Part 2: What common mistakes should I avoid when setting up my community platform? (Solo Series)

In the second episode of this two-part Solo Series, we’re hearing from Hungry for Good Advice. Our letter today deals with  a community creator who's looking for some tips to set up their community platform right the first time.

Over the last five years, Bri has partnered with dozens of clients and community members to select the right community platform for them and to avoid some of the most common pitfalls related to the setup process. She is exploring all possible angles and sharing what you can do to avoid each pitfall.

In this episode:

(03:12) The communitea: Hungry for Good Advice’s letter

(04:39) #1 Beware the freemium model

(12:05) Don't turn your community into both the product and the funnel

(13:35)  The free trial fiasco

(15:59) Debunking the belief that it's morally wrong to charge for community

(17:53) #2 Keep it simple, sweetheart

(19:33) Leverage your channels and spaces with engaging words and the right size

(22:23) Avoid the great mistake of introducing friction

(24:22) #3 Develop a plan for leadership early on

Resources Mentioned:

📩 Community building from scratch? Check out my email drip series with 4 Foundational Strategies for Beginning Building.

🔥 Catch up with Part 1 of this Solo Series

🎧 Continue the discussion about a free community that leads to a paid one with Dear Bri Episode 8 with Alli Ball.

🎙️Fiasco of the two-week trial in Dear Bri Episode 17 with Diana Davis.

📺 Watch Bri's FREE masterclass to learn the 4 Types of Communities

❤️ Sign up for Heartbeat. Bri’s recommended all-in-one community platform.

💛 Join Ember. The place for go-getter community creators.

Bri Leever

🖥️ Website

📹 Youtube

📱LinkedIn

Want your story to be next? Submit an anonymous letter about your community conundrum, fiasco, drama, or other dilemma here.

