I was recently in Cape Town, South Africa to give a couple of talks on the topic of community. Several people asked me if the sessions were going to be recorded as they would not be able to attend the sessions in-person. Unfortunately, neither of these talks were recorded or streamed live.
While all of the content from the class can be found in my book Community-in-a-Box, I thought it would be helpful to provide a synopsis of the session Innovation City. One of the questions I most often get is how businesses can use community for growth. I think this is a great question because I believe community will become essential for every business:
“Building a community is no longer optional for growing your business.”
The challenge is how to do that in a way that balances the need for trust in the community with the need for generating results. That is exactly the problem I tackled in my talk, so the rest of this post is a thorough overall of the key points I shared during the session. Enjoy and always feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to learn more about the how to build, grow, scale, and measure thriving communities!
Introduction to Community Building
When I started the Enterprise Sales Forum, I expect max 25 people to show up for the first event. Three years later, we ended up building a global community that scaled across 24 cities and 30,000 members that generated real business results.
Most communities fail after just a few events. I’ve seen it happen over and over. Someone gets excited, throws an event, maybe even gets a decent turnout. Then numbers drop. By event three, they’re wondering why they even started.
Why? They were focused on events, not systems. They were chasing vanity numbers instead of building something that could sustain itself.
The communities that succeed understand they are creating something of immense value over the long-term. They’re building a flywheel, not just hosting meetups.
The Community Flywheel: Your Growth Engine
Think of your community as a machine with three moving parts. Each one feeds the others, and when they’re all working together, you get sustainable growth.
Content is the value you create. For Stack Overflow, it’s answers to developer questions. For Enterprise Sales Forum, it was talks from top sales experts. In the beginning, you and maybe a handful of passionate members will generate most of this. The content attracts people to check out what you’re building.
Events create anticipation. They’re time-based moments when your community gathers to experience something together. Virtual meetups, in-person talks, AMAs on Discord (these all count). What matters is that they’re scheduled and people can mark their calendars. This anticipation keeps existing members engaged and draws in new ones.
Connections are where the real stickiness happens. You need spaces where members can have one-to-one conversations, help each other solve problems, and network in ways that turn into genuine relationship. This is where trust gets built whether through forums, Slack channels, social media, and anywhere members can actually talk to each other.
When all three work together, they build momentum. Good content leads to events. Events spark connections. Connections inspire new content. Some members get so involved they volunteer to help. They share their expertise. Eventually they become leaders.
What Gets the Flywheel Spinning
Four things put the Community Flywheel in motion, something I learned through plenty of trial and error:
Predictable cycle — Sales professionals told us they blocked off the third Tuesday of every month for our events. That consistency built trust. People knew when to expect us. Pick a schedule and stick to it.
High quality — The bar you set attracts the people you want. We spent time vetting speakers and preparing them beforehand. Members told us our events felt more professionally executed than other sales meetups they’d attended. Quality attracts quality.
Curated membership — We removed members who didn’t align with our community’s principles or professional interests. Members needed to trust that they’d meet peers worth their time. Curation creates safety and serendipity.
Intrigue & novelty — Mix things up while staying true to your vision. We brought in VCs and CEOs to talk about sales. We hosted “Rate My Pitch” events. We invited nationally known authors. These special events created buzz and attracted new groups we hadn’t reached before.
When You Know the Flywheel Works
You’ll feel it when community market fit happens. Growth happens without you pushing. Members you don’t know take on leadership roles. Volunteers are easy to recruit and highly engaged. The vast majority of new attendees cite word of mouth as why they came. People independently share content about your community without you asking them to.
The community starts owning and guiding itself. You’re still there as a leader, but others have caught the passion and vision that started you on this journey.
Trusting the Process
After two successful Boston events with 85+ attendees each, I thought I’d figured it out. Event three had only 20 signups, and twelve people actually showed up.
I drove up to Boston with a pit in my stomach that kept getting bigger. My speaker was gracious and the content was solid, but looking at all those empty chairs felt made me feel like a clown.
The next event wasn’t much better, with more people but the wrong audience. We have random folks not in sales, including one guy who kept blurting out nonsensical questions. Again, my speaker was patient, but I was thoroughly embarrassed.
Instead of blowing it up, I doubled down on the process. I found a well-connected local speaker (a CEO in the sales space), secured a better venue through a sales enablement company, and tripled the promotion. That combination worked. We got 100 signups despite an incoming snowstorm, and the next month brought 100 actual attendees.
Boston became a real community because I trusted the process. Every community organizer I’ve talked to mentions “hitting the valley” at some point. I slammed straight into that valley, but things turned around and the community came back stronger.
Systems matter more than enthusiasm. When you get punched in the face, like I have and you will experience, the process keeps you grounded in your vision.
The 11-Step Launch Checklist
You need to be systematic when launching. Here’s what matters:
Foundation (Steps 1-4)
1. Community Values — These are your decision-making filter. Values help you prioritize what’s important and exclude distractions. For Enterprise Sales Forum, we focused on education, volunteer-driven initiatives, and people helping each other. We discouraged vendor pitches, heavy sponsor reliance, and self-promotion.
2. Building Your Team — Avoid the “talkers” trap. You need doers, not people who just want to be associated with something cool. Wrong team members nearly killed a few of our chapters. The culture the wrong people bring will poison everything.
