The art of building generational community to commerce brands

I was inspired to write this amidst a particularly frantic day racing around NYC.

I started off in the AIR space in Carroll Gardens hearing from marc about their distribution plans for Season 3 of Danger Testing, an hour later I was walking through McCarren Park where it seemed like every runner moving at any real pace was decked out in Bandit gear, at the edge of the park I bumped into Kiki Couchman amidst one of Sourmilk’s increasingly viral drops. Later that afternoon I was doom scrolling on the L Train back to Collaborative HQ and stumbled upon a post from Michael Washington about an upcoming upstate retreat with the USAL crew, and later that night attended another gathering of Club Chess downtown.

Everywhere I look there are emerging consumer brands aligning to well defined subcultures. The challenge is that building a scalable business alongside an engaged community can often feel at odds with maintaining its lore and authenticity. The examples above are some of my favorite breakouts, but investing in these businesses at pre-product can be challenging and requires a clear idea of the community to commerce journey.

Each of the above examples, and many more like Swang and Halfdays, have authentically mastered at least one of the below strategies for building a highly resonant, community first brand.

Key Strategies:

1. Start with a specific “Identity Wedge”

2. Co-create products with your community

3. Layer network effects on top of community resonance

4. Position your community so incumbents are “on the outside looking in”

5. Anchor your growth to IRL moments
   

1. Start with a specific “Identity Wedge”

Before a community can scale, there has to be a shared “why” — a tight cultural identity, value, or aspiration that creates belonging. In the case of Sourmilk it was a growing community of people struggling with gut health, with USAL it was creative people in LA looking to get outside during Covid lockdown. In every case, the community emerges from the founder’s experience and desire for a new way of doing things, the community grows from their articulation and response to the friction. In the best case, these communities map onto a rapidly growing secular trend, and the “industry” surrounding that trend is not perceived as authentic to the subculture.

• Position around a niche cultural movement or emerging subculture (i.e. Boiler Room)

• Articulate a point of view that makes belonging visible and repeatable (e.g., language, symbols, rituals). I have now seen the USAL camo hat in three American cities.

• Cultivate exclusivity, but not for exclusivity’s sake (invites, drops, invite only Discords, brand ephemera that starts small but becomes aspirational).

Community forms fastest when the “in-group” signal is obvious and aspirational, avoid an aspiration that is money or status driven, instead it should be aspirational because of the people involved. Manufactured exclusivity can easily backfire a la Frog Club.

@couchwomanSourmilk.com

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2. Co-create products with your community

Make the community the architect, not just the audience. Putting the community at the center of your product discovery, development, and promotion is a delicate balance without the community itself feeling overly commercial. Surfline, Danger Testing, Bandit Running, and USAL do this well in very different categories.

• Solve the problems endemic to the subculture. Surfline exemplifies this perfectly. Before their platform, dedicated surfers spent hours analyzing USGS data, weather reports, and word-of-mouth intel. Many would arrive at breaks only to leave frustrated. Surfline’s global camera network eliminated this friction, becoming a beloved adventure companion that now generates $35M+ ARR.

• Community participation on product decisions. Danger Testing drops apps like songs. From “digital labubu” toys to Rick Rubin-inspired creative partners. Their products emerge from daily NYC quests and train conversations, creating a playful relationship where DMs overflow with collaboration and app requests.

• Make the community the guide. Usal identifies their guides from within the community to lead future experiences (ranging from a fly-fishing trip to a bird-watching expedition or a ceramics course). SoulCycle has done this in a different way, turning class participants into coaches via their training program.

• Reframe and expand what is aspirational. Bandit Running’s Unsponsored Project celebrates Olympic trial athletes who lack major sponsorships. While top brands focus on the elite 0.01%, many lesser-known athletes provide free marketing simply by appearing on camera in branded gear. Bandit flipped this by creating unbranded gear that celebrates high-octane amateurs, redefining what’s worth aspiring to.

People advocate for what they helped create. Each of the above brands identifies new products and redefines their target customer from within.

@loslayupbrochacho the performance is over ✌️💔

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3. Layer network effects on top of community resonance

Your early identity and participation hooks should compound into network effects where each member makes the brand more valuable by inviting their friends. The dream is that a new member of your community attends multiple events, invites their friends, and becomes a champion for the community and the brand. While lifetime value, K-factor, and NPS scores are technical ways of evaluating this resonance, I also ask what share of sales comes from non-holiday gifting? Gifting is often a symbol of deeper brand affinity and desire to evangelize.

Beyond events and the product itself, below are some useful tactics we have seen brands exercise:

• Build community-to-commerce loops: every purchase unlocks new identity capital. Bandit Running turns marathons into social movements; their Discord powers training clubs and product feedback loops.

• Reward participation with status (leaderboards, early drops, limited badges). Run Club apps like Strava—network effect emerges from social bragging + data sharing.

• Encourage peer discovery with benefits: members bring members. Many consumer apps encourage sharing with free subscriptions, credits and platform unlocks.

Building a community is challenging, but the magic comes from when the community builds itself by members recruiting each other organically.

