Q&A with Tom Luddington: Founding Designer at Outverse

Designing the next generation of community tools

We’re incredibly excited to welcome Tom Luddington as our Founding Designer at Outverse. Tom was previously Product Designer at Softr, a leading no-code platform. He’s also a seasoned community builder, having founded and scaled The Designers League (TDL), a global community of 70,000+ creatives. We sat down to discuss his design & community journey so far.

What excited you to join Outverse?

Tom: Community has been really instrumental to my growth as a designer and maker. Building my own community and actively participating in many others has shown me how much power there is in being a part of something where — no matter where you are physically located — you have the ability to connect with others like yourself.

Joining Outverse was a no-brainer knowing that we’re focused on solving the same big issues I faced when growing my own community. I’ve seen the limitations with other tools firsthand including the lack of real customisability. With a focus on enabling high-quality interaction and collaboration, Outverse is massively levelling up the experience for online communities — which I’m super excited to be a part of.

Tell us a bit more about The Designers League and your own personal evolution as a community builder?

Tom: I created The Designers League (TDL) when I moved from London back to my home city (which has a population of around 100,000). It felt immeasurably smaller and lonelier instantly. I decided to create a Facebook group to keep in touch with university friends and peers; upon seeing my friends and their friends join also it sparked the idea that this could be so much more than simply a coping mechanism!

Several years later the community has grown to over 70,000 members, with 0 ad spend. Building TDL showed me I could wear more hats and move beyond just my skillset as purely a designer to become more of a generalist maker type.

When I started TDL, community building was less of a trend — and we certainly did not have the same amount of options when it comes to tooling as exists today. It’s a great time to start a community, but an ever increasingly hard time to build something that lasts. That’s something we’re looking to fix with Outverse.

How did you get into design and what has your journey looked like since?

Tom: When I was a teenager I played in a couple bands. I found myself enjoying tweaking our Myspace layouts (remember that?) and creating branding / merchandise more so than actually playing in a band. I taught myself all the usual tools and techniques and have never looked back.

Moving into product design happened when I launched my community and decided to build sites and products for it. Being unable to code, I had to rely on tools like WordPress to get these off the ground. The later emergence of no-code tools like Webflow, Bubble & Softr really opened my eyes to what I could make and build without significant technical overhead.

This led me into really being passionate about building tools and platforms which enable users to create more easily. My previous role at Softr saw me helping users create software without code and my new role at Outverse is a return back to my roots, building tools for the next generation of online communities.

What’s your biggest recommendation to anyone looking to build a community today?

Tom: Start with a super specific purpose; worry about expanding the scope of it later. With TDL, my initial purpose was getting feedback on design work from university peers. As we grew in size, we became more of an ell-encompassing home for designers spanning across all stages of career and experience levels.

Keeping focused helps you pinpoint the type of community member you want to attract and it also means you can focus on just doing the main function of your community really well — which is integral to keeping your community healthy and active.

Once you have an active early community you have the perfect opportunity to expand your offerings by listening to your members and discovering what they want and need.

What’s your favourite thing you’ve built?

Tom: The Designers League as a community and its various accompanying websites & products over the years. It was an amazing learning experience which taught me how to be a marketer, developer (without code!) & community manager all at the same time.

Outverse is currently in early access — sign up to our waitlist. Follow us on Twitter & LinkedIn for all the latest updates. 🪐