You open your community on a Tuesday morning. You posted yesterday, and the day before that. The badges are on. There are fourteen spaces, each one neatly labeled. Your engagement rate is down again.
You did everything you were told.
That’s the problem. A lot of community building advice got repeated until it turned into a rule, and now people follow it in situations where it actively makes things worse. Here are the seven pieces I’d stop following, and what I’d do instead of each one.
Why Is So Much Community Building Advice Wrong?
Most of it treats a community like a content channel. Post daily, chase the metric, add more stuff. Your members didn’t join a feed. They joined for an outcome and for each other.
I’m not picking on anybody. Most of this comes from people who mean well, and plenty of it was true for their community at one specific moment.
It spreads because it’s so actionable. “Post daily” is a clear instruction. A leaderboard is something you can switch on this afternoon. “Notice who’s gone quiet and introduce two people who should know each other” is fuzzy, slow, and impossible to put on a checklist. So the tactical advice wins the internet, even though the fuzzy work is what actually builds the thing.
Here’s the sorting test. If a tactic treats your members like an audience to be activated, be suspicious of it. If it treats them like people to be connected, you’re probably onto something.
What Advice Is Making Your Community Quieter?
Three pieces: post every day, gamify everything, and build out every space before you open. Each one makes a small community feel emptier than it is.
Post every day
Your community is not an Instagram feed. There’s no algorithm rewarding your consistency. Post daily into a room that isn’t ready for it and members open the app, see 11 unread things, feel behind, and close it.
It also trains everyone that you’re the one who talks. You become the broadcaster, they become the audience, and then you wonder why nobody starts their own conversations. I see this most with founders who came from content. On social, you’re trying to be seen. In a community, you’re trying to get other people seen.
What I’d do instead:
- Post less, and only post things that need a response
- Ask one question only your members can answer, instead of seven prompts nobody touches
- When it’s quiet, leave it quiet for a bit. A member may have been about to speak up
Two posts a week that both matter beat daily posts people learn to skim. The longer version of this fix is community engagement without more content.
Gamify everything
Permanent points and leaderboards don’t create engagement. They create performance. People leave “great share” to move their number, and the names at the top are usually just the people who like leaderboards.
Meanwhile your most thoughtful member, the one who reads everything, comes to every call, and had a business-changing insight last month, has 42 points and feels like she’s losing at something. She’s getting exactly what she came for, and the system you installed is telling her she’s doing it wrong.
Points reward volume. The behaviors you actually want (a vulnerable question, an honest account of what didn’t work, a real answer for someone else) are never high volume.
What I’d do instead:
- Use gamification for a moment, not forever: a five-day challenge or a two-week sprint with a finish line
- Turn it off when the challenge ends
- The rest of the time, recognize people yourself. Name the member who helped someone, point at the win, highlight the question that made everyone think
A founder who noticed beats an automated badge every time.
Build every space before you open
Five people spread across 14 spaces makes every room look dead. The same five people in two spaces feel like a lively little group.
Density decides whether a community feels alive, not volume. Ten posts in one room reads as busy. Those same ten posts across 14 rooms reads as nothing.
What I’d do instead:
- Start with two or three spaces, fewer than feels right
- Let them get crowded
- Give a conversation its own space only when it’s genuinely overflowing
Structure should follow behavior. Collapsing 14 spaces down to four is one of the most common fixes I make in other people’s communities, and one of the fastest wins there is. It’s the same thinking behind a minimum viable membership and what your community actually needs on day one.
What Advice Is Costing You Money and Energy?
Pricing low to fill the room, and piling on value so nobody doubts you. Both feel safe and generous. Both leave you carrying more for less.
Price low, raise it later
Cheap members churn faster and engage less, so the low price doesn’t even buy the full room it promised. And you’ve anchored your audience to a number you can’t sustain.
You can raise your price over time. I’ve done it twice. That works when you’ve added value and grandfathered people in. “Here’s what we’ve added, and here’s the new price for new members” is a very different conversation from “I can’t afford to keep doing this.” Your members can tell which one they’re hearing.
A low price doesn’t reduce risk. It relocates it. You trade the risk of an empty room for a full room that costs more to serve than it pays you, and that one is much harder to get out of. Price at what the outcome is worth to a committed person from the start. The full case is in how to price a membership community.