*Dear Bri is produced by Ideablossoms.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This solo episode of Deer Bree covers some of the most common questions that I get in community building, and it has to do with architecting your community platform. It comes on the heels of another solo episode where I give you the nitty-gritty breakdown between the five most common community platforms that I build on. So make sure you head to that one next if technology is something that is plaguing your nightmares at night. And I do have one caveat to share about this episode. In the beginning, I spend a lot of time on not technically architecture, it's more so talking about the model of your community. It's a point that has been touched on in several different episodes from several different angles, but I really wanted to take some time on this episode specifically because depending on the model that you choose for your community, it has pretty dramatic impacts on not just the technology that you select, but the architecture inside. So it's one of the most common pitfalls I see people making. And the downstream effects of that mistake are pretty dramatic. So I wanted to hit it head on. We spend a lot of time talking about the free versus paid versus premium model. But make sure you stick around all the way to the end because I talk about something that I've noticed all-star community builders start thinking about right from the very beginning, and that is leadership development in their communities. So stay tuned to the end to hear those thoughts. And there are a couple follow-up episodes that I will mention in this episode that are great to follow your own rabbit trail through the other Deer Brie episodes. Enjoy! Welcome to Deer Brie, an advice column for community conundrums, fiascos, and drama. This season of Deer Brie is sponsored by our friends over at Heartbeat. Heartbeat is an all-in-one community platform, and it's the one I chose to host my own community. Your members can finally have events, conversation, content, and even courses in one distraction-free, intimate, customized home. I chose Heartbeat for three reasons. First, Heartbeat is unparalleled in their events management features. Events are a core part of my community architecture, and their features make my life so much easier. Second is segmentation. It's super easy to break my community into smaller, more niche subgroups and create a more customized experience for that group in Heartbeat. And finally, their courses. Being able to host my educational materials and learning journey in a community-first platform makes my community that much more valuable and retention that much stickier. I'm an affiliate with Heartbeat, which means when you sign up through my link in the show notes, I get paid a small amount and no extra charge to you. Thank you for supporting my work in that way. And finally, I usually record this podcast from Hawaii Island. So a special thank you to the Kanakamali people on whose land I currently reside. Thank you so much for joining me for another solo episode. Today, our letter comes from a community creator who's looking for some tips to set up their community platform. Let's get started. Dear Brie, I'm in the early stages of setting up an all-in-one community platform, and I would love your take on best practices. A little context: my community is called the Curious Table. It's a space for home cooks and food enthusiasts who want to explore new techniques, share their culinary experiments, and build genuine connections over their love of cooking. We plan to offer a paid membership that includes monthly live cook-alongs, a recipe swap forum, and spaces for members to post their kitchen wins and flops. I've been researching platforms that bundle everything: events, content, messaging, even courses down the road, but honestly, it's starting to feel a little like a maze. What are some of your best practices for hard-won lessons for choosing the right platform, structuring the space so it feels easy to navigate and not overwhelming, and onboarding members so they actually use what's there. I really want to set this up right from the start so our members feel welcomed, supported, and excited to participate, not lost or intimidated by too many features. Any wisdom you share would be so appreciated. Signed, hungry for good advice. All right, Hungry. I have a lot of things to share about this. In this video, we're going to talk about three of the most common pitfalls I see people make when setting up their all-in-one community platform. Now, the first mistake I see is super common. Almost every person, every client member that I work with at some point has been enticed by what we call the freemium model. This is where the funnel for your community is incorporated and baked into your community. You have a free section of the community where members are able to get a taste, but then mostly be enticed to join the paid version of your community. This is a very enticing model because we think it's going to require less effort. We think we can host our funnel and our product all in the same space and that they will feed each other for us. However, in application, this could not be farther from the truth. And I'm going to tell you how it really breaks down. But first, let me start with a little bit of context. In the community space, we are where Android and iPhone apps were about 10 years ago. So if you remember 10 years ago, when you went to download an app, if that app asked you to pay, it was like laughable and insulting. Like, what? How dare you ask me to pay for something that I'm receiving? And so apps really had no option other than to introduce a freemium model where you had a free limited version of the app that then, if you paid, you could get the upgraded premium features. Now that worked and works well in technology, especially during that time when there was so much entitlement and skepticism around apps. Now I dare you to go into your app subscriptions and see how many apps you've forgotten about that you signed up for. Now it's super common for us to pay for apps. And that's because slowly over time we realized oh, I can either only get a free version of this and it's clunky and filled with ads, or I can pay a little bit to know that I'm getting the right quality of information and service from this app. Communities have undergone a similar transition where we're coming from the world of free Facebook groups. In