The Three Drivers of Community Value
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Jay Clouse's model for why anyone pays to be in an online community: connection, transformation and identity. Connection comes first because our culture has evolved faster than our biology and people are not getting enough of it offline. Transformation, moving from point A to point B in a way you can recognise, is the easiest thing to promise because it is tangible, so it usually becomes the marketing message. Identity is the quiet third driver, where a great experience teaches people something about themselves and becomes part of who they are. The strategic point is that transformation sells the membership while connection and identity are what actually make it stick, so a design optimised only for content will churn.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Lead marketing with transformation
Use the point A to point B outcome as the explicit value proposition, because it is the most tangible promise a prospect can grasp.
Pro tip Phrase it as something a member could later say they achieved.
- 2
Design connection as the retention mechanism
Build deliberate one-to-one and small-group contact, especially live sessions, because connection is what makes people stay even after the transformation lands.
Pro tip Real-time video contact converts profile photos into people members feel invested in helping.
- 3
Create room for identity
Give the community a name, a motif and a shared self-description members want to repeat, the way people announce that they do CrossFit.
Pro tip Identity gives people purpose and a sense of who they are, which is why they talk about you unprompted.
- 4
Place yourself on the content-versus-connection spectrum
Decide whether the membership is primarily content and programming or primarily connection and relationships. Most have both, but the emphasis sets member expectations.
Watch out The lean you choose pre-frames how members engage; you cannot quietly switch later without breaking expectations.
- 5
Let that placement set price and scale
Content and programming memberships tend to price lower, retain slightly less on average and scale more easily. Connection-led memberships price higher but get harder as they grow.
Pro tip In connection-led communities, success itself creates the next set of problems, so plan for that before growth arrives.
- 6
Audit every feature against a driver
For each space, event or asset, name which driver it serves. Anything serving none is overhead that dilutes the rest.
Watch out Gamification often serves none of the three and simply manufactures busywork.
In the wild
When Ali launched the YouTuber Academy in 2020 he questioned whether a community was needed at all, since he had grown on YouTube alone by putting his head down and doing the work. His team pushed back, arguing he was unusual. After the first cohort, the feedback surveys kept coming back talking about the community rather than the content, which he found genuinely surprising.
→ Community, not content, turned out to be what students valued most in the surveys.
Jay pointed to a member of the lab who teaches people to become runners on a plant-based diet, reaching them mostly through Instagram. Her audience is narrow enough that people who find her recognise themselves in it immediately, which supplies the identity driver almost for free alongside the running transformation she sells.
→ A hyper-specific niche where identity and transformation reinforce each other.
Common mistakes
Assuming members came for the content
Content is only one route to transformation. Members frequently rate connection and belonging above the material, and building content-only kills retention.
Selling connection you cannot facilitate
Promising relationships without paid facilitation pushes the work onto members who are already paying, and unled accountability groups fall apart when one person disengages.
Ignoring the scale cost of connection
The more you lean on relationships, the harder growth becomes. Growing fast in a connection-led community actively degrades the product.
From the transcript
“second to that I would say is transformation going from point A to point B in a way that you can recognize”
“the third thing I think people seek out or really appreciate at least when they find it in community is a sense of identity”
“would argue that a lot of the stickiness or recurrence that comes in community comes from connection or a sense of identity”
From the episode
How To Build An Online Community - Jay Clouse
Jay Clouse