3 community building lessons learned while growing a coworking space with 1,000+ memberships
This article shares 3 important lessons I’ve learned about community-building in my nearly 8 years at Fishburners. Fishburners is Australia’s first and largest coworking community for tech startups. Since opening in 2011, it has supported over 2,000 startups.
How to build an engaged community
One of the most popular questions I’ve been asked over the 7 years I’ve been at Fishburners is, how did you build such an engaging and collaborative community?
Over the years we have had people from around the world come and visit Fishburners and question what our secret sauce is. Even alumni who have been to silicon valley, often come back proudly speaking about how Fishburners has a better community than what they could find overseas.
Now, I have worked at Fishburners for almost eight years, but the community of Fishburners actually started before I began. Six months in fact before I began, where Mike Casey and Peter Davison decided to create one of Australia’s first coworking spaces focused on founders helping founders succeed. The space was completely run by members for the first 6 months and it was the early efforts of these supportive members which created the DNA that we have at Fishburners today. Those early members put out the rubbish, did the books, ran workshops, built the first Fishburners website- all out of love for the community that was doing so much for them and their startup.
I like to explain that story as I know I was lucky, I was working for a company that already had a valuable asset. It’s an asset which I have always taken very seriously and focused on growing and strengthening over the years I have worked from Fishburners. Our community has helped create hundreds of startups and led us to being able to expand into three cities with 1,000 desks.
Here are a few tips that may help anyone looking to build a new community or strengthen an existing one:
Community Tip #1- Set Expectations
Once someone’s expectations have been set, it’s difficult to change them (related to ‘anchoring bias’). So it’s vital that you carefully choreograph the introduction of new members and ensure they’re well aware of “how we do things around here” and what is and isn’t acceptable.
Mismanaged expectations are a recipe for disaster. By way of example, imagine an online community (say a Facebook group) where self-promotion was specifically against the rules. Think about how differently you’d react if you were told directly during the induction process versus posting something self-promotional in your first week as a member, having the admins delete it, and then giving you a formal warning. The same guidelines can have a very different impact when expectation aren’t set up front.
It’s common when selling people on joining your community (directly or indirectly) to have to carefully balance the desire to heavily sell people on the benefits while still managing their expectations. An individual salesperson can certainly be motivated to overhype, but once the member is in the community their neglected expectations will leave them unhappy, annoyed, or toxic to the community. When you’re building a community, the old saying “undersell and overdeliver” is crucial. With one exception — don’t be afraid to oversell the benefits of engaging in your community. It might sound contradictory, but in most any community — you only get out what you put in. So set the expectation up front that they’ll get more if they give more (which also means your other members will be happier… win-win). It also changes the mindset from “what are you going to do to help me” to “what can I do to help others”.
We’ve learned that you absolutely have to set these expectations as early as possible. Even a day or two after the new member has gotten started, you’ll be hard pressed to change the expectations they went ahead and formed on their own.
In many cases, you’ll want to start setting expectations right on your website. By getting ahead of the ball, you’re significantly reducing the opportunity for the new member to set their own (incorrect) expectations. Every touchpoint after your website should then reinforce their expectations. Take the time to map out the touchpoints along your customer’s journey and plan how you’ll strategically set their expectations along the way — your best bet is to start with the most important, and layer on the detail over time (all the while reinforcing the most crucial ones).
It’s vital you keep in mind that you need to always communicate what’s in it for them. Unless your community is specifically based around altruism and contribution, you need to tie their efforts back to a net benefit to them. You should only need to explain this in the beginning though, as once they’re an active member of the community they should see the benefits first hand.
At Fishburners, we have 6 key touch points between visiting our website and starting as a member. Along those 6 touch points, we layer on exactly what it means to be a burner (Fishburners member) and what to expect from their membership. We even have a set of activities that ensure they embody the values of our community in their first month.
Listing out all the expectations you want your members to have is important, so take the time to list them and rank them by importance. If you’re feeling stuck, these might be helpful:
- What do you want them to care about?
- How should they behave?
