How Do You Build a Community From an Audience?

If you already have an audience, building a community can open up entirely new streams of revenue. You could bring people together through events, memberships, workshops, online groups, or other experiences—and build new sources of revenue around the value those experiences create.

This is the Community Revenue business model.

The opportunity is to look at the people you already reach and ask: Why would they benefit from coming together? Maybe they want to meet people like themselves, learn from each other, collaborate, support each other, or simply spend time with people who share their interests.

But recognizing the opportunity is one thing.

How do you actually build the community?

The Community Revenue Blueprint breaks the process down into five stages:

• I. IDENTIFY the opportunity.
• II. VALIDATE the assumptions.
• III. EXPERIMENT by bringing people together.
• IV. ENLIST the people who step forward.
• V. BUILD what you've learned they need.

You begin by developing a Community Revenue Hypothesis: an initial theory about how a group of people could create value for each other by pursuing a Shared Mission, and how that activity could generate Organizational Value. Then you test that hypothesis before making investments in building a Community Space.

The Blueprint takes a validation-first approach. Instead of building a persistent community based on assumptions, you start small, learn what people actually value, and use that evidence to determine what to build next.

Build experimentally before you build permanently.

 

I. Identify the Organizational Value and Shared Mission

 

The first step is to develop your Community Revenue Hypothesis. To do that, you need to identify two things: the Organizational Value you hope the community will create and the Shared Mission that will give people a reason to come together.

Together, these give you an initial theory about the Community Revenue opportunity. The rest of the Blueprint will help you determine whether that theory holds up when you put it in front of real people.

 

Identify the Organizational Value

 

Start by asking yourself: Why do you or your organization want to build a community in the first place?

The answer is your Organizational Value: the measurable benefit the community creates for the person or organization that supports it.

Communities can create Organizational Value in different ways. Sometimes the goal is to generate revenue directly from the community itself. Other times, the goal is to use the community to help another product or service succeed. These are two different approaches, and understanding the distinction will help you decide what kind of community you're trying to build.

 

Community Revenue: Monetizing the Value Created by the Community

In a Community Revenue business model, the community is the product being monetized directly. That revenue could come from memberships, events, sponsorships, education, donations, or other sources.

You don't need to decide exactly how you will monetize the community yet. The important thing is to recognize that if you want to generate revenue directly, you need to create value. We'll explore that further below.

 

Community-Led Growth: Using Community to Support Another Product or Service

 

Not every community is designed to generate revenue directly from the value created by the community itself. Sometimes the goal is to use the community to support the sale of another product or service.

For example, a software company might build a community to help customers get more value from its product and stick around longer, or a brand might use community to strengthen customer loyalty and encourage referrals.

When the community primarily creates Organizational Value by supporting the sale, adoption, retention, or success of another product or service, that's Community-Led Growth.

While the Community Revenue Blueprint can help you build this type of community, because the community impacts revenue indirectly, it is much harder to measure the return on investment. Community-Led Growth therefore falls outside the scope of this Blueprint.

For the rest of this Blueprint, we'll focus on building a community designed to directly generate Community Revenue.

 

Identify the Shared Mission

 

Once you know why you or your organization wants the community to exist, you need to look at the opportunity from the members' perspective.

Why would they come together as a community?

The answer is the Shared Mission: the common purpose that brings a community together and gives members a reason to participate. It defines who belongs, why they gather, and what they hope to accomplish or experience together.

To identify the Shared Mission, answer three questions.

 

1. The Who: Who Is Coming Together?

 

Start by identifying the people the community is intended to serve. Be specific. You're not trying to bring together everybody in your audience. Identify the particular people this community could serve—and where the boundaries are. Who shares the need, goal, experience, or interest that brings these people together? Who doesn't?

 

2. The Why: Why Do They Want to Come Together?

 

Next, ask why these people would want to come together. What are they hoping to accomplish, experience, change, or enjoy?

Some communities bring people together to pursue a Transformation: a lasting, meaningful change that members experience through participation. Members may want to develop new skills, overcome challenges, or make progress toward an important goal.

But not every community is built around Transformation. Some people simply want to spend time with others who share their interests. A group of movie enthusiasts may gather to watch and discuss films. A group of music fans may come together to enjoy live performances. The experience of participating and the relationships they develop can be valuable in their own right.

The important thing is to understand why these people want to come together and what makes participating worthwhile.

 

3. The What: What Value Will They Create for Each Other?

 

You don't need to design specific activities or experiences yet. At this point, you simply need a hypothesis about the type of value members could create for one another when they participate.

• Knowledge: Learning from other people's experiences
• Support: Being around people who understand what you're going through
• Accountability: Having people help you follow through
• Collaboration: Working with others to accomplish a common goal
• Access: Connecting with people, opportunities, or resources
• Feedback: Getting input and perspective from others
• Connection: Building relationships with people who share a common goal

Your community may provide more than one type of value. Bring those answers together into a working Shared Mission:

We are a group of [Who] that gather to [What] so that [Why].

