Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool

As more and more identity formation happens online, it is inevitable that most of it happens in private spaces. As we spend more and more time living in these spaces, it’s inevitable that their intentional shaping should become more important to us. As more and more internet-first communities choose to build the means for themselves to live, it is

The paid community concept is a reconfiguration of digital communities caused by the failure of big social networks to ensure deep vertical communities to thrive. It provides mainstream tools to niche communities. Maybe niche communities need niche products? One hypothesis could be that “bottom-up community-driven businesses” emerge when one commun

Bloomberg is an example of the classic Web 2.0 business maxim “come for the tool, stay for the network.” But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social netw

Education and practitioner networks

We’re seeing a lot of new venture funded education communities, but here once more is a reason to be more excited about bottom-up community-driven businesses. What happens when groups of independent teachers or consultants who are already chatting have shared interfaces to formalize, quote, and invoice? In the p

Don’t buy into the VC hype on this one. There will not be one tool to serve new internet-first communities.

“communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

This entrenchment effect provides a realistic business case for bespoke social networks. Running a bespoke social network means you’re basically in the same business as Slack, but for a focused community and with tailored features. This is a great business to be in for the same reasons Slack is: low customer acquisition costs and long lifetime valu

A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.

The key point to understand about Bloomberg is that it’s both a software product and a social network. The software product determined who would join the network, but the network is what keeps users there. It’s like a multiplayer video game, or Harvard: Sure, the quests and campus are useful, but people keep showing up because of the friends they’v