Making following conversations easy, a Substack example.

We do research before starting businesses, it would be daft not to! The idea of Community Discovery is that we should do the same when we build community.

There are many ways to do Community Discovery, a big part of my own journey has been to follow conversations meticulously with a goal to create and solve problems for the people.

Typically I’ve done this with what I call a Surround System — this is where you create a process to bring information to you. It takes a bit of time and tweaking to make it work, but once it’s in action and it is used, it can be amazing for keeping on top of what is happening in your ecosystem.

My real desire has been for this to be built into our ‘community products’. And Substack has done just that with their Notes and the ability to view ‘My Subscribers’ Notes.

This may seem insignificant and small, but it is also powerful

They’ve basically made it super easy to follow conversations from people that care about what you create. You can use it to your advantage as a community builder to understand the things that they care about, get involved in discussions and basically just show that you care.

This is very different from choosing who you follow. This opens the doors to understanding the very people that are subscribing to you.

Of course, the work of actually doing the community research still needs to happen, but hurdles have been reduced by building it into the product. The real results come when you can design your community accordingly, in a way that makes people feel heard and almost like you can read their minds. 🔮