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Of course, what we're talking about here is
engagement
, but that word is often misconstrued. “Look,” explains Gina Bianchini, “engagement isn't a like on Facebook. A like is just one-way communication. It doesn't go anywhere. You have to think about what a community actually is—it's people talking to one another. Engagement is always about getting that conversation going and keeping it going.”
¹⁵

Local Motors does just that by providing a meaningful outlet for the underserved pent-up creativity of car enthusiasts at every step in their process. They're not just letting their members peek behind the curtain of automotive design—they're helping them become the wizard. As a result, because they are turning loose so much fundamental passion, they didn't even need a huge community to become, as Chris Anderson wrote in
Wired
, “the future of American manufacturing.”
¹⁶

And he wasn't kidding. Back in 2013, Rogers and GE CEO Jeff Immelt teamed up to cocreate a Local Motors–style microfactory that specializes in speeding the time from mind to market for GE appliances. That factory opened in 2014. At the time of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, it already had two GE appliances in production. On the heels of that success, Local Motors is building an additional fifty microfactories to drive innovation in other industries.
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There is the mistaken impression that to really tackle a bold challenge via a DIY community, the community needs to be huge in order to match the scale of the task. Not true. While today's Local Motors community is over 130,000 active members strong—with another 1,000,000 or so lurkers (those who watch but have not yet participated)—the collective that built that first Rally Fighter was a meager 500 people by comparison. The point is this: If your community can provide a legitimate release valve for people's incredibly frustrated passion, you are unleashing one of the most potent forces in the history of the world.

It started in the late 1990s. Jack Hughes was running a software development company in Connecticut. During those quiet periods between projects, Hughes kept his employees busy by holding in-house programming competitions. A few years later, after Hughes sold that company and was looking around for what to do next, he realized those competitions were something to build upon.

“I was sitting with my brother at a picnic table,” he explains, “discussing that fundamental business problem: How do you find really qualified people? A great developer, a great creative person, is a very difficult thing to find. But I already knew—because we had run those internal programming competitions—that developers loved to compete and that those competitions were a good way to identify top talent. Since so much of development work had become web work, I
started wondering what would happen if we put those competitions online.”
¹⁸

In 2002, Hughes stopped wondering. He and his brother set up the website TopCoder and began holding contests. “Initially we put some money up as prizes, just to keep things interesting, but mostly the contests were for pride.”

Pride, as it turns out, was the secret sauce.

Hughes was a longtime sports fan. He loved the bracket-based tournament structure used by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) during March Madness. He also loved how baseball analysts had begun to depend on a far wider assortment of statistics than just home runs and RBIs. So Hughes created a leaderboard for TopCoder that works much the same as a NCAA tournament bracket. He also started posting electronic “baseball cards” for each programmer, the box scores displaying everything from statistics on how many competitions a given coder has entered to their highest and lowest scores in those competitions.
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This rating system was designed so coders could look at the names and ratings of the other contestants entered in a contest and decide if they had a shot at winning and if the contest was worth entering. But it quickly became a point of pride.

“Really,” explains Hughes, “we turned coding into a massive multiplayer game. We would post a problem statement, and as soon as a coder opened it, a clock would start ticking down. People got points for how quickly they submitted a solution and how accurate their code was. But how high your rating was, that was a badge of honor. People weren't competing for the money, they wanted the rating.”

But the money didn't hurt, so rather than just making up competitions for his community to solve, Hughes solicited outside business. By atomizing big projects into bits, then organizing competitions around each bit, specialists within the TopCoder community deliver solutions one puzzle piece at a time. Some people are great at spotting bugs in code, while some are great at fixing bugs—that sort of thing. After these individual contests have been won, the whole project
is reassembled and delivered to the client. It's a great crowdsourcing model.

And it's had enormous impact. In the beginning, a TopCoder community of roughly 25,000 was solving serious problems for the likes of GEICO and Best Buy, but it didn't take long for those numbers to grow and for that community to become involved in efforts significantly farther afield. For example, when Dr. Ramy Arnaout of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was trying to sift through a huge pile of genetic information about the immune system, he decided that rather than just consult with fellow scientists, he might want to give TopCoder a shot.

“The result,” wrote Carolyn Johnson of the
Boston Globe
, “a deeply biological problem—analyzing the genes that produce proteins involved in the immune system's ability to identify microbes—could be rapidly and efficiently answered by a community of more than 400,000 computer programmers.”
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What's more amazing is how little time and money it actually took for the community to do this work. A two-week contest brought in over a hundred entries from coders in nearly seventy countries. Sixteen of those entries outperformed the algorithm then used by the National Institutes of Health. And—for those interested in using TopCoder to crowdsource programming needs (rather than as a guide to building a DIY community)—the whole contest cost just $6,000.

But if you are interested in looking at TopCoder for exponential community building purposes, the most important thing to remember is that it's not just competition that drove their growth. “Competition just happened to be the thing that first engaged our community,” says Hughes. “Many other aspects of TopCoder are about collaboration. People get involved not because of the money or the sponsors or the fact that they can get jobs as a result. They get involved because it's social. We've given our community a place to get together because they want to get together—that's why it works.”