- What should they value about your company?
- What should they value about your community?
- How do you want them to contribute?
- How should they interact with other members?
- What does a typical day in your community look like?
- What shouldn’t they do?
- What isn’t acceptable?
- What happens if they aren’t doing things the way they should be?
- and most importantly; What value will they get from engaging in your community
Community Tip #2- Give up control
Have you ever been in the position where you wanted to get something done, but you didn’t have the freedom to do it? I’m betting if you’re in startups, you’re the kind of person that’s prone to that feeling! There’s something super frustrating about wanting to help, knowing it will have a positive impact and yet for some arbitrary reason you’re not allowed to do it. Stopping that feeling for your members is what this tip focuses on — giving people the chance to get involved.
If you’re managing a happy, engaged community (and making sure to set expectations as we talked about), you’ll have members excited to contribute their time and energy. That’s a powerful thing, but it can be fleeting if you make it too hard (or even impossible) for those members to get to work!
Pitching in for the good of the community is a well-established part of the Fishburners community culture. In the early days, it was born out of necessity but has become a part of what makes Fishburners great. In those early days (when I first started), I was the only paid staff member in the company and the community took care of many aspects of keeping the office running — things like taking out the rubbish, organizing social events, and putting beers in the fridge.
As we started growing and hiring more staff, we assumed that we should start to handle these things so our members could “focus on their startup,” but it turns out we were wrong. In the short time we took all these tasks over from the community and pushed them away from contributing, we lost some of the spark that gave our community life. We quickly realized the more your members contribute, the more they feel part of the community and the more invested they are in its success.
It turns out there’s a psychological principle behind this too, and it’s often referred to as the Ikea effect — people place more value and care more about things they’ve helped build.
Sure, expanding from 30 desks to 1,000 meant that we needed specialized staff to keep the business running *but* we think carefully about the balance between what we should do for the members and what we should let them do for themselves — so they get the best possible value and experience.
In the words of one of our longest-standing members and resident community expert Rob Wood; “If there’s something the community can do, ensure they do it instead of your staff.”
It seems counter-intuitive but letting your members do things you could do for them can give them a much better experience and significantly improve their sense of engagement and belonging in the community. It might feel like your palming off work sometimes, but it’s all about helping the members and the community help themselves.
For example, every Friday night we have a popular public event: Friday night startup pitches. This event is almost completely member run. We have a member host, three members judge and three members pitch. Before the event, the host will go around the office and collect the week’s wins and losses from the community. Sometimes hesitant at first, the hosts always end up thanking the Fishburners staff afterward — grateful to have had the chance to meet a bunch of members and making useful connections. If a Fishburners staff member hosted pitches, that’s a golden opportunity for collaboration and networking that’s lost every week!
Now I’m sure you’re wondering more specifically how you can implement this for *your* community. So let’s cover three critical steps to putting this community building secret to work.
#1 Appoint Champions
Your champions will be a small, empowered group of members expected to represent the community from the inside. Not sure who to choose as a champion? These people will essentially pick themselves; you want to select the people who are already heavily engaged in the community. These are the people who are always making suggestions, asking for ways to get involved, being appreciative of the work you and your team do. Empowering these people and showing the other members that they’re a shining example will pay huge dividends. Many of the great initiatives at Fishburners came from our amazing champions.
#2 Make it easy to contribute
Generally speaking, people want to do the right thing. But there’s a limit to how far out of their way someone will go to help. And it’s our job to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute. John Corbett (Head of workplace at Cisco) taught me ‘if there is a leak on the floor, it’s human behavior to walk around the leak, not go and find a mop to clean it up. You need to make it easy for them to clean it up.’ If you make it almost as easy to clean up the mess as the walk around it, people will make the effort. In a world of convenience, we are always looking for the easiest way to get information or fix a problem. Look at your community, and find ways to make it easier for them to contribute. Maybe it’s a forum on a social media platform they already use, or a suggestion box near the coffee machine they visit every morning, or maybe it’s having the paper towels on the bench so they can see exactly where they are.
