Gall's Law
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."
John Gall is an author on systems and their construction. Whilst many of his works are somewhat light hearted looks at systems theory, the above quote does I feel hold true for many online communities. Here are a few reasons why it pays to start small with your community.
- You can fail safely – Seth Godin talks to MiX here about the importance of failure. If you fail when things are small you get to learn and make things better. If you fail having built up expectations then you'll probably be for the chop.
- Complexity is kept low – When you start small you're making it much simpler for users to get involved because there isn't too much for them to process.
- You're not spreading your resources – Most communities require staff to seed things. Sure eventually you want the community to build most of the content, but to begin with you'll have to do a lot of legwork yourself. If you make things overly complex you'll be spreading yourself too thinly.
- You don't let the tumbleweed settle – If you have spread yourself too thinly your communities look very inactive. People love social proof, so if your communities are empty there's not much incentive for them to stick around. Much better to focus your content in a small community to begin with.
- You can target your early adopters – If you have a relatively small focus you can devote real attention to attracting early adopters to your community.
- You have success stories to tell – If you do the above you'll hopefully have some real success stories to tell internally, which should in turn make it easier to expand things and secure more resources.
Must say I'd never heard of that law before, but starting small with your community is without doubt the way to go. Get some early wins in first and then look to grow.
I'm not really a fan of Seth Godin but think he's pretty much on the money with that MiX video. Failing is great but you don't want to fail so big you can't recover from it.
This probably applies for most things in life though, certainly in your business life. Start small, achieve the win and then you can get the resources to help it grow.
I think this applies in all manner of ways. Think of society as a complex system. If you have a state trying to do it all you're trying to build a complex system from scratch. If you have a market trying to do it, you have lots of smaller 'experiments' that test the market, and the one that works best is then scaled up through popular demand.