My core thesis for community is transformation. It’s the throughline ever-present in my career, read explicitly and between the lines in my book, where it’s said the journey makes the character.
Community building is like designing a path for becoming, individual to collective.
Let’s get to it.
Community as a Self-Fulfilling Growth Prophecy
Where there is transformation, there’s an opportunity for community. And a story to be told. A story lights the path for others to walk through their own becoming.
My favorite stories underline belonging through inside-out transformation: the Ugly Duckling, the Wizard of Oz.
It’s the journey that makes the hero, not the other way around. It’s what they go through, from A to B, that leads them to become relatable. Dorothy might have missed a deeper definition of home, had she stayed in Kansas.
Where there is transformation, there’s an opportunity for community. For shared experiences, shared practices, the ways-I-tried and the what-worked-versus-what-didn’t. Resonance, relatability. Communities are but stories of how belonging is built.
A story of one that creates possibilities for many: often a seeker who ventured into hosting small gatherings to solve a problem of their own, and soon found themselves solving a problem for the world.
Community and the Archetypal Journey
As the story goes, it almost always starts with the Fool: a hopeful romantic, confidently and unbeknownst to herself, stepping onto a cliff.
I. The Fool. Picture the first-time founder who’s sure they’ve got it, armed with a great idea. Or the first-time mother who can’t wait to raise a beautiful human, theoretically aware it takes a village, unaware she has to build it.
They don’t yet know they have a problem.
II. The Hermit. She ventures into the dark holding a single light of her inner knowing: there must be a better way. She’s by herself, googling, on YouTube, on Reddit, in WhatsApp groups, searching for the version of herself she never stopped believing in. This is hard. But there must be a way.
Now, at least, she knows she has a problem.
Where there’s a Hermit, there’s the most pivotal opportunity for community. Loneliness leads to the threshold, and a door appears.
From innocence to awareness, the role of community is to be a Lighthouse: a beacon of clarity, shining hope through the dark night of a problem. As I wrote when first sharing that framework, the Lighthouse is where you attract and become a reference for the people still searching in the dark.
III. The Emperor and the Star. They find community, and through it, discernment. They become aware of not one but many possibilities. They meet new people, make new friends, start to learn new ways. The archetypes vary here. Some become the Emperor, authorities in their own lives, earning agency over their decisions, a founder learning the tricks and tactics to take the reins of the business.
Some become the Star, finding newfound rest and nourishment, the sense they can finally drop their shoulders and take off their shoes. A new mom who finds a place where she can finally hear it and tell it how it is. No judgment. They’re not home yet, but they’ve found a sojourn. A refuge for now.
IV. The Magician. After how far they’ve come, and returned, and persisted, we could say they’ve arrived. The Magician masters the elements to create their own reality. They became who they desired to be, through community: recurring showing up, participating, sharing. They asked questions. They figured out solutions together. They became a master of their own trade.
That founder raised capital, built a solid team, or broke even. That new mother’s kid is now three, and she’s found a model of work that works for her. They’re almost there. But not quite. Besides their own success, something inside is eerily silent.
Something is missing. What’s next?
From awareness to solution, your community becomes a Port: a place they keep coming back to. They came once for the food. They come back for something else they’re still learning to name. A familiar face. A sense of home. A sense of hope. It’s the stage I think of as the steady rhythm of presence that turns “I tried this” into “I can’t do without it.”
V. The World. The last archetype of the Major Arcana, the universal image of success. Here, your journeyer isn’t just successful, they share it with the world. They answer more questions than they ask. They help others. They light the way. They mentor, they invest, they inspire. In short, they’ve become the Lighthouse, now attracting a new cohort of lost ships, of Hermits still figuring it out.
The World’s success spills out and beyond. It becomes growth.
From success to contribution, your community becomes a City.
They came, they returned, they established themselves, building a home and investing in its development like citizens. They don’t just visit. They live here. They belong. They claim it as their own. They help it grow.
Community as a Growth Story
Communities abound where there’s opportunity and curiosity to grow, to learn, and to become a better version of yourself.
Following this story, communities are not only personal transformation journeys.
They’re growth stories, pertaining both to the individual and to the community they belong to. This is the whole argument behind why I believe customer success is your real go-to-market: a person who walks the entire arc, from I didn’t know I had a problem to I’m thriving and I want others to find this too, becomes the engine. As I put it there, the more intricate the journey, the stronger the movement.
To every person navigating this journey, from the Fool to the World, they attract at least a handful of others who are earlier versions of themselves.
Following this, communities become a self-fulfilling growth prophecy.
One person’s story inspires hundreds of others, who, on their own, may walk that path. They’ll also become at least a dozen who inspire thousands, who on their turn become a few hundred who inspire millions, and so it goes.
Not so mathematically, but organically.
Community thrives on transformation, however subtle that A to B journey may be.
A broke college kid who wants to travel the world.
A fresh graduate who wants a purposeful career.
A young executive who wants to become a founder.
An early-stage CEO who wants to make their first seven digits.
A gig worker holding two jobs to pay for their kid’s tuition.
A lonely young adult, new to NYC, trying to make friends.
An elderly person, NYC-native, trying to make new friends.
A creative, ambitious soul who becomes a first-time mother, and wants to embrace it all, love and success, into a fuller life.
Throughout my life, I helped build a home for all the above. In a way, throughout my life, I’ve been all the above.
