21 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Community
I learned everything about community building from real mistakes. I didn’t have any mentors when I was starting my first community.
If I had to start over, I’d do it differently. This article lists all the common mistakes even the most experienced community managers make when building a community from scratch.
Avoiding these mistakes will save you time, energy and frustration. It will also make the community building process enjoyable and rewarding.
The most common community building mistakes are - starting without a purpose and strategy, ignoring member onboarding, inconsistent communication and lack of moderation. These mistakes will often lead to members abandoning the community and slow down growth.
Gartner’s research shows that 70% of the communities fail, often due to avoidable issues. But your community can do better.
TL;DR: Common Community Building Mistakes
Here’s a quick overview of the mistakes community managers make that leads to the downfall of the community -
No clear purpose or vision
Launching without strategy and planning
Choosing the wrong platform
Underestimating community management needs
Expecting overnight success
Poor onboarding practices
Lack of moderation policies
Inconsistent communication
Spamming or over-communicating
Overemphasis on selling or self-promotion
Creating a generic or unoriginal community experience
Ignoring member feedback
Not encouraging member contributions
Failing to foster relationships between members
Lack of trust and transparency
Prioritizing quantity over quality
Refusing to adapt or evolve
No long-term vision for the community
Keeping the community siloed from the rest of the business
Ignoring data and analytics
Neglecting privacy and member safety
1. Lack of clear purpose or vision
Starting a community without a clear purpose or vision is a common pitfall. Without understanding the true purpose of the community, and who it serves, your community is destined to fail.
Your community members need to have clarity on the value your community provides to them. Can your members tell what the community is about?
Lesson: Define a strong purpose, member persona for your community. Your community growth strategy should align with your community goals.
2. Launching without Strategy and Planning
Community launch phase is exciting. Community managers often feel enthusiastic about launching the community and skip the strategy and planning phase.
The key elements of community launch like setting goals, setting up KPIs and defining member guidelines get overlooked.
The result? Chaos and no clear path to community launch and growth.
Quick Fix: Take the time out map out basic community strategy, define clear goals and important metrics to track.
3. Choosing the Wrong Community Platform
The choice of community platform depends on the community’s specific needs. For example, a business community or a customer community may need the platform to support feedback collection, ability to publish changelog and support for SEO-optimised articles.
If the community platform doesn’t support it - the community will miss out on several growth opportunities. Community managers will have to send people to different areas of website to get product updates, share feedback.
We made this mistake when building our last community - a dedicated community of video developers. We had to send our members to different platforms like LuMa for webinars, Canny and Upvoty for product feedback.
It’s one of the reasons, we natively integrated product feedback to make Jatra an alternative to Upvoty and Canny.
Lesson: The choice of community platform is an important decision to make. Migrating an active community to a different platform should be avoided and discouraged.
4. Underestimating Community Management Needs
Assuming the community will run itself is a classic mistake community managers make. A community needs nurturing.
Every thriving community needs active community managers, moderators to guide discussions and maintain a momentum in the community.
Fix: Treat community management as a core task. Dedicated sufficient resources to nurture engagement.
5. Expecting Overnight Success
Building a community takes patience. A “big bang” launch on ProductHunt may give you the initial spike in traffic and member registration; but it will eventually fade away.
Community builders often underestimate the time to build a successful community.
Advice: Set a realistic expectation and milestones for community growth. It should be measured in months, not days.
6. Poor Onboarding Practices
The first impression is the last impression. Setting up a healthy onboarding flow for new members is important. Expecting your members to figure out things on their own is a classic mistake. Even the ‘pro’ users need a proper onboarding and making them familiar with community goals and expectations.
How to Improve: Create a warm welcome process. Read our Community Onboarding Guide to get a clearer picture of onboarding flow setup.
7. Lack of Moderation Policies
No rules and no moderators equals chaos. Without clear community guidelines and rules, toxic behavior or spam can run rampant. Members need to know what’s acceptable in your community.
Remedy: Establish simple and clearly defined rules and moderation policy. Ensure the moderators address issues fairly so members feel safe and respected.
8. Inconsistent Communication
Inconsistent communication is the top reasons for failure of community. Proper, clear and timely communication from community leaders ensures a healthy and positive culture in the community.
Fix: Have a dedicated ‘announcements’ section on your community to post updates, announcements and keep the members informed about the direction of community growth.
9. Community Spam and Over-Communicating
On the flip side, bombarding members with too many messages or promotions will annoy them. You will need to strike the right balance between your messaging.
Members do not like constant pings or feeling that they are being marketed non-stop.
Better Approach: Be mindful and strategic with announcements. Focus on quality interactions over quantity. Respect your member’s attention.
10. Overemphasis on Selling and Self-Promotion
This applies to brand communities. Pushing your products or corporate messages continuously will erode trust and destroy the feeling of belonging. When member feel that they’re being treated as sales leads, they will abandon your community.