people's minds, communities are free. So we often think that our audience isn't ready to recognize the value of the community we've created. Now, I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm really pleased to tell you that this has changed significantly. So, number one, before you make the assumption that your audience is not ready to pay for a community, I would ask them what communities they are paying for today. And if they are already paying for communities, if your value proposition is tight, they will pay for yours. If there's enough value behind the experience and the reason for them to join it, they will pay for it. But I see far too many community builders start with the default that they have to have a free community. And that's just not true anymore. In fact, I know several cases where people have told me that whenever they encounter a free community, they're immediately skeptical and not interested in joining for the very same reason that we're not interested in downloading a million free apps on our phone anymore. Because we know that if it's free, it's either not going to be as high of a quality or I'm going to become the product. So that's not necessarily a good reason to definitely charge for your community, but it's a really good reason for you to not default to a free community. The other reason it's not a great idea to have a free tier and then a paid tier in your community is because people assume that by the nature of free members being able to see what's happening for their paid members, that's automatically going to entice their members. But the nature of community is that it's really full. And honestly, when it's done well, it's overwhelming. So when you subject your free members to glimpses of all of the things happening in the paid community, rather than being able to isolate that free member with the one program or event or element of your paid community that would be most enticing to them, you're just barraging them with a little bit of all of the information, which is not very effective. And unfortunately, community platforms are great at what they do, which is managing your community. But when you start to put people who are not your community, they're not opting in as a participant, they're just here to get a taste and test some things out and see what they like. Now we've created this really blurry line between audience and community. Are they just here to like consume content, take a little taster and leave? Or are they here to like actually be a participant and to show up and to give? You've now blurred the line of those roles. And in doing so, you've hindered your free members' ability to get value from your free community. It's an unfortunate reality of our society that we tend to value what we put our money behind. And so when you invite someone into your community as like a partial member to get a test, in some ways you've really disadvantaged them from being able to get the full value out of the experience by the nature of setting them up to join for free, because they're not going to engage in the same way as if they had even just a little bit of skin in the game in the form of a payment. Or sometimes, if you're not doing a payment, you could also do like a scholarship program. There's ways to make your community accessible, even if you have a payment structure behind it. Ali Ball actually nailed this in her episode, and that's a great episode to follow up with after this one. If you're curious to hear more about this dynamic between free and paid, Ali talked about how when she tested a free Facebook group that led to her paid community, Ali Ball actually painted the perfect picture of what really happens when you create a free community that leads to your paid community. It's a great episode. If you haven't listened to it yet, definitely add it to your list after this one. But when your free community is working really well, it's really full, it's really vibrant. People ask a question and it's answered immediately. Really, they never hit the edge or the good reason to tip into your paid community because your free community is working so well. Conversely, when your free community isn't working well, when conversation isn't vibrant, when it's kind of like a ghost town and it's a little bit dead, people don't have a good reason to go join your paid community. They're like, well, this isn't that great. Why would I pay a little bit more money to get more of this? So it's just a weird dynamic to say, like, our free conversation is here, and then our even better conversation is over here. Because if it's working, it's probably working too well. And if it's not working, there's no reason for them to pay to get more of it. There are literally so many angles that I can approach this problem from. And I'm trying to give you just like a snapshot of each of them because this is probably one of the most tired conversations in the community space that I've had. And I hope you receive this as a gift because I've seen and had to help far too many communities recover from this really ultimately, I think it's just a really lazy model for your community. I think it's people trying to hit the marketing bird and the community bird with one stone when really like you need a marketing and sales strategy. You need a funnel that leads to your community. And there are tools that are way better equipped to help nurture in a targeted way your members to becoming members. And that is so much more easily done and effectively done outside of your community platform. Even community platforms like Circle, which have the marketing hub and this enticing promise of being able to put all of your email marketing and your community all in one place. While it's not untrue, Circle and all-in-one community platforms that incorporate email marketing, they're best at emailing the people who are already signed on and committed as members of your community. They're not great at bringing, like, don't abandon your email service provider kit or mail or light or whatever you use, thinking that you can bring that into your community platform. Definitely keep your email service provider. It's going to be way better equipped with way more features to nurture your ideal members to becoming members. One other angle of this, and then I'll start moving on to platform architecture, but this is just like such a big one when it comes down to the model of the community. That's the free trial. So, what's