Outcome Oriented Communities

alex

— 2 min read

I've got mixed feelings about the word "community," at least in the context of technology and startups. On the one hand, I more or less grew up on the internet. If it weren't for the niche websites, forums, and IRC channels + the friends I made there in the early aughts, I'd be much worse off today. Might not even be around at all. Which is to say: communities + connection on the internet remains a topic near and dear to me.

On the other hand, it's a cliche nowadays that Big Tech (TM) has absorbed and sanitized much of the internet, and online community is no exception. The great faceless machine has co-opted "community" to mean "marketing / customer service for my brand, but 'community members' subsidize the labor," which... ew. 2020 made this all the more apparent as online community got hot (for obvious reasons) and everyone and their mother jumped in to bolt community onto their offerings or fund new companies in the space.

To be clear, I'm very much pro-capitalism. A sustainable commercial model is good for the product, good for the users, and good for the creator. And sometimes brands really do have raving fandoms willing to provide free labor! But it's hard to keep the good parts of community while sticking it under a sales & marketing function with a can of venture funding gasoline. (Harder still not to roll my eyes at the hype cycle where everyone thought "community" was the magic solution to their rising CACs, but I digress...)

Last week I discovered a series of videos by Rob Fitzpatrick (of Mom Test fame) about outcome oriented communities. In Rob's words, an outcome-oriented community is a "business model [...] when people join not just to hang out with each other but because they're trying to achieve something or reach a destination." Rob gives the example of his author group: members want to publish a book, and they're willing to pay for a community that helps with that goal. Thinking about it, I realized I've been exposed to a lot of great communities with this shape. Off the top of my head:

  • MicroConf: bootstrapped software startups
  • MicroCapClub: investors in small < ~$250MM market cap public companies
  • Stoic Strength: olympic weightlifting + strength training (I train with Connor)
  • Leading Edge: right-brained personal evolution for left-brained high achievers
  • + I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton here, even just from my own experiences

Each of the above is a community and also a standalone business. People are willing to pay to be members in some way/shape/form and the value exchange is clear. There's less of a hard-sell-sales-funnel or exploitative "users are the product" vibe. In other words: incentives are better aligned.

Back to Rob's videos: it feels like we are still in the early stages of this model. Much of community structure and ops seems to happen by accident rather than by design. The software guy / founder in me can't also help but notice: the tooling is also scattered, with all of these communities living in an ad-hoc combination of social (twitter, instagram), forum software (circle, invision, discourse), group chats, etc... Might there be something to build in "outcome oriented community software"? Maybe. But for now, it's an interesting frame to think about.

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