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Issue #13
When I decided I wanted to freelance, I did what everyone does. I Googled it.
I found a blog that looked like it might teach me some things. Then I found her on YouTube, watched a few videos, and liked her enough to hand over my email for the free slice of her course. The free part was good. Good enough that the paid course felt like an easy yes. Under $200, I had it, I went for it.
But honestly? The biggest selling point wasn't the curriculum.
It was the Facebook group.
Even brand new, knowing almost nothing, I knew I needed people. Other freelancers. A room where someone two steps ahead of me could tell me what I didn't know to ask. She had that, she said.
A community came with the course. And that, more than the modules, is what got my money.
What I Actually Bought
The course was full of links that went nowhere. Half of it was elementary, stuff I was already doing before I paid to be taught it. Disappointing, but survivable. I get it, courses can go stale. Fine. But I did get my $200 back on that 30-day guarantee😜
The group was the part that stung.
She was never in it. I posted questions more than once and watched them sink, unanswered, past nobody. Out of a thousand-some members, maybe two or three posted in a given week. It wasn't a community. It was a list of people who had all bought the same thing and then never posted.
I ended up making a few friends by offering my LinkedIn unashamedly and unapologetically in a farewell-to-this-group kind of post. I went looking for community and left having to build my own, one connection at a time.
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Community Used To Be Something You Stumble Onto
A bowling league. A church basement. The other parents at the bus stop. You didn't apply. Nobody onboarded you. It formed because people were already near each other and kept showing up.
Then everything moved indoors. Forums, Facebook groups, Discords, paid memberships, "spaces." Somewhere in that move, a word that described something that happened to you (community) got picked up by marketing and turned into something that could be built, named, and sold back.
Patreon was one of the first to turn community into a product you subscribe to, fans paying a monthly fee not just for a creator's work, but for access, for proximity, for the feeling of being on the inside.
It's strategy. 90% of social media marketers say building an active community is crucial to what they do. Not nice to have. Crucial. When nine out of ten people whose job it is to sell you things agree a single word is at the core of their marketing strategy, you're not looking at an accident. You're looking at a decision, and an easy one, human by nature, the decision to belong.
And It Just Makes Sense. The Decision To Belong Works.
Belonging is the one thing advertising could never manufacture directly. You can promise whiter teeth. You can't promise the feeling of having a community or the people in it. So the next best thing is to gather those people in a room and put your logo on the door.
The payoff is enormous, because a real community does the brand's work for free. Community-led onboarding cuts churn by 29%. About a third of companies now lean on their communities to handle first-line customer support. Read that twice.
The members answer each other's questions. The members welcome the new people. The members defend the brand in the comments when someone shows up swinging. Just like any Brand Evangelist would do.
That's not a scam. That's the trade, and here's the part I actually believe: when the belonging is real, it's a fair one. I've happily answered a stranger's question in a group I love and never once felt used. I felt like a member. The value moved both ways.
It only curdles when the belonging is fake, and the labor is still expected.
Which is exactly what I'd walked into.
62% of people who join a brand community say they're there to belong, not to buy. Those people show up with the real thing, the genuine want. The only question is whether the brand shows up too, or whether they built the room, named it, charged for it, and then left.
My freelance group was the empty version. The architecture of a community with none of the wiring to light the place up. A door, a price tag, a thousand names, and not one of us becoming anything to each other. I was doing the work of being a member. I paid, was posting, hoping, and getting silence in return.
You can feel the difference almost immediately once you know to check. A real community keeps going when the brand stops posting. A manufactured one goes quiet the second nobody's running it. One is a neighborhood. The other is a stage set of a neighborhood, and you're the only one who showed up in costume.
So No, "Community" Is Not A Dirty Word.
It's a real thing marketing learned to imitate, and the imitation got good enough to charge for.
The trade is fair when the belonging is real. You give a brand your loyalty and your free enthusiasm, and you get actual people back. It's only a swindle when they keep the word and skip the people. When "community" is just the prettier word for "customers we'd like to keep."
So next time a brand invites you into its community, the question isn't whether the word is being used on you. It always is.
The question is the one I should've asked before I paid:
Is anyone actually in here? Or just me and the marketing?
Until Next Wednesday,
~Aliya