We have a neurotic yet loving mini-poodle with a Napoleon complex. His name is Roomba. Yes, he spins around and cleans up after us.

It started as a teenage hobby. I worked on fan sites and forums in the late 90's, hacking on ezBoard, vBulletin, phpBB, etc. Thankfully I learned some basic web development skills along the way. I graduated during the global recession in 2009, and those self-taught web skills kept me employed.

In 2010 I started organizing in-person meetups and workshops, mostly around WordPress and other web-related topics. I owe my early career to those local communities. That all culminated in joining GoDaddy in 2015. I was hired as the founding Community Manager for GoDaddy Pro, their new partner program for web designers. We launched the GoDaddy community forums shortly thereafter. I flipped over to the GoDaddy Blog in 2016 but kept working closely with the community team. We had community members writing for the blog, and I was often on the road, meeting our members at events where we were sponsoring or speaking. Jump ahead to 2020. At that point I was more on the operations side, serving as a Product Manager, overseeing GoDaddy's global blog, community, and event platforms.

In 2022 I took the leap to start my own thing as an independent contractor, helping startups with their community programs. That brought me to Glide. It wasn't a hard decision. I love the product, the team, and the community. It's amazing.

Working with leadership and managing up. Community is a nebulous term, and what leadership expects from a community program will vary greatly from one organization to the next, or even one leader to the next. For example, I've had senior leaders and executives with very strong opinions about a community being the same thing as an audience. While the two are closely related, building a community versus building an audience are very different types of work.

Being able to articulate these sorts of nuances, usually under pressure, and hold your ground on what you know is right... well, it's really hard. I'm still working on it!

Being a generalist. Community professionals have to wear a lot of hats, especially when you're working in a startup or a smaller team. Even in larger organizations, having the flexibility of a generalist mindset helps a ton. Creating content, hosting events, handling communications, triaging and escalating issues, supporting users, mitigating conflicts, managing platforms, deep-diving on analytics and technical reports... those are just some of the responsibilities that come to mind.

Having a wide range of interests, an insatiable curiosity, and a willingness to get your hands dirty and DIY? Those are all invaluable traits for a community pro.

Depends on the community! I think Discourse is a nice, well-rounded platform for more technical product support communities. I enjoy Discourse as both a user and administrator. They're constantly making performance improvements and shipping handy new features. I've come to love the embedded chat, for example. (Disclosure: We're currently using Discourse at Glide.)

Circle has become my go-to recommendation as a Facebook Groups alternative. Likewise, I'm keeping an eye on Superwave from Hopin as an alternative to Slack. Gainsight Community, fka InSided, is one I haven't used a lot as an admin, but I've been very impressed as a user, and I like their approach to product development. If I were starting a new product community, they'd be at the top of my shortlist, followed by Bettermode.

Last but not least, I continue to hold a special place in my heart for Invision, because I've been using it the longest. IPB has the best moderator tooling out of all the community platforms, in my opinion.

Prompt them. Ask questions. Run polls. Call people out by name. Give them a reason to show up, or even better, a reason to react. People have a transactional interest when they first join a community. They're looking for answers, for information, for inspiration. Likewise, you're going to have members who join because they want to show off a little, to share what they know. Indulge in that. Get the flywheel going. That's where the conversations begin.

A community is a connected group of people with something in common. That's my broad definition of community.

Connected group: There are 1:1 relationships between members.

People: A community consists of individuals, not brands or entities.

Something in common: Purpose, place, profession, interest, etc. Whatever it is, it's the one thing that all the members have in common.

Contribute to existing communities that you want to be part of. I got my start by answering questions in fandom forums. Then I became a moderator, then an administrator - a volunteer community manager, basically. When I pivoted to in-person meet ups, I did the same thing. I showed up, listened, and contributed where I could. You can do the same. Share your knowledge, your expertise, your perspective, your insights. Offer to help. You'll build credibility, trust, and rapport over time. Ultimately, that's what community management is - being a trusted facilitator for a connected group of people who all have something in common. :)