596: Why Building a Community Might Be the Most Important Thing You Do This Year

Podcast: Download (Duration: 46:27 — 53.4MB)

Building an online community in 2025 is now one of the highest-leverage moves an online business can make because email deliverability is shrinking, SMS reach is worse, and social feeds keep suppressing organic posts. The right platform for most creators is one of four: Discord (best for tech-comfortable owners who want extensibility for free), Circle ($100+/month, best for polished paid communities), School (Circle competitor with strong locked-content previews), or Facebook Groups (free, high reach on paper, dying in practice). I just launched a Discord community for my course, and my co-host Toni Herrbach is launching a paid Circle community for female founders at $9/month.

We walked through the whole build on this episode. Which platform to pick and why, what to charge (free vs $1 vs $9 vs $200/month), how to moderate spam without living inside the app, how to onboard new members without spooking existing ones, and the specific mistakes both of us have already made in the first week. Toni and I have been in and around paid communities for a decade (Andrew Youderian’s ECF, Ezra/Molly’s ad group, Tiffany Ivanovsky’s 70K-member fashion community, and Jen Garza’s 100K keto community), so this is not theoretical.

Below is the practical breakdown: platform-by-platform pros and cons, the pricing psychology, the moderation stack, and the sequence to launch a community without setting yourself on fire.

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Key takeaways

• Community is now more important than email and SMS because deliverability and algorithmic reach keep degrading. A community is the only owned channel where people actually show up.
• Discord is the best free platform for tech-comfortable owners. Its API and bots let you automate moderation, sentiment analysis, and payment webhooks. Downside: dark UI, learning curve, chat-only threading.
• Circle ($99+/month) is the best paid platform for polished, non-technical communities. Locked-content previews, gamification, and video are built in. Downside: best features (like a YouTube profile field) live on the $200+/month tier.
• Facebook Groups are functionally dead for engagement. Reach was nerfed years ago to sell ads, search is broken, and groups get banned with no recourse. The one free advantage is that everyone already has Facebook.
• Charging $1 to $9/month dramatically reduces spam and low-effort members. It is the single strongest anti-spam mechanism outside of technical moderation.
• Paid course members must have a separate space from free-tier members. Mixing them makes advanced members feel their expertise is being wasted on basics.
• Moderation cost is the number one thing new community builders underestimate. Plan for daily attention from you, a raised-up member moderator, or an overseas VA before you scale past 100 members.

Why is building a community important in 2025?

Building a community is important in 2025 because email open rates and SMS delivery are both trending down, and every social platform now suppresses posts to sell ads. A community is the only channel where members opt in to check the app and see what you posted. That is the whole reason to build one.

The math is stark. Meta’s group reach was cut years ago in favor of ads. Email deliverability now fluctuates weekly with Gmail and Yahoo policy changes. SMS response rates have dropped as consumers get spammed by campaigns.

A community sidesteps all of that. Members log in because they want the information, not because the algorithm decided to show it to them.

Discord vs Circle vs School vs Facebook Groups: which platform should I use?

The right community platform depends on your budget, technical comfort, and audience. Discord is free and infinitely extensible if you can code (or use ChatGPT to code). Circle and School are paid but polished, best for non-technical owners with a paid community. Facebook Groups are free but functionally broken.

Here is the head-to-head comparison.

Why I picked Discord for my course community

I picked Discord for my course community because of extensibility and price. The Discord API is deep, the bot ecosystem is mature, and I can write custom moderation code that pipes messages into an OpenAI sentiment analysis and auto-suspends bad actors. No other free platform gives you that level of control.

The secondary reason is that Discord is mainstream enough that two thirds of my office-hours attendees already had the app installed on their phones. That is the friction test: if members already have the platform, adoption goes up.

The tradeoffs are real. The UI is dark by default (an eye-strain issue for some readers), Discord uses a chat model rather than forum threads, and there is a learning curve for members who have never used it. Two out of the first 45 members hit a signup issue in the first week (one was email deliverability on their end, one we never solved).