Give them tons of value
The instinct, be generous, is right. The version where you keep adding bonuses so nobody can accuse you of not being worth it is not. You exhaust yourself, members get overwhelmed and use less, and you’ve taught everyone that value equals quantity, so you can never stop adding.
I’ve done this one too. I once built an entire resource library almost nobody opened, because I was anxious about whether my membership was enough. It wasn’t a value problem. It was a fear problem, and I tried to solve it by making more stuff instead of getting clear about what I’d promised.
What I’d do instead:
- Deliver one outcome exceptionally well
- Before building anything new, ask whether a member asked for it or you’re just nervous
- If it’s nerves, it doesn’t get built
That one question has saved me an embarrassing number of weekends. Generosity isn’t volume. It’s caring whether it actually worked for them.
Should Your Community Run Itself?
No community runs itself. A healthy one runs on much less of you, which is a worthy goal, but less of you is not none of you.
This advice is dangerous because it makes founders feel like failures for being needed. You look at your community, which clearly needs you, decide you built it wrong, and back away. Then it loses its heartbeat.
The communities people point to as self-sustaining almost always have a founder or a team doing significant invisible work: the connecting, the noticing, the tending. It’s like walking into a restaurant and thinking the place just runs. There are twelve people you can’t see making that happen.
Aim for a community that doesn’t collapse when you step away for a week, not one that needs nothing from you ever. Build so conversations don’t all depend on you, and keep showing up as the host. The job doesn’t disappear. It changes shape.
And honestly, I don’t want the version where I’m not needed. The relationships are the best part of this for me. A community that ran completely without me would be a community I’m not in.
Is Engagement Rate the Health of Your Community?
Not on its own. Engagement rate can’t tell you whether the same six people generate all the activity, or whether anyone is getting the result they joined for.
It also can’t tell you that your quietest member just landed the biggest client of her career off something she read in your community and never commented on. She counts as disengaged. She also renews in a heartbeat and tells her friends.
There are successful communities where members lurk, absorb, apply, and stay for years. There are busy-looking ones with terrible retention, where everyone chats and nobody gets anywhere. You’d take the quiet one every time, yet the noisy one is what everybody optimizes for, because it’s the one you can see.
What I’d watch instead:
- Retention
- Whether new members take an action in their first week
- Whether members talk to each other or only to you
- What people say when they renew
More on each of those in the community metrics that actually matter. This one costs the most because chasing the number changes your behavior. You post more, run a challenge nobody asked for, send the nudge email. Bad metrics don’t just misinform you. They redirect your whole week.
Try This Prompt
Use this to find the advice you’re following on autopilot.
“I run a [type of community] for [who it serves] with about [number] members. Here’s everything I do in a typical week and month: [list your posts, prompts, calls, gamification, spaces, bonuses, and the metrics you check]. Next to each one, I’ve noted whether I’ve seen it work in my own community or started it because someone recommended it: [your notes]. Flag which practices treat my members like an audience to activate rather than people to connect, and which one I could pause for two weeks with the least risk. Give me a short table with three columns: the practice, what it’s likely doing, and keep, test, or pause.”
Break One Rule This Week
Pick one piece of community advice you’ve been following because somebody told you to, not because you’ve watched it work in your own room. Maybe it’s on this list. Maybe it’s something else. Stop doing it for two weeks and see what happens.
My guess is the sky won’t fall, and you’ll get back energy you’ve been spending on something that was never helping.
That includes anything I’ve said here. I’m not handing you a new set of rules to follow blindly, because that’s exactly the problem. Test things against your own room and keep what works there.
The founders I trust most can tell me why they do something, not just that somebody told them to.
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More From Your Community Strategist
Not every episode has a video version, but the channel is where the walkthroughs live: Circle builds, settings, and setups on screen instead of described out loud. New videos every Thursday.
More Like This
Listen: The Community Metrics That Actually Matter. The full set of numbers to watch once you stop treating engagement rate as the scoreboard.
Listen: Your Community Isn’t a Content Machine (Stop Treating It Like One). The five shifts from producing more to hosting better.
Watch: What Your Community Actually Needs on Day One (Hint: Not What You Think). The on-screen case for launching with fewer spaces than feels right.
Listen: Why AI Won’t Fix Your Quiet Community. For when the quiet is tempting you toward the newest tactic instead of the fundamentals.
Keep Going
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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