It’s Not The Features…It’s The Environment!

I think a lot of people don’t understand that when it comes to building an amazing online community, it is less about the features, and more about the environment that you create.

Many have a hard time grasping this concept because a community’s environment is an intangible item. You can’t explain it in numbers, or paragraphs of text. Its just there. And if you partake in the community, you know when a kick ass environment exists, and when it doesn’t.

Do features, design and UI help create the environment? Absolutely. But the community’s environment make features valuable, the features don’t make the community valuable.

This is evident in many of the online communities that I use as regular examples in my posts. For example, Sermo is nothing more than a forum. But they have created a high quality environment for doctors to interact. Such a high quality that they are able to charge hedge funds and big pharma companies $150,000 for access to the content that is being created by the community.

There is no formula to building a great environment, and therefore a community. Much of it is like entrepreneurship. It takes persistence, dedication, creativity, and a healthy dose of luck.

Luck is a key part, because you never know what member or action might be the tipping point. But as Bo Peabody (founder of Tripod) explains in his book “Lucky or Smart”, while you can’t force luck, there are a number of things that you can do to increase your chances of being lucky.

So what does this mean in the world of the Facebook Platform and Ning? It means that nothing, especially those two items, are the be all, end all of online communities. Facebook has a pre-existing, established environment and Ning is for the most part an environment out of the box.

For another take on this subject, see Venrock’s VC David Beisel’s latest post.