How to start an online community

01

Pick the business first, not the topic

The question is not what you know about. It is which of a small number of businesses you are willing to run, because they need different things from you. A room of fifty people paying $100 a month is a different job from a room of five thousand paying $9, and the second one needs an audience you either have or do not.

Here is how the index splits, with the number of real communities in each. Read one or two in the shape you have in mind before you write a word of a sales page.

• High-ticket communities (72): $100 a month and up, and people are paying it.
• Small and premium (84): Under 500 members, $50 a month or more. A business without a big audience.
• Big and cheap (12): Under $25 a month, 5,000 members or more. Volume as the model.
• The middle band (62): $25 to $99 a month with 1,000 members or more. The most common way this works.
• Busiest rooms (9): Three or more posts per member, 500 members or more. Activity as the product.
• One-off pricing (35): Sold once rather than billed monthly.

The two most people talk themselves out of are the top and the bottom. High-ticket feels presumptuous until you read communities charging it, and the cheap end looks easy until you notice every one of them sits behind a channel that already had the audience.

The decision that follows is how much of your own time the thing consumes. A discussion-led room can run on a few hours a week once it has enough members to keep itself going. A room built on live calls costs you those hours every week for as long as it exists, and no amount of growth reduces them. That is not an argument against live work, which is what the highest prices in this index are attached to, but it is the difference between a business that scales and a job you have sold in advance.

02

Price it against the category

A price is only high or low next to something. This is the median published monthly price in each category of the index, dearest first, with how many communities in that category publish a price at all.

That last column matters more than it looks. Most communities do not publish a price, so a median built on a handful of listings is a hint, not a fact. Treat the categories with the fewest priced listings as the least settled, which is also where the room usually is.

Use the median as a reference point, not a target. Pricing at it is the one position with no argument behind it: you are neither the cheap option nor the considered one, and a buyer comparing three rooms has nothing to go on but your sales page. Sitting clearly above it forces you to say what the extra buys, which is a useful thing to be forced to say. Sitting clearly below it is a volume bet, and volume needs an audience.

Each category page opens with the full distribution rather than just the median, including the band with the fewest communities in it. That band is worth a look before you settle on a number, because it is where you would have the least direct competition, and it is often empty for a reason worth understanding first.

03

Decide what is bundled

Three things get sold alongside access, and they are not interchangeable. Courses are made once and cost nothing to serve again. Live calls cost you an hour every time. One-off products are cash up front with no renewal to manage. Real examples from the index:

• AI Video Bootcamp (25,524 members, $9/mo): 20 courses across 138 modules, 0.9 posts per member
• Teal Swan (10,000 members, $79/mo): 3 paid tiers, a one-off product alongside the membership
• Urban Forex Elite Community (188 members, $2,000 one-off): 3 paid tiers, a one-off product alongside the membership

The pattern worth noticing is that a course library alone tends to go quiet. Check the posts-per-member figure on any teardown: a community with a large library and almost no posting is closer to a course with a comments section, which is cheaper to run and much harder to keep people paying for.

The reason is straightforward. A course is finished, and a member who has finished it has no reason to pay again next month. Whatever keeps people subscribed has to be something that only exists while they are inside: the call that happens this week, the feedback on the thing they made, the people who will read their draft. Courses sell the membership; they rarely renew it.

Tiers are the other decision here, and the index is clear about what they are for. The communities running several paid tiers are not selling more content at the top, they are selling proximity: a smaller room, a faster answer, time with the person whose name is on the door. That is worth building once you know which members keep asking for more of you, and premature before then.

04

Choose the platform

This follows from the format, not the other way round. Four platforms carry the communities in this index, and the honest summary of each is short.

• Skool: One feed, a course library and a leaderboard, all on skool.com. Simple to run, and the community lives under Skool’s brand rather than yours.
• Circle: Spaces, events and courses under your own brand and domain. More to set up, and nothing to be discovered through.
• Mighty Networks: Courses, challenges and a member directory, with native mobile apps. Your brand, on an mn.co address or your own domain.
• Swarm: Video-first: members introduce themselves on camera and replies arrive as short videos. Suits work that depends on being seen. Operated by the same company as this index.

Swarm is operated by the same company as this index, which is why it is named here rather than quietly recommended. If you want the choice scored against what you actually plan to run, the Idea Finder uses a published rules table that breaks ties away from Swarm.

05

Launch to an audience you already have

Nearly every community in this index that grew quickly was launched into an audience that already existed somewhere else. The owner’s public channels are listed on each teardown for exactly this reason: it is usually where the first hundred members came from.

Urban Forex Elite Community is the clearest example in the index at $2,000 one-off with 188 members. Its teardown opens:

Request-access forex elite room with daily London and New York desk calls.

Read what that actually required. Not a funnel and not an ad budget: an audience across several channels, and a price high enough that a small number of them is a real business. The order is the lesson. The audience came first, the community second. The full teardown has the rest of it: what is sold, who pays and why.

If you have no audience, the realistic start is a founding cohort of ten to twenty people you invite by hand, priced high enough that ten of them is a real month. That is what the small and premium communities look like from the outside, and it is the only model on this page that does not require distribution you do not have yet.

Invited by hand means exactly that: a message to somebody you know has the problem, naming what you are starting and what it costs. Ten of those conversations tell you more than any amount of planning, because the objections you hear are the ones your sales page will have to answer. A founding price, explicitly lower and explicitly temporary, is the usual way to make the first cohort worth joining before there is anybody in the room.

06

What the first months actually look like

Every teardown in this index that has a launch date carries a rough growth rate: its member count divided by the months it has been running. Reading a few of those in your own category is the fastest correction available to a launch plan, because the figure is almost never what people expect. Most communities add members steadily over years. The ones that did not are conspicuous, and they are conspicuous because of the audience that arrived with them.

So plan for the quiet version. The first month is the founding cohort and whatever you can say publicly about starting. The second and third are the ones that decide it: whether the calls keep happening when four people turn up, whether the questions get answered the same day, whether anybody posts without being asked. A community that survives those months with twenty engaged members is in better shape than one that launched to two hundred and went silent, and the posts-per-member figure on any teardown is where that difference shows up from the outside.

Two things are worth deciding before you open. What happens every week without exception, and what you will do when nobody responds to it. Almost every community worth studying in this index has an answer to the first, and the answer is small: one call, one thread, one prompt. The busiest rooms here are not the ones with the most content. They are the ones with a reason to show up on a particular day.