Why Online Communities Need Events to Build Real Trust
Source: Simon Owens's Media Newsletter
The playbook for sustaining digital communities has inverted: founders can't manufacture belonging through content alone. The most successful communities now rely on physical events as their core retention mechanism rather than a secondary perk. Natalie scaled her community to 1,000 RSVPs by delegating event hosting to her accelerator students. This reduced her operational load and signaled to members that the community could exist independent of her presence—a threshold most community builders never reach because they remain the single point of trust. Events require venue costs, coordination, and actual bodies showing up. That friction filters for genuine engagement in ways digital-only communities can't match.