Month: March 2026

Why I keep building communities

I didn’t start in tech. I spent eleven years in healthcare, talking with patients and their families, working alongside doctors and nurses, and learning something that has shaped everything I’ve done since: people need to feel heard before they can move forward.

That sounds simple, but it’s the kind of simple that can easily be forgotten.

In healthcare I learned to meet people where they were. A patient’s family wants to feel cared about, a surgeon doesn’t need to understand computer file systems, they need to know how to save lives. I have always seen my job as figuring out what people need and help them get it. The setting may have changed, but the work didn’t.

When I moved into tech and started building communities, I found a lot of communities were being built backwards. People were building for themselves, making decisions based on what they wanted rather than focusing on serving their users. Simple things like getting too clever with naming, calling forums “conversations”and blogs “stories” and then wondering why nobody could find anything.

A community isn’t a marketing channel. It’s not a funnel. It’s not an engagement metric on a dashboard. A community is an enablement resource. It exists to help people do their best work and live their best lives. When the goal shifts from helping people to extracting value from them, the community stops being a community. I don’t even call it lurking when people visit my community and don’t post. I call it gleaning. They came, they found what they needed, and they left. That’s a win. Not everyone needs to raise their hand. Some people get value by reading a knowledge base article at 2 AM, others get value by finding how others solve problems similar to theirs. Everyone has their own reasons to be part of a community, and they are all valid..

I think the reason this matters so much to me is personal. I’m the father of special needs children, and I have ADHD. I’ve worked in a variety of places and industries, from being elbow-deep in dish soap at a remote fishing lodge in Alaska to removing viruses from a grandmas computer so she could see the pictures of her grandkids again. Every one of my experiences taught me the same thing: we do better when we’re not alone. Not for someone to tell us what to do, but because we all need someone to be there for us. Listening. Sharing a bit  of themselves, and offering a hand without assuming we need to be pulled.

There’s a metaphor I keep coming back to. Rope. A single strand of string is useful, and can completely fulfill a multitude of functions, but multiple strands together become stronger than the sum of its parts. That’s what a community does. It takes individual people, each with their own experiences and perspectives and skills, and weaves them into something stronger.

That’s why I keep building them. Not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve seen what happens when people have a place to show up, be heard, and help each other.

That’s a community. It’s worth the effort, every time.

Building a community that people want to come back to.

What makes people come back to an online community?

I’ve been building and managing communities for a while now, and the biggest mistake I see is people building a community that works for them, not for the people who will actually use it. They name things cleverly instead of clearly. They optimize for engagement metrics instead of asking whether anyone is actually getting value.

So here are a few foundational principles I keep coming back to.

Listen before you build. The fastest way to build something nobody wants is to skip the part where you find out what people need. Ask questions. Sit with the answers. Resist the urge to assume your experience is universal.

Call things what they are. If it’s a forum, call it a forum. If it’s a blog, call it a blog. Clever naming might feel creative, but it puts a barrier between your members and the thing they came to find. Communication is a two way street, and that starts with making sure people know where to go.

Community is enablement, not marketing. A community exists to enable people to do their best work, not to funnel them into a pipeline. When the goal shifts from “how do we help people” to “how do we extract value from people,” the community stops being a community.

Respect every type of participation. Not everyone is going to post. Some people read a knowledge base article and leave. Others get help with a problem and move on. I don’t call that lurking, I call it gleaning. They got what they needed, and that’s a win.

Measure what matters. The metric I care about most is whether people come back. If they do, they’re finding value. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter how many registered users you have on paper.

Building a community is a lot like braiding rope. Individual strands are useful on their own, but woven together they’re stronger than the sum of their parts. The goal isn’t to get people in a room. It’s to give them a reason to stay, and a reason to return.

What kind of communities have you built, and how did you build them? I’d love to hear what principles you’ve found to be foundational. I would also love to hear about communities you have been a part of, and what worked for you and what didn’t in those communities.