#57 How To Grow Your Community With Flywheels
🙋🏽♀️ FROM THE COMMUNITY
Today's newsletter is inspired by a question from Greyson MacAlpine.
Greyson is building a community for women founders in tech struggling with burnout. She is also a badass UX designer & studio founder.
I've been thinking a LOT about flywheels the past several days and would love to hear your personal perspective within the context of community-building; (e.g. differences between funnels and flywheels, pros and cons, practical application, etc).
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Imagine you go to a party and everyone there has never met. In fact, you weren't encouraged to bring friends. Would you stay long? Would you go back each week when they host it again?
There are a lot of marketers out there teaching how to build funnels.
Funnels are powerful – with the right funnel you can build a 7-figure education business. And don't get me wrong, funnels are important and I have them in my business, too.
But funnels aren't the best tool for growing a community. Sure, funnels will help you get people in the door. But the key to growing a thriving community is retention – keeping people in the room.
The reason is this: funnels are linear.
Serving a community is not set and forget (cue Becky's squeaky wheel) and so you can develop flywheels in your community business to continuously improve your offer, and bring more members in.
You can design flywheels to be data-driven, allowing them to help you make better business decisions.
We started to talk about flywheels last week when I wrote about member momentum – as a member gains traction, they bring more people into the community.
Today I'll dig even deeper into this:
In this video you'll learn:
The difference between flywheels and funnels
How flywheels are used to build products
How you can use flywheels to grow your community
👩🏻🏫 THIS WEEKS LINKS
Learn More About Flywheels
I did not invent flywheels, I've learned a lot about them from the resources below! If you want to dive deeper check these out:
I have been very inspired by Rosie Sherry and her 'Community Flywheels.' Her approach is very aligned to how I think about continuous discovery research to help you evolve the community experience. I highly recommend reading her guide to community flywheels.
Nathan & Rachel talk a lot about Flywheels on the Billion Dollar Creator podcast. Check out this episode Creator Flywheels: Scale Your Business The Smart Way. They discuss how to think about flywheels everywhere... including in your content strategy.
Nathan Barry also has a great essay on Creator Flywheels – there is a section about video testimonials that is seriously genius.
I use a flywheel to grow my newsletter. Here's what that looks like –
See how building community fuels my entire business?
Lastly, Rachel Rodgers credits Jim Collins and his book Good to Great for her understanding of flywheels. He wrote a short guidebook, Turning the Flywheels which I have not read but is on my list next! I'm always looking to better understand flywheels because they are so powerful in helping us build sustainable business.
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