I built an online community from scratch. I made every mistake possible. Here are the resources that finally turned things around.
Let me tell you how this started.
Three years ago I had an idea. A simple one. I wanted to create an online community for people in my niche — a space where people could share experiences, ask questions, support each other, and grow together. I’d seen communities like it in other spaces and thought, ‘I can do this.’ How hard can it be?
Very hard, as it turns out.
I spent the first six months doing almost everything wrong. I chose the wrong platform. I focused on the wrong metrics. I burnt myself out trying to create all the content myself. I watched my carefully built community go silent for days at a time and had absolutely no idea why or what to do about it.
The community didn’t die. But it came close. And the reason it survived and eventually grew into something real was not because I figured it out on my own. It was because I found the right resources: the right books, newsletters, courses, communities about building communities, frameworks, and thinkers who had done this before me and documented what they learned.
This post is everything I wish someone had handed me on day one.
If you’re building an online community — whether you’re just starting or you’re stuck in the messy middle — these are the resources that changed how I thought, how I worked, and how I led.
First, let’s Talk About What Building a community actually means.
Before I get into resources, I want to clear something up.
Building a community is not the same as building an audience.
An audience watches you. A community talks to each other.
An audience grows when you create good content. A community grows when members find value in connecting with each other — not just with you.
This distinction took me embarrassingly long to understand. I was creating content like a broadcaster and wondering why nobody was talking. I wasn’t building a community. I was building an audience and calling it a community.
The moment I understood the difference, everything I was doing changed. And the resources below are largely responsible for that shift in thinking.
My opinion? Most people who say they want to build a community actually want to build an audience. Neither is wrong. But if you’re going to build a community, you need to understand what you’re actually signing up for — and these resources will help you figure that out fast.
The Books That Changed Everything
“Get Together” by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto
This is the first book I recommend to anyone who asks me about community building. Full stop.
It’s published by the team at People & Company, and it’s one of the most practical, human, and genuinely useful books I’ve read on the subject. It doesn’t talk about communities in the abstract. It tells real stories of real communities — from a running club in a small town to massive online movements — and draws out the principles that made them work.
The central argument is simple and profound. Communities form around a shared identity and a reason to keep showing up. You don’t build a community by collecting people. You build it by giving people something to do together.
I read this in one sitting. Then I read it again with a notebook. The chapters on finding your first members and creating rituals that give people a reason to return are worth the entire price of the book alone.
My opinion? If you read only one book on community building, make it this one. It’s short, readable, and immediately actionable.
“The Art of Community” by Charles Vogl
Where Get Together focuses on the practical, The Art of Community goes deeper into the philosophy.
Vogl introduces the concept of the “boundary” — the line between inside and outside a community — and argues that strong communities have a clear sense of who belongs and what that belonging means. He outlines seven principles of belonging that apply to communities from ancient religious orders to modern online groups.
This book made me think about my community differently. I’d been so focused on growth — getting more members — that I’d completely neglected depth. What did it mean to be a member? What did members owe each other? What rituals or practices defined the group?
After reading Vogl, I rebuilt my onboarding process from scratch. I created a clearer sense of what membership meant. The engagement rate in my community jumped within a month.
“Buzzing Communities” by Richard Millington
Richard Millington is one of the most respected practitioners in professional community management, and this book is his masterwork.
It’s dense. It’s detailed. It’s not a casual read. But if you’re serious about building a community at scale, it is essential.
Millington introduces the community lifecycle model — the idea that communities move through stages from inception to establishment to maturity — and gives you specific strategies for each stage. What works when you have 50 members is completely different from what works when you have 5,000.
This book saved my community during the growth phase. I was applying tactics meant for large established communities to a small emerging one and wondering why they weren’t working. Understanding the lifecycle model fixed that immediately.
“People Powered” by Jono Bacon
Jono Bacon is a community legend. He built the Ubuntu community into one of the largest open-source communities in the world. He knows what he’s talking about.
People Powered focuses specifically on communities built around products and businesses — which is increasingly the landscape most community builders are working in. It’s practical, strategic, and full of frameworks you can apply immediately.
The section on community engagement models alone is worth the cover price. Bacon breaks down exactly how to move members from passive consumers to active contributors to leaders — and gives you concrete tools for facilitating each transition.
