Amber Atherton (investor, author) on building virtual communities: Start small and niche

Last week, we were delighted to have Amber Atherton join us for our biweekly Watercooler event series, where we get an inside look at how today’s leaders and innovators are thinking about music and tech.

Amber is an investor and founder (her community software startup Zyper was acquired by Discord) and author of the book The Rise of Virtual Communities. Her book features a series of conversations with virtual community founders and leaders across Web 2.0 and Web3, including conversations with the founders of Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Flickr, Reddit, Discord, FWB… and Water & Music!

During this conversation, we were joined by our founder Cherie Hu, who offered some music industry-specific context to Amber’s thoughts on virtual communities.

You can listen to the full audio below, or read on for key quotes and takeaways:

Hybrid (IRL/URL) communities tend to last longest

“What definitely stands out as a key thread throughout the book is that most successful communities tend to use some combination of real-life events and online events. There’s a common interest, which initially attracts people, which then proliferates into location-based meetups. People tend to want more from a connection than just typing online.” (Amber)

Scale is the enemy of community-building

“The good thing about the last few years of focus on superfans [in the music industry] is that there’s been a collective realization that there are alternatives. There’s never been a cookie-cutter way to build a career as an artist. The benefit of focusing on community is that, from the beginning, it compels you to think about what you really care about as an artist, and about what kind of message and culture you want to communicate through your music. Then you build something based on that that doesn’t automatically go for maximum scale as the default. In fact, maximum scale will often deteriorate the mission or goal of community-building.” (Cherie)

Expect to see more paid communities — the more niche, the better

“Community-building is a lot of work. More people are waking up to the idea that communities need investment. You need to pay for the resources, the community moderators, the community managers, for it to feel great — and a lot of that is only possible with predictable revenue. Similarly, you need people to feel invested, and to actually show up for the community to feel lively. The best way to start a community is in a really small, hyper-fragmented niche, but in the hopes that the niche is growing.” (Amber)

… But not every project or product needs a community

“My advice would be, before you start deciding what platform you host your community on, decide whether you actually need a community. Do you have a clear idea of who will join this community, and how the people in the community will interact with each other? If you don’t, you probably don’t need a community. Setting expectations is also really important. You’re not going to grow a community in the same way you would grow a SaaS product or market an album. It’s a completely different set of success metrics.” (Cherie)