Together, your Organizational Value and Shared Mission form your Community Revenue Hypothesis: your initial theory about how bringing these people together could create value for them and generate revenue for you or your organization.

 

II. Validate and Refine the Community Revenue Hypothesis

 

Your Community Revenue Hypothesis is based on assumptions. Before you bring people together, talk to potential members to learn more about their needs, test your assumptions, and refine your hypothesis.

The goal isn't to prove your hypothesis. It's to refine it enough to test through an experiment.

 

Talk to Potential Members

 

Have individual conversations with the people you're hoping to bring together. Ask about the desire, goal, need, experience, or interest you identified in the Shared Mission.

You're trying to understand:

• How important is this to them?
• How are they pursuing it now?
• Would connecting with other people create additional value?
• Have they invested significant time or money in this interest, activity, experience, or goal?
• Does another community already serve them adequately?

Focus on what people have already done rather than asking them to predict what they might do in the future. Their past behavior can show you how much people value the Shared Mission.

Actions speak louder than words.

 

Look for Community Readiness

 

These conversations will help you assess Community Readiness: the degree to which a latent community already exists around a Shared Mission. In other words, how much do these people already want to come together?

Look for patterns:

• Do multiple people share the same interest, activity, experience, or goal?
• Do they see value in connecting with others who share it too?
• Does the desire to come together appear repeatedly across your conversations?

You don't need certainty. You need enough Community Readiness to justify bringing people together with a series of experimental events and seeing what happens.

 

Lay the Groundwork for Feedback Loops

 

These conversations should lay the groundwork for future Feedback Loops: an ongoing process of gathering input from community members, acting on that feedback, and communicating the results.

Feedback isn't something you collect after you've built the community; it’s part of how you decide what to build. Use what you learn to refine your Community Revenue Hypothesis.

 

III. Host Events as Experiments

 

Once your conversations suggest enough Community Readiness, it's time to bring people together and see what happens.

To bring people together, you need a Community Space: an environment intentionally designed to gather people to participate together around a Shared Mission.

Eventually, you might build a persistent space, such as an online group or even a dedicated physical location. But before investing significant time and money in something persistent, experiment with events.

These events can be virtual or in person, depending on what makes the most sense for the people you're trying to bring together. A workshop, meetup, dinner, conference, retreat, or other gathering gives you a chance to test your Community Revenue Hypothesis by seeing what actually happens when people come together.

Because events are time-bound, they provide you with an opportunity to make adjustments more easily than a persistent space would.

 

Use Feedback Loops to Refine Each Experiment

 

Build Feedback Loops into your events. Gather input from participants, act on what you learn, and use that feedback to improve the next experiment.

Combine what people tell you with what you observe them actually doing:

• Do they show up?
• Do they participate?
• Do they create the value for one another that you anticipated?
• Does the experience deliver the value they came for?
• Do they want to come together again?

You're also learning more about the Organizational Value in your Community Revenue Hypothesis:

• What does people's behavior tell you about how much they value the experience?
• Is the community creating value worth monetizing?
• Does your Community Revenue Hypothesis still make sense?

Build experimentally before you build permanently.

 

IV. Repeat, Learn, and Enlist Your Community Champions

 

One successful gathering doesn't mean you have a viable community or business model. Keep experimenting by hosting more events, using your Feedback Loops to refine your Community Revenue Hypothesis as you go.

Look for patterns in people's behavior:

• Do you have the right people at your events?
• Are they finding value in connecting?
• Do they keep coming back?
• Are they willing to make meaningful investments of time or money?

You're looking for evidence of two things: that members consistently create meaningful value for one another, and that there's a credible way to generate revenue from that value. Both matter. A successful gathering isn't necessarily a viable business.

The more consistently you see these behaviors, the more confidence you can have in the Community Revenue opportunity.

 

Find and Enlist Your Community Champions

 

As you repeat your experiments, pay attention to the people who step forward. These are your Community Champions: members who take shared responsibility for the success of the community.

Community Champions don't just attend; they help shape, grow, and sustain the community through their knowledge, leadership, time, and talents. They may welcome other members, offer suggestions, volunteer to help, or find their own ways to contribute.

Don't simply identify your Community Champions. Enlist them. Ask them what they've learned from the experiments, what members need, and what would make it easier for people to continue pursuing the Shared Mission together.

Don't build the next iteration of your Community Space for your members; build it with them, starting with your Community Champions.

 

V. Build What the Community Needs Next

 

So far, you've been bringing people together through periodic events. Now it's time to decide whether members would benefit from a persistent Community Space where they can connect and participate between those events.

