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Fran Méndez

The problem with building a flagship community

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

This week I have been super focused on strategy for Commune. For a while, I thought having a flagship community on the platform to use as a rock-solid case study would be a really great idea.

I played around with creating a paid community and newsletter to help people become unrejectable. It would be a space with periodic webinars from different folks teaching you how to improve your skills, share your work, and make jobs find you instead of the other way around. Building this would also give me a great excuse to test new Commune features like private groups and monetization.

After a bit, I completely discarded the unrejectable idea. I have my book, Shift, about to launch, so it made more sense to focus on that. Building a community around Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) and Shift seemed absolutely perfect. Plus, most of you already know me from my work on AsyncAPI, so it felt like a totally natural fit.

The problem is that neither of these ideas actually aligns with what Commune needs right now. Let me explain. For Commune to really work, we need a high density of communities. We need more newsletters and more people so cross-pollination naturally happens. We do not need a ton of people crammed into one single group. The goal is not a single massive audience, but rather a network of many different communities related to the same topics of interest.

Do not get me wrong here. I am not saying those communities are bad ideas. I only considered them because I genuinely believe they are useful. But running them does not push my main goal forward, which is making Commune grow.

So I decided to step back from all those side projects for now. I am fully focused on Commune. I am rolling up my sleeves and doing the not-so-glamorous job of reaching out to people one by one to get them on board. That is what will actually push this whole thing forward.

I am starting with my own network, as you have probably noticed. My network is mostly heavily into APIs, EDA, AsyncAPI, and that kind of stuff — and lately AI as well, but who is not on AI lately! Because of this, you should definitely expect more newsletters around these topics.

I know I'm not alone so I'm going to ask you for help here. What are some good newsletters around these topics that you think should be on Commune?


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Fran Méndez

Creator of AsyncAPI | Empowering Staff+ Engineers & Architects to master Event-Driven Architectures with proven tools, processes, and best practices.

Hey hey! I'm Fran, the creator of the AsyncAPI specification (the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs). Subscribe to my newsletter —The Weekly Shift— where I share expert advice about building Event-Driven Architecture and share my journey writing my first book, Shift: The Playbook for Event-Driven Architecture Advocacy.

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