5 Hard Lessons We Learned Launching Our New Community

As you may know, we recently launched our new offering, The CMJ Community. Given the meta nature of this offering (a community for community builders), we want to share transparently our main learnings. In this article, we'll share some insights we gained from the community launch. It's a long one! I hope these lessons can benefit your work, help you feel less alone, and inspire all kinds of new ideas for you:

1. Platform set-up is no joke

This ain’t my first community rodeo; as a team, we’ve helped set up or personally set up hundreds of communities. Yet even knowing what we were getting ourselves into, I was humbled (yet again) by just how much work it takes to prop up a community.

I am now clear that thoughtfully launching or re-launching a community requires 3 types of labor:

1. Strategic decision-making

2. Operational exploration, testing, and setup

3. Tactical community labor

Strategic decision-making involves making key choices–ideally, with your team and your community–about your group's purpose. For us, this takes the shape of a Community Compass™ made up of four parts: audience, programming focus, impact, and values.

Operational exploration involves planning for the member experience, including onboarding, ongoing engagement pathways, co-leadership opportunities, and setting up and systematizing the back-end automation and workflows needed to scale that experience. Then, you must test and troubleshoot all those systems and experiences, listen for feedback, and continually iterate.

Tactical community labor involves all the copywriting, communications, event planning, design, admin, and content creation work involved in setting up a community.

"I am now clear that thoughtfully launching or re-launching a community requires three types of labor: strategic, operational, and tactical."

For creators and even those in large enterprises doing this for the first time, these three types of work are often done solo. My effing goodness, is that a LOT for one person to wrap their heads around! It’s also a lot for a team, but the solo struggle is real. If you’re in the midst of this, know that (1) you’re not alone, and (2) you don’t have to continue alone. I hope you’ll consider joining The CMJ Community!

2. Moving from content ideas to a content calendar takes tiiiime

It’s one thing to have a clear focus for your community and quite another to operationalize it and get your individual ideas into a content calendar, draft posts or plan meeting agendas, schedule or post your programs, and then encourage engagement around each one. And a thoughtful community content strategy requires ALL those steps.

We had to go through several stages to move from ideation to content publication and outreach:

Stage 1: Ideation on big sheets of paper

Handwritten list of ideas for the community by content type

Stage 2: Discussion and determination of final list of initial programs on a sample calendar (to see and feel what the cadence will be like)

Google Sheet of an unfinished draft of a potential month of content plans

Stage 3: Notion drafting and editing as the final (working) version of our content calendar

Notion content calendar with clear tags, ownership, and drafts

Stage 4: Schedule in the community platform. We try to schedule everything we can ahead of time in case life gets in the way of doing it on time.

Stage 5: Circle outreach around each piece of content to encourage folks to contribute or RSVP

3. Just when I thought I was finished writing emails… 🫠

I’m gonna be honest with y’all. I don’t like writing emails. Part of what I disliked about running a cohort-based community was that it demanded so much energy from me in the form of email writing and social media sharing during our launches 2x a year.

This time, we reduced our launch emails from 14 to 7. But we had to add emails to our current members and to specific segments of folks who attended our live workshop, applied for scholarships, or were previous clients. It was still a lot!

I’ve realized that there’s no escaping email writing. There is no real shortcut (ChatGPT ain’t gonna cut it). And, ultimately, it’s worthwhile to write them. With few exceptions, email is the most effective way to get people to join your community. To manage the workload, we try to plan them out in advance and lean on collaboration, sharing the tasks of ideating, writing, proofreading, and scheduling in our newsletter platform.

"With few exceptions, email is the most effective way to get people to join your community."

4. Your energy is your most important resource

As the leader of your community, who you are matters more than what you do. That’s because how you show up and the energy you bring to the room–virtual or otherwise—affect everything else you do. People will join your community for many reasons, including wanting to be closer to your special “vibe.” Of course, you should be working to scale leadership so that your vibe shapes the culture of the space and interactions, but you never stop being important.

"Who you are matters more than what you do."

During the launch, I came to this realization about fifteen separate times. I would be rushing to throw together a section of the workshop, stressing about something that was inhibiting me from feeling creative, and each time, I had to remind myself: “Who you are matters more than what you do.” I would slow down, take a deep breath, and return to our values (equity, compassionate candor, relationality, equanimity). Then, I would reset myself accordingly.

You may not get everything done before your launch. But what you do get done should reflect the world you’d like to live in and create for your community members.

5. There’s nothing like a launch to activate the ol’ friends: people pleasing and anxiety

My biggest anxiety was not how many people would sign up for our membership; it was that new members wouldn’t have a good experience and feel that they would get their money’s worth! I’ve been on standby for feedback, but this assessment takes time in any community. This is typically why I would never launch with a monthly subscription option; it takes more than a month to get value out of a membership. But we decided to launch monthly as it is the most accessible option for many of our members, and I’m glad we did.

Anxiety and people-pleasing will be beside you during your launch (and after). They just will be. They can ride along with you, but don’t let them drive.

Thank you to our incredible co-leaders, EYOC alumni, and new CMJ Community members for being a part of this effort with us. We can't wait to build incredible communities together.

🚨 The CMJ Community is the best place to get support on our coaching calls, connect with peers who have been there, and tap into our courses and resource library (with gems like a complete launch checklist).

📣 If you need more support or want a Done For You solution, the CMJ team also offers community setup as a service (CSaaS). We’ve been offering it quietly to a few customers on Circle. Want to know more about this kind of partnership? Contact us.