How To Build An Online Community (Complete Guide w/ Tom Ross)
Chris Do and community expert Tom Ross provide a complete guide to building, pricing, and scaling a successful online community.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · April 9, 2024
The Deception of Digital Community
The first rule of building a great community is that it is not about you. It is not a stage for your personal brand, a bigger audience for your content, or a fan club with a paywall. The great deception of online community is believing that the founder must be the star. Most people approach it with a social media mindset, thinking all eyes must be on them.
This is a fatal error.
Tom Ross, CEO of the million-member marketplace Design Cuts, argues for a radical reframe. “To be a great Community Builder you should be a great facilitator,” he states. This work is not about having all the answers. It is about creating a structure where members can find answers from each other. Your role shifts from content creator to architect, from guru to guide. The goal is to get out of the way and let the members create value for one another.
In a discussion with The Futur’s Chris Do, Ross dismantles the myths surrounding membership communities and provides a tactical playbook for building one that thrives. While the appeal is undeniable: recurring revenue, scalable impact, and a powerful business model, the reality is far from passive income. “Community doesn't sleep,” Ross warns. It involves managing human relationships, and humans are notoriously unpredictable.
Do concurs, describing his own experience running The Futur Pro Group. “They don't do what you want. They're like cats in a room,” he says. “Sometimes they behave and sometimes they don't.” You can build the best tools and resources, but getting members to use them requires constant encouragement and nudging. It’s a constant exercise in managing the nuances of an ecosystem of people.
Despite the challenges, the model works. It works in any niche, from arborists to face painters. It works as a side hustle or a full-time venture. And when it works, it creates a powerful engine where members are helping members, long after you’ve logged off. The secret is to stop thinking about what the community can do for you and start architecting what it can do for its members, without you.
Defining Your Territory
Before you can build, you must define. A community without a clear purpose is just a group chat. Ross insists that people overthink this first step, getting lost in abstract ideas. He proposes a simple, three-part filter for choosing your topic.
First, find something you are passionate about. Community is a long-term commitment, and passion provides the fuel to sustain your effort. Second, you must have genuine experience and credibility. This isn’t about being the world's top expert, but you need a foundation of knowledge to build upon. Third, there must be a market opportunity. This could be an underserved niche or a group of people hungry for connection that existing platforms don't provide.
These three elements, much like the framework of the Japanese concept of Ikigai, create a stable foundation. “What are you good at, what are you going to have passion for that you can sustain that effort, and what is something the world needs?” Do asks, connecting it back to a core principle of purpose-driven work.
Once you have a topic, you must craft a value proposition. Ross offers a simple, powerful formula: Your community name helps [this type of person] achieve [this type of outcome]. This is not the place for what he calls “word salad.” Vague, aspirational statements like “my community helps people in the mid to late stage of life who are trying to self-actualize” are useless.
To test the strength of your value proposition, Ross invented what he calls The Podcast Test. “Can you confidently and concisely deliver your value proposition every time you're interviewed on a podcast?” he asks. A strong value proposition is so clear and memorable you can repeat it verbatim, every single time. It becomes a mantra. For his own venture, it’s simple: “Learn.Community helps you to launch and grow a successful online community.”
Do demonstrates its power with his own example: “The Futur Pro Group helps creative entrepreneurs scale their business.” The clarity is the point. The words “creative entrepreneurs” allow a specific group to self-identify. The phrase “scale their business” speaks directly to their goals and pain points. In one sentence, it signals who it’s for and what it delivers.
This is not just a marketing exercise. A sharp value proposition becomes the north star for every decision you make, from content programming to member onboarding. It is the promise you are making, and your community is the vehicle for delivering on that promise.
The Four Pillars of Community Value
A community cannot survive on discussion alone. To command a recurring subscription, it must deliver tangible, ongoing value. Ross organizes this value into four distinct categories: Help, Action, Learning, and Connection.
Most communities start and stop with the first pillar.
- Help: This is the foundational space where members can ask questions and get unstuck. Whether it's you, your team, or other members providing the answers, it's a critical utility. Do notes this happens constantly in The Futur Pro Group, and adds, “what's beautiful is the community members helping each other.”
- Action: Information without implementation is worthless. This pillar is about moving members from passive consumption to active participation. This can take the form of sprints, bootcamps, or challenges designed to guide people toward a specific achievement. Group action builds momentum and creates a shared sense of accomplishment.
- Learning: This can include workshops, a knowledge base, courses, or live training. It’s about packaging your expertise in accessible formats. Ross used his own community to launch a course, creating a “community-powered” experience where live sessions and Q&A supported the pre-recorded modules, making the learning process interactive.