Why Facebook Groups are functionally dead for engagement

Facebook Groups are functionally dead for engagement because Facebook cut group post reach years ago to force pages to buy ads. Posts no longer show up reliably in members’ feeds. Search inside a group is bad enough that you cannot reliably find a thread you were tagged in three days ago.

The reach kill is what actually broke groups. My old My Wife Quit Her Job Facebook group hit 15,000 members and effectively died the moment Meta throttled feed distribution. Members were still there, but nobody saw the posts.

The other hidden cost is platform risk. Groups get banned without warning and without recourse. If your community is your business, you cannot afford that risk on a platform you do not own.

Should a new community be free or paid?

A new community should almost always charge at least $1 to $9 per month because the payment barrier is the single strongest spam filter you have. Free communities attract every self-promoter with an offer. Even $5 per month clears out 90% of that.

The exception is when the community is already bundled inside a paid course or product. In that case, the community is a retention and success benefit, and free access makes sense (that is how my Discord launched: free for existing course members only).

The other reason to charge is skin in the game. Members who pay are more likely to follow the community rules because they do not want to lose access. A $9/month member behaves better than a free member. A $99/month member behaves better than a $9 one.

How much should I charge for a community?

Pricing depends on the value the community delivers. Toni’s female-founder community launched at $9/month, which is deliberately low as a vetting tool ($9 clears out most spammers without gatekeeping serious members). Andrew Youderian’s ECF is a couple hundred dollars per month and delivers deep operator-level access.

The pricing ladder to keep in mind: $9/month (low-friction entry, high volume, still filters out spam), $27-$47/month (mid-tier, most established paid communities), $200+/month (Ezra Firestone’s Molly Pittman ad group used this tier, expert-led with strong access expectations).

The pricing anti-pattern to avoid is promising a specific expert will be present and then having someone else run the community. That is where paid communities lose their reputation. Always sell the community as a group experience, not as one person’s regular attendance.

How to structure a community from day one

Structure a community with paid members separated from free members from day one. Every mature community owner I know has hit the problem of new-member basic questions annoying long-time paid members whose expertise deserves higher-level conversation.

The three-tier model that works:

• Free/low-cost tier: Open discussion, general questions, entry-level content. Acts as a filter and a lead source.
• Paid member tier: Locked space for course/product buyers. Higher-level questions, direct owner access on a schedule, hot-seat sessions.
• High-tier mastermind: Weekly or monthly live calls, direct 1:1 or small-group time with the owner, expensive.

Give each tier its own channel or space so conversations do not bleed. Circle and School handle this natively. On Discord, use permission roles to lock channels to specific member roles.

How do I moderate a community without losing my life?

Moderating a community at scale requires a stack of three things: automated tooling, raised-up member moderators, and (past a few hundred members) a paid VA. Doing it all yourself is the number one reason community builders burn out and let quality collapse.

Automated moderation with AI and bots

On Discord, pipe messages into an OpenAI API call for sentiment and intent analysis. Auto-flag posts with promotional intent, offensive content, or spam patterns. Auto-suspend repeat offenders. The Discord API and bot ecosystem make this straightforward if you can code or work with someone who can.

On Circle and School, use built-in moderation queues plus native content-filter rules. The tradeoff is less customization.

Raise up community members as moderators

In any community with weekly office hours or hot seats, five to ten members will emerge who love the space and would happily moderate for free or in exchange for perks. Ask them. Give them a mod role, clear rules, and a private channel to check in with you.

I know exactly which of my course members I would ask when I open the Discord more broadly. Long-time active members are always the best mods because they know the culture.

Hire an overseas VA for daily monitoring

Once a community grows past 100-200 members, one person needs to check it every few hours during business hours. That is not the founder’s job. An overseas VA at $5-$15/hour can handle content moderation for a few hundred dollars a month.

Discord vs Circle: which one is really easier to run?

Circle is easier to run if you are non-technical because payment processing, member management, moderation queues, and locked-content previews are all built in. Discord is easier to run if you can code because you can automate more, integrate deeper, and never hit a feature paywall.

