"We don’t think of ourselves as a brand. We're more of a community."

You hear this everywhere now. From DTC startups, now with Discord servers. From fitness brands with multiple membership tiers. From founders on podcasts explaining how they're different from legacy companies. Community has become the word brands reach for when they want to signal that what they're building is more meaningful than commerce.

And don’t get me wrong, some of it is genuine. Running clubs give isolated people a reason to show up somewhere every week and maker communities connect people who would otherwise create alone. The brand created these gathering places and something human grew.

But some of it is also cosmetic. A newsletter list or a comments section should not be mistaken for one, for example. What is worth paying attention to, is what brands are reaching for when they say "community".

Most importantly, I think they want their work to mean something beyond transactions. That's a good thing, but along with that comes a desire for pro-active engagement that does not need to be fed. A sort of advocacy without prompting you might say. None of those desires are wrong. But wanting community and understanding what community actually is are very different things.

For us, Community is what happens when your brand stops being yours alone.

Unlike Champions, Allies, Skeptics or Critics, all of whom maintain individual relationships with you, Community is emergent. It's the moment when the people you've attracted begin forming relationships with each other. And once it forms, it develops its own life, its own culture, its own momentum. You catalyzed it, but make no mistake, you don't own it.

Audience Versus Community

An audience watches. They consume what you create, but the relationship tends to flow in one direction. You perform, they receive. Audience members relate to you, but not to one another.

A community participates. They contribute, co-create and form relationships with each other around what you've built.

The difference manifests quite simply. When you are not present, your audience goes quiet, but your Community keeps talking, creating and connecting whether you show up or not.

Most brands want community but only know how to build an audience. They focus on reach and follower counts, broadcasting content and measuring engagement. Building community requires something fundamentally different. It demands the creation of space. Space for people to connect with each other, not just with you.

Community Starts Inside

For many brands, the first step towards building community is a mis-step. They try to build an external community before they've built an internal one. They want customers to become advocates while their own employees are disengaged. It doesn't work.
Your employees are your first community.

They're the first people who keep company with your brand daily. When your internal community is strong, it radiates outward. Employees become natural Champions and Allies, speaking about what the organization stands for because they genuinely experience it.

When your internal community is weak, that radiates outward too. Customers sense the gap in authenticity and no amount of external community-building overcomes that disconnect.

Before you invest in building a customer community, ask yourselves if we have a genuine internal one? Do our people actually embody what we claim to stand for?
If the answer reveals gaps, that's where the work starts.

When Community Actually Forms

Community formation has recognizable markers that go beyond engagement metrics. You'll notice people forming relationships you didn't facilitate, meeting independently, having conversations in spaces you don't control. Shared language emerges organically, complete with inside jokes and unique rituals. A really important sign of Community is that new members get socialized by existing members rather than by you.

Perhaps the most telling marker is that the community starts to develop a collective memory. They remember promises you made, mistakes you acknowledged and how you've evolved.

At this point, you're no longer managing individual relationships. You're stewarding a living system.

What Brands Rarely Anticipate

We have said before that a brand is not only what you say, but what others carry on your behalf. This co-creation is powerful when it aligns with your purpose. Community members become storytellers, creating narratives that attract others like them. But it also means you can't fully control what your brand means. The community's interpretation becomes as real as your intention. Sometimes more real, because it's collectively held and constantly reinforced.

Strong brands don't fight this. They recognize it, respect it and work with it.

The Grace and the Weight

Strong community is the best insurance a brand can have. When you make a mistake, community members who feel genuinely invested will give you grace. They'll defend you. They'll stay through difficulty because they're not just customers, but members of something they've helped build.

But that same investment cuts both ways. A community that feels betrayed is far more damaging than any number of dissatisfied individual customers, as they amplify each other's concerns, coordinate and organize opposition in ways individuals cannot.

Community remembers, and it easily compares your actions to your promises. It won't tolerate sustained gaps between what you claim and what you do, which is why authenticity becomes non-negotiable once community forms.

The Harder Work

The company you keep isn't just individual relationships anymore. It's a living collective with its own momentum, memory and meaning-making. That collective can amplify everything good about your brand or expose every gap between your promises and your reality.

Most brands never get to face this challenge because they never build beyond individual relationships. If you've reached the point where a community is forming around you, you've accomplished something rare.

Now comes the even harder work. Learning to serve what you've catalyzed without being consumed by it.

In my next newsletter, I'll share what that harder work actually looked like for us. It involved twelve hundred seats, thirty-eight consecutive sold-out events and a conversation Jane and I kept having that we didn't want to finish.

—Steven

P.S. Here's a test worth running on any brand that calls itself a community, including your own: stop posting for two weeks. See what happens. If the conversation continues without you, you've built something real. If everything goes quiet, you've built an audience. Both are valuable. They're just not the same thing.