#3 Push back and acknowledge their efforts
This part can be tough, especially if you haven’t properly set expectations because it can come across as rude or out of line. But you’ll want to empower yourself and your team to say no to members wanting or expecting you to do things that you’ve decided they can (and should) do for themselves. If a member asks for assistance with a task designated as ‘for members to do,’ you can help guide the member by suggesting they ask another member (such as a Champion). It might feel difficult at first, but making this a habit will build resilience in your members, these requests will decrease, and your community will become more cohesive and collaborative as they solve these problems together. BUT DON’T FORGET — when a member does something awesome for the community, ensure they get acknowledged for it (ideally publicly)! Make sure you thank them for helping. It’s surprising how motivating a simple thank you can be.
Community Tip #3- Sweat the small stuff
You’ve probably heard of the ‘aha moment,’ the small action your users take where they suddenly realize the true value of your product. The ‘aha moment’ is usually the moment where the user finally ‘gets it’. For Twitter, this moment is when a new user has followed 30 people. After digging through their data, they discovered that anyone who’d followed 30+ people virtually never churned. So now they’ve designed their whole onboarding process to get you to follow 30+ people.
This tip is looking at something similar but slightly different. We’re not looking for that small moment when people see the real value in your product. Instead, we’re looking for small decisions that can create disproportionate value. These high-leverage changes aren’t easy to find but can add massive value to your community.
The best place to start is to think about the core benefits people get from your community (not just the obvious ones) and work backward from there. In the case of Fishburners, one of these is to make connections with other like-minded startup founders. So our first step is to think about how we can increase the number of relationships between members. To make a connection, people have to meet. When I say meet, it isn’t just saying “Hi,” it’s introducing yourself and your startup and vice-versa. So this is what we want to maximize — founders meeting.
Of course, there are the obvious things like organizing a meet & greet, or having events. But we’re obviously going to do all those straightforward things. What we want to focus on are the less obvious things. How can we subtly create more meetings?
Well, one of the ways we do this at Fishburners is by what kind of appliance we buy for our kitchen…
At Fishburners we only provide cafe style coffee machines — not capsule coffee like Nespresso. Why? Because it takes around 3 minutes to make a coffee in the cafe-style machine. Those 3 minutes means there’s usually 2–3 people at the machine at once, and there’s plenty of time for the founders to meet while they’re making their coffee! These brief meetings break the ice and create the perfect opportunity for founders to meet someone that complements their business or their stage in the startup journey.
By having that coffee machine, that’s a big driver of one of our core values without having to force members to meet each other in unnatural ways. Instead, we’ve created a natural opportunity for people to meet. We’ve designed a lot of aspects of Fishburners to maximize these chance meetings and internally refer to it as ‘bump in factors.’
Another way to approach it is to reduce the ways people can avoid a valuable touchpoint as we listed together earlier. If there are things people do that reduce their chance of meeting other founders, we want to design against that. One way we do this is by trying to maximize the number of people who eat their lunch in the main kitchen area (which we combine with our main breakout space — the two together are called the ‘Idea Space’).
Why? Because it creates opportunities to meet other founders. Most other offices will have a central kitchen and then several small kitchenettes littered throughout the office with facilities like sinks, microwaves, and fridges. At Fishburners, we only have one kitchen with all the facilities members need so that everyone goes to the same place. If we had kitchenettes around the office, people would always choose the easiest option! That easy option means just using the closest microwave to their desk where they’re unlikely to run into anyone instead of going that little bit further to the central kitchen that’s full of great people to meet!
This kind of experience design applies online as well. For example, you could have your members write an introduction post that’s shared publicly on their first day of membership. This tactic isn’t uncommon, but it’s important to follow the guidelines above and think about how to make it as easy as possible. So don’t just make them write a post, give them a simple framework (or checklist, or set of questions to answer) that makes it super easy to write that introduction post.
There are unlimited ways to put this principle to work, but my best recommendation would be to work backward from the most prominent benefits people get from being in your community.
