The great misunderstanding at the heart of community

“Build it and they will come” is the most persistent lie in community building because it flatters founders, executives, and platform teams in exactly the ways they most want to be flattered: your product is special, your audience is waiting, and distribution is a detail that will take care of itself.

In reality, communities do not magically assemble around a shiny new space, Slack, forum, or membership product. They form slowly around relationships, shared stakes, and repeated proof that it is worth people’s time to keep showing up.

If you want your community to actually work, you have to treat seeding and early growth as the work. Not as a post-launch afterthought once the platform is live and the champagne glasses are in the dishwasher.

Why “build it and they will come” won’t die

The phrase survives because it offers three powerful emotional protections for leaders and builders.

• It protects the ego. If success is just a matter of building, then any failure is a product problem, not a relational or strategic one.
• It protects fantasy. Hollywood stories and cherry-picked startup legends foreground the moment something launches, not the years of invisible seeding beforehand.
• It protects the budget. It is cheaper on paper to pay for a platform than for the unglamorous labor of outreach, moderation, onboarding, and programming.

Underneath, there is also a genuine misunderstanding of network effects. People hear that “networks get more valuable as more people join” and assume that if they can just get a few hundred signups, the system will take over.

But network effects are not a switch; they are a slope. In the early days, you are pushing a boulder uphill against the “cold start problem” where the product is not yet valuable because there is not yet a dense network inside it.

What a community actually is

A community is not a platform, a content calendar, or a captive audience. A community is a group of people who recognize one another, share an ongoing problem or aspiration, and return to a shared place because it reliably helps them move on that journey.

That definition sounds simple, but it implies three hard requirements that “build it and they will come” ignores.

• Mutual recognition: People need to feel seen by other members, not just by the brand.​
• Shared stakes: There must be something they cannot get alone—knowledge, support, access, or momentum.​
• Reliable payoff: Each visit has to reward participation (answers, intros, visibility, new skills), not just passive lurking.

A forum with 10,000 registered users and no real relationships is not a community; it is a lightly haunted database. A small Discord where 30 people solve each other’s hardest problems every week is.

How we got here: a short history of the myth

The “build it and they will come” myth draws from three overlapping histories.

1. Hollywood and mythology. The “Field of Dreams” narrative… if you build the field, the players will appear… became a cultural shorthand for visionary courage, not distribution strategy.​
2. Early internet success stories. The most famous communities and platforms (from early marketplaces to massive Q&A sites) look, from the outside, like overnight successes, but their early days were intensely manual: cold outreach, curated invitations, and hand‑matched interactions.​
3. SaaS and tooling optimism. As community platforms matured, it became easy to buy “infrastructure” while ignoring the human systems that made the early exemplars special. Tools marketed themselves as growth engines instead of as containers for the real work.​

Founders read post‑hoc growth narratives that compress years of messy seeding into a tidy arc. Airbnb’s growth, for example, is often told as “great product plus virality,” but in reality leaned on clever tactics like piggybacking on Craigslist’s existing user base to bootstrap liquidity.

Once those stories harden, executives hire teams to “do what Airbnb did,” except they skip the part where someone spends months hunting for the first hundred “right” people and making them successful.

The myths that refuse to die

Several recurring myths keep “build it and they will come” alive inside organizations.

Myth 1: “If the product is good enough, community will emerge”

This myth confuses utility with relationship. Yes, there are products so useful that users talk about them unprompted—but that emergent buzz is not the same as a community with shared identity and rituals.

Even network-driven products rarely trust utility alone. Teams often seed both sides of the network with deliberate incentives, outreach, and programs precisely because great products still need dense early usage to become self-sustaining.

Myth 2: “We just need a platform and a launch”

Teams often invest heavily in the visible moment: branding, landing page, launch event, and an empty forum with a welcome post from the CEO.

What follows is a pattern many community leaders know too well: a spike of logins in week one, a flurry of introductions, then a sharp decay into silence because nobody has a reason or rhythm to return.​

Myth 3: “Content will magically create interaction”

Leaders frequently assume that publishing enough content (blog posts, webinars, AMAs) will naturally convert into peer-to-peer engagement.

What content actually does, mostly, is attract eyeballs. Without deliberate prompts, structures, and facilitation that invite members to talk to each other, you get an audience, not a community.​

The right metaphor: gardening, not real estate

The better way to think about community is gardening, not real estate.

Real‑estate thinking says: buy land, build a beautiful building, list the amenities, and people will sign leases. The building is the product; occupancy is a marketing problem.

Gardening thinking says:

• Start with a small plot (an atomic network), not a sprawling estate.​
• Choose specific plants that thrive together (the right mix of members and roles).​
• Tend the soil every day: water, prune, check for pests (onboarding, conflict resolution, programming).​

In the gardening model, your job is to create the smallest possible environment where members benefit more from being together than being alone, then extend that environment carefully.​

This shift—from “How do we fill this space?” to “How do we keep this living system healthy?”—is the difference between a dead forum with nice branding and a living community that can eventually compound.​

The hidden work of seeding a community

The hardest part of community building is the work nobody sees on a roadmap or budget line.

• Curating the first 30–150 members: finding people with strong needs, complementary skills, and a bias to contribute, not just consume.​
• Hand‑matching value: introducing people, prompting collaboration, and sometimes privately nudging those first outcomes across the line.​
• Designing early rituals: recurring meetups, prompts, or challenges that teach people how to use the space and why it matters.​

Early‑stage community builders spend a disproportionate amount of time off‑platform: DMing people, hopping on calls, embedding in existing hangouts, and persuading potential members one by one that this new space is worth their time.​

From the outside, this looks like “no growth.” From the inside, it is painstaking calibration: which member profiles thrive, which topics spark genuine back‑and‑forth, which formats sustain participation rather than consume it.​

How to actually seed a community (step by step)

Here is a pragmatic approach that replaces “build it and they will come” with something more honest and effective.

1. Define a sharp who and why

Before platforms or programs, articulate the smallest specific group you are building for and the ongoing job your community will help them do.

• Replace “marketers” with “B2B product marketers at seed–Series B startups trying to launch in new categories.”
• Replace “customers” with “power users responsible for internal rollouts who need to look smart to their stakeholders.”

The narrower and more consequential the problem, the easier it is to create a community that feels indispensable, not optional.​

2. Start with an atomic network, not a big bang

Borrow the atomic net+work idea: create the smallest functioning cluster in which members can get value without anyone else existing.​

This might be:

• 15–30 design leaders who commit to a monthly roundtable.
• 20 marketplace sellers in the same niche who share pricing, playbooks, and feedback.

Design the network so that if no one else joins, those people would still consider it a success. That is your test for real community value.​

3. Seed by invitation and hands‑on onboarding

In the early days, treat every new member like a collaboration, not a signup.

• Source people manually from places where they already gather: conferences, Twitter lists, niche Slack groups, open‑source repos, creator platforms.​
• Invite them with a clear promise tied to their context: “We are assembling 20 peers wrestling with X. Here’s what we’re doing in the first 90 days.”​
• Onboard with a conversation, not just an email: learn what they want, what they can offer, and connect them to two people or threads immediately.​

Communities and other curated networks have used this style of hand‑selected, invite‑only growth to create early density and a sense of specialness before opening the doors wider.​

4. Design for interaction, not just content

From week one, your priority is generating member‑to‑member interactions that feel meaningfully better than what they can get elsewhere.

• Use specific prompts: questions that are narrow enough to answer easily but open enough to invite stories.​
• Run small‑room formats: circles, salons, office hours, or cohort‑based sprints, not just massive webinars.​
• Codify rituals: recurring threads (“wins of the week,” “ask a pro”), monthly calls, or live sessions that anchor people’s calendars.​

Stack Overflow’s evolution, for example, shows how clear structures for asking and answering questions can create persistent sub‑communities where people specialize and stay engaged for years.​

5. Close the loop and make early wins visible

People keep coming back when they see direct payoff for their participation.

• Celebrate specific outcomes: deals done, jobs landed, launches improved, ideas tested.​
• Show attribution: “This wouldn’t have happened without this conversation or this member.”
• Capture and reuse value: turn great threads into guides, FAQs, or member‑led sessions, giving credit to contributors.​

This is how weak ties harden into a sense of shared identity: “This is where people like me solve problems like this.”​

“Yeah, but…”: common objections

Leaders and teams push back on this approach in predictable ways.

“Yeah, but we don’t have time for that level of manual work”

The uncomfortable truth is: if you do not have time for manual work, you do not have time for community.

The choice is not between “scalable” and “manual”; it is between “manual now with the possibility of later scale” and “automated now with almost guaranteed decay.” The cold start problem simply cannot be solved at arm’s length.​

“Yeah, but we already have thousands of users”

A large user base is an asset, but it is not a community in waiting.

You still need to identify the subset most eager to connect, design an atomic network around them, and invite them into a more intentional space. That may mean segmenting and starting small inside your own larger ecosystem.​

What 20+ years of this work actually teaches you

This is the part nobody puts in a case study: communities do not fail quietly; they fail in slow, demoralizing ways that look, superficially, like “low engagement metrics.”

What is really happening is misalignment of expectations. Executives expect “channels” they can blast; members expect peers and progress; community teams are stuck in the middle trying to explain why a weekly newsletter and a Slack workspace are not magically producing advocacy and retention.

The organizations that eventually get community right do one of two things. Either they suffer through one or two failed attempts and finally give someone enough authority and runway to start again properly, or they accidentally stumble into the right pattern because a passionate internal champion ignores the launch theater and quietly nurtures a small cohort until the results are undeniable.

In practice, that looks like this:

• The community lead spends their first three months less as a “manager” and more like a matchmaker, anthropologist, and concierge.
• The metrics they care about are weirdly qualitative at first: who is referencing whom by name, who is coming back unprompted, which rituals people complain about if you cancel them.
• The moment things start to work is almost always when the company stops trying to own every interaction and starts letting members lead—hosting their own gatherings, writing their own resources, defining their own norms.

There is a humility required here that many brands, especially those used to one‑way marketing, find deeply uncomfortable. You cannot both script every interaction and claim you have a community. You can have a broadcast channel, a content hub, even a fan base, but not a genuine community.

If this sounds frustrating, that is because it is. The work is emotionally demanding, operationally messy, and often undervalued. But it is also one of the few levers in modern business that compounds: the better the relationships, the richer the stories, the more people you attract who care about more than a discount code.

Over decades of watching communities rise and fall, one pattern holds: the ones that last are built by people who are more obsessed with member outcomes than with member counts. Headcount follows heartbeat, not the other way around.

The mantra worth remembering

If there is one sentence to replace “build it and they will come,” let it be this:

Start small, care loudly, design for them to need each other more than they need you.