davidspinks

Every company starts as a community. As they grow up, they just forget. They must return to Neverland.

Wealth is something rarely talked about amongst community builders. It's taboo. But there's an opportunity to have a more nuanced conversation about the intersection of business and belonging. Are capital and community at their best when they drive each other?

Adding some sort of kickstarter functionality to this would be really interesting. Or making it possible to earn ownership points by investing money, though I imagine that might alter the purity of the community dynamic. Excited to see how it all comes together either way.

Really solid list of tools for any startup that's building a new community from the ground up. Love to see more companies "building in public".

It was definitely broad and sure doesn't cover the entire spectrum of companies. I do believe that it include a whole lot of startups today though, and I hope that this helps them think about how to better set themselves up to succeed.

How am I shutting down debates? I think it's important to respond to anyone who has a unique perspective.

"Some business models are "get as many users as possible, get acquired, and live as a loss leader for a larger organization" and that's perfectly fine."

I agree, and address that in the article.

Yea that's a good point...though one could argue that they're still selling a product, the insurance. But yea this model may require a different approach.

So you disagree with what the post is saying?

I'm trying to respond to the content of your post. If it's such common sense then it should be easy to come up with examples. I'd argue that there isn't much in between. Either you're building a company that has to sell a product or you're building a high growth monetize later company. This post is addressing the former option.

"maybe some products should not be free and the creators should consider paying for them"?

Not sure what you mean by the creators should consider paying for them.

Any examples?

How is this marketing? It's about validating an idea to make sure you're building the right thing.

"Like, getting situated, getting everything working, working out the kinks, evaluating possible monetization models, etc. etc."

What does getting situated mean? Working out what kinks? People aren't paying for your product they're paying for what they believe your product to be. Kinks don't matter.

"Uhh, no. A lot of companies can work on this model. And do so. The examples are numerous."

Lets hear them.

"And, what is it with this condescending style of writing? If the content of the article wasn't full of reductive, hand-wavy half-baked ideas, the arrogance in that entire piece would be forgivable. But that's not the situation it looks like."

Sounds a lot like your feedback.

Issues should be solved now so use the original url.

Sorry about that, should be better now, replaced the broken caching plugin with w3edge.

I had one installed but it wasn't working for some reason. I replaced it with W3Edge now and it's working great. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Site should be performing better now. W3edge helped with caching. Thanks for reading.

Sorry about the server issues.

Cached version: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?&d=760352947104&mkt=en-US&set...

That's a fair point and probably a much better use of the mantra. Unfortunately, that's often not how it's applied, in my experience.