Tip: Prioritize creating value for your members and offer support, instead of constant promotion. Earn trust by focusing on members’ needs and interests.
11. Unoriginal Community Experience
Avoid copying another community’s style and culture. If nothing sets your community apart, people will have no reason to engage or stick around. A generic experience fails to spark loyalty or excitement.
Solution: Develop a distinct community culture or niche. Highlight what makes your community special. It could be your theme, events, or values - so members feel they're part of something they can't find elsewhere.
12. Ignoring Member Feedback
Not listening to your members is a fast-track to failure. Community members often voice great ideas, concerns or needs. When that feedback is ignored, people feel unheard and may disengage.
Over time, frustration builds and members will leave for competing communities where their voices are heard.
Fix: Actively ask for feedback and engage with members. When they provide feedback, them them updated on the actions you have taken to address the feedback.
13. Not Encouraging Member Contributions
If the community relies only on the leader for content, it will feel like a one-sided broadcast. You may choose to DM your members and motivate them to share replies on existing threads.
Members who have no chance to contribute or shine may lose interest. Stifling user-generated content means missing out on diverse voices and organic engagement.
Encouragement: Create opportunities for members to post, ask questions, share projects, or help others. Celebrating member contributions makes everyone feel more ownership of the community.
14. Not Fostering Member Relationships
A community is not just a content feed. It’s about people finding value through networking and bonding with each other. As a community manager, you will have to actively help build the network.
You may start by connecting people with similar interests, conducting online events, webinars where you gather people ‘face to face’.
Host icebreakers, encourage introductions and help members find other members with similar interests or background.
15. Lack of Trust and Transparency
Great communities are built on trust and transparency. Secrecy or inconsistent rules will breed distrust.
For example, deleting posts without explanation or making decisions behind closed doors makes members uneasy. People need to trust the community leadership and process.
Fix: Be open about how and why decisions are made. Communicate changes, enforce rules fairly for everyone, and admit mistakes. Transparency shows respect for members and builds a trustworthy environment.
16. Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality
Member count is just a vanity metric. Chasing big membership numbers instead of meaningful engagement is a classic mistake even the professional community managers make.
A high member count looks good; and marketing department loves it. However, it means little if hardly anyone is active or loyal. Focusing on quantity can actually dilute the community experience and drive away core members.
Remember: It's better to have 100 engaged members than 10,000 inactive ones. Invest in quality interactions, not just vanity growth stats.
17. Failing to Adapt and Evolve
Communities thrive when they create value for its members and owners. Even the most successful communities that failed to evolved have gone down with time.
Members come and go and interests shift. What worked a couple of years ago may not work today.
Advice: Always re-evaluate your community and engagement patterns. Introduce new discussion topics, features and events based on members interest and feedback.
18. Lack of Long-Term Vision
Some community builders only focus on immediate gains and neglect future planning.
Without a long-term vision, you might run out of steam or fail to scale when the community grows.
Short-sighted tactics (like constant gimmicks to spike activity) can backfire.
Plan Ahead: Envision where you want the community in a year or two. Set a roadmap for content, milestones, or features to gradually expand the community’s value over time.
19. Keeping the Community in a Silo
Treating your community as an isolated side-project is often the reason most promising communities die. If you are building a customer community for your business, it’s essential to integrate and align it with business goals.
It’s’ essential to have business leaders, managers and key stakeholders to in the community.
20. Ignoring Data and Analytics
They say, “You can improve it ONLY if you can measure it”. Data will not give you just the information. It will tell you the story of community health and growth.
Most community managers rely on intuition to make decisions about community. Lack of analytics means missed growth opportunity.
Be Smart: Base your decisions on the data. Analyse community content and member activity trends to know what to ignore and double-down on.
21. Neglecting Privacy and Safety
A community we managed ignored user’s privacy. It allowed anyone to freely DM others without the ‘approval’ from the receiver. The results? Spammers sneaked in and send spam and advertisement messages to members through DMs.
Simple mistakes like these can annoy your core members. Pay utmost attention to privacy and safety of your users.
Also ensure that your member’s privacy is protected and you are transparent about the data use. It’s recommended that you setup basic security measures; like vetting new members and content moderation to keep your community safe for everyone.
How to Build a Stronger Community
Avoiding mistakes is half the job. The other half? Doing the right things. Here are 4 proven ways to build a thriving, high-retention community:
Start with a clear purpose. Know who your community is for and what value it offers. This clarity helps attract and retain the right members.
Improve onboarding and inclusivity. A warm welcome builds trust fast. Help new members feel safe, seen, and ready to engage.
Show up consistently. Keep communication active and moderate fairly. Consistency builds trust, and fair rules create a safe space.
Listen and adapt. Gather feedback, track metrics, and evolve with your members' needs. The best communities grow with their people.
We hope you will learn from our mistakes and not repeat them in your community. If you have questions or feedback for us; feel free to reach out or comment below.
Our goal is to help you build successful communities quickly. Let’s build amazing communities together.