New projects and products are often surrounded by lots of hype and excitement!
It seems like the natural order of things, regardless of whether we are talking about an entirely new product line, or even a project starting up here in our Hive community.
And it may not be all that difficult to gather a big crowd of excited users, if you have something that is perceived to be worthwhile enough to get involved in. It might not even have to be a "game changer," just something that adds substantial value to an existing situation.
The saying "if we build it, they will come" may be quite true... but it overlooks an important part of the equation: what are we going to do once we have built it and they come and the initial excitement wears off?
It is actually a critical part of the equation in which we often get to sort out people who are "Builders" from people who are "Maintainers" and "Sustainers."
Builders often discover — the hard way — that they're actually not very good at running something once it has been built. And I think that is in large part to blame for why we see so many otherwise great projects fire up, burn brightly for a short while, and then quietly fizzle out into nothingness.
Perhaps it's not surprising: the nature of brilliant innovation is quite different from the mindset required for dealing with the daily grind. It's perhaps one of the main reasons why many successful partnerships are made up of one person who is filled with brilliant ideas and another who brings a great deal of steadiness and measured decision making to the project.
Our second layer here on Hive is filled with the skeletons of things that were started with a great fanfare and initial popularity and support but which quickly faded away.
If you take a moment to look behind the initial hype, and subsequently to examine the commentary surrounding the demise of these projects what you often end up with is a lot of questions along the lines of "is anybody even in charge of this thing, anymore?"
Having personally built — or been part of building — a number of online communities back in the early days of the web, I know from personal experience but there's a lot more to community building than simply creating a community.
Furthermore, building the "bridge" from "great idea" to long-term sustainability can be a very long and often boring grind. I can think of a more than a few examples where it took 2-3-4 years from inception before a community became self-sustaining.
A large part of actually making it through those years consisted of the tireless (and thankless!) process of presenting a front to make the community look like it was thriving —when, in fact, it was not — and constantly innovating and presenting people with reasons to keep hanging around and to tell their friends.
The worst possible thing you could do would be to say nothing because there was nothing to say. You had to invent something to say even if it felt boring and repetitive.
Whenever we look at the wasteland of failures and pick out the occasional "gold nugget" of something that leaves us thinking "wow, these people are still doing this!" what we usually discover is somebody who relentlessly keeps promoting their project or community through thick and thin.
And, to be honest, that is exactly the personality it takes to make something succeed.
Of course, I am sure there are people in the peanut gallery who will point to exceptions and say "yeah, but look at these people — they just put it out there and they are huge successes!" But let's keep in mind that exceptions are precisely that: they are a rarity, not the typical outcome.
Reaching sustainability — or "critical mass," as it is sometimes referred to as — takes a lot of effort, energy and persistence.
Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!
As always, a 10% @commentrewarder bonus is active on this post!