We built a community the same way we build products — by showing up every day and iterating

Community is a product

Most communities die because nobody treats them like a product. Someone creates a Slack, invites 200 people, posts a welcome message, and then watches engagement flatline within two weeks.

VCMC did not start with a grand plan. Ryan, Luca, and I just wanted a place to share what was actually working in our day-to-day builds. Not AI news. Not fundraising takes. Not hot takes about AGI timelines. Workflows, prompts, tools, failures, and shortcuts. The stuff that saves you three hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

That constraint turned out to be the entire product. The group chat had a clear value proposition from day one: share what actually works, not what sounds impressive. Failures and shortcuts over polished case studies. And people kept showing up because the signal-to-noise ratio stayed high.

The cold start problem

Every product has a cold start problem, and communities have the worst version of it. Nobody wants to post in an empty room. Nobody wants to be the first person to share something vulnerable in front of strangers.

We solved it the way you solve any cold start problem. We were the first three users, and we used the product relentlessly. Ryan, Luca, and I posted every day. We shared real builds, asked real questions, admitted real failures. We set the tone before anyone else arrived.

When new people joined, they did not land in a ghost town. They landed in the middle of an active conversation between builders who were clearly not performing. That made it safe to contribute. One person shares a prompt that cut their deploy time in half. Another person shares a Claude Code workflow that broke their entire staging environment. Both are equally valuable because both are true.

The group grew to 70 people and 15,000 messages without a single marketing campaign. Every invite was personal. Every new member was someone we had worked with, met at an event, or whose work we respected. Curation is not gatekeeping. It is product design.

Sixty people in a room

The first real test was the meetup. We ran a "Shipping with AI" event and 60 people showed up. People from Startmate, Me&u, Airtree, Archangel VC, OpenAI, Blinq, Buildpass, Cuttable. I looked around the room and thought: pretty sure that was the highest density of world class builders in one room in Australian history.

The second meetup sold out at 52 guests with a 16-person waitlist. OpenAI's Scott Falkner spoke and posted about it afterwards to 142 likes. Then Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, tweeted about us. That was a moment where Luca, Ryan, and I looked at each other and thought: this thing has its own gravity now.

But the events work because the group chat works. The meetups are not the product. They are a feature of the product. The daily conversation is what builds trust. The events are where that trust compounds in person.

Engagement loops, not announcements

The thing that kills most communities is when they become announcement channels. Someone posts a link. Nobody responds. Someone else posts a link. Nobody responds. Within a month, the only people posting are the ones who treat the group as a distribution channel.

We designed against that from the start. The group runs on conversations, not broadcasts. Someone shares a workflow, and three other people respond with how they would do it differently. Someone hits a wall, and within an hour two people have offered to pair on it. That feedback loop is the retention mechanic.

I think about community engagement the same way I think about product engagement. What keeps people coming back is not content pushed at them. It is the feeling that their contribution matters and that they will get something useful in return. That is the loop. Contribute, receive value, contribute again.

Build the brand before you need it

We built vcmc.ai with a proper brand page, "in case the New York Times picks up on this group." That sounds like a joke, but it is actually serious product thinking. You build the infrastructure before you need it, not after.

The website, the visual identity, the clear positioning — all of that existed before the Greg Brockman moment. When attention arrived, we had something to point people to. We looked like we had been doing this for years, not months.

What I learned

Community building is product building with a different input. Instead of code and design, the raw material is people and conversations. But the principles are identical. Solve the cold start problem. Design the engagement loop. Curate ruthlessly. Ship the MVP and iterate.

The group chat is still the core product. Seventy people sharing how they actually build, every single day. No algorithms, no feeds, no content strategy. Just builders talking to builders.

That turned out to be enough.