Yes - my brown cavoodle! His name is Frodo. He is my everything.

I have organically fallen into community via creating an online space for my personal community. After uni, I went into customer operations and management and made a career change into community building in tech.

For it to be taken seriously and to monetize off this. Community-led often implies not-for-profit.

Signing up for the The Community Collective course and then staying in their ecosystem as an alumni for years after, I still am a part of it. This, and attending events on community building. Reading The Business of Belonging by David Spinks helped a lot.

Would have to be Circle from a configuration point of view and Instagram more recently as it has developed community-enhancing features such as a broadcast channel with replies and deeper engagement functionality.

Prioritise your community responses, comments, DMs and questions above all else. Ensure timely and value-add responses. It's easy for them to stop engaging with you or your community if you drop the ball on this.

A spare for people to come toegther with a shared interest, challenge and most importantly lived experience.

Join a community of community builders to help validate some of your thinking. It can be very lonely.