3. Platform Selection — Keep it simple and focus on engagement. Don’t overcomplicate your tech stack at the start. Pick tools that members are familiar with.
4. Venue Strategy — Virtual, in-person, or hybrid? Each has trade-offs. Virtual is easier to scale but harder to build deep connections. In-person creates stronger bonds but limits who can attend.
Content & Experience (Steps 5-8)
5. Content Planning — Quality over quantity. Plan six events ahead so you’re thinking long-term. Every event should deliver real value.
6. Speaker Sourcing — Build your roster of expert speakers before you need it. Vet speakers carefully and prepare them beforehand.
7. Event Management — Create processes and checklists that scale. Have an hour-long venue walkthrough before events. Test all AV equipment. Have a team debrief after every event.
8. Membership Curation — Balance safety with serendipity. Review who’s attending. Remove members who don’t align with your community’s principles.
Sustainability (Steps 9-11)
9. Monetization Strategy — Free communities usually fail. You need revenue to cover costs and signal value. Charge for memberships or events. Get sponsors. Just make sure you’re not compromising your community’s values for money.
10. Promotion Engine — Always be promoting. Four weeks out, send the first announcement. Three weeks out, focus on content. Two weeks out, highlight speakers. One week out, encourage members to share and invite friends.
11. Sponsor Relations — Approach this as partnerships, not money grabs. The right sponsors add value to your community. The wrong ones turn events into sales pitches. Use Step 1 to guide the decision process of adding sponsors.
When we launched Singapore, we followed this process exactly. They stuck to the system with consistency, quality, curation, and occasional novelty. They got through the inevitable valley and built something that lasted. Skipping steps or doing them without purposeful intention creates expensive do-overs.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Most people measure the wrong things. They track vanity metrics that look good on paper but don’t predict success or drive business results. Here are some examples of vanity metrics vs. pulse metrics:
Vanity metrics make you feel good but tell you nothing:
Total members registered
Social media followers
Event registrations
Number of events hosted
Pulse metrics predict success:
Repeat attendance rate
Member engagement depth
Organic content creation
Percentage of highly involved members
If your repeat attendance is declining, that’s a warning sign. If only organizers are creating conversations, you don’t have a community. If there’s no member-generated content, engagement is shallow.
The C1-C2-C3 Framework
Here’s how you tie community activity to actual business impact. Work backwards from your business goals.
C1 Metrics (”Goals”) — Business outcomes where community has impact. Revenue, leads generated, cost savings, innovation, talent acquisition. Pick a metric someone in your company is directly responsible for as part of their objectives.
C2 Metrics (”Bridge”) — Actions that connect community activity to business goals. Post-event actions taken, repeat member interactions, content that gets upvoted or shared. These establish correlation between what members do and things that lead to business results.
C3 Metrics (”Pulse”) — Community health indicators such as repeat attendees, percentage creating content, GitHub pull requests, member referrals, top contributors. These are the day-to-day signals that show your community is alive.
Revenue Attribution Example
Suppose a tech company wanted to prove ROI from their developer user groups beyond basic lead generation. Here are some things they tracked:
C3 (Pulse): 40% repeat attendance rate at user group meetups
C2 (Bridge): 25% of repeat attendees scanned QR codes to sign up for developer newsletter (much higher rate than non-repeat attendees)
C1 (Goals): 8% of newsletter subscribers converted to paying customers
When they run the numbers, they can see a correlation in additional revenue generated directly attributed to community engagement depth. Deep engagement shown through repeat attendance leads to newsletter signups, which leads to conversions. This gives the community team solid ideas on experiments they can run to increase repeat attendance, knowing it would flow through to revenue.
Start with your C1 goal. Pick something the business cares about. Then work upwards from C3 metrics to find C2 metrics that correlate to the outcome you want.
Your 30-Day Action Plan
Week 1: Define your community values. Identify 3-5 people who could be your core team.
Week 2: Pick your platform. Plan your first event. Pick a date, find a venue, and reach out to a potential speaker. Make it 4-6 weeks out so you have time to promote.
Week 3: Build your content calendar for the next six events. Create your promotion strategy.
Week 4: Launch promotion for your first event. Track who’s signing up. Adjust your promotion based on what’s working.
After your first event, measure what matters. How many people showed up? How many were repeat attendees? Did anyone volunteer to help or create content? Did members connect with each other?
Then plan the next event and do it again.
What You Should Be Doing Right Now
Your customers are waiting for the community you haven’t built yet. There are people out there right now who need what you’re thinking about creating. They need a place to connect with peers. They need to learn from experts. They need to feel less alone in what they’re working on.
The tools are there. The Community Flywheel model. The 11-step launch checklist. The C1-C2-C3 metrics framework. The 30-day action plan. Everything is in Community-in-a-Box if you want the complete guide.
You don’t have to start from scratch. The process works. I’ve seen it work for Enterprise Sales Forum. I’ve seen it work for chapters across multiple cities. I’ve seen it work for clients I’ve consulted with.
The only way you’ll know if it works for you is if you try.
Systems matter more than enthusiasm. The sequence matters. Trust the process, especially when things get hard.
Now go build something that lasts!
Want to dig deeper? Grab the complete guide “Community in a Box” or reach out if you need help figuring out your specific community strategy. You can find me on LinkedIn or at mark@triberoi.com.