The Community Concept
(Illustration by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)
Every week features new newsletters from Nathan Graber-Lipperman examining media, business, and pop culture through a Gen Z lens, as well as telling stories from his personal entrepreneurial journey. To read his last newsletter, click here.
“What makes humans different from other animals? We’re the only species on earth that observes Shark Week. Sharks don’t even observe Shark Week, but we do.”
If you’ve watched Community — my favorite show of all time — you probably remember this dialogue from the pilot. After the study group meets for the first time, the group devolves into in-fighting…until Jeff Winger gives one of his classic inspirational speeches, that is.
During the speech, Jeff snaps a pencil for effect and lobs criticisms at Ben Affleck (to much agreement among the group). But what stands out the most is how he brings it all together:
“You’ve just stopped being a study group. I hereby pronounce you…a community.”
It’s a fitting way to tie in the show’s title. What I always picked up on, though, was those eclectic, lovable misfits banding together over something they shared: Spanish homework.
Thing is, Community was never the most mainstream show. It had its cult following, sure, but it went through years of production hell and cancellations due to subpar ratings. Therefore, liking the series almost felt…counterculture.
A dirty word for some, I know. Between my phone (a Google Pixel 2), my writing style (long), the sport I play (ultimate), and some of my sneakers (yes, New Balances can be hype), I’ve always been labeled by friends as anti-mainstream.
And that was always okay with me because, well, I enjoyed chasing those things. I never did anything out of spite for what was popular; in turn, I would never do anything because it was popular. I just always liked doing my thing and sticking to it.
Therefore, when it comes to Unplugg’d, something I’ve thought about a lot is whether I’m the right person for the job. I can talk about building out a “community” all I want, but I’ve always seemed to gravitate towards things that were unique, different than the things my peers were interested in.
Nevertheless, people have been flocking to online communities for quite some time now. Reddit, GroupMe, Facebook Groups, and — more recently — Discord wouldn’t exist otherwise!
A text from Bobby Hundreds’ Community account.
Also, there certainly are a lot of business models that have popped up around this concept. You can now interact with your local community in new ways, turning an empty room into profitable storage space (Neighbor) or even selling your unused driveway to someone looking for a parking space (Pavemint).
There’s even a new platform literally called Community that allows people with built-out audiences to engage their fans through text messages, a newsletter of sorts sent through a more casual medium than email. Though it has yet to still launch to the public, the startup has raised capital at a valuation of over $200 million, and they’ve rolled out the platform with figures such as Ashton Kutcher and Bobby Hundreds.
A friend of mine, Mateo Price, has been working on a growth consultancy called Authentic Media Ascension. Their value proposition is simple: we help you build your following through analytics and strategy while letting you stay true to yourself and your brand.
Recently, he sent me a string of excited text messages. As they’ve brought in more and more revenue and scaled their business, Mateo’s been pondering AMA’s purpose, their why. He’s always stressed the importance of creators carving out their coteries, but he came to a realization: the concept of community has always been prevalent in his life. Whether it was playing video games like Runescape with friends or seeing someone tweet out their 2Hype (one of their clients) tattoo and saying that it helped them when they were in a terrible state, hard work felt validated when it impacted other people.
In reading his texts, I came to that same realization…because a passion for building communities has been a constant in my life.
Sure, maybe the mainstream hasn’t always shared my love for certain things. But when I saw something I really cared about, I went and started a community encircling it. In doing so, not only would I create value for myself (in that I now got to participate and talk about that thing I loved), I also created value for other people, too.
My dad always comments on this. He’ll point to the fantasy football drafts I would turn into day-long events as commissioner and commit to offline, poster-board drafting. The sneakers I would purchase and resell to customers I met through Facebook groups and eBay, as well as the old ‘heads I would chat with on forums like NikeTalk. He’ll bring up the ultimate frisbee tournaments I would organize just because I wanted to play more than just the school-run one (even after my freshman year of college, a kid in the grade below me at my high school actually contacted me to ask if I could run it again because so many people were clamoring for it, and I happily obliged).
But nowhere do I think it stood out more than the Hall High School Bowling Club. For whatever reason, my older brother and his friends started the bowling club when I was a skinny, impressionable sophomore. Though the student group always existed in an unofficial capacity (it did once appear on the Hall High Wikipedia page, which stands for something, right?), I decided to start expanding it because I really just liked to bowl.
