Notes from Nothing

It’s Community — First, Next and Last!

Congrats to Noah Kagan for pulling off an eventful community event — Community Next, last weekend at Stanford. Way to go, buddy!

So who’s Noah?: I’ve heard a lot about Noah and his enjoyable/informative blog Okdork.com, shared a blogosphere chat with him, and finally had a chance to meet him at my bday party last month.

Here’s Matt Marshall on Noah: Noah Kagan is one of those young guys who always seems to know what is going in Silicon Valley. He’s given a lot of thought about community building. He recently left Facebook, is working on various projects, and writes a blog at Okdork.com (via Venture Beat)

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In the midst of all the great posts covering initial thoughts, the fun, the party, more thought posts (more on this later), I couldn’t resist highlighting Noah’s 2 cents on building community through “Community Next”:

I am saying when you want to create a community you can do it successful in 2 ways:

1- Active participant. You always have a drinking group and you say let’s put this on a website. Then more join and more join and so on. Bamn. Done. Community.

2- Have something Killer. No, not literally. Make an awesome product. Make an event or site that people want to talk about it. Create a system for it. Allow them to give feedback. Provide tools for people to develop it. Bamn #2. Community is formed.

That definitely is the place to start while creating communities… Well said, and well done, Noah! See you at a community event/party soon 😉

Anyone else attended the event and have a scoop to share? 🙂

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  1. Mario Sundar

    Noah!

    Well, too bad I missed “Community Next” but I look forward to the next event you conjure.

    …and, you’re invited to the next party, i/me/my friends throw. Given your comment, I’ve decided to bring sexy back to the blog 🙂 How? I’ve no clue… LOL

  2. noah kagan

    Mario,

    I will make sure you are the first person at the next event. I think you brought an interesting point with your post that you may not have noticed. It is interesting to think about perceptions of people based on their online writing, comments, profiles, etc…

    You were much sexier than I expected when I met you a few weeks ago;)

  3. Mario Sundar

    Damon,

    Esp. for community marketers it’s important that you LOVE what you’re doing… My next post will talk about Microsoft’s new “enthusiast evangelist”.

    If your product adds significant value to a group of people (small or big) you’ve a community brewing and picking one of the enthusiasts to evangelize and further build community is essential.

  4. Damon Billian

    I missed the bar fight (check ValleyWag)…drat…

    Noah put together a solid event & I really liked the “Founders Panel”. The key thing that I took away is that you need to love what you’re doing…while it may seem like a cliche, I do think that’s what resonated the most when the panel was talking.

    Building a great product that people want to talk about isn’t easy. That’s why I’ve always said you can’t do “community” for everything under the sun…there’s just not enough sexy, cool products out there.

    The guys from Threadless were awesome.

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