Note: this post was originally published January 12, 2023 on my personal site.
Until you’ve seen one really, truly work, the word “community” feels like a buzzword. For me, it used to make me think of pictures of diverse groups of young people sitting on blankets in the grass, laughing into salads. But in the first step of my post-graduate career, I had the opportunity to build a community and witness the incredible value that it brought to its members and the local area. The community that I built and the work I did at Groundswell Startups truly made me fall in love with my hometown.
The Before
When I joined Groundswell, it was essentially a very ambitious meetup group. They had just bought a long-foreclosed skatepark, ramps and all, and were hosting two events monthly: a happy hour at a local bar and a series of speaker- or panel-led events at whatever venue, bar, or company would have them. We knew who our audience was for these events and had an idea of who we wanted to reach with our new building and offerings, but no clear path to get there.
Building Groundswell — that is, creating the coworking and incubator space, was a huge investment. Beyond the physical cost of renovating and furnishing the building, we would have to create all of the processes to make it a functional coworking and event space.
Besides that, while we were starting from an email list of more than 1300 people who were interested in startup resources, they weren’t customers. We were going to have to sell them on something that didn’t exist yet: a community.
Building a Vision
In figuring out how to build that community, we worked backwards from a vision. That vision started with a couple of examples we’d seen work: Brad Feld’s description of a “give first” startup community in his book Startup Communities and the very real example of our sister incubator, Domi Station, in Tallahassee.
But how do we apply those examples to our audience and local area? One of my first tasks at Groundswell was to interview the Community Manager at Domi. Through those conversations, my goal was to learn how and why people joined the community, how they measured the value they got from the community, and some of the challenges that we could address as Groundswell got started.
I also interviewed three of the first startups we had worked with. Founders we met with frequently and who we hoped would represent the future occupants of the space. I started to get a pretty good idea of what our future members likely wanted to get out of the community and what would convince them to give our community their time and attention, especially when deadlines were nigh and resources sparse.
After all of that, we had our vision and we wrote our mission statement.
We wanted to create a place where entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and innovators could share their ideas; get honest, transparent feedback; and support each other. The ultimate goal was to help companies access the resources to get off the ground, scale, and even get acquired. That goal required the participation of a few types of people, who we defined as such:
Talent: people looking for jobs who had sufficient skills to support the growth of these companies.
Mentors: people who could share their expertise and experience in order to help startups make better decisions.
Founders: people who are starting companies. These, ultimately, would be our customers, who we wanted to fill the space on a daily basis.
It was still pretty difficult to communicate what this community would look like to our future members. So, we had to think about what a member of our community would do. This became our success criteria for our selection of new community members.
We knew someone was contributing to the community we wanted to create if they were:
- Celebrating the success of their and other startups’ successes,
- Actively creating or contributing to products or companies with scalable models,
- Giving constructive, honest feedback to help companies improve their products, pitches, and strategy,
- Sharing their recent and past learnings to help expose others to new knowledge or insights.
In every introduction to the community, there were only two rules that we introduced: don’t be an asshole and don’t sell. Just as we had determined what model members of the community might look like, we also determined what we wanted to avoid: what we had seen cause other communities to fail or what scared us away from other communities with similar goals.
Once we had an idea of what this community looked like and what behaviors we wanted to take place there, we had to recruit its members. We laid out what our values and expectations looked like for our existing community members and empowered them to be ambassadors. Then our next job was just spreading the word.
Sharing the Vision
Honestly, as a recent college graduate, I truly felt I had the coolest job in the world. We spent a great deal of our time creating our vision of what the space would look like, how people might use it, and then sharing that vision — often in an empty warehouse still under construction. We thrifted, sourced donated furniture, and created DIY solutions (many of which were quickly replaced) to create the MVP.
When we launched in June 2016, with a mostly cobbled-together office space (with 15 doors missing due to a nearly year-long materials shortage), we opened the doors (at least, the ones we did have) to something like 260 excited visitors and only 15 paying members. It was exciting and terrifying: we had the space, but now we had to make good on our promises.
Illustrating our Values
In that first year, our focus was on discovery. Where could we create value for our members? How could we illustrate our “give first” mentality ourselves, before asking it of others? How could we promote the behaviors that we had determined meant that the community was evolving successfully?
The first thing we did was put our money where our mouth was when it came to our values of honesty and transparency. We asked for feedback constantly, we set aside a great deal of time to check in with individual members of our community to see what we were doing well and what we were not. We hosted tons of events, sometimes three per week, to test content, and to see what really resonated with our community. Many failed or proved difficult to scale, but we were never afraid to try something new and to ask how it went.
We fought past the sugar coating, in many cases, to encourage our community to say what they were really thinking (on a scale of one to ten: how frustrated are you that we still do not have doors?) And we invited that feedback into the open — we gave our community the space to voice their frustration and as a result, when we overcame those challenges (when we finally got doors), this approach gave us the space to celebrate.
We also became really invested in our members’ endeavors. We freely gave our time and lent our skills to truly benefit the projects our members were committed to. So much of what I learned in those three years about marketing and about strategy came from sitting in meetings and listening to our founders and mentors talk through startups’ problems, or from the hours I spent helping founders create better pitch decks, kickstart their market research, or figure out why users were falling off the page or out of their programs.
Seeing the Model Scale
As members, not just stewards, of the community, our team fully committed to demonstrating the “give first” mentality that we wanted to see and it paid off. Wanting to pass along what they knew or had learned, or just wanting to give back to the community, we saw our mentors making Groundswell their new “local haunt.” They donated their time to startups, they helped connect them to other experts, and they truly supported each other.
We saw tons of new partnerships being born and companies sometimes completely reforming out of the mutual collaboration we saw in the space.
By the end of my time there, we were up to 150 members, 60 startups, and 25 members. Many of our original mentors and members had stuck around and some of our startups had graduated to mentorhood, offering support to incoming founders.
We had launched an internship program that connected students, especially those who were otherwise ineligible for off-campus programs, to a variety of startups, where they could get hands-on experience with a variety of industries and tools.
We had created open feedback sessions for our members to test products or marketing materials, we were hosting pitch contests with actual cash prizes, and we were launching a formal incubator program to equip new founders with their first executive summary and pitch deck.
Although I left Groundwell in 2019 when I made the move to Washington, D.C., I make semi-annual visits every time I’m back in town. I’ve been excited to see that, although its community and culture has evolved somewhat, its core values remain and the community that I helped build is still very much intact and is still supporting the Space Coast entrepreneurial ecosystem today.
