Why community products fail?

Communties are around in products all around us, be it for health, professional, hobbies — you name it. Some of them make us stick more than others. Has anyone gotten it right?

Individual vs community

“What would make a truly successful community?”

What do you mean — “fail”?

Let’s define failure first. Failure here is “inability to generate constant engagement” via returning user traffic in a period that’s defined as the lifecycle of a user on the community.

For example, let’s say that a fitness app wants to target an average of 6 months of usage (and therefore subscription) but users churn at an average 6 weeks. That’s failure.

Or let’s say a professional community for peer to peer networking connects users with other like-minded users. They get a 100 sign-ups of which 80 have a first call. But only 20 come back for a second call — That’s failure.

The biggest of all failures, however is failing to empower users to achieve what they thought they would, when they signed up.

Personal example — Healthify me, Fittr

So why do they fail?

1. Business >> User mindset
   This leads to quick wins and a leaky bucket.
2. Non perpetual by design
   Customer advovacy leads to true growth. It needs to be baked into the design of a community for it to grow.
3. Low investment it’s “people” post-acquisition
   Most marketing dollars and inorganic notification blasts target acquisition. It takes careful understanding of user needs to standup something that provides a recurring reason to users to return.

So, what would make a great community product?

To be continued here: https://surabhi9.medium.com/what-makes-a-good-community-4118eea850f6