- Connection: This is the most overlooked yet most powerful pillar. Connection is about fostering genuine relationships between members, independent of the community’s primary topic. Ross started launching “connection events” with no professional agenda. “We're not going to talk about work,” he told members. Instead, they used icebreakers and shared personal stories. The result? “People made genuine friendships,” Ross says, and engagement in the wider community lifted because members now had context for one another. You are more likely to help someone you know.
Building connection is the ultimate act of facilitation. It is about creating the right environment and then getting out of the way. Do shares a similar strategy using the platform Airmeet for monthly networking events. They use five-minute speed networking rounds with prompts, followed by topic-based virtual tables where members can gather to discuss video production, branding, or just catch up. “They run by themselves,” Do explains. “These calls usually are set up for 90 minutes but we'll log back in a couple hours later and people are still hanging out.”
This illustrates two fundamental truths of community. First, the most valuable interactions often happen when the leader isn't there. “The kids have more fun when the teacher is out of the room,” Ross jokes. Second, the leader's job is to facilitate, not dominate. Do actively avoids joining the virtual tables too often because it shifts the dynamic from peer connection to a training session. The goal is not to be the center of every conversation, but the catalyst for them.
The Uncomfortable Math of Membership
Before you build anything, you must confront the numbers. A community is a business, and it requires a sound financial model to survive. Ross simplifies this process into two critical questions: How much do you need to earn, and how much can you realistically earn?
These two numbers are often far apart. Many aspiring founders have unrealistic income goals detached from their audience size, credibility, or experience. The first step is to calculate your personal “need” figure: the take-home income required to cover your costs and live comfortably. This sets your floor. The second step is to understand what the market will bear.
Ross outlines six key considerations for setting your price:
- Your Income Needs: Does this need to be a full-time income or a side hustle? The pressure to earn changes your entire strategy.
- Market Rates: Research other communities in your niche to establish a price range. Your price will likely fall somewhere between the low and high end.
- Member ROI: How much value, monetary or experiential, are members receiving? Do describes this as choosing between building an Airbnb or a Ritz-Carlton. A bespoke, high-touch experience commands a higher price.
- Your Model: A VIP mastermind for 10 people will have a dramatically different price point than a scalable forum for 400 members.
- Your Reputation: Be honest about your current standing in the market. An established influencer can charge more than an unknown person starting out. This isn't unfair; it's a reflection of brand equity, a central tenet of building a personal brand.
- The Excitement Price: A tip from community expert Jay Clouse, this question reframes the entire exercise. “What price would make you feel excited every time a member signs up?” If you feel resentful about the price, it’s too low.
This final point leads to Ross’s concept of The Value Seesaw. The transaction must feel balanced. If members get all the value and you get none, resentment will poison your work. If you get all the money and members get no value, they will churn and destroy your reputation. The seesaw must float in equilibrium.
This balance is why Ross issues a stark warning: “Please don't offer lifetime memberships.” A lifetime deal is a marriage, Do adds. It’s a promise that doesn’t account for your own growth, changes in your business, or the ever-increasing demand on your time. The initial cash injection is alluring, but years down the line, when those members are still requesting support for free, the value seesaw will be hopelessly broken.
To find the pricing sweet spot scientifically, Ross recommends the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter. Developed by Dutch economist Peter van Westendorp, this model avoids asking people what they want to pay, which always results in a lowball number. Instead, it asks four specific questions to map out a range of acceptable prices. The data reveals a sweet spot that is neither too cheap to question its quality nor too expensive to be prohibitive.
Finally, every community builder must understand two numbers: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and churn. MRR is your lifeblood. Churn, the rate at which members cancel, is the leak in your bucket. “If your churn rate is bad you're really going to struggle to grow,” Ross explains. A 5% monthly churn rate is exceptional; 10% is good. Anything over 15-20% indicates a “leaky bucket” that needs urgent repair. One of the biggest culprits of high churn is offering monthly subscriptions. They attract less committed members and create 12 decision points per year to cancel. Shifting to quarterly and annual plans, as both Ross and Do have done, attracts a higher quality of member and significantly improves retention.
From Hypothesis to Launch
The most dangerous phase of building is the period between the idea and the launch. Too many entrepreneurs spend months building a product in isolation, only to release it to the sound of crickets. The solution is to validate your idea before you commit significant resources.
