Start With a Few

Why The Soci3ty is Building for a Handful of Clans First

Everyone in tech knows the script.

You design the product.

You polish the landing page.

You pick a date.

You “go to market”.

If you’re ambitious, you start talking about your “total addressable market” and how many thousands of people are “in your funnel”. Launch day is imagined as a kind of secular holiday: a graph going up and to the right, some celebratory tweets, a Medium post.

We’re doing something different.

We’re not going to market.

What we’re doing instead is ‘going to community’.

Instead of trying to launch our new community platform (a.k.a the ‘Clan OS/Operating System’) to the public, we’re starting with a small circle of deeply aligned Clans. Not because we lack ambition, but because we’re committed and intentional about everything we’re building.

If your thesis is the We-Economy — that is, a people-powered, community-owned, co-created economy — then the first question isn’t “How big can this get?”

It is: “Who are the few we should start with who are actually able and willing to build with us?” In other words, practicing what we preach by co-designing and shaping the platform with our community, and by empowering them