Neither platform is intuitive from day one. Discord has a real learning curve (bots, roles, channels, permissions). Circle’s UI is smoother but the best features live on higher pricing tiers ($200+ for basic things like a YouTube profile field, which is nuts).

The honest test: are you willing to spend a week learning the platform’s quirks and building automations? If yes, Discord wins on cost and flexibility. If no, Circle wins on time-to-launch.

How do I keep the community active every day?

Active communities require daily seeding for the first three to six months. That means the owner (or a dedicated community manager) starts a conversation, asks a question, shares a link, or replies to threads every single day. Communities are like fires. They go out fast when nobody adds fuel.

The playbook that works: post one topical prompt per day (news, question, hot take), reply to every question within 24 hours, and run a weekly live session (office hours, hot seat, or Q&A) that anchors the week. Andrew Youderian ran daily posts in the early days of ECF and still shows up regularly years later.

For business communities specifically, tie prompts to current events (tariffs, platform changes, algorithm updates) because members already care and will engage without prompting.

What kills a community?

Communities die from four things: spam saturation, over-reliance on the founder, feature bloat, and mixing incompatible member tiers. Every one of those is preventable with basic hygiene.

Spam saturation happens when moderation is under-resourced. Fix: charge $5+/month or invest in AI moderation from day one.

Founder over-reliance shows up when the pitch is “the founder will answer your questions” and then the founder is not there. Fix: always sell the community as a group experience.

Feature bloat happens when the owner adds every requested channel until the space becomes noise. Fix: consolidate ruthlessly. Fewer channels, higher signal.

Mixing tiers happens when free members drown out paid ones. Fix: separate spaces from day one.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best platform for building a community in 2025?

The best platform for building a community in 2025 depends on your technical comfort. Discord is best for owners who want free hosting plus deep extensibility via bots and API. Circle is best for non-technical owners running a polished paid community. School is a strong Circle alternative with better locked-content previews. Facebook Groups are the wrong answer in almost every case because reach was killed years ago.

How much should I charge for a paid community?

A new paid community should typically launch at $9-$47/month for a broad-audience group, $99-$297/month for a niche professional community, and $200+/month for an expert-led mastermind. Any monthly payment above $1 dramatically cuts spam and low-effort members, and $9/month is the widely used low-friction entry point.

Do I need Discord instead of Circle or School to build a community?

You do not need Discord unless you want the extensibility of custom bots and automations. Circle and School handle the entire community stack (payments, member management, moderation, content) for a monthly fee, which is worth it for non-technical owners. Discord is free and infinitely flexible, but the learning curve and moderation build are real work.

Are Facebook Groups still worth using for a community?

Facebook Groups are rarely worth using for a serious community in 2025 because Meta throttled group reach years ago to sell ads, search is broken, and groups get banned without recourse. The one narrow case is a large existing audience that already lives on Facebook and will not migrate anywhere else. Even then, treat the group as one channel among several, not your primary community.

How do I stop spam in a community?

Stop community spam with three stacked defenses: charge at least $5-$9/month to filter out low-effort members, use automated moderation (Discord bots plus an OpenAI sentiment call, or Circle/School built-in filters), and have a human moderator (you, a raised-up member, or an overseas VA) checking the space several times a day.

How much time does running a community take?

Running a community takes at least 30-60 minutes a day in the first six months if you are the primary owner. That includes daily prompt posts, reply-to-questions rounds, and moderation queue review. Expect one full day per week for weekly live sessions and community strategy.

Can I use ChatGPT to moderate a community?

You can use ChatGPT (via the OpenAI API) to automate the sentiment analysis and content classification part of community moderation, which handles roughly 80% of the routine work. Discord bots can pipe messages into the API, flag promotional or offensive content, and auto-suspend repeat offenders. Human review still matters for edge cases, disputes, and cultural judgment.

Should I open my community to non-paying members?

Opening a community to non-paying members works if you separate the spaces so paying members never have to answer basic questions from beginners. The free tier is best used as a lead-generation funnel with limited access, while the paid tier gives full access, direct owner time, and higher-level conversations. Never mix them in the same channel.

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