help each other cook. It is most often a very small group of people relative to the thousands of people that attend trade shows.
In a trade show, like a 5k member community, you can meet way more people, but the connections are weaker and naturally, you don’t know most of the participants. There is more advertising (people using the community for marketing) and less interpersonal communication.
Both share a love for food, but they get there through different means. The BBQ with friends probably fosters more deep conversations and relationships instead of networking with more people and reaching a bigger audience.
I personally prefer tight-knit groups, where we can share ideas freely, help each other over long periods and “be there along the way” — less networking and more real connections. A good BBQ evening with friends fosters real connections and interactions, not to mention it is tastier 😋
Here are the bare necessities you need for an MC based on my experience, so you could mold it to your needs. An MC follows 3 basic properties:
- Small group with a shared goal: A group of 5–20 people so people can still develop meaningful personal connections.
- Conversation medium: Signal, Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp… group.
- Recurring meetings: Live meeting every other week, we use Zoom at the moment — could be optional, but I highly recommend it.
Why?
You could say, “Ok Agam, nice idea, but doesn’t it seem like a timid way of creating a community? what are you seeing that I’m not?” — You are basically asking what are the advantages of this.
Well, good question, as even I didn’t realize it until a year later.
These are the main advantages:
- Low barrier to entry: Creating a >1k community is no simple feat, it is doable, but I feel like people run after it without realizing that it is really hard to achieve and that most communities like it were created without having a big number KPI in mind. For a Micro-Community, finding a handful of friends is not too hard, and creating a chat group is, for the most part, free.
- High ROI: This is something you will have to take my word for, it does change with the people you bring in but for us, the value returned highly outweighed the investment. Many ideas were shared, new friendships were created and I feel like a lot more is to come.
- Goal advancing: Coming back to the “Average of 5 people…” quote, the moment you have a group with which you share your thoughts, issues, and ideas, you advance and start thinking about your goals in a more palpable way. Think about that coffee date you had with a friend and they gave you the motivation to advance with your idea or a new perspective — now this is systematized.
- Accountability: We also use the MC as an accountability group. Every time I want to slack off I remember that I will update the rest of the group in the next meeting, which makes me more accountable.
- Deep conversations: I’m not new to big communities, it is either you are one of the popular kids or you are pretty much a lurker. I always felt like there wasn’t a lot of room for deep conversation, mostly it was textual, which also removed layers of back and forth information that could’ve been exchanged live.
- A small group helps each other more: When you are in a big community, there is a sense of being part of a group, but it isn’t intense as in a group of fewer than 20 people. Here there is more of a feeling of “we are in this together”, so the help isn’t necessarily a give and take one like in communities where people usually post as a marketing channel. In an MC you feel more genuinely connected.
- Meeting new people: One of the cornerstones of a Micro-Community is that you don’t have to know everyone at first, but you gather around a common interest. Almost half of the people in our MC are people I didn’t know before, and I’m super glad I do now. Without a reason to hold the group together, I wouldn’t have had the chance or incentive to meet them, not to mention, take 1–2 hours every other week to talk to them.
Sounds great, but how do I start? What will it be about?
I’m glad you like the concept! Well, now the next steps are pretty easy. Are you an aspiring writer? An electronic music nerd? Algo-trading enthusiast? Any subject you want to advance in is valid!
Next, make a list of 2–5 friends who share this same goal and ask them if they want to join a chat group and talk about it once in a while (Pro-Tip: meetings every 2 weeks are perfect, not too much, not too little). If they have friends that might be a fit, ask them to join too.
Congratulations, you now have your own Micro-Community! Isn’t that slick? This is the gist of it, I have many more tips and anecdotes on how to effectively run such a Micro-Community, which I’ll write about soon.
Summary and next steps
The number of cool ideas, new people I met, and progress I made this past year can undoubtedly be attributed to our Micro-Community. Who knows, maybe it will sprout more Micro-Communities, or grow to be a small-big one.
I truly believe it might be the right path for many others — you don’t need to create a 5k community from day one, start with a Micro-Community next time ;)
I’ve learned tons of tricks and I had a lot of thoughts about this concept that I want to continue to share with you.
If that sounds interesting you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter at @agammore for more related content, or hit me up via a DM for tips on creating your own Micro-Community — I’ll try to be as responsive as possible. I’m super excited about where this idea can go, so let’s start creating.
I wanted to thank @TomGranot, Andy Katz and my beloved sister @Leeam332 for reading the drafts of this article and helping it sound a lot better ❤️