“The ideal way that you launch anything, whether it's a product, service, or a community, is you need to have more buyers who have expressed intent than what you can supply,” Do explains. When demand is greater than supply, you are in a position of power. As Ross notes, this isn't about manufacturing hype at this stage; it's about seeing if anyone wants your idea at all.
The best tool for this is a waitlist paired with an application. This process achieves several goals simultaneously. It proves demand, validates your core concept, and provides crucial data about potential members. Most importantly, it prevents you from getting a hard “no” after you’ve already done all the work. “You'd rather get the door slammed in your face early on before you've committed too much,” Ross says.
He put this into practice when launching his own community. With an existing audience of around 40,000 on Instagram, he set a clear goal: he would only launch if he could attract 100 founding members. He put out a call to action and received nearly 400 applications.
This overwhelming response did two things. First, it proved the concept was viable. Second, it lit a fire under him. “I was like, oh wow, I need to go build this thing now,” he recalls. With 100 people ready to pay, the motivation was immense. “I built the whole community in three days because I was like, I got 100 people ready to pay me. I can't hang around now.” Without that external pressure, he admits it probably would have taken him three months.
The application itself is a powerful filtering tool. It allows you to screen for your ideal member and identify red flags. Ross includes a question about which payment plan they intend to choose, but crucially, he also includes an option: “Sorry, I can’t afford this right now.” This simple addition prevents a clogged pipeline of people who are interested but unable to buy, allowing him to focus on the most qualified leads. This strategy is essential for anyone serious about getting their first customers efficiently.
Once demand is validated, the next step is choosing a platform. Ross advises against defaulting to familiar tools like Slack. Instead, he advocates for an objective R&D process. Create a spreadsheet listing your platform requirements, marking each as a “must-have” or a “nice-to-have.” Evaluate different platforms against this list and your budget. This turns a gut decision into a strategic one. Both Ross and Do use Circle.so, a popular all-in-one community platform. Ross compares finding the right platform to finding a partner, referencing a line from the film Good Will Hunting: “She's not perfect and neither are you, but the question is are you perfect for each other?” No platform is perfect, but one will be the best fit for your specific needs.
The Art of Architecture and Culture
With paying members waiting, the task becomes building the house they will live in. How you structure your community space has a profound impact on the member experience. Ross sees founders make the same mistakes repeatedly.
The first is creating a space that is too busy. In an attempt to signal value, people stuff their community with too many sections and channels. This doesn't add value; it creates overwhelm. Members don't know where to start, so they do nothing. This cognitive overload directly contributes to churn. Do admits to making this mistake. “We added in everything that they've always wanted,” he says of The Futur Pro Group’s move to Circle. “We found that if you take 100 people and you create 10 spaces, there's a good chance that some space will have zero activity.” They had to make the hard decision to shut things down. Less is more.
The second mistake is a poor balance of content versus community. When the navigation is 99% links to courses, a knowledge base, and resources, it feels less like a community and more like a membership site. The purpose shifts from connection to consumption, undermining the core value proposition. The architecture must prioritize spaces for interaction.
Beyond structure, you must design your brand and culture. A community deserves its own distinct brand identity. Ross suggests starting by choosing three to five words you want people to associate with your community. For Learn.Community, the words are: Practical & Actionable, Helpful & Supportive, Personal & Open, and Fun. He then audits every brand touchpoint, from the weekly newsletter to the onboarding sequence, to ensure it aligns with these words. When he found that the platform's default automated digest felt impersonal, he turned it off and started writing a custom one himself to better reflect his brand.
For The Futur Pro Group, Do identifies their words as Generous, Professional, Ambitious, and Creative. These words define the bar for quality and commitment, differentiating it from other communities in the space.
This brand identity is the foundation for your community culture. Ross defines culture simply as the expected behaviors and values shared by the group. A strong culture does four things:
- It is clear and easy to understand.
- It attracts the right kind of members.
- It deters the wrong kind of members.
- It is upheld by members, even when you aren’t there.
To illustrate the power of culture, he points to the dueling dojos in the show Cobra Kai. Both are communities teaching karate. But one, Cobra Kai, is built on a culture of “No Mercy.” The other, Miyagi-Do, is built on balance and defense. They are in the same niche, pursuing the same outcome, but their cultures are worlds apart. Your community's culture is your dojo's philosophy. It tells members how to behave, what is valued, and what is unacceptable. This is not something that emerges by accident. It must be designed, communicated, and reinforced from day one. You are not just building a product; you are building a society in miniature, and you are its first leader.
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“This is my warning: don't offer lifetime memberships.”
— Chris Do
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