In some cases, that could mean a physical space. But for most communities, it means a persistent digital space, such as an online group or forum. Not every community needs a persistent Community Space; some communities thrive through recurring events alone.

By the time you're deciding whether you need an online platform, you've already started building the community.

In fact, you haven't had enough information to choose the right platform until now. Your experiments have shown you how members participate, how they create value for each other, and what they may want to continue doing between events. Those are the things you need to understand before deciding what platform can best support them.

 

Build the Space With Your Community Champions

 

If a persistent Community Space would create additional value, work with your Community Champions to determine what that space should look like.

• What would members use the space for?
• What would make it valuable enough for them to return regularly?
• How could it help them participate, connect with each other, and pursue the Shared Mission between events?

Don't just ask your Community Champions for feedback. Invite them to help build the space. Give them opportunities to shape the space and take shared responsibility for its success.

 

Decide How the Community Will Generate Revenue

 

Your Community Revenue Hypothesis has included both a Shared Mission (which creates opportunities for members to generate value for one another) and Organizational Value (which represents the benefit to you or your organization). You've been testing both, and should now know considerably more about:

• What members value
• What they're willing to invest their time in
• Who could potentially pay
• What they might pay for
• Which experiences create the most value
• What the community will require from you or your organization

Until now, you were still learning where the value comes from. Through your experiments, you’ve seen what people actually participate in, return for, and invest their time in. This helps you determine how that value can generate revenue.

 

Member Revenue

 

If you've decided that members would benefit from a persistent Community Space, introducing that space is a natural time to introduce payment. You're providing even more value to your members by offering them something new: the ability to connect, participate, and pursue the Shared Mission together between events.

But you don't need a persistent space to start generating revenue. You can continue bringing members together through events and begin charging for them, as long as you're giving members a clear reason to pay. That could mean creating larger or more valuable events, introducing paid workshops or educational programs, or developing other experiences that provide more value than the events that came before them.

In either case, the principle is the same: don't simply start charging for what you were already giving away. Give members more value and a reason to pay for it.

 

Sponsor Revenue

 

Members don't have to be the only source of revenue. Sponsors may be willing to pay to reach, support, or create experiences for a community whose members they want to connect with.

Don't guess what people will pay for. Find what they value, then build the monetization mechanism around it.

 

Avoid Common Community-Building Mistakes

 

As you work through the Blueprint, watch out for these common community-building mistakes:

 

1. Building for Members Instead of with Them

 

One of the biggest risks in building a community is investing significant time and money in something members don't actually value. You can build an elaborate experience only to discover that people don't participate or don't find enough value to come back.

Choosing an online community platform too early is one of the most common ways this happens. You invest in setting up and designing the space before you know what members actually need, only to discover that it doesn’t support what they actually want to do together.

Use Feedback Loops throughout the process. Learn from members as you experiment, and use what you learn to guide your decisions.

 

2. Trying to Do It All Yourself

 

Building with your members doesn't just mean asking for their feedback. As Community Champions emerge, enlist them to help shape, grow, and sustain the community.

New community managers sometimes hesitate to do this because it can feel like asking members for favors. But for Community Champions, contributing isn't necessarily a burden; it’s part of the value they get from participating. Giving them meaningful ways to use their knowledge, leadership, time, and talents can give them a greater sense of ownership and strengthen their connection to the community.

If you continue trying to create every experience, start every conversation, welcome every new member, and make every decision yourself, the community will always depend on you to keep it going.

Give your Community Champions opportunities to take shared responsibility for the community's success. You're not simply asking them to help you; you’re giving them another way to participate in a community they care about.

 

3. Mistaking Interest for Community Readiness

 

Someone telling you, “That sounds like a great idea,” isn't validation.

Remember, actions speak louder than words. Look for behavior. Do people show up? Do they participate? Do they return? Do they contribute? Are they willing to invest their time?

These behaviors provide much stronger evidence of Community Readiness than enthusiasm alone.

 

4. Validating the Community Without Validating the Business

 

A community can create tremendous value for its members without becoming a viable Community Revenue business.

That's why your experiments need to test both the Shared Mission and the Organizational Value. Are members creating meaningful value for one another? And is there a viable way to generate revenue from that value?

You need evidence for both. A valuable community isn't necessarily a viable business.

 

The Bottom Line

 

Building a community doesn't begin with choosing a platform, designing a space, or deciding what to charge. It begins with understanding why people would want to come together and how their participation could create value for both them and your organization.

The Community Revenue Blueprint gives you a way to test those assumptions before making larger investments. By starting with conversations, experimenting with events, and enlisting Community Champions, you can discover what members actually value and whether there's a viable business opportunity.

You don't need to know what the finished community will look like when you start. That's what the Blueprint is designed to help you figure out.

Don't build a community around your assumptions. Bring people together, discover what they value, and build from what you learn.