Who told you to build that?

🏗️ Your offer has load-bearing wall: Richard Millington (FeverBee) did a webinar on offer architecture — and it's the kind of thing that makes you realise you've been renovating the bathroom while the foundation cracks. If you're building community offers without a structural plan, this is 45 minutes that'll save you 6 months.

🤖 Last call before the bots leave: The Year of the Bot bundle — 50+ free AI tools, workflows, and strategies from people who actually use this stuff — closes on Feb 15. That's Saturday. If you haven't grabbed it yet, this is your "I'll do it later" becoming "I missed it forever" moment.

📐 SPACES: the acronym that earns its keep: CMX's SPACES framework maps your community work to actual business goals — Support, Product, Acquisition, Content, Engagement, Success. If someone asks you "what does your community actually do for the business?" and you freeze, this is the cheat sheet.

🔁 Close the loop or lose the plot: Gainsight wrote up how product teams use community forums to close the customer feedback loop — with a real example from ShootProof. The trick? A structured format for feature requests so you're not drowning in "it would be nice if…" noise.

🧠 Your community has a hierarchy of needs: Richard Millington (again, because the man doesn't miss) mapped out a community hierarchy of needs — think Maslow, but for member experience. Spoiler: you can't get to "belonging" if "I can't find the events" isn't sorted first.

I want to be honest about something.

I spent months improving my community's event programming — tweaking formats, testing times, adding new session types — while ignoring the most basic friction: my members couldn't easily get the events into their calendar.

They told me. Multiple members said the same thing: "I want to come, but I forget because I have to RSVP every single week and nothing syncs automatically."

So I fixed it. I implemented recurring calendar invites so sessions were in their week by default.

Attendance increased by 50%. This week.

Not because the content got better. Because the access got better.

And I only knew to fix it because I asked.

Here's the pattern I see constantly — in my own community and in the founders I work with:

Something isn't working → founder assumes the product is wrong → founder builds a new feature, redesigns the offer, launches a new programme.

Nobody asked for any of it.

The founder skipped the cheapest, fastest diagnostic available: talking to the people they're building for.

This isn't a community problem. It's a founder problem. We default to building because building feels productive. Asking feels vulnerable. What if they say something we don't want to hear?

But the gap between what you think your members want and what they actually need — that gap is where communities quietly suffer.

I don't run one survey and call it a day. I run three loops, and each one catches different information:

1. The user research round (proactive)

Every so often, I go directly to my community and ask for feedback. Not a passive survey link dropped in a channel. An actual research round — reaching out to members individually, asking what's working, what's not, and what they wish existed.

This is how the calendar problem surfaced. Multiple members, unprompted, said the same thing: weekly RSVPs were a barrier. I wouldn't have caught that from engagement metrics alone. The numbers just showed "attendance is flat." The people told me why.

2. The entry/exit interview (transition moments)

When someone joins, I ask why. When someone leaves, I ask why.

Not the polite version. The real version.

I don't just want to hear "I'm too busy" (that's the high-level reason). I want the deep-seated reason: "I wasn't getting value from the calls because the times didn't work for my timezone" or "I joined for accountability but I never felt comfortable enough to share."

That's the data that actually changes your product.

3. The NPS form (periodic health check)

For other communities I work with, I implement a regular NPS survey. It's not glamorous. But it gives you a trend line — and a trend line is what tells you whether your changes are working or whether you're just rearranging deck chairs.

The magic isn't any single loop. It's running all three, because each one reveals a different layer of truth.

I want to tell you about a founder — let's call him Next Journey.

He spent almost a year building his offer in isolation. Refining. Perfecting. Tweaking the positioning in a vacuum. Heads-down, no external input.

Then he started doing sales calls with real potential clients.

Everything shifted.

His positioning got sharper — because real people told him what language resonated. His messaging got clearer — because he heard the actual objections, not the ones he imagined. He got closer to describing what he actually does in a way that made people lean in.

A year of solo building couldn't do what a few honest conversations did in weeks.

That's the feedback loop in action. Not a fancy system. Just: talk to the people you're trying to serve, and let what they say influence what you build.

This week's newsletter is about Product Fit — the idea that your community's "product" (the sessions, the content, the experience) actually matches what your members need.

Here's my hot take: you cannot achieve Product Fit without feedback loops.

You can guess. You can benchmark. You can study what other communities do. But until you systematically ask, listen, and adjust, you're building for an imaginary audience.

The founders who get this right aren't the ones with the best features.

They're the ones with the shortest distance between "something's not working" and "I know exactly what to fix."

Here's your move:

Because when members see that their feedback actually changes something, they don't just stay.

They start giving you better feedback. And that's the real flywheel.

Not content. Not features. Not another rebrand. Just: ask, listen, build, repeat.

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