I’ll be honest: my first attempt at building the Candid community was a spectacular flop.
And it was an expensive, exhausting lesson in what not to do.
I made a classic mistake that I recognise scrappy entrepreneurs make all the time. I treated the community like it was a standalone product. I built a walled garden, entirely separate from the rest of my business ecosystem, and tried to sell it as a holistic, all-in-one solution.
The result? Crickets. People didn’t show up. I struggled to sell it because the pitch didn’t resonate, it was just a "community" without a clear job to do. It’s easy to be glib and joke about it now, but sitting behind your screen, watching a community you poured your heart into turn into a ghost town, is genuinely sad and scary.
It forced me to step back, stop guessing, and rethink everything. That’s when the penny dropped: community isn’t your product. It’s your growth flywheel.
If your main goal as a creator is to increase monthly recurring revenue and active users, you cannot afford to treat your community as an isolated island. It needs to be the engine that drives your entire business forward.
To stop building spaces that flop and start building systems that fuel your growth, you need to answer two foundational questions.
📌 Who is actually in your community?
Your community’s identity dictates its entire purpose. Are you serving leads? Potential customers? Existing customers? Brand advocates? Strategic partners?
You can't serve them all in the same room. They all fit into the flywheel, but you have to pick a lane.
Looking back, if I had stopped to properly analyse my audience, I would have built a community exclusively for my advocates; the strongest, most aligned people in my network who always referred me clients. Instead, I built a space for potential clients.
But here’s the problem with that: when my client base naturally evolved and shifted over time, the community suddenly made absolutely no sense. The foundation cracked because the wrong people were in the room.
Establish exactly who you are serving before you build a single channel, launch a forum, or host a single event.
📌 What problem is the community solving for your business?
Once you know who is in the room, you need to get brutally honest about what job the community is actually doing for your business ecosystem.
Working with leads? Your community is doing an attraction job. It’s a top-of-funnel magnet.
Working with potential clients? That’s an acquisition job. The goal is conversion.
Working with existing customers? You’re doing an engagement, nurturing, or onboarding job to reduce churn and increase success.
Working with advocates? You’re building an amplification and referral engine to bring in more perfect-fit people.
Nine times out of ten, when someone brings me in, the honest answer is the third one.
When you understand the specific phase of growth your members are in, you know exactly what action you need them to take. Do you want them to convert, engage, or refer others?
Answering these two questions completely changes how you operate. It moves you away from guessing and tells you exactly what kind of space to create today.
More importantly, it tells you what you need to build next to ensure your community actually becomes a sustainable, profitable asset in the long term.
NEW: MEMBER ENGAGEMENT & RETENTION COACHING
For most people I talk to, the answer to question two is retention.
They are good at getting members in. But they are not sure how to keep them, and the room is slowly going quiet.
So I have packaged the way I work on exactly that: Member Engagement & Retention Coaching. It is 1:1 coaching, not done-for-you. So, you keep your hands on your own community; I bring the system, the diagnosis and the honest second opinion, and I stay with you while you run it.
It is built for: founders who own the revenue a community protects, and the managers who run the room day to day.
I take ten people at a time, maximum, so the work stays close. And two seats have already filled up.
Not launched yet? Even better. We get the foundation right the first time.
Always build community,
Member Engagement & Retention Coach
I help community and membership leaders keep the audience they worked so hard to get; measurably, in the channels they already own.
Claude was used to draft the first version of this article based on a transcript of me talking through this model, and various other chats with mentees on the topic.
Claude is well trained on my branding, business and professional context and the final draft of every issue is painstakingly edited and set up by a human.