At that time, I was engulfed in homework, playing three sports, and in the thick of most of the teenage pressures that come with high school. Yet I didn’t really care. There was something about getting a squad together and hanging out at the alley; when you were to get a group together and do that, time seemed to slow down, and everything seemed so…simple.
Besides, I’ve always been someone who embraced competition, but I was never a fan of the cutthroat nature of most other activities I engaged in. With bowling, we would form teams and I could run tournaments and leagues that filled that yearning for healthy competition, the kind where you could sit back and banter while also gunning for the dub. Therefore, in building out this community, we saw more than 100 different individuals come to our events over time.
You better believe I screen-printed those tees, too!
What started as something I did for me — finding other bodies to help fill that void of healthy competition — became something that other people really, really enjoyed. Even as my commitment to bowling waned, some of my friends dove into it even more. All of a sudden, if you weren’t getting a 200, it was seen as a bad game.
One of my friends, Peter (pictured in the middle), has actually continued his bowling career three years later. The last time I talked to him towards the end of Summer 2019, he was fresh off his first 900 series — three perfect games (which consists of 36 straight strikes) in a row — and clocked in as one of the best bowlers in the state. He said his hope is to be on the PBA Tour within the next 2–3 years, though he has to do some work in upping his average of 235 or so.
When I was with him, I asked Peter a question. Not to take credit for your accomplishments by any means, because you’ve obviously gotten to this point through hard work of your own. But if it weren’t for my original passion for bowling and how much I pushed for the club to keep growing, do you think you would be at this position where it’s become such a big part of your life?
He responded, “No way.”
As I wrote about in my “Some Personal News” story, a big refocus for me was mapping out what my pyramid of success looks like. At the top of the pyramid was my most important block, the thing driving all of my decision-making; I determined this to be the pursuit of my own personal happiness.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot more recently because of a life design exercise I’ve been going through, the same one that sparked the initial conversation between Mateo and I. Success — as I determined it — was growing a company, yes, and designing products that customers want to purchase.
And yet, if I can find just one person who engages with my writing, joins our Discord channel, and derives value from something I’ve created, I feel this awesome sense of joy. I feel like there’s a real sense of meaning to what I’m working on. I feel like I’m succeeding.
That’s why the amount of engagement from the Unplugg’d Community has been so exciting and encouraging for me these last couple of weeks. People seem to really like it!
Sure, it’s been a small sample size in the Discord — truthfully, a core group of 3–5 people really conversing — but the implicit understanding is that everyone is there to discuss in good faith, be vulnerable with each other, and articulate their thoughts with context and depth. Also, a big part of my hypothesis is that we can talk about more serious topics (such as the BLM movement and COVID-19) while also leaving room for the more fun aspects of a community (see: our channel dedicated to out-of-context rap lyrics). This has played out in real time, as we’ve talked about the J. Cole-Noname controversy as well as Twitter’s addition of audio.
I’m not sure if all of these assumptions will have legs in the long run, though in the meantime, I’d like to believe that our users have enjoyed this space as much as I have, a space where they’re hopefully more and more comfortable to share their stories and engage discourse around life and culture. I felt like our conversation around Moonlight really proved we can build something special; towards the end, one participant even wrote, “This is awesome to read. Thank you all for sharing. I really appreciate getting to read all your experiences.”
A comment from our Discord channel. Contact us to learn more about how to join!
I bring this all up not to plug our Discord channel, or tell you to buy a shirt from me. No, I wrote this whole piece to better show how communities are endlessly providing value for me, both for the ones I’ve built and the ones I’ve joined.
Yes, if the Facebooks and Reddits of the world have shown us anything, there is a monetary incentive for bringing groups of people together. Yet in the end, I wholeheartedly believe the notion that the best products are the ones that improve our lives, not the ones that profit off of our attention, anger, and time. Why I’ve decided to really focus on building out our community is because I believe that the value proposition is strong and necessary, and when I wake up in the morning, the thought of continuing to strengthen this group of people gives me a real sense of purpose.
Even if it turns out to be a group of eclectic, lovable misfits.
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