It is never too early to start planning for future growth. Once you’ve ascertained whether you’re building a library or a coffee shop, you can start designing adaptive strategies.
We conducted some research into our customer base and we discovered three early signals that seem to show up consistently in customers with communities that struggle:
- No clear use case / basic launch direction
- Lack of stakeholder alignment / clear ownership
- Lack of early progress (things stall post-kickoff)
If these key things aren’t addressed from the beginning, they become a leading indicator of downstream failure.
If you address them too late, the community becomes increasingly fragile and at risk of early fragmentation. See Community Fragmentation: When Growth Becomes Your Obstacle.
The risks of moving too early aren’t as high and tend to manifest as:
- processes that are more complex than necessary
- member’s experiencing unnecessary friction
- a heavy staff workload
- ghost towns
- the lack of meaningful data for reporting
Further reading
The Community Lifecycle: From Launch to Legacy
The community that I reference in the article above is a good example of a community that had breaking processes due to insufficient scalability. Our moderation protocols weren’t scalable so we took the opportunity when we moved from vB to Discourse to revisit them. It was the right move.
Does anyone else have a story?