4. Position your community so incumbents are “on the outside looking in”

I will never forget waiting in line for a USAL pop-up in Soho last winter on a rainy winter Sunday. There were more than a hundred people waiting to get inside. I leaned over to the person (turns out he was the Creative Director at a multi-billion dollar outdoor brand) next to me in line to ask about the hype, “The entire outdoor industry is on the outside looking in on this community, it does not immediately matter what they are selling.” He went on to explain how brands like Patagonia, North Face, Cotopaxi, and others have positioned their products around the performance outdoor consumer set, but none of them have tried to align themselves to urban culture (beyond rare capsule collections).

Many of these brands, even with their $100m+ marketing budgets and retail distribution, are targeting the same tightly identified consumer, leaving them exposed to a community that identifies, and ultimately sells to a misunderstood consumer. Swang is running a similar play in golf, and Half Days for female skiers.

This authentic community first positioning might seem niche at first, but I promise you, no one is waiting in line for an hour in the rain for a Patagonia, Titleist, or Burton pop-up in Soho. As these communities reach scale and define a new consumer, incumbents will feel threatened.

5. Anchor your growth to IRL moments

The fastest-growing community-first brands often start offline, then convert online or via retail. This is not a new concept, but the range of quality and execution is dramatic. Below are a few common tactics that we see in consumer brands that stand out.

• Host “unscalable” small dinners, salons, or retreats for early members. (i.e. USAL activations)

• Turn flagship events into identity-driven rituals. (i.e. Bandit “Unsponsored Project”)

• Layer physical activations with digital identity proof (I.e. ComplexCon uses RFID badges that track which booths you visit, then sends targeted product drops via email).

• Product scavenger hunts (i.e. Nike SB product drops across NYC on Go Skate Day)

• Neighborhood drops (i.e. Sourmilk limited yogurt drops across NYC)

• The Runway ML Film Festival has become a key event for both the film and media community, as well as the AI model fanatics.

The brilliant thing about these experiences is that whether it is a software product, a CPG food brand, or an apparel company, each of their events and experiences is built for the community first and second to offer an in-person platform to showcase the product and build enduring affinity.

Cautionary Tales

Building an authentic community requires understanding how promising brands can lose their way. The following cautionary tales highlight critical failure modes and flame outs we should try to avoid. Each example initially showed strong community signals but made fundamental mistakes that destroyed the very dynamics that fueled their early success. These failures represent deeper misunderstandings: confusing engagement with belonging, scaling without preserving quality, and attempting to manufacture connection rather than foster authentic shared identity. Once community trust is broken, it’s nearly impossible to rebuild.

Clubhouse’s cautionary tale: Initially built powerful community dynamics through exclusivity and authentic conversations, reaching 10M+ weekly active users at its peak. The invite-only model created genuine scarcity and belonging, early adopters felt part of an elite intellectual salon. High-quality conversations emerged organically as thought leaders, celebrities, and experts engaged in unscripted dialogue.

However, rapid scaling without maintaining quality control led to platform dilution and user exodus. As Clubhouse opened to everyone, room quality plummeted. The platform is filled with spam rooms, self-promotion, and low-value content. The audio-only format that initially felt intimate became overwhelming as thousands joined single rooms. Most critically, Clubhouse failed to develop community-building tools beyond basic following, no way to form lasting connections, create recurring gatherings, or build identity around specific interests.

By 2022, weekly users had dropped over 70%. The lesson: growth must preserve the core community experience that created initial value. Exclusivity alone isn’t sustainable, but the quality and intimacy that exclusivity initially protected must be maintained through other mechanisms as you scale.

WeWork’s community washing: Attempted to build community around workspace rental but fundamentally misunderstood what creates authentic belonging. Despite raising $47B, WeWork’s “community” was largely marketing spin around a real estate arbitrage model. They provided beer taps, ping pong tables, and networking events, but lacked genuine shared identity beyond geographic proximity.

Real community members were essentially customers competing for the same resources (desks, meeting rooms, wifi bandwidth). WeWork couldn’t answer fundamental questions: What did members truly share beyond needing workspace? What problems were they solving together? What aspirational identity were they building toward? The company conflated amenities with community and transactions with relationships.

When the business model unraveled, so did any semblance of community—members had no emotional investment in the brand or each other. The lesson: community requires deeper connection than transactional relationships. Simply putting people in the same space and calling it community doesn’t create the shared purpose, mutual aid, and identity formation that drive true community dynamics.

BeReal’s Community Collapse: BeReal initially built an authentic community around “real” social sharing—no filters, simultaneous posting, genuine moments. They reached 20M+ daily active users by tapping into Gen Z’s desire for authenticity over Instagram’s performative culture.

However, they made critical mistakes: they never developed a sustainable business model beyond the initial novelty, failed to evolve the core product experience, and most importantly, didn’t build deeper community connections beyond the basic sharing mechanic. Users had no reason to stay once the novelty wore off, no relationships formed through the platform, and no identity capital was built.

The lesson: Novelty isn’t community. A viral concept needs to evolve into genuine relationship-building and shared identity creation, or it becomes just a temporary trend. BeReal confused engagement with community—people used the app but didn’t belong to anything meaningful.

Takeaway

In a world where the marginal cost of producing software and consumer products moves nearly to zero, the greatest opportunity to build generational brands is by building a ground up community, and to let them be the guide that informs and inspires new products, and ultimately produces durability from network effects.

And never forget, communities know when they’re taken advantage of, and it’s only a matter of time before it shows up in your P&L.

Christopher Dowd is an investor at Collaborative Fund, the venture fund backing AI Residency (AIR) and companies that push the world forward. This post was originally published on their blog.