Let’s get back to communities. This chapter talks about how the best scenes community enginehave grown. This is the main point.

If you want to build your Discordcommunity, you have to do this.

Before you start, you need to put a lid on the top of it.Using YouTube or adscould be one way. Sponsoring other newsletters or artists could also be a good idea.This article written down a long list of ways to make the top of the funnel.There are a lot more ways to get people to join your community, but these are the most common ones that people use.When we talk about growth, let's talk about these things a lot more in the next chapter.

• Social mediaads
• Targeted ad networks (Carbon, NFTNow)
• Youtube/Tiktok/Twitter content
• Sponsor newsletters
• Sponsor creators
• Pay affiliates
• Websites like Reddit, Product Hunt
• Sponsor podcasts
• Your own podcast/newsletter
• Link on your own product
• Email list
• Physical stuff (posters, events, etc)
• Text messages to a list

The Community Growth Engine: How Duolingo Scaled to 90 Courses and 300M Users | Laura Nestler

Where Should I Send People?

With products, you always tell people to "Get the app" or "Go to this website."With communities, you don't want to send people to a forum or a chat they don't know how touse.This is why events have been built into Scenes, even though it's hard and expensive. Events are a better way to get people to your site.When people use Google Calendar, you want them to be able to set an alarm for the event.

Events are both the lifeblood of a community and the place where people come to meet them.Stop directing new community membersto a chat or a tutorial. Instead, point them to an event or a webinar where there's a real person who can show them around.If you want to get people to come to your event, you'll have to plan out your ads and inbound channels over the week. This is because events are exhausting to do, overwhelming to existing users, and hard to plan.This is what we did for 11 straight months. We've done this for many clients, and it works like a charm.

Once a person has been to a 30 min - 1 hour event, they will have some idea of what your community and your mission are.

Then, at the end of an event, they sent people to a tutorial that they talked about.In no way should you use a video like this one as a "landing page."

People should also be quickly told how to use the chat and other asynchronous communication channels right after the event. They should also be told how to use them quickly.This makes people very excited for the next event.

Once you have a good level of community engagement, you can move on to giving roles to people who have been active and focusing on monetization and referrals. We set benchmarks for how successful community engagement is in later chapters.Chapters on referrals and the next one on CMF will go over referrals in more depth.

It doesn't matter which platform you use to run this sequence. Scenes has built-in mechanisms to make this flywheel work.You'll need to combine Zoom, Discord, a forum tool, Notion, or Google Docs at least to make this happen. You'll need to do this at least once.It's called Scenes, and it's a one-and-done. Most of your traffic and most of your engagement will come from mobile, where about 80% of your traffic will come from.A plug isn't what this is about. It's more like us saving you a lot of time and headaches with this.

Final Words

Here's a tip: If people get an email before the event, it might just show up in the promotions.A "Set Reminder" button on a calendar app won't show up in any ads.To help you run your community, Scenes allows you to set a reminder on your Google Calendar by default.