Notes on the Community Building and Finding Your People games
Background
The rules around finding people have evolved a bit with the advent of the internet. I’ll cover both new and old realms in the order of how well they work.
Game Walk Through
- Identify who your people are. This takes a lot longer than most people think, and most people don’t consciously design this. Get concrete on who you want to surround you for this chapter of life. For me, that is ambitious, passionate, appreciative of aesthetics, hard working, successful, thinks of life as a game, and stays a kid forever. They look something like exited founders and business owners, design engineers, writers, unconventional career people.
- Be someone that your people would love: just like dating, it’s two sided. Be someone your people love and when they meet you things will click. Be someone of value that is interesting to them. If you are not interesting, you will have a hard time attracting people.
- Identify where your people are. What websites do they visit? Where do they live in the world? How they spend their time? Do they follow X type of creator? Does that creator have a community?
- Put yourself in communities that your people frequent. Join the clubs, ask the event organizers how you can volunteer and be involved
- If you are building a community, build content and products that you can put in front of these people, bring them to your community, and close them towards some engagement
- Many times, if you are a bit weird, these communities will not exist or it will be too expensive to join them. You will have to create them. In these situations, become the broker. Be the Beacon.
- From here, you want to focus on how to win friends and keep retention in a community high. Those are fat games that need separate game notes.
These rules are simple, yet effective. There is work required to get what you want. A vast majority never thinks about curating their friends and peers in the same way we curate our information diet or our food diet or our music. However, the people you surround yourself with is the most important decision you will ever make in your life.
Cheat Codes
- Research then join related communities.
- Be the Beacon. Attract your people to you via: social apps, twitter, content, blogs, media
- Ask people you love, where do they spend their time… and go exist there.
Engage in Communities
If there are a lot of people like you, just join a community where a ton of you exist. This is like a fellowship for economics writers or a slack community for young people in VC, or an international snowboarding club.
Most of the time public “clubs” aren’t great, but they are a good first step. There is likely a more bespoke, harder to find community that has more of your people. Maybe it’s a friend group or a DJ collective or maybe it’s a reading group on AI that happens once a month in Washington Square Park. Once you find a small signal, explore that “node” and try to go further to where your people exist.
Hobby clubs + communities usually serve as great proxies. Communities are basic belonging units that you will likely gel with. Going a step further, find out the people that you want to be around and figure out w
Be The Beacon
Build a personal brand around ideas, work, and points of your personality that you care about, as your people will also care about these things and become attracted to you. Do this on social platforms, with public writing, by being loud and fun and talking about your passions at the bar, etc.
Building a personal brand by writing in public or recording content and allowing the internets and apps to do their thing to diffuse your personhood is ultra scaleable and highly effective. Your people will start interacting with your ideas or you’ll start engaging via DMs. It also allows people to remember you when people or opportunities arise within your circle–”Hey An, you’d be great for this job. Hey An, you would love this person”
You want to put out works or signals of yourself that other people like you can attach to. This may be youtube videos with your personality, a blog through your inner musings, or something like putting out great design engineer content to find other engineers who love beautiful products, just like you do. Just put stuff out there. It’ll be lonely for a long while, as content usually is. You are going for quality here, you only need 5-10 people just like you.
Create work that is true to the core of who you are (or who your community is/enjoys) and the algorithms will take care of the rest. Then, find wherever your people congregate and put it in front of them: prototype twitter for hackers, tik tok for a generally younger crowd, on twitch for super online people, etc.
In this game, being the beacon is the most efficient way to find your people if your people don’t already congregate somewhere.
Ask Your People
One thing I like to do when starting a game, is asking people how they did it and copying them. That way, I get quick results, and I get to learn best practices. Find people who have found their people how they did it, and ask those you want to surround yourself with how they found their people. I’m interested in Design Engineering, so I would ask all my design engineer friends where they hang out, where they met people, who they follow etc.
Then, you’ll be at the same place they are in a fraction of the time. This is related to my idea of Mentor Hacking in new games (more below)
Game Rules I’m Considering
- value ladders
- collecting people as a sales funnel
Notes
Mentor Hacking