The gig worker’s version of this journey is the one I’m living closest to right now, building a community-led growth engine from the ground up, one city at a time. The principle holds the same as it does for a new mother or a first-time founder: you build a home, you make it safe, and then you let them in.
Strong communities emerge from liminal spaces.
As I’ve written before, significant life transitions are lonely places, and a high-potential epicenter for better communities. The loneliness is the opening. The threshold is where the door appears.
20 Years of Practice in One Section
Community building is like designing a path for becoming.
One that doesn’t rely on textbooks or how-to videos, but on safe spaces that enable real talks to be held, vulnerable experiences to be shared, and deep connections to be made. The closer to the core, the more vulnerable we are, and the more we belong. As I wrote on closeness, the key variable for closeness is vulnerability.
The strongest signal of who belongs together is shared journeys.
Identity is shared journeys: the more layered our lived experiences, the more likely we are to find trust and resonance. We don’t manufacture community so much as connect existing dots, people who already belong together.
The way you find those dots is by telling the truth about your own journey first.
To radically own your story is, as I’ve written, an act of care toward yourself and others: when you tell your story, you become a lighthouse to others who resonate with it. But before you can tell it, you have to hear it, which takes making space for quiet, the listening that precedes any creative storm. You are your first audience.
And how do you accelerate the collisions that turn strangers into a community? You engineer serendipity: by increasing the rate and relevance of the encounters through frequency, density, and catalyzes and letting go of the variables you can’t control.
Your role is not to make each connection happen, but to make space for it.
Day 1 of 28 · The Community as Becoming Series
I’m starting a content series that encapsulates 20+ years of community building.
From a 13-year-old navigating Lord of the Rings and RPG forums, unconsciously learning the mechanics of rewards that turned strangers into friends, and turned participants into contributors in exchange for levels of moderator badges.
From a 33-year-old who’d published a book on community building based on a decade of practice across four continents, who expanded a global chapter-based community across Africa and APAC, consulted for national governments on startup ecosystem development, and had her own business acquired.
From a 37-year-old mother who, yet again, took community for granted, only to relearn that communities are built by people who need a bridge to something.
The hack in Hacking Communities was never a shortcut. It’s cracking the code, and the code is personal. You become someone who belongs at home with yourself first, and then you build a home for others. There is no playbook. There is only the person.
For the next 28 days, I’m writing about community as a path to becoming.
Day 1.
A final note, on who’s writing this.
My name, Laís, means “of the people.” I took it literally.
I’ve always been drawn to liminal spaces, the thresholds, the in-between.
It’s fitting that my favorite archetype is Brigid, the Celtic goddess of the forge and the hearth, of the public realm and the domestic one, of law and of poetry. She holds opposites without choosing between them. I’ve spent my life at that.
I’m a law school dropout who once had a promising future in constitutional law and dreamed of her career as a journalist or diplomat. I’m also a nomad who built a home. And a small-town girl, daughter of a farmer and a banker, who became an entrepreneur through community.
I write this from my desk across the Raritan Bay, a ferry ride from Broadway.
At eighteen, in a one-theater town, I went to see whatever play they programmed, every week. At twenty, I carried a pocket watercolor kit to Mauritius and painted a nonprofit’s expansion strategy, not yet knowing I’d drop out of college within the year to lead it across Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
I’ve since lived and worked across San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, picking up five languages along the way. I founded a marketplace and sold it. I wrote a book in two languages. I learned how to build, and how to leave when the time was right.
Then there’s the part of me who came first and never left, the one who stood backstage while the builder traveled. She took the stage when I became a mother, twice, and there I found my deepest reinvention. She writes prose and poetry, shapes metal into jewelry and wheat into bread. A metalsmith, a wordsmith, a homemaker in the oldest, most literal sense: one who makes a home. It turns out that’s the same verb I reach for to describe what community builders do. We build a home where others feel safe to walk in, take off their shoes, and belong.
I am not the founder or the mother, the breadwinner or the homemaker, the builder or the artist. I am where all of them meet, and the place they meet is community. The hostess sets the table where strangers become friends.
Everything I build is a version of that table. I make the excuse for you to gather, and I hold the space: a nest where you can recalibrate before taking flight again. I walk with you. I help you find north. And if you need refuge, I keep the fire lit.
I’m a character still in the making, writing from my own lived experience and turning it into narrative as I go. Making meaning out of what I’ve lived, then turning the success stories, mine and others’, into pattern-based, repeatable frameworks.
That’s the whole method: transformation first, narrative second, framework third.
It’s why I find community lessons in the strangest places. In silversmithing, where you solder the strongest joints first so the piece survives the heat of every joint added after, the same way strong relationships let communities scale without compromising their integrity.
In surfing, where an 8-year-old once told me I’d stolen his wave and I learned the etiquette on the spot, because the best communities don’t need a manager in the room: the goal of a great community leader is to become obsolete.
And it’s why I keep writing through transition rather than waiting until I’m on the other side of it. From nomadic founder to writer and mother, what I learned is that transitions aren’t something to fix. They’re the work itself.
As I wrote then, feeling at home isn’t about having a place, it’s about feeling that you belong in your life. Writing my first book felt like a long process of giving birth to myself. Once it was published, it no longer belonged to me, but to those who’d read it.
That’s what I’m doing here, again. Becoming someone, out loud, and turning the pattern into something you can use.
If any of this is your season too, I’d love to walk part of it with you.