What will you do if you love a brand vision and you apply for that role, some how you got rejected because they felt you had no result ot proof of work.

I recently had a chat with @Jakub Pacanda. Some people love the community industry. Some people care for it. ...and then, there's Jakub. He plugs it into a power socket with 440 volts! I've been in the community industry for 20 years and I can count on one hand the people who match his energy for online communities...and I'd still have fingers left over. It makes me feel the industry is in safe hands. (no, i'm not retiring yet 😅) It started simple. Jakub follows me on LinkedIn - and figured I had something worth seeing and asked for a demo of Jatra - the community platform we make. It was supposed to be a 30 minute demo. But we spoke for 90 minutes. We talked about a lot of things: - about the platforms, what they get right and wrong - where the community industry is heading - the opportunities opening up - buying and selling communities. I didn't know it's a real market! I'm impressed by his commitment to uniting the industry. I want to know from the community: 1. Who's the most energetic person you know in the community industry? 2. What's your take on the future of online communities?

Bevy acquired CMX in 2019. But did it truly acquire its most valuable asset? The CMX Slack community currently has 8,539 members and appears to be using Slack’s free plan. That creates an interesting problem. Slack’s free plan only makes the most recent 90 days of messages searchable. Content older than one year can eventually be permanently deleted. Years of conversations between thousands of community professionals are therefore either inaccessible or at risk of disappearing. To unlock the complete message history, Bevy would need to upgrade the entire CMX workspace to Slack Pro. Slack Pro currently costs $7.25 per active member per month when billed annually, or $8.75 when billed monthly. If all 8,539 members were active, Bevy could theoretically pay: $742,893 per year with annual billing $896,595 per year with monthly billing Bevy would be responsible for that bill because it operates CMX. However, Slack only charges for active members, generally those who have used the workspace within the last 28 days. The actual cost would therefore depend on how many CMX members are still active. Even with only 3,000 active members, preserving the community’s complete history would cost approximately $261,000 per year. But the bigger cost is not the software bill. It is the loss of collective intelligence. The CMX community has spent years producing conversations, answers, introductions, recommendations, lessons, frameworks, and industry knowledge. When that knowledge lives inside a platform with limited history, it cannot compound. Members repeat questions that have already been answered. New members cannot learn from older discussions. Valuable insights disappear from search. The community continues creating knowledge, but the platform prevents it from becoming a permanent asset. This is not necessarily a criticism of Slack. Slack was primarily built for team communication, not for preserving the long term intelligence of a large professional community.

After 10 years, it has just started migrating its community to Higher Logic Vanilla. For our collective research, this is an interesting case study for two reasons. FIRST, MIGRATION PROCESS Atlassian is showing us what migrating a decade-old community can look like, and what a community owner or operator can learn from it while transitioning between Level 3 and Level 4 of Community Investment Mastery. How do you prepare members? How do you preserve relationships, trust, data, content and reputation? And how do you make sure a technical migration doesn't destroy the value built over a decade? SECOND, POST-ACQUSITION STRATEGY When you acquire a community, aren't you buying more than just a mass of people with recurring membership revenue? You're buying relationships, leaders within the segment, trust between them and the collective intelligence that holds the entire community together. Retention isn't just about how many members stay. It's about whether the entire system that creates value, including that recurring revenue, stays intact after the acquisition. And this is exactly why I wouldn't criticise IgniteTech (They acquired Khoros), Bending Spoons (They acquired Meetup) or Salesforce (They acquired Slack) for their early Community M&A transactions. They didn't have anything to build on. There was practically no Community M&A playbook before them. We're only now creating one together. Every successful and unsuccessful acquisition they make creates know-how that the rest of us can learn from. And that's incredibly valuable for the evolution of the entire industry. I also don't agree with the idea that a new owner has to ruin a community. They can save it too. There are communities that didn't disappear because they were acquired, but because their founder burned out or couldn't make the transition from Level 3 to Level 4 of Community Investment Mastery.

During our first live session of “THE PULSE”, Jakub explained the idea behind the CommunityIndustry community and our current game plan for taking it to another level in a relatively short period of time. He was also showing you our platform Tapdust, which is another tool for compressing time, getting rapid access to information from your own portfolio, and understanding what is currently going on there. You don’t necessarily need to watch the full recording. Your time is limited, I get it, and 94 minutes is quite a lot. Instead, I recommend watching the first 30 minutes, mainly to get familiar with Jakub himself :) and his mission here. During the call, Jakub asked me if I could answer three questions. The first question focused on what caught my attention that week. The second was about what I was currently working on, and the third was about the current members of our community. Who gave me some value, caught my attention, etc. For the third question, I mentioned Mason's post. I was able to connect with him in the comment section and give him a few tips on how to get more members into his own Claude Code community. There’s no need to go deeper into my answers here because you can hear them in the recording. What really mattered to me was the first question and Jakub’s advice. I was working on LEVEL 1 in Community Investment Mastery, especially on improving my empathy. I see empathy as a solid foundation for building relationships that last more than two years and also for connecting individuals with each other. I strongly believe in the power of education. That means I love self-improvement, personal growth, and constantly learning new things. For me, it’s not just about reading a book and saying, “Yeah, that was a really great book.” And then what? What’s the next step? I like expanding my horizontal knowledge so I can build strong context and understand as much as possible across different areas. But when I find something I genuinely want to become an expert in, then obviously I’ll go much deeper.