I recently had a chat with @Jakub Pacanda. Some people love the community industry. Some people care for it. ...and then, there's Jakub. He plugs it into a power socket with 440 volts! I've been in the community industry for 20 years and I can count on one hand the people who match his energy for online communities...and I'd still have fingers left over. It makes me feel the industry is in safe hands. (no, i'm not retiring yet 😅) It started simple. Jakub follows me on LinkedIn - and figured I had something worth seeing and asked for a demo of Jatra - the community platform we make. It was supposed to be a 30 minute demo. But we spoke for 90 minutes. We talked about a lot of things: - about the platforms, what they get right and wrong - where the community industry is heading - the opportunities opening up - buying and selling communities. I didn't know it's a real market! I'm impressed by his commitment to uniting the industry. I want to know from the community: 1. Who's the most energetic person you know in the community industry? 2. What's your take on the future of online communities?

Bevy acquired CMX in 2019. But did it truly acquire its most valuable asset? The CMX Slack community currently has 8,539 members and appears to be using Slack’s free plan. That creates an interesting problem. Slack’s free plan only makes the most recent 90 days of messages searchable. Content older than one year can eventually be permanently deleted. Years of conversations between thousands of community professionals are therefore either inaccessible or at risk of disappearing. To unlock the complete message history, Bevy would need to upgrade the entire CMX workspace to Slack Pro. Slack Pro currently costs $7.25 per active member per month when billed annually, or $8.75 when billed monthly. If all 8,539 members were active, Bevy could theoretically pay: $742,893 per year with annual billing $896,595 per year with monthly billing Bevy would be responsible for that bill because it operates CMX. However, Slack only charges for active members, generally those who have used the workspace within the last 28 days. The actual cost would therefore depend on how many CMX members are still active. Even with only 3,000 active members, preserving the community’s complete history would cost approximately $261,000 per year. But the bigger cost is not the software bill. It is the loss of collective intelligence. The CMX community has spent years producing conversations, answers, introductions, recommendations, lessons, frameworks, and industry knowledge. When that knowledge lives inside a platform with limited history, it cannot compound. Members repeat questions that have already been answered. New members cannot learn from older discussions. Valuable insights disappear from search. The community continues creating knowledge, but the platform prevents it from becoming a permanent asset. This is not necessarily a criticism of Slack. Slack was primarily built for team communication, not for preserving the long term intelligence of a large professional community.

At our second community meeting, we met with @Tomáš Tapšík, @Daniel Udofa, @Jan Jíra and @Marco Sebastian. We went through what had happened in the feed over the past week and took a closer look at several posts and activities, including those by @Rebekah Waller and @Sonia Zvereva. I also shared what I had learned from @Kaustubh Katdare. We discussed in depth why choosing the wrong community platform can ultimately become a very expensive decision, following up on the experience Marco had previously shared in his post about Slack. We also had a deeper discussion about the feelings around hiring that @Deborah Njoku brought up. Daniel then told us more about where and why he had been nominated, how the Stripe community works, and how he is building Builders Collective Africa. We also talked about the launch of our Premium community and showed how, why and for whom we are building Tapdust. Those of you who received a voucher for your contribution already have access as a reward for your contribution. At the same time, we have released the first 50 vouchers for VIP membership at $100/month instead of $2,500. The promo code is available here. Finally, we looked at TrustMRR and the brilliant way they connect startup founders.

I'm Kaustubh, and this is actually my second introduction in this community. Apparently, one introduction wasn't enough. 😄 I've been building online communities for nearly 20 years. Over that time, I've built some very large communities from scratch and used pretty much every popular community platform I could get my hands on. ...and somewhere along the way, I got frustrated. So I made a list of everything that annoyed me about community platforms... and started building my own. That prototype eventually became Jatra Community Platform, which I launched in 2024. Unlike Skool or Circle, Jatra is built specifically for business communities. The idea is simple: a community shouldn't just engage existing customers. It should also help acquire customers! So we've put a lot of work into SEO and AEO, making community content discoverable through Google and AI platforms. Once people arrive, you're not limited to discussion threads (my biggest frustration!). You can run discussions, chats, chat rooms, articles, events, jobs, a shop, feedback, and more inside the same community. No plugins required! You don't have to use everything. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Having different formats gives community builders a lot more ways to create useful reasons for people to come back. Just about two days ago, we launched Jatra AI. It keeps an eye on the community 24/7, helping with the boring monitoring work so community managers can spend more time doing the part AI is still pretty bad at: building actual human relationships. Thanks to @Jakub Pacanda for reminding me about this lovely community. Looking forward to meeting more community people here, exchanging notes, stealing good ideas responsibly, and learning from everyone. 🙂