so tricky about community is that people, again, really don't get value unless they are active and participate to some degree. And what's even trickier is if someone decides not to participate, if Jared decides not to show up to any of the calls, the effects aren't just on Jared's experience, but now it affects everyone else because we don't get to hear Jared's brilliance. In my episode with Diana Davis, she talks about the fiasco of the two-week trial, also a great follow-up to this episode, and having this sense of people just like dipping in to like take the free snacks and lick the pretzels, and then dipping out and how that created just the worst vibe in her community. It took away from the experience of her best members, the ones who were ready to show up to do the work. And who do you want to be attracting? Is it the people who come in, lick their hands, like pull a scoop of free snacks and jet out? Or is it the people who come and are willing to give, are willing to participate, are willing to support others? So, what I've found is that the premium model is often like we're enticed by it because we think we're gonna get more people in. We think we're gonna have like bigger, more impressive numbers in our community, but really all it does is lines you up for a really difficult engagement journey from then on out. This podcast is sponsored by Ember Consulting, where I'm the founder and head community creator. At Ember, we help people who are familiar with running their business on content, coaching, or consulting become community powered. As you hear in this podcast, creating a community is really tough, and managing it can be even harder. So don't do it alone. Whether you're looking to launch a new community or pivot your strategy, our one-on-one consulting helps you skip the learning curve and do it right the first time. And when you're ready to belong to a space just for community creators learning, testing, and growing their communities together, check out the Ember Community. Now, back to the episode. And that is an insidious belief that I see spreading that it's morally wrong to charge for community building because you're profiting off of the loneliness epidemic. And while I am the first one to tell you that I hate the transactional nature of our society just as much as the next person, this is a constraint that we have to deal with. It's not going to be fixed anytime soon. And if Facebook has taught us anything, it's that if you are getting value from a business, you are either consciously paying for it or you are unconsciously becoming the product. This belief irks me so much because we don't look at doctors and say that they're morally wrong for profiting off of illness. We don't look at conflict mediators and say that they're wrong for profiting off of war and conflict. And in the same way, community builders, in being paid for the time and the energy that they're expending, just because it's also helping solve a very real problem of loneliness in our society, doesn't mean that you should not be paid. You absolutely should be paid for your time and effort. And I will go so far as to say when your members aren't being charged, in a lot of ways, you might not be setting them up for success to be the best participant in your community, anyways. So the TLDR is this charge for what you are worth and charge for what your community is worth. Don't try to do more than one thing at a time by turning your community into both the product and the funnel for the community as the product with the freemium model. There are way more effective methods, and freemium is not one of them. Now, let's get into the nitty-gritty of the architecture. So I'm going to be speaking specifically to a simple paid community model. You might have different tiers. You might have that, you know, your first tier gets the whole community package, and the premium tier gets like one-on-one coaching. Now, let's move into some of the common pitfalls that I see people make when architecting their community spaces, channels, feeds, depending on which platform you're using, they use different vernacular. Let's get into it. One of the most common things I see, and I'm gonna blame Slack for it, is we love to create different channels and different spaces for all of the different topics that someone might someday possibly think about wanting to post in our community. I blame Slack because Slack is a conversation tool. It's entirely conversation-centric. Their entire goal is to sort conversation. That's like why we have all the channels that the way that we do. In all-in-one community platforms, there's more complexity layered over your community architecture. We not only have conversation, but we also have content and we have events. Within content, we might have courses, we might have libraries of past event recordings or resources that have been shared. So you're just holding a greater amount of information. And the information organization should be different than something like Slack, which is only holding your channels. Now, I get why people do this. And it's because your channels or your spaces, usually in the all-inline community platforms, you'll have a left-hand sidebar. That left-hand sidebar is your ocean front real estate for communicating to your members what happens here in your community. And we want to use it very wisely. Now, people tend to think, oh, well, what happens here is we talk about motherhood in business. We talk about finance. We talk about, and they just end up thinking that all that happens in their community is all of these different discussion channels. And what I work with my clients and my members to understand is to reframe how we are thinking about those channels and then especially the names of the channels, less around the topics of discussion and more around the actions that your members are taking. I'll give you an example. Instead of wins as a channel, so this is where we post all of our topics for our wins, tweaking it so your channel is named Share a Win. This moves the focus of your channel from a topic to an action, sharing, sharing a win rather than one of the things that happens here is we post about our wins. This is such a tiny shift, but it's actually a profound energetic change when you look at the community layout as a whole. The next thing with channels and spaces is that people start segmenting them into smaller groups way too early. You want to think about your channels and