In late 2013, Appirio, the cloud services consultancy, purchased
TopCoder and the community was put under the leadership of Appirio cofounder Narinder Singh. “We saw the amazing successes possible through TopCoder,” explains Singh, “but we also noted that it was being used by a relatively small number of customers, under limited circumstances. The more innovation a company wants, the greater the access to powerful technology they will need. Our goal in acquiring TopCoder is to make it mainstream technology for small, medium, and large organizations, to give them that ‘show me' moment they need to make the exponential capabilities like TopCoder a core part of their technology arsenal.”
²¹

Recall the Law of Niches. The ego-belittling truth the Internet makes visible is that none of us is as unique as we'd like to believe. And this is good news. It means that if you are passionate about something, there's a pretty good chance others share that passion. So the best reason to start a DIY community is unrequited love.

Look, if you can leverage an existing community to fulfill your dreams, go that route. But if you're passionate about something and no one else is sating that desire, then you have first-mover advantage. Don't underestimate this power. When Galaxy Zoo first started, they were pretty sure only a handful of people would sign up to catalogue galaxies—yet within a very short time, tens of thousands of people were involved. Why? There was a deep, unmet need in people to participate in astronomy, and Galaxy Zoo was the only game in town.

We saw something similar with Asteroid Zoo—the Zooniverse-hosted collaboration between my company, Planetary Resources, and NASA to use humans to identify new, never-before-detected asteroids, which, in turn, will create a rigorous dataset from which we can train up AIs to do the same at scale. This is such a specific desire that we were not certain how people would react, but just as with Galaxy Zoo, the crowd wildly exceeded our expectations. In the first six days of the
project, we saw more than one million images reviewed and more than 400,000 asteroids classified.

There's a corollary here: If you don't have first-mover advantage, then ask yourself what new and exciting twist you are bringing to the table. Think about CrossFit. The health and fitness space was exceptionally crowded when this workout craze was introduced, but CrossFit leveraged two facts: People work harder when they're in a group of peers, and outside of yoga, there were no fitness classes aimed directly at men. So while CrossFit lacked a first-mover advantage, their distinguishing elements were new (no other game in town) and exciting (you get a better workout), and that was more than enough to build upon.

It's also important to remember that people join communities because it reinforces their sense of identity (see below), but they stay for the conversation. This is also why the very best communities actually force their members to interact with one another—they actually drive that conversation. And if you're the person organizing a new community,
²²
then driving a high level of interactivity must be your primary responsibility. Every community manager is first and foremost a conversational caretaker. When Chris Anderson initially created DIY Drones, he spent an average of three to four hours each day curating his community. Simply put, if you're not an especially social person or are too busy to put in that kind of time, community building is probably not for you.

A great many people try to build communities for the wrong reasons, which is no different from building a house on a rotten foundation. Do the latter, and no matter how fancy your door knockers are, the structure will eventually collapse. The same holds true for communities. So before we even get into why you should take the time to build an online community, let's start with the three main reasons why you
should
not
build a community.

1. 
Greed.
Online communities are about achieving an MTP, not the cash. This is not to say you can't monetize these communities, but this won't happen right away. Communities are about authenticity and transparency, and you need to prove that you're the real deal before you begin asking for real dollars.

2. 
Fame.
Reputation economics tells us that one of the main reasons people join online communities is because they want recognition. And the purpose of your community is to give it to them, not to you.

3. 
Short-term desires.
For starters, getting a vibrant DIY community up and running isn't going to happen overnight. Moreover, people are attracted to big visions. When Planetary Resources attracted our Vanguards (essentially the foundation of our community), it wasn't because they were excited to help us build a new telescope. They were excited about opening the space frontier.

If you've decided you want to start a community, there are nine key stages you will need to pass through along the way.

1. Identity—What Is Your MTP?

2. Designing Your Community Portal

3. Community-Building Resources

4. Early Days of Building Your Community

5. Creating Community Content

6. Engagement and Engagement Strategies

7. Managing Your Community

8. Driving Growth

9. Monetization

People join DIY communities because it reinforces their sense of identity. So start by finding your people. Who is your tribe? What is your MTP? “Passion is the differentiator,” says Jay Rogers from Local Motors. “So throw up a flag and be very clear what you stand for.” Be as specific as possible. Write up a mission statement, post it in a visible place on your website, then cling to that statement. Put differently, the Law of Niches works only if you very clearly identify and authentically support that niche.

This is also why it's important to tell your story. A mission statement is nice, but unless you're already a public figure, then people need to know who you are and why you're doing what you're doing. This could be in written form, but better yet, turn on your cell phone camera and record a video. Don't forget to let your passion shine thru.

There are six basics regarding designing the look, feel, and engagement of your community portal:

1. 
Just get started—design something authentic.
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously said, “If an entrepreneur isn't embarrassed by the first release of their product offering, then they launched it too late.” The same applies to communities. You want to start by starting. Don't spend years designing the right portal, and don't blow your bank either. Authenticity matters. And having a personality is key (so people can quickly figure out if they belong in your tribe), but giving people a place to have a conversation is more important. You can always add better window treatments later.