Community

“This is the future. It's all about having your community, which is very small, For which you are relevant.”

“You look at studies of history and you find in studies of history what brings about happiness and health past a certain amount of money. Of basic subsistence life. There's no correlation between the amount of money you have and the amount of healthy happiness …”

“Especially in a world of AI where everything's easier to build, the moat is community. It's how many people want to buy your stuff because they want to associate with you.”

“And when, after I left and when Vazirix decided to basically sunset the whole thing, It was a community that fought and said, you know, we want it, give it to us.”

“There's a new pattern of entrepreneurship, which is, it's not build product, then build community and trust. It's build community and trust in a niche you care about, and then layer products on top.”

“Actually, at this point, to be very honest, except for the community, nothing.”

“Building a community. That, that is the engine that can take you to a billion dollars in ARR, but you have to start building that early on.”

“I think it makes sense to create your own community when you have something that is free for everybody, or it's a big portion that is free, or if it's open source, if it's a developer product. But if it's not that, then you have a closed product. People need t…”

“A lot of founders, especially the tech entrepreneurs, tend to think of the tool they want to build, as opposed to the community. The primary paradigm tends to be, here's a tool. It's a hammer. It's a screwdriver. I give it to users to do a specific thing. And …”

“But if I were running a SaaS aimed at a niche, community would be far down on the list of things that I wanted to start. Unless I felt like there was an extreme vacuum in the space and I already had an audience. Where I could kickstart that community.”

“If you look at where I think things will go with the evolution of AI, people will want to talk to people, so like community becomes much more important, referral becomes much more important, where the mouth becomes much more important. All of these things are …”

“Community, which is basically a SMS platform. That's a little bit more approachable than using like an attentive or a Klaviyo for texting, which can get out of hand pricing wise. It's a little bit they group it based on how many subscribers you have rather tha…”

“My thesis is that every community, every, every well-oiled community can actually have a community, a journal. So if we go back to how we define a community before, which is like purpose, purpose slash mission and rituals, the rituals piece is the journal in a…”

“I think community as a way of creating safety, having authentic conversations, feeling that you're not alone, that others are going through the same thing, and then sharing best practices is so powerful.”

“They will learn more from that community than they will learn from managing one random person that they were attached to managing in some project that may or may not see the light of day.”

“If a bot can help answer, you know, the top hundred most commonly asked questions, then that will lead your members to ask more specific, more nuanced questions, go into more detail, and that will lead to better conversations as well.”

“If someone chose to build a community and have the bot not tell people that it's a bot, I think that a community would still form, and we would never know.”

“I think if you have a long sales cycle or a high price point where there has to be many, many, many touch points in order to get somebody to decide to buy, I'm not sure that community should be the number one thing that you invest in.”

“Like I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves.”

“Starting money first is wrong, right? Money comes, it's a superstructure on top of a community. It's a way for the community to represent its debits and credits between each other.”

“The lesson they call it eternal September is that it's so important that as you grow, that you're thinking about, okay, it's great that, you know, word of mouth is happening. It's great that there's an influx of people, but how do I improve upon the experience…”

“The community is always more important than the technology.”

“Board Apes and a lot of the other what we call PFP projects, so profile picture projects, I think the right way to think about them is that they are effectively placeholders. To be able to bootstrap a community, and in the long run, will be much more than a pi…”

“When they do that, they will feel such a sense of ownership over that community that they will be your fiercest advocates in the community, and they will be the people that are engaging and recruiting people into the community because of that sense of ownershi…”

“I've seen so many businesses that make the mistake of just kind of adding community to somebody's already full plate, or hiring or promoting an executive that has zero community experience. That is, it's very tricky because it will slow you down, but it also p…”

“Every team should have a goal that's shared with community across the board on the exec team, because there's other teams that you don't even think about that you really need to work with to build a community like accounting or legal, and they have to be putti…”

“So I recommend if you really want to build a community, then you need to start with at least two people. It's really a good way to go. I mean, unless you're very small, that's not a hard and fast rule, but if you look at all of these things that have to happen…”

“The thing that gets people into crypto is not the tech. It's greed. Like, let's be very honest, right? Like, yes, the tech and the vision and, like, the narrative is super compelling. For a lot of people, the greed's a big part of it. And as they get into it, …”

“I don't think community is a VC fundable idea, much like media has been, in general, a terrible, these, we need community, we need media, is that, does that mean it should be VC funded? No”

“It does, even though the more individualistic society is Is the lonelier it's likely to be. And also I argue that the neoliberal capitalist mindset, so the dog eat dog me first, self-interest first mindset is also inimicable, ultimately, to a world in which we…”

“And sometimes they go and try and recruit somebody from outside the community. That almost always fails.”

“I think the core, like the best MVP today is community. Even if you're like for SaaS platforms or anything”

“That's the other thing that we've learned from listening to startups for the rest of us is that you can't do it alone. You got to do it with the community and to do it with somebody in your earbuds going along as a practitioner, not just a preacher.”

“Nowadays, most of these open source companies, you know, 95% of the code is written by employees, and the five percent are like patches or connectors or something like that that the community is building.”

“So the community is still very important, but it's gone from basically substituting for your engineering org to substituting for your product management organization.”

“Like, sometimes people go, we're really excited to announce that this is now open source, meaning we don't want to take care of it anymore, so go live over there. We'll give it to the community, except they haven't actually identified anyone in the community w…”

“I mean, the, if you can listen too much to your community and community, a lot of the early community members will want to hold on to what was original.”

“About 50% of our content today is actually from the community, which has its own problems but in the long run, you know, it does.”

“My friend Abed Gaith, who is the basis of the Abed Nadir character in Community”