It all starts small.

Communities are about accomplishing things that cannot be done alone as individuals. Whether big, small, or ephemeral — communities are about connecting people and serving people in ways otherwise not possible.

All communities start small. All big things start small.

It is okay to be small.

Smallness is a community’s superpower.

It enables shared intimacy, and ultimately allows for a sense of collective identity to emerge. There is power in being nimble, tightly knit, and intimate. Often times, the size of a community is often a lagging indicator of success in this regard, and never the direct reason why a community is successful.

It’s about creating deep value.

The process of building a community is one about trust and patience, something that is founded on strong ‘whys‘ and slowly manifested into reality through hard earned trust.

To understand what made a communities thrive, avoid emulating the current and instead look into what influences and achievements shaped their culture early on. That’s not to say that communities can’t become something big and scalable. But whether they do so or not, most meaningful communities share this commonality of happiness during their earliest times of smallness.

We live in a world that is obsessed with scaling and the ‘big’. 

More is not more. It is simplicity that attracts, not noise and information.

If you are building a community, I ask you to consider taking a step back and instead focus on how to do small things with great love first.