Why people join communities

If you need to have separate USPs for your community and for your product, what might your community’s USPs look like?

Each community is going to be a little different. But some classic reasons people join communities (whether open source or not, there are actually plenty of similarities between becoming active in an open source community and other community endeavors). Here are some of them:

• Gain skills

• Find mentorship / become a mentor

• Advance your career

• Feel like you belong

• Guide the conversation around a particular topic

• Become known as an expert in a topic — this can be a reason / motivation for people to answer questions in a community

One critical thing to recognize is that people act out of self-interest, as do organizations. They join a community not to ‘give back,’ but because there is something in it for them. *Just because no money exchanges hands doesn’t mean both parties can’t benefit from the relationship.

If you want to grow your community, figure out why your existing community members are joining and what value they’re getting from the community. And use that to guide your community evangelism messaging; as well as to guide the types of events you hold, the conversations you encourage in your Discord, etc.

Do you know an open source company struggling to differentiate themselves from competitors? Have them get in touch with me.