your spaces like you would a physical space. So if you have any experience planning events professionally, you're going to know exactly what I'm talking about. You're not going to invite a group of 12 people into a football stadium. In the same way, you're not going to invite 2,000 people into an intimate coffee shop. So your spaces and the number of spaces, and especially the number of channels and different topics or identities, should reflect the number of people in your community. So if you're just getting started and you have around 25 members, you really only should have one discussion space because you want all of the conversation to go into that space. You don't want to expand it to and break out a different type of space until that first one feels like bursting at the seams. Okay. In events, it's always better to have the venue. Be at capacity than to size up to a bigger venue and only have it at half capacity. So we're playing with the design and we're playing with the energy of your online community, which can feel a little trippy because it's all virtual, but the same mechanics that we use in person experience design apply to the online spaces. The other reason this shoots you in the foot in the beginning is because you make it less obvious where to post. So if when you have a lot of different topics, or like this channel is for moms, and then this channel is for pet owners, and then in this channel we're talking about AI, you're like, you're going to post your dog meme about AI, but you're like, do I post it in the AI channel or do I post it in the dog parent channel? The second that somebody has had to ask, where should I post this? If it isn't immediately obvious, like dead center, so obvious. If it is not obvious, you have failed. You have failed. You have introduced friction. Now they're second guessing, like, uh, this is too much. I'm just not going to post it. So, especially in the beginning, when people are just adopting and normalizing the behaviors that you want to see, your space naming and layout has to be so dead obvious to your members that if there is any way they can ask, is this the right place? If there is any reason that they have to ask, where should I post this? You've failed already. So pay attention for yourself. And I've totally made this mistake. We launched a community for a client and I was on their like kickoff call, and they were trying to ask their members to like go into a certain space to post. And they were like, Brie, actually, which space do you think we should post in? And I just laughed. I was like, Oh, we've failed. Like, we failed right now, right at the launch. And I knew in that moment. And so I went back right after the meeting and I was like, I didn't say that on the call. I was like, let's post it here. But right after the meeting, I was like, I'm gonna remove all the other spaces. I can't believe I didn't see this before. So it happens to me too. Do as I say and learn from what I do wrong. The third most common pitfall that I see in setting up your community platform is segmenting your already small community into smaller groups without a plan of leadership. If and when your community is ready to start moving the affinity and affiliation of the community from your big group experience into small group experiences, which, by the way, is usually at between 100 and 125 members, you must ensure that small group experience has at least one to two leaders who are accountable for the space and for the group. Otherwise, I guarantee you those leadership small groups are ghost towns in the making. What I like to do once a community is launched and expanding and wanting to introduce smaller, more intimate experiences so that they are posited to scale is I like to create a voting system for bringing either small groups, interests, or identities into existence in the community. So you can introduce a voting system where people can propose an interest or an identity or a small group pod. Once we have enough votes accounted for that want to see this group be born in the community, we have a second process where we have to identify one to two leaders who are going to be responsible for the upkeep of that conversation channel andor any events that are happening. I found if you can get these two things in place, you'll usually have a pretty good shot at these becoming one of the most intimate and valuable elements of your community. But it requires more effort than just lazily tossing out small group channels and telling people to join them if they have that interest. So to wrap up my advice for our dear letter writer, Hungry for good advice, the first one is get really clear on your model. And I have extra cautions around creating a free leading to a paid tier model in your community. If you want more resources on the type of community that's right for you and for your business, check out my Four Types of Communities free masterclass. It will walk you through the four different types, the strengths, and the challenges that you're signing up with for each. Secondly, when you're architecting the channels and the spaces on the side of your community, keep it simple. Keep in mind the number and the volume of members that you're bringing in and make sure that you are matching the number of spaces so that you're not either cramming a million people into a few tiny spaces or you're not inviting a very few people into a million different spaces. So make sure that you match that. Pay attention to the oceanfront real estate in your community, that left-hand sidebar, make the titles of those spaces as actionable as you can. And finally, when you are ready to segment your community into smaller, more intimate groups, make sure that you have a leadership and accountability structure in place first. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. And if you want the nitty-gritty behind my favorite all-in-one platforms and some of the ones that I caution against, make sure that you watch part one. And if you are just getting started with community building from scratch, I highly recommend checking out my email drip series with four foundational strategies for beginning building. Thanks so much and see you all next time. Thank you so much for sharing some space with me on this episode. Please like and review wherever you find your podcast. To submit your own community conundrum, fiasco, or other drama, go to the link in the show notes. Aloha and catch you next time.