The Newsletters Worth Reading Every Week
FeverBee’s Newsletter
FeverBee is Richard Millington’s company, and their weekly newsletter is consistently the best writing on professional community management available anywhere for free.
Every edition is packed with research, case studies, and frameworks. Millington writes with unusual clarity, and he’s not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom about what makes communities work.
Subscribe at feverbee.com. Read every edition. Save the ones that are relevant to your current stage.
The Community Club Newsletter
The Community Club is a community for community professionals — yes, that’s a real thing and it’s genuinely excellent — and their newsletter covers trends, tools, job opportunities, and tactical advice for people building communities professionally.
What I like most about the Community Club is that it’s practitioner-led. The advice comes from people who are in the trenches of community management right now, not theorists writing from a distance.
Orbit’s Newsletter
Orbit is a community growth platform, and their newsletter and blog are some of the best free educational content available on community strategy and measurement.
Their writing on community metrics is particularly valuable. They’ve done serious thinking about how to measure community health beyond vanity metrics like member count, which is exactly the kind of thinking most community builders need.
Lenny’s Newsletter
Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter covers product, growth, and retention — but increasingly covers community as a growth channel. If you’re building a community around a product or brand, Lenny’s writing on retention and engagement is essential context.
The Online Platforms and Tools Worth Knowing
Circle
When I relaunched my community after my early failures, I moved it to Circle. That decision changed everything.
Circle is purpose-built for online communities. It has spaces for discussion, events, courses, and direct messaging. It looks professional. It’s easy to navigate. It gives community managers the tools they need without the clutter of features you’ll never use.
Before Circle I was running my community in a Facebook group. I will not describe in detail how badly that was going. But moving to a dedicated community platform — one that was designed specifically for what I was trying to do — was like switching from cooking in a hotel room microwave to having an actual kitchen.
My opinion? Platform matters more than most people admit. A bad platform creates friction. Friction kills engagement. Spend time finding the right home for your community before you start growing it.
Mighty Networks
Mighty Networks is Circle’s main competitor, and it’s genuinely excellent — particularly if you want to combine community with courses and memberships in a single platform.
The native course functionality is stronger than Circle’s. The membership and payment features are more developed. If your business model involves selling courses or paid memberships alongside your community, Mighty Networks is worth serious consideration.
Discord
For younger audiences and communities built around gaming, tech, or creator spaces, Discord is often the right answer.
It’s free, it’s familiar to a huge demographic, and the real-time chat format creates a kind of energy and immediacy that forum-style platforms can’t match. The trade-off is that Discord conversations move fast and are hard to search — which means valuable discussions get buried quickly.
Know your audience. If they’re already on Discord, meet them there.
Slack
For professional and B2B communities, Slack remains the dominant platform.
It’s where professionals already spend their working day. There’s no learning curve. The integrations with other tools are excellent. The downside is that Slack’s free tier limits message history, which can be a significant issue for communities that rely on searchable archives.
Notion
Not a community platform, but an essential tool for running one.
I use Notion for everything behind the scenes of my community. Member handbooks. Content calendars. Event planning. Onboarding checklists. Community guidelines. Moderator documentation.
If you’re building a community of any real size, you need a system for organising the operational side of things. Notion is the best tool I’ve found for that.
The Communities About Building Communities
Yes. These exist. And they’re invaluable.
The Community Club
I mentioned their newsletter above, but the community itself deserves its own mention. The Community Club is a Slack-based community of community professionals – managers, builders, strategists, and founders – who share advice, resources, job opportunities, and support.
The quality of conversation in the Community Club is unusually high. These are people who take community building seriously as a craft. Being in the room with them — even a virtual room — raises your game.
CMX Hub
CMX is one of the oldest and most established networks for community professionals. Their annual CMX Summit is the flagship event for the industry. Their online community and resources are a great starting point for anyone entering the field.
Orbit Community
Orbit’s own community is a great place to discuss community strategy, measurement, and growth with other practitioners. The conversations tend to be thoughtful, and the Orbit team actively participates.
The Courses Worth Investing In
FeverBee’s Online Courses
FeverBee offers several online courses on community management covering strategy, engagement, growth, and measurement. They’re not cheap. They are worth it.
