Paint a picture of the future you want. Go there. People will follow. A summary of Seth Godin’s Tribes.
Communities is what the whole internet is made of. The community of The Verge followers that reads their articles and watches their YouTube videos; the community of Kardashians followers that for some reason cares about the Kardashians lives; the Open Source community of developers, writers, translators and managers that maintain a number of Linux distros. Each of those is a tribe.
What is a tribe?
According to Seth Godin, there’s three elements that make a tribe:
- An ideal.
- Connections between members.
- Practical objectives or actions to follow.
Doesn’t sound like we’ve rediscovered fire right there, because we haven’t. That is just a basic human association. And, well, that is a tribe.
Nowadays, a tribe can be a great help to test a project idea, gather money for a good cause, or just have fun and grow together. They are also mostly digital. And their goal is not survival, it’s growth.
Case Study #1. Building a tribe.
Indie Hackers is probably the best example, because it is also a bit meta. Indie Hackers is a forum for entrepreneurs to gather, share stories and ideas, and learn to build a tribe. When Courtland Allen created it, the whole indie hacker, digital nomad trend was not a thing yet. He just had enough foresight to see those trends coming and build a platform where people can learn about it and grow.
He, indeed, built a tribe from the ground up. And in this example the tribe itself is his whole business. His platform is a forum, so it lives and dies by the tribe.
That community creates hundreds of posts a day, hosts gatherings and has given birth to numerous successful businesses. It also made Stripe acquire Indie Hackers in 2017 (just a year after it was founded), so not bad at all.
Case Study #2. Adopting a tribe.
Up until mid 2023, Reddit was considered a great place to hang out, with thousands of tribes inside it. Yes, it had a lot of toxicity, but that’s true of every social platform in the internet, and at least Reddit was heavily moderated by dedicated volunteers that came from the community, and it’s users were mostly very active.
Then came Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman with a brilliant idea:
Let’s charge exorbitant prices for access to our API, effectively killing every third party client and forcing users to use the official app. Let’s also ignore the community’s complaints and gaslight them into thinking we’ve done nothing wrong and they are arguing over nothing. Genius!
I bet he sounded a lot dumber while saying it but I honestly wasn’t there. So, what happened? Part of the tribe felt offended and fled. It didn’t kill Reddit, it’s still a buzzing place, but it did make it worse. And it didn’t help Reddit’s future IPO as much as Huffman had expected, given that users’ protests made their advertising attractiveness drop in the days after the API changes.
The case study isn’t about Reddit though. That would be a masterclass in disrespecting the community that built you. The case study is about platforms like Lemmy or Kbin, platforms similar to Reddit that grew overnight thanks to Mr. Huffman’s brilliant ideas. Kbin had to scramble to instruct people on how to better use the platform to avoid taking its servers down; and the larger Lemmy instances were gaining thousands of users per day.
In this case, Lemmy and Kbin developers didn’t build the entire community they now have. They built a place, a tool, and by making it attractive, and with the help of some external factors, they now have huge tribes that work to make those platforms better.
Back to the basics. Motivate, connect, leverage.
So, as established before, all that’s needed to have a tribe is:
- An ideal.
- Connections between members.
- Practical objectives or actions to follow.
If you take a look at these two examples, we have all of that, even though the origin of the tribe is very different. One came to be because of excitement over a new way of living, a new philosophy. The other was a spin-off from a place where the tribe didn’t feel at home anymore, so they migrated and became a new tribe.
In each case:
- An ideal motivated them.
- The connections between their members empowered them.
- That empowerment gave them leverage to take action towards a certain goal.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Other interesting ideas in the book.
- Critics are not bad. If the critics are constructive, they are a great tool to improve. Otherwise, they go to prove that the tribe (and the product/service) is growing and getting attention (that’s more than a lot of endeavours have ever achieved).
- Not all leadership involves getting in the face of the tribe. It takes just as much effort to successfully get out of the way and let the tribe move.
- You don’t need a plurality or even a majority. In fact, in nearly every case, trying to lead everyone results in leading no one in particular.
- And finally, my favorite lesson from Tribes: Paint a picture of the future you want. Go there. People will follow.
Thanks for reading.