Welcome to the 3rd issue of The Community.

There are over 350 people who are now readers that I’ve had personal conversations with.

Doing what doesn’t scale is important early.

You all mean the world to me.

Hope you enjoy!

The Big Idea

How Beehiiv is poised to build a community.

Tyler Denk, Co-Founder & CEO of the hyper-growth newsletter startup Beehiiv seemingly has community on his mind this week:

Tyler posted a poll on Twitter asking his followers which platform they’d prefer if Beehiiv were to launch an active community. (spoiler alert: Slack & Discord are neck and neck).

Love this.

Seeing Beehiiv’s meteoric rise over the past few months, over the past few weeks I saw this glaring gap - Beehiiv has a tremendous PLG motion, a rapidly growing customer base, and a movement they’re about to lead, but no community to build a movement.

I sensed it was only a matter of time.

Below is a community growth plan I wrote up and sent them weeks ago.

It can be executed before a platform is picked and can run concurrently if/when they choose to roll out their own owned community.

Overview:

Beehiiv is a newsletter platform built for growth. Founded by early employees at Morning Brew, they’ve helped tons of creators and brands to grow faster.

Here’s their incredible revenue growth:

Along the way, they’ve amassed a tremendous amount of raving fans.

Their brand (and product) are super strong and folks love the vibes they’re bringing.

What I love:

Beehiiv is already building community on Twitter.

They’re doing it by having their whole team active and engaging on every single tagged post of Beehiiv or anyone on the team.

This energy and passion is palpable and people feed off it.

This encourages folks (myself included) to keep posting about them and tagging them. Their engagement is my engagement and I directly benefit from it (as do they).

This ignites a nice growth loop (and gives value to all their raving fans and customers).

My followers see the post → check out my newsletter + their accounts → both ways have links to sign up for Beehiiv (my newsletter has Beehiiv in the footer + their social accounts have beehiiv linked)

Here’s the Challenge:

There is no community for Beehiiv customers, to capture even more growth and to support them.

There’s the Beehiiv team liking every tweet under the sun (I LOVE this).

There are some creator spotlights’ in Beehiiv emails, but more work can be done to collaborate with their users and prospective users to really create a movement.

A relatively recent ‘mail VIP users a cool thing’ plan went out. But this doesn’t build ‘community’.

This is an influencer campaign at its core. Not a community-building one.

The core challenge is there’s no community maximizing impact for creators and companies in the Beehiiv ecosystem.

This is a MASSIVE opportunity for growth.

Solution:

Build it.

But before launching a Slack or Discord, create something quickly executable that can drive impact with the flexibility to recalibrate if needed.

Build Community / Customer Advisory Boards (CAB)

Create x groups of 8-12 members (start small)

Some Potential Personas:

• Top Influencers with newsletters

• Biggest companies using Beehiiv

• Creators with the most subscribers

• Biggest partners from the ad network

Plan:

• Meet Quarterly

• Discuss what’s working and what isn’t for them

• Discuss the product

• Have them sign NDAs and show them new rollouts first

• Produce co-branded content (optional)

• Send them one-of-a-kind gifts quarterly in prep as a thank-you

• Build a bunch of intangible benefits for members (intros, exposure, etc)

• Have them add ‘Community Advisor’ as a job title to LinkedIn + X accts

• Add in posts/announcements of this to create FOMO.

Build a digital community

• Leverage the Community Advisory Boards as a starting point - Listen to the needs of creators, companies, partners, and advertisers.

• Create pillars of support that support those key needs. Have content roll out from Beehiiv to help and encourage members to help one another.

• Intangible benefits for contributing: being seen, exposure, more newsletter sign-ups, etc.

• I suspect that having both creators and companies in the same space will encourage larger companies to learn from creators, network with them, and potentially work with them on collaborations while still learning from other companies too.

• Pick a platform that best supports engagement.

• Share the most popular threads and new ideas talked about by members in a Beehiiv weekly newsletter (of course).

Create “clubs” around member goals.

Examples:

• 1k subscriber club

• 10k subscriber club

• 20k subscriber club

• 100k subscriber club

• 1 mill subscriber club

Plan:

• Help members get to the next level through exclusive newsletter content that they unlock when they hit the next subscriber club goal.

• IRL intimate events for folks that hit the top 1 million subscriber club.

• Facilitate roundtables to allow members of each club to learn from other members.

Encourage Beehiiv users to build their own communities.

• Notion did this masterfully here.

• Create structure (rules) for organizations that want to build their own (Facebook Groups + Discord only as an example).

• User Incentives: learn from others, gain exposure, business development.

Substack and Convertkit have nice newsletter and email tools with some pretty solid growth strategies.

What they don’t have is a movement.

The opportunity to create one by leveraging community is very open and creators, solopreneurs and brands alike are ready for it!

The Gap I see in the space:

So many SaaS founders and marketers want to build community to help scale their growth but don’t know where to start with community building.

This is why I started this newsletter.

My calling is to help SaaS companies build community-led motions to help solve their GTM challenges and give more people a space for belonging.

2 Resources

I. Return on Community:

Holly Firestone, Community Strategist and former community head at Atlassian, Salesforce, and Venafi talks about connecting Community to Cash Flow with ROI insights. (read more)

II. Community is the Future of AI:

To keep knowledge open and accessible to all, we much come together to build the future of AI. (read more)

3 Tools

I. Bronto

Bronto is a cool pivot by Commsor helping build the Go To Network movement. Users can leverage Bronto to connect all their communities and networks (think social + WhatsApp + Slack) into a single digital inbox with the ability to leverage LinkedIn for intros to your prospects through the people in your network who are already connected to them. (try it)

II. Matcha

Matcha is an evolution of Meetsy (again by Commsor) used for member matching. This is the sauce for engagement as you can connect community members to others to meet with new people on a regular cadence. Building your network, mentorships, and business development are all some use cases here. Others have tried, but Matcha looks to be the most seamless here.

Shocked more brands aren’t using this as a low-hanging add-on to their community-led motions. (try it)

III. Partiful

Partiful is a fun no-cost app for in-person events and meetups. I’ve used it for informal and formal events and it’s a hit because of ease to set up and connection to text messaging to ensure folks show up! (try it)

Thanks for reading!

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Until next week,

Jared

p.s. What is one important problem you would like community to solve for you?