I took their community strategy course during the period when my community was struggling, and it gave me a framework for thinking about what I was building that I simply didn’t have before. The ROI on that investment has been significant.
The Community Club’s Learning Resources
The Community Club offers workshops, courses, and learning resources specifically for community professionals. Their content is practitioner-led and practically focused — which means the advice is grounded in what’s actually working right now rather than what worked five years ago.
Mighty Networks’ “The Art of Community Design” Course
Mighty Networks offers a free course on community design that covers platform setup, engagement strategy, and member experience. It’s obviously somewhat platform-specific, but the principles are broadly applicable.
A good starting point if you’re early in your community-building journey and not yet ready to invest in paid courses.
Podcasts Worth Adding to Your Rotation
The Community Experience Podcast
Hosted by practitioners for practitioners. Conversations with community builders across industries about what’s working, what’s failing, and what they’ve learned.
Community Signal
Patrick O’Keefe has been in community management for decades, and his podcast reflects that depth of experience. Long-form conversations with community professionals about strategy, ethics, moderation, and the future of online communities.
Build Your Tribe
More focused on social media and audience building than pure community, but valuable for understanding the intersection of content strategy and community growth.
The Personal Failure That Taught Me More Than Any Resource
I promised you a failure. Here it is.
About eighteen months into building my community, things were going well. Membership was growing. Engagement was good. I was getting positive feedback constantly.
So I decided to scale fast.
I launched a paid membership tier. I started running weekly live events. I introduced a mentorship programme matching senior and junior members. I launched a newsletter just for the community. I started a community podcast.
All of this within about six weeks.
I had read about growth strategies. I had studied what large successful communities were doing. I wanted to implement all of it immediately.
The community didn’t collapse. But it came dangerously close.
My most engaged members — the core group who had been there from the beginning, who had helped shape the culture and invited their friends and kept conversations alive during the quiet periods — burnt out. Not me. Them.
I had added so much activity, so many programmes, and so many touchpoints that showing up in the community started to feel like a job. A demanding one. Without the pay.
Three of my most valuable members quietly disengaged. One sent me a message explaining why. She said she loved what we’d built, but it had started to feel overwhelming. She couldn’t keep up. She felt guilty for not participating in everything. So she’d stopped participating in anything.
That message was devastating.
I had broken the thing I’d built by trying to grow it too fast. I’d optimised for activity when I should have been optimising for depth. I’d added programmes when I should have been nurturing the relationships that already existed.
I rolled back almost everything. Cancelled the live events. Put the mentorship programme on pause. Simplified everything back to the core of what had made the community valuable in the first place — good conversations between people who trusted each other.
It took three months to rebuild the energy that I’d scattered in six weeks.
My opinion? This is the lesson no resource fully prepared me for, even though many of them hinted at it. More is not always better in community building. In fact, more is often worse. The communities that last are not the ones with the most programmes or the most activity. They’re the ones where members feel genuinely connected to each other and genuinely welcomed every time they show up.
Protect the intimacy of your community even as it grows. Especially as it grows.
If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice before I launched that six-week growth sprint, it would be this: your most engaged members are not an infinite resource. They are people with lives and limits and competing demands. Treat them accordingly.
How to Actually Use These Resources
A final, practical note.
Don’t try to consume all of this at once. I made that mistake too.
Start with Get Together. Read it cover to cover. Then join the Community Club and introduce yourself. Then subscribe to FeverBee’s newsletter and read every edition for a month.
By that point you’ll have a much clearer sense of where you are in your community journey and which resources address the specific challenges you’re facing right now.
Community building is a long game. The resources above will give you better tools and sharper thinking. But the real education happens in the doing — in the moments of unexpected growth and unexpected silence; in the member who becomes a leader and the member who quietly disappears; and in the decisions about what your community stands for and who it’s truly for.
No resource gives you that. Only the work does.
But the right resources make the work a lot less lonely.
And a lot less expensive to get wrong.
Are you building or growing an online community right now? I’d love to know where you’re stuck or what’s working for you. Drop it in the comments or come find me in the community.
This post reflects my personal experience and opinions. Resource recommendations are based on my own use and are not sponsored or affiliated unless otherwise stated.
