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The best communities are accidents.
​read time 4 minutes

I've done a whopping 10 episodes of the Builders podcast now, and I've noticed a pattern emerging amongst the guests who have built their own communities.

Almost every single one of them stumbled into it.

Nobody woke up one morning and said, "today I'm going to build a community." They were mostly trying to solve a problem in their own life, and the community turned out to be the answer.

Take my community, Guiris de Mierda, as an example.

A few years ago, I was a single, living in Madrid, had a great group of friends. However, it was also quite an insular group of friends.

We didn't meet many new people.

Around this time, I'd just started making content and I'd had a few moments where I'd run into people in the street who watched my videos, and the conversations were always good nice.

I thought, there's something here. I just didn't know what...

My plan at the time for how to monetise my content was to sell t-shirts (genius, I know). So I had the idea that if we throw an event, I can bring all these people together. Plus, I can use the event to promote my t-shirts.

Long story short, nobody gave a fuck about the t-shirts. They stayed for the human connection. They stayed for the community.

Nobody planned that. I definitely didn't.

After speaking to people on the Builder's Pod, I noticed the same pattern there too.

​Katya, told me she posted one video about how she had no Latin friends in London. Just an honest vent that ended up getting 500 comments.

Which led to forty strangers turned up to a Peruvian restaurant the following week. She wasn't building a community. She was being honest about something she was missing, and other people not only felt her authenticity, they felt the same feeling she was.

Dani from Mussa wanted to sell bikinis. Somewhere along the way, she ended up with a community of 600 women. The community was the product. She just didn't know it yet.

These weren't masterplans...

They were people trying to solve their own problem, and getting back something much bigger than they asked for.

So if any of this resonates, I'd just gently nudge you in the same direction.

You don't need a plan, or a perfect strategy, and you definitely don't need a brand or a logo or a content calendar before you start.

You just need something you're missing in your own life. Or something you're interested in that you wish other people cared about too.

Make a video about it.

Tell the world you want to connect with others who feel the same way.

And let the algorithm help you find your people.

That's the titbit for today.

Tom

I work with business owners on a one-on-one basis to help them build a personal brand by telling their authentic stories, just like I have.

If you'd like to apply to work one-on-one with me, take this short quiz, and if it's a match, we can book in a call 👇

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The Builders Pod

Curious about building community and personal brand? I reckon you'll like the Builders pod 🚀

In this week's pod, I speak with Katya, founder of Latina Society, a community she built for Latin women in London after moving there from Nicaragua.

Katya is a great example of somebody who built a community simply because the one she needed didn't exist yet.

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