First is the experience trap. People can’t get experience building communities without giving the chance to build them. Many get lucky and make it work on their first time. Some fail at their first 5 attempts and succeed on the sixth. Whose advice would you trust more? Building online communities is not a profession where you need experience to be able to do it successfully. Experience helps, but it’s not the essential ingredient.

Second is that often the people who have created a successful community struggle to do it for others. Building one community is excellent, building 2, 3 or 5 gets tricky. Extrapolating the key elements that can be applied elsewhere is the really, really, hard part. Refining a model is what makes a community builder a serial community builder.