Building Community and Trust 🪃

Short, practical drops on culture and technology. 🚀

Our community is growing! Start and end your week with what the builders are reading. 👇

To the community 🙏

Happy Friday! ☀️

We're ending the week considering community building, but before we do, let's do a wrap-up of some interesting internet stuff that happened this week:

• Have a day gaming! Many think it's a focal piece of the Web3 movement

• Spotify vs. everyone who doesn't like Joe Rogan (surprising twist: even the government is getting involved)

• San Francisco is dragged on social for a press conference on plumbing

• Some of the big tech names are getting smoked (plus some good old fashion Stripe humour)

• Paulo reminds us all that the world is only changed based on what you do

Okay, let's get into it. 🚀

Tweet of the Day (TOD)! 🐦

I tend to be a man of extremes. I go very seriously in one direction for a period of time (I'm trying to make that period of time longer). One of my current curiosities is distance running. Specifically, runners from the Great Lakes region of Africa (where I lived in the summer of 2012). An impossible number of the best runners on earth come from the same place. 

Eliud Kipchoge is the best marathon runner of all time. He is also unfailingly humble. Today's TOD tells me one thing: If the 🐐 only needs black coffee and sourdough bread, you only need black coffee and sourdough bread. Just get it done today.

Community 🌍

This week a friend called in a favour. I low-key love when that happens because I get the chance to make someone happy who has given a lot to my life. He wanted me to come and speak to his MBA cohort about the power of podcasting. We ended up focusing the conversation on building community. Podcasting is an incredible way to do that.

Why? Because it builds trust unlike any medium I've ever seen. 

Why would the above be true? Yes, content demand changes as demographics do, sure. This may be a natural evolution of the key demographic (18-54). But my bet is it's more than that. My bet is it starts and ends with community and trust.

Young people don't listen or watch mainstream media because they don't trust it. Polished sound-bites from polished people. You'd never speak to me that way if we were speaking in an honest and vulnerable way at the coffee house. You wouldn't speak like you're standing at a podium. You wouldn't dodge the real question and you wouldn't chase clout by putting down someone else on the other side of the idealogical isle.

I don't know if the Nielsen report is good or bad. This isn't a value judgement either way. In some ways I do have a 21st-century lament that consensus and truth are next to impossible in this landscape. There's something to be said about us all huddled around the same evening news report, but there is also something to be said about decentralization and the rise of independent experts.

It all comes back to trust and community.

Rules for building community 🤝

The first question I ask myself is 'What does my community want from me?' Sure, consider things like your community channels (how you reach them- or how they want to be reached). Not everyone needs a podcast, or even a website for that matter. But I'm paying more attention to the relationship they want with me.

Here are the rules for building community that I'm taking in to 2022.

• Don't put yourself in a position to take from your community. Just like Winters said to Buck Compton as they prepare for the invasion of Normandy in Hanks & Spielberg's epic Band of Brothers. If there's a paid tier coming, for example, don't produce daily free content and then put a paywall in front of it. Add the content that your paid community wants. 

• Establish trust. What does the community want from you? What do you want from them?

• Be consistent. If you break their trust, find a way to make it right. Trust is not easily earned in the 21st-century and is all-too-easily lost. I've broken the trust of my community before. I've taken those licks and learned. Feedback is critical.

• You set the tone for the community and facilitate their connection, but you don't own it. It will take on a life of its own and your job is to listen.

• Make feedback loops simple. How do they candidly tell you what they think?

• Show your work. Nobody is interested in what you think. Ultimately they will be interested in how you think. If they can trust that, they'll forgive you when you screw up.

• Be you. Authenticity is the currency of the internet.

Thanks for reading. I hope you start building today. 🚀

Gratitude 🙏

I feel lucky to have you on the other end of this newsletter. If you haven't yet, join the community, and a bring a friend! Have a great weekend.👇

See you on the path.

- MG