Have you ever dreamed of creating a community of 2,000 members in 5 days, charging its access $5, and generating $10,000 in less than a week?

Yeah, me too.

Well, guess what? This is exactly what Jackson Fall did 3 weeks ago. 

In a matter of days, Jackson overcame THE problem many spent months on:

Going from 0 to 1, and turning an idea into a community of hundreds if not thousands of minds working in the same direction.

I’ve actually been so obsessed with this specific “0 to 1 problem” that, over the past 24 months, I wrote an entire book called The 5 Pillars Of Community Building, explaining in details the 5 steps any community builder should follow to overcome it.

So when I saw Jackson turning a viral tweet into a community, it just clicked.

This guy just went through the 5 steps described in my Book… in 5 short days.

Seeing this, I figured there would surely never be a better example to illustrate the frameworks I explain in this Book, and decided to write a case study, breaking down all the actions Jackson did well so you can do the same.

In this article, I’ll show you the 5 steps to overcome the 0 to 1 problem, and analyze how Jackson Fall applied them to his community.

I hope you’re as hyped up as I am - it’s going to be a good one!

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Step #1 | Define The Reason Why Your Community Exists

Let’s rewind a little bit to get the full picture here.

Jackson Greathouse Fall is a Brand Designer, Writer, and for a few weeks now, the Creator of the HustleGPT challenge - a challenge quickly turned into a community of AI enthusiasts wanting to leverage the power of ChatGPT.

On March 15th, Jackson posted a thread explaining a new experiment he was launching for himself. Here it is:

Jackson Greathouse Fall @jacksonfall

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible. I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to. Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business? Follow along 👀

8:48 PM ∙ Mar 15, 2023

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95,496Likes14,076Retweets

The twist to the story?

In 5 days, he made 20M+ views on his original post and gained 100k+ followers.

Pretty mind-blowing 🤯

But he didn't simply contemplate his success and stop here.

No, Jackson turned his temporal clout into a community.

Indeed, only a few hours after posting this original tweet, Jackson quickly saw people copying his experiment, wanting to do the same for their business.

Instead of calling them out, he quickly realized they would all go through the same journey and struggle with the same things.

He realized that, if he created a community:

• A shared community brand could give weight to their ideas.

• The cumulative experiments and compounding members' insights could help them all. 

• Being part of a group where every discovery could be used multiple times by all the members could help them all.

A few hours later, he created a discord and launched his community: HustleGPT.

The lesson here that every community builder should learn from Jackson:

Your community needs a purpose beyond its own existence.

He didn’t start a community for the sake of a community.

Jackson first did his experiment, then found out he and others could achieve their goals faster by joining forces. He found the reason why his community should exist before creating it - not after.

Step #2 | Establish Your Community's Identity

Creating the community was only the beginning of the journey for Jackson.

To help as many people as he could to leverage AI, he knew he needed to make his community recognizable.

At the beginning, community leaders embody their community. Their personal story is their community identity, and their story show who they are, why they are building a community, and how people can beneficiate from joining it.

Jackson followed the same tactic explained in my book, starting by sharing his personal story to establish his community’s identity. He continued sharing his personal story and the progress he was making with his experiment daily on Twitter.

However, after a certain time, members will need to attach themselves to a community, a project they have the power to influence, not a single creator.

And that’s when you should start revamping your community’s identity.

For Jackson, only a couple of days after his original post, he renamed the community "Makeshift" and created an entire brand identity around it, letting members take ownership of the community and identify themselves as “Makeshifters” and not “Jackson Fall’s fans”.

New name. New website. Same community.

Jackson Greathouse Fall @jacksonfall

Today, I'm announcing Makeshift, a community for people who want to see human creativity being pushed to new limits. Makeshift will evolve as AI and our collective imaginations grow. Join us: wemakeshift.co Follow us: @wemakeshiftco Thanks again, Jackson

wemakeshift.coMakeshiftThis place is for you—...

8:25 PM ∙ Mar 23, 2023

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301Likes10Retweets

Step #3 | Shape A Content Strategy

The best way to get early traction for your community?

Creating content that resonates with readers so much that they want to learn more about what you’re doing and want to be involved.

Jackson’s original tweet kinda took care of the content strategy for him, with readers seeing his content and wanting to do the same.

But he didn’t stop there.

Beyond his original tweet, he followed the content strategy of Nike and Red Bull:

Putting members front and center.

He highlighted their initiatives, their wins, and rewarded the ones pushing the boundaries and with the most creativity by giving them visibility.

How exactly?

• He organized Twitter Spaces to give members opportunities to show their progress.

• He appeared on Podcasts to talk about the community and the progress members were making.

• He started posting threads on his personal Twitter account showing the progress made by members.

