Lifecycle of an Outcome-Oriented Community // Three growth stages // OOCs

September 5, 2022 · writing

When a new community is getting started (and while it is still quiet af), we want to know whether we’re investing our hands-on effort into doing the right things. (And also whether🔒 those early, non-scalable activities will lead toward something more scalable and hands-off.)

For both questions, it’s helpful to have a view of the lifecycle.

In the most general sense, the lifecycle of “community” is traditionally organized into four stages, defined by how self-sufficient the group has become. In the first stage, you’re doing 90% of everything (starting discussions, answering questions, welcoming new arrivals, and marketing it to the outside world). Once members are doing half of the heavy lifting, you’re in the second stage, and when they’re doing nearly all of it (including the marketing, at least in theory), you’re in the third stage. If a community continues to grow from there, it will eventually become over-busy and need to split itself apart into sub-groups (organized around sub-interests, sub-goals, sub-cultures, regions, languages, or whatever other dividing line). This self-division (or “mitosis”) is the marker of the fourth stage.

While the above is indeed quite helpful for tracking progress, I find it less actionable (and motivating) than I would like. So I prefer to think of OOCs in just three stages:

1 // The Content and Concierge Stage 

To be honest, this bit kind of sucks. The work-to-reward ratio is awful, and it feels like exactly the sort of 24/7 job you were hoping to avoid. Plus, the whole thing can backslide back to zero if you stop doing stuff.

You’re on the hook for stimulating and sustaining pretty much every bit of activity; you’re giving loads of 1-on-1 assistance🔒; and the newsletter is quite stressful since there isn’t always enough stuff happening to justify sending it. 

It’s not all bad though: the quality and quantity of customer learning are insane, and today’s manual labor (i.e., bespoke content and assistance) will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s self-serve system. Plus, you can accelerate through this stage quite quickly, if you’d like to. (More on that coming shortly.)

2 // The Simple Stable System Stage

This stage is where an OOC feels fun, sustainable, rewarding, and impactful.

Members are making progress on their own (and helping each other to do the same). Your newsletters write themselves, overflowing with inspiring examples of member success. People are reaching their goal and crediting the group with helping them get there. You start to see evangelical alumni and organic referrals. 

You can take vacations again. (See: [[Build a product, not a prison]].)

While you wouldn’t want to linger long in the less-than-joyful Content and Concierge Stage, it’s completely fine to stay put for as long as you’d like at the Simple Stable System Stage. 

A stable OOC can be a decent source of semi-passive income (requiring ~1-4 hours per week) and can, depending on your size and pricing, support the hiring of a community manager or helper. (Subscription revenue adds up quickly: 200 members at $40/month is just shy of $100k/year.)

3 // Strategic Expansion Stage 

Of course, rather than staying put, you might prefer to advance to the Strategic Expansion Stage, where you’ll figure out what the community will really be for your business.

Is the OOC to act as a core revenue stream? If so, you’ll focus on flywheels🔒 (for growing membership) and/or complementary products (for growing lifetime value).

Or is it more valuable in service to existing products as a source of customer insight (where scale doesn’t matter) or customer success (where direct revenue doesn’t matter)? Or will it be a launchpad for future products (where you might attempt to retain your alumni rather than graduating them)?

Each path involves different activities and focus. (Several of these expansion options are explored in the original OOC video📺.) So, three stages for an OOC:

1. Content and Concierge (dig in, get involved, and accelerate through it)
2. Simple Stable System (step back, extricate yourself, and enjoy it)
3. Strategic Expansion (do what you like with it)

(For reference, the OOC group here is very much still in the Content and Concierge stage. Meanwhile, the Useful Authors’ OOC is sitting contentedly at Simple Stable System, and we’re using that stability as an opportunity to focus on our complementary SaaS product. Once the software is a bit more self-sufficient, we’ll return to figuring out the community’s long-term strategic role.)

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