Hacking Communities

People want more than a product. They want BELONGING.

We need a reason to get together, but what what matters is why we stay together. It is about the conversations around the table, the invisible space between which is engineered by values and shared beliefs, maintained through constant interactions that build trust, over time. Community means growing relationships, not transactions. Developing authentic ties through ongoing conversations that don’t go from one to many. It goes in all directions. Belonging still matters. Loneliness is an epidemic. Building communities is a health measure. We need to reinvent communities.

Hacking Communities is a knowledge platform consisting of experience-based frameworks to help companies or individuals growing or building grassroots communities around a brand, idea, or place.

A foundational guide to community building based on the author’s 15 years of experience from private to public sector across 4 continents. It aims to help individuals, business owners or real estate developers to design, build and grow communities around around ideas, businesses or spaces. It goes from underlining why now is the best time to start or grow a community—a loneliness epidemic— to defining key principles and experience-based frameworks to community building, including the “Community Lifecycle”, design of “Closeness Circles”, “Engineering Serendipity” method, and others.

ABOUT

Discover the foundational principles and frameworks to further develop yourself as a strong community leader. This guide makes the case that anyone can develop the leadership and communication skills required to sustain high-growth communities.

It includes:

• 3 Core Leadership Values: How to sustain long-lasting communities through values-based leadership.

• Community Lifecycle Framework: Discover the 5 development stages of high-growth communities.

• Communities vs. Crowds: How connectedness, identity, and growth differentiate communities from crowds.

• 3 Steps to Build Collective Relationships: Attraction, Engagement, and Commitment

• Engineer Serendipity Framework: How to enhance the rate of effective collisions between people.

While the title "Hacking Communities" alludes to tips and tricks for community building, its content means to equip emerging leaders with the social skills and foundations to build self-sustaining communities: values, principles, and mindset.

It features personal stories, research studies, and creative metaphors collected during my journey to becoming a community leader.

BOOK REVIEWS

“Laís is one of those rare people who lead their life by how they think the world should be, and in ways that can help the most people possible around them. This is what makes her the best type of community builder”
– Excerpt from Foreword by Derek Andersen, Co-founder, and CEO at Startup Grind and Bevy 

“While Lais has proven herself as an impactful community builder, what makes her unique is she is both a skilled practitioner and a teacher. As a result she understands the theory and the practice of community building, and her insights are rooted in what works.”
– Erik Torenberg, Founder and Chairman at On Deck 

“It's both: practical and heartwarming. Besides rich personal experience told in a raw and authentic way, you can expect to find well-researched insights into community building… get ready for actionable know-how on how you can hack a community around your product, company or an idea.”
– Natasha Zolotareva, Journalist, International Media Specialist and Writer at Entrepreneur.com

“Most people who talk about community building want to romanticize it, or worse, they want to make it into a series of actionable “steps” without heart. Laís de Oliveira explains the required actions in amazing detail, but she does it with a sensitivity and a wisdom that can only come from experience (...) Every page gets better and better. If you care about people, read this book”
– Roy H. Williams, Author of the bestselling trilogy: Wizard of Ads

"Required reading for anyone looking to build communities. Part raw accounts from the journey of building communities -- from Malaysia to San Francisco -- part actionable guide for building communities; this book is a fantastic read. Highly recommended."
– Arnobio Morelix, Co-Founder & CEO at Sirius Education, Author of Rebooted: An Uncommon Guide to Radical Success and Fairness in the New World of Life, Death, and Tech

"An accessible and tactical guide to building community. As if Lais, in her work building up StartupGrind and other communities, wasn't enough of a reason to buy the book, her research-based approach to spark and scale communities is so clearly laid out in the book, within the first few pages I was already writing down notes of what I could be doing."
– Zvi Band, Entrepreneur and Author of Success Is in Your Sphere: Leverage the Power of Relationships to Achieve Your Business Goals 

“The reason why it is possible using Oliveira’s strategy to hack a community is precisely because she doesn’t focus on strategies and tactics for building community. She wants to help you, the person building the community, grow into the mindset of being a community builder … This (book) is to understand how to build communities intrinsically. We’ve needed this in the space. It’s beautiful prose and it’s highly introspective. It’s tremendously artful and it deserves a read. It deserves two reads. Four reads. It deserves a lot of reads.”
– Samantha “Venia” Logan, Founder at Socially Constructed Online