Build With Becky: Smart Strategies To Grow Your Community-Driven Business
Sep 17, 2026 · 7 min · 8 segments
If I wanted to validate a new community idea, I wouldn't start with a membership. I'd start with a challenge, a sprint, or a beta cohort. In this episode, I'm breaking down why a time-bound experience…
If I wanted to validate a new community idea, I actually wouldn't start with a membership.
I'd start with something like a challenge, a sprint, a beta cohort, like a small four, six, eight week type thing.
You're like making a promise with your people that this thing is going to exist, that we're going to keep going.
And what you're looking for, what you're actually looking for is validation to understand people's behavior.
Do they actually want to come together on this topic, purpose, goal, transformation, community, whatever it is that you're like helping bring people together to do? Do they actually want to come together to do this? And are they going to show up? Are they going to engage? Do they get results? Um, are they actually connecting with one another? Are they talking to each other? And so you want to validate this in like a smaller sort of contained model that you can test for a period of time and then end it and then analyze the results and decide like, okay, does it make sense? To keep going, do we wanna shift this? We did this recently with a client.
So she's interested in a membership, but she had designed sort of like a program type experience.
So right now, currently she's halfway through the eight-week program, and she realized that a community model is actually going to make a lot more sense for her people based on the kinds of questions they're asking, what they're looking for, how they're connecting with one another, how things are evolving through the lessons that they're learning every week and the progress that they're making.
what it made sense to start it as an eight-week program as a test but now we know okay we a membership is going to make more sense here community project is going to make more sense here so she's in the middle of the program we've already decided this and now we're in like pivot mode to flip from a program to a membership so her program people at the end of the program are going to have the founding member opportunity to join the membership and then we're planning a membership launch This is one of my favorite ways to do this because we've got proof of concept, we have a solid programming strategy, we have curriculum, and we have a great start on like who founding members might be and what they care about and what they're interested in.
And of course, like because we're halfway through the program, we're getting feedback from them like, hey, let me know what you think about this.
Like, what are you interested in next? Like, where do you feel like you need more support? Like, because you have this group, this that you can validate with your founding people, you can start to understand like, how should you design this community experience so that it's going to be really valuable so that people want to be a part of it so that they're willing to stick around.
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If I wanted to validate a new community idea, I actually wouldn't start with a membership.
I'd start with something like a challenge, a sprint, a beta cohort, like a small four, six, eight week type thing.
You're like making a promise with your people that this thing is going to exist, that we're going to keep going.
And what you're looking for, what you're actually looking for is validation to understand people's behavior.
Do they actually want to come together on this topic, purpose, goal, transformation, community, whatever it is that you're like helping bring people together to do? Do they actually want to come together to do this? And are they going to show up? Are they going to engage? Do they get results? Um, are they actually connecting with one another? Are they talking to each other? And so you want to validate this in like a smaller sort of contained model that you can test for a period of time and then end it and then analyze the results and decide like, okay, does it make sense? To keep going, do we wanna shift this? We did this recently with a client.
So she's interested in a membership, but she had designed sort of like a program type experience.
So right now, currently she's halfway through the eight-week program, and she realized that a community model is actually going to make a lot more sense for her people based on the kinds of questions they're asking, what they're looking for, how they're connecting with one another, how things are evolving through the lessons that they're learning every week and the progress that they're making.
what it made sense to start it as an eight-week program as a test but now we know okay we a membership is going to make more sense here community project is going to make more sense here so she's in the middle of the program we've already decided this and now we're in like pivot mode to flip from a program to a membership so her program people at the end of the program are going to have the founding member opportunity to join the membership and then we're planning a membership launch This is one of my favorite ways to do this because we've got proof of concept, we have a solid programming strategy, we have curriculum, and we have a great start on like who founding members might be and what they care about and what they're interested in.
And of course, like because we're halfway through the program, we're getting feedback from them like, hey, let me know what you think about this.
Like, what are you interested in next? Like, where do you feel like you need more support? Like, because you have this group, this that you can validate with your founding people, you can start to understand like, how should you design this community experience so that it's going to be really valuable so that people want to be a part of it so that they're willing to stick around.