Back in 2014, there was an emerging idea in Silicon Valley called “growth hacking.” It attempted to merge the disciplines of product and marketing, to embed marketing techniques directly into a product itself, thereby creating a virtuous loop where one group of users creates a new group of users, and so on.

I was fascinated by this idea, and wanted to learn more about it.

On a train ride home, on a whim, I made a list of 10-15 folks who were writing about growth hacking. I sent them each a cold email offering to fly them out to Chicago at a time of their choosing. I’d organize an event around them, invite the Chicago startup marketing community, and pay for a happy hour after.

Several folks said yes. So I spun up a Meetup group and started sending out invites.

Fast forward a couple years, and the Chicago Growth Hacking Meetup had over 400 members.

I never presented at the Growth Hacker Meetup. I’d introduce the speaker and get out of the way, notebook in hand.

And yet my firm became associated with growth marketing in Chicago. I developed relationships with many of the smartest marketers in Chicago, some of which became clients, or team members, or investments. I published a successful Udemy course on digital marketing using many of my learnings from those sessions, which was instrumental in landing my role at Kellogg.

Creating a community and becoming the hub around an interest was a pivotal moment in my career and the trajectory of my company.

I’ve since seen many other successful iterations of this.

My wife created Big Careers Little Kids, a Chicago-based group connected executive women in the fields of law and finance who have small kids. It’s an incredibly impressive group of women, and as a result she has an incredibly enviable network.

The World Innovation Network (originally the Kellogg Innovation Network) was created by Robert Wolcott, Kellogg professor and founding partner at Clareo.

Charlie O’Donnell, then a junior VC at Union Square Ventures, created the NY Tech meetup around 2003. It is still vibrant today, with over 62,000 members. As a result of being the hub, Charlie developed a fantastic network and got access to early stage deals, which helped him branch out and create his own fund.

I believe community is a highly underrated channel for individuals and firms looking to achieve trusted advisor status.

Why Build a Community?

Being the creator or organizer of a community has a host of benefits:

• It provides a form of “passive social proof”. If you have a group with several hundred professionals coming together for an event you organize around a given topic, they start to associate you with that topic. Even if you aren’t the one giving the presentations, they (perhaps subconsciously) associate the wisdom shared in those sessions with you, at least by extension. In presentations or pitch meetings, clients are often impressed with you being the hub of a community, especially when the caliber of speakers is high.
• It creates a reason to reach out. One of the difficulties in nurturing relationships, especially in industries with a long sales cycle, is the question of what to say. Being the hub of a community gives you a great reason to touch base with people and extend invites.
• It gives you a reason to grow your network. Likewise, you have a built in reason to extend invitations to people you don’t know yet but who fit your Ideal Client Profile. Most cold approaches are self-serving. This is an easy way to offer value instead, and gets you in the room with them in a way where everyone is in a frame of mind to interact and engage.
• It can inform service offerings and thought leadership. You can use your community to get insights into common pain points for your ICP, which can inform the things you speak or write about, as well as potential service offerings you can layer on.
• It can become keystone content. If you do present at these events, these can become the basis of your Authority Marketing efforts, which can be repurposed for video, into articles, shared over email, etc.

A Playbook for Creating Community

So how do you go about building a community? A couple of suggestions:

Identify a clear niche and purpose

Your community needs to serve a specific audience with a specific purpose. The more focused you are, the better. "Chicago tech" is too broad. "Chicago Growth Marketing" or "Chicago Women Executives with Young Children" are much better. This clarity helps potential members immediately understand if the community is for them. Ideally this focus overlaps with your Point of View, or who you seek to serve.

Create clear value propositions

Think carefully about what members will get out of participating. It could be access to knowledge or expertise, networking with peers, opportunities to speak or present their own expertise, or access to potential business opportunities (I’ve found the best communities try to shy away from making it explicitly about the latter.)

Consider curating.

The first members you add will set the tone and culture for everything that follows. So ideally they are representative of the kinds of people you want to have long term.

Create a profile or persona of the ideal community member (hint - they’ll probably have a high degree of overlap with your Ideal Client Profile.) Invite 5-10 folks to be your anchor members.

Consider making them “advisory board” members, and tasking them with inviting other folks, promoting your events, welcoming new members, etc. This gives the right people something they can put on their own resumes, and gives you extra sets of hands to help grow the community.

Lastly, consider putting any invitations to join or attend behind a form of some kind to quality people. There are business people who won’t fit your member profile, who look for events to attend for the sole purpose of aggressively selling them. You want to be able to filter these folks out to keep the quality of interactions high.

Choose your format.

Communities can take many forms. Do you want it to be in-person, or online? Or both? How often do you want to meet? do you want the format of each session to be the same, or do you want to mix it up?

It might be worth asking your community early on (or your new advisory board) what kinds of events they would like the most.

Focus on quality.

The value community members get will largely be a function of the quality of the speakers you bring in, the topics you choose to focus on, the kinds of discussions you are able to facilitate, and the quality of the other members you attract.

Quality should be your focus every step of the way. It’s better to do 3 events a year that are high quality than a monthly event where quality is so-so.

Help facilitate connections.

A primary reason people join communities is for the connections they can make. Rather than taking a laissez-faire approach, be proactive.

Ask each new member to coffee. Ask them about their goals for the coming year. And then look for proactive ways to facilitate introductions between members who might be able to help.

You might be tempted to use this as an opportunity to microwave new business yourself. If they explicitly ask for more information about your business, great. But I would keep the focus on serving them and helping them get value out of the community. You want them to be long term members of the group. Business will come. Be patient.

Leverage technology appropriately

You can get fancy with this, but you don’t have to. You can use Mailchimp for sending newsletters and event invitations. You can collect RSVPs using Eventbrite or similar. You can use Slack so members can communicate in between meetings. And you can use a LinkedIn page to promote your events and give members a mechanism to promote themselves.

The Long Game

Building a community is a long-term investment. It requires patience, consistency, and genuine commitment to serving your members. But the rewards – in terms of relationships, reputation, and opportunities – can be transformative for your firm.

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