It is well known there’s no better marketing than showing how people have succeeded by using your solution.

And Jackson mastered this strategy.

To attract new members, do like him, create content that resonates with your audience, highlight the success of your early members, and make people want to associate themselves with your values.

Step #4 | Organize Your Community Space To Facilitate Communication

The Makeshift community quickly became too big for Jackson to manage.

Before a certain number of members, he could easily manage to answer all the messages in Discord, help members who were facing blocks, and connect members working on similar ideas together manually. 

But when he reached 500 members, all of this became way more difficult. 

The thing is, for a community to thrive, members must be able to share information and ideas easily.

As in everything in life, to see success, communication is key.

At this stage, he realized he needed to introduce a couple of diversified options enabling both asynchronous and synchronous communication.

Two of my favorite initiatives:

• GitHub Repository: Members took care of creating a GitHub repository with all the projects part of the community so that members could get in touch with members working on similar projects. It allowed new members to know more about the projects in the community in an asynchronous way, without having to talk directly to other members (removing a barrier at entry).

• Community Calls: Jackson organized weekly calls on Twitter spaces, optimizing solely for genuine engagement, with members joining for one hour only to catch up with the latest news and progress of the community instead of having to catch up with hundreds of discord messages.

Without those initiatives, chances are members would have joined and then quickly left Discord.

For any community to thrive, members need multiple touchpoints to learn more about the project and start engaging with it. Make sure to organize your community spaces (Discord, Twitter, Notion) to faciliate communication and incentivize contribution.

Step #5 | Facilitate Your Members’ First Contribution

Finally, a community is only one when members contribute toward the same goal.

To turn this movement into a real community, Jackson needed members to take initiative and ownership of the community - not just follow his lead.

So instead of focusing on growth, Jackson took the opposite approach and tried to find engaged members keen to take on new initiatives for the community.

So how did he do that exactly?

1. He encouraged them to share their progress on Discord daily. If members didn’t make any progress, their next chance to share their advancement was the next day. Not a week or a month later. By reducing the time between each prompt, Jackson ensured members had a reason to engage daily.

2. He gave them a space to celebrate their wins with others. He gave them a weekly opportunity to talk in one of the Twitter Spaces, giving a good reason for members to engage in exchange for free visibility in front of a highly targeted audience.

3. He re-invested the $10,000 generated from this project. He used the funds to help projects grow and empower members, giving them again another reason to engage in the community in the hope of receiving a grant.

4. He helped spread members initiatives. The original idea of the GitHub repository as mentioned above, for example, didn’t come from him. But when he saw the initiative, he helped spread it across the community with a Discord announcement and tweets on his account. Members saw that, if they were engaging and coming with new initiatives, Jackson would support them and help them spread the word.

Jackson didn’t follow a growth-at-all-costs strategy but focused on engaging the early members. He seeded the insiders and empowered early members to contribute. And that’s a step you shouldn’t overlook if you want your community to stand the test of time.

| Closing Thoughts

As shown in this essay, what Jackson accomplished in 5 days is truly a playbook for community building:

• Starting by defining the reason why his community exists.

• Establishing his community’s identity.

• Shaping a content strategy putting his members front and center.

• Organizing his community space to facilitate communication.

• Facilitating his members’ first contribution through smart incentives.

He went through the 5 steps of community building, executing perfectly the strategy to turn any idea into a community.

If you want to do the same, I can’t recommend you enough to grab a free copy of my Book, The 5 Pillars Of Web3 Community Building.

The question now for Jackson is:

Will he succeed in making Makeshift stand the test of time?

And more importantly, what can he do today to make sure his community will still be engaged in 3 or 6 months?

In my opinion, his best chance at making his community enter a state of cultural relevance - this moment that will cement his community into a state of enduring relevance - is to start laying the right foundations for a symbol system to emerge.

It is to turn this group of AI enthusiats into Makeshifters, into a group that live for the value the community has set, defining themselves through its symbols (names, emojis, languages, etc.), the same way bikers on their Harley Davidson, for example, wear the same clothes, have the same values, and organized their life around their tribe.

That’s a challenge I’ve been very interested in in the past months, and I’ve actually created a mini-course called The Modern World Builder - A Handbook to Collective Symbol System, that help community builders, once they went from 0 to 1, to go from 1 to 100 or even 1,000.

In this mini-course, I outline a path for you to bring your people together, build a culture of intimacy, and show you the entire lifecycle of an internet community and how to thrive at each phase. It's the same type of valuable insights than those in my book, but on more topics, with more examples, and with more templates you can apply to your community. You can check out the exact outline here.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition, and until the next one, keep building!

Speak soon,

- Eliot

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