I grew an online community to $100K ARR over one year, AMA!

Thank you, Mitchell! I would probably follow a similar recipe (even though I didn't really know it was a "recipe" at the time since I had no idea what I was doing):

• Start by building an audience, which I did on Twitter and with my newsletter
• Once you reach a decent number of followers/subscribers, launch a community so they can connect together (the exact number of followers/subscribers you need depends on the type of community you want to build, for example a small mastermind of 10 community members may only require a newsletter with 100-200 subscribers)
• Once the community has grown to a point where you need support, hire people to help you! It doesn't have to be a huge commitment: I started with someone who joined on a freelance contract for a few hours a week, but it helped me a lot to manage all of the different moving parts of the community.

Step 2 and 3 are just one avenue you can take to create a sustainable business from the audience you built in step 1. You could also find some sponsors for your newsletter, but then the number of subscribers you have to aim for is much, much higher. I hope that helps!

Thanks so much Channing — and thanks again for inviting me to host this AMA!

My days always start with writing. I have two hours blocked every morning for researching and writing articles for Ness Labs. Then, I'll participate in the community and spend a bit of time on Twitter. I try to not have any meetings in the morning. In the afternoon (when I'm a bit more awake 😅) I do calls, meetups, podcasts, etc. Thankfully, my workload is actually not bad at all.

And I incorporate quite a bit from my neuroscience education into the way I work. The concepts of cognitive load, mental health management, the generation effect, etc. are central to the way I make decisions and spend my time / mental energy.

p.s. I did a short day in the life video on YouTube which kind of addresses the first part of your question :)

Thank you so much for your support, Francisco! For social media, I use it mainly in three ways:

• To post links to my new articles and YouTube videos
• To connect with people are interested in similar topics
• To work and learn in public (for example by sharing milestones and challenges)

I feel like all of these bring value to folks I connect with on social media, and it's been really great to be part of a little network of nerds who love to geek about topics I care about! A subset of these folks may join the Ness Labs community, but it's mostly a byproduct of providing value on a consistent basis.

In terms of choosing topics, I just sift through my notes and see if there's anything inspiring in there. I constantly take notes throughout the week — while reading online articles or books, while listening to podcasts, while having conversations with friends. So I have a very long list of potential topics and it's just a matter of choosing one, which can be hard sometimes!

I use writing as a thinking tool, so sometimes I don't know a lot about a topic before I start working on an article. Writing weekly articles is an excuse / forcing mechanism to research and learn. Many thanks for the thoughtful questions!

That's a great question — something I was also worried about at the beginning as well. In case that helps, here are some of the tasks our community manager has listed in their job description:

• Welcome everyone in the community and point them out to relevant resources
• Manage the community events calendar
• Reply to requests going to our community support inbox
• Participate in the community by replying to conversations and connecting members together
• If they have time after all of these are covered, brainstorm and suggest ideas to make the community even more valuable to members

I haven't found the need to create KPIs at this stage. As long as members are happy and get the support they need, I'm happy as well :)

Thank you, Alex! The screenshot in the post above is from Memberful. I also use Stripe for my overall revenue, which includes sponsorships, workshops, etc.

Thank you, Jaan! I think 1K newsletter subscribers is a good number to start a community. In terms of platform, you need to think about the experience you want to create.

If you want a small mastermind, it could just be a Telegram group. If you want real-time conversations with the ability to host video calls, Discord is great. And if you want asynchronous conversations that eventually turn into a searchable knowledge base for newcomers, Circle is IMHO the way to go. There are lots of great options, it's just about being intentional as a community builder :)

In terms of fostering engagement, what has worked really well for Ness Labs is to remove myself as much as possible from the equation. I do host and join events, but I encourage people to form their own groups within the community, and to host their own events around their interests. The more your members feel like they are co-owners of the community, the more value they will get, and the higher the engagement levels will be. I hope that helps!

Thank you, Nick! It may seem like we have lots of different types of people and interests in the community, but knowledge workers who care about productivity, creativity and mental health are actually a niche — I can see from the conversations in the forums that members truly have a lot in common.

It's not that easy IRL to find friends who can geek about productivity systems, mindfulness, etc. So I do think it's important to niche down a little bit so you can create an agora where people with similar interests can connect together. :)

Thank you!

1. I use Circle because it's easy to set up, easy to manage, and helps foster thoughtful, asynchronous conversations. You can build both a knowledge base and a community. I even use it to host my online courses.

2. I tried to offer a price that would be affordable for members around the world, while leaving enough margin to cover the costs of running a community. I know some communities have a much higher price point but I'm very happy with where I landed!

Thank you so much, Bhumi! And I'm so glad you're part of the community :)

Thank you! I've never launched a web app so I don't think I'd be the right person to answer that question though :)

Thank you, Ruben! At the beginning, I was systematically posting everything I wrote to Twitter, which really helped to grow the newsletter. I was also posting on HackerNews, but that was a bit more hit and miss. (virtually no traffic if you don't make it to the front page)

Nowadays, I don't post all of my articles on social media, and I rely a lot more on the newsletter and organic traffic from search engines to get people to discover my work.

In terms of writing an engaging newsletter, the most precious tool is feedback from your audience! I personally encourage my readers to reply to my newsletter, so I get a good idea of what they enjoyed (or not). Looking through your analytics to find the content that seems to resonate the most with your audience is also good practice. I hope that helps!

Yay, welcome to the community! Here is a screenshot I took 30 days after I launched the community:

In terms of topics to write about, I explore ideas at the intersection of what I care about, and what my audience cares about. At the beginning, it was a lot of experimentation, but now thanks to my analytics I can tell what kind of content is most popular, and I can make sure to write stuff people will hopefully find interesting.

Thank you so much, Joel! One daily habit I think could have helped make things more manageable would be to spend 30 minutes looking at our processes and see what could be automated. To this day, there's still a lot of stuff that's fairly manual, and I'd love to automate myself away from these — for example, managing our community events calendar. I'm trying to do this more often now, but it unfortunately hasn't become a habit yet!

Many thanks, Ali! Twitter was the biggest growth driver at the beginning. I also go lucky a few times on HackerNews, and launched the newsletter on Product Hunt which brought a few thousand new subscribers. Today, it's pretty balanced between Twitter and traffic from Google, which is growing slowly but steadily.

Thank you, Abdellah! It's a mix of content and social media. We get visitors from search engines and Twitter mostly. One of my goals for this year is to look into our acquisition channels to make them more efficient, but right now it's basically just writing good content and tweeting about it.

Yay, thank you for signing up!

Definitely the talk You and Your Research by Richard W. Hamming. I also really enjoyed How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan — it's the book that convinced me I should study neuroscience.

I think there are lots of communities built around shared interests as well, whether it's knitting, photography, or writing. There are a few things you could do to make such a community successful:

• Provide interest-based resources people can learn from
• Invite experts in that area of interest
• Connect people together so they can learn from each other
• Start interesting conversations around topics they care about
• Celebrate members who support and lift other members in their quest for knowledge

It's really not that different from shared-goals and industry-based communities. As long as people have interesting conversations within a safe space, you have done a great job already!

Thank you! I know it's a cliche saying this, but do things that don't scale. A community is about fostering authentic connections between human beings — that's not something you can automate or fix with code. Spend a lot of time talking to your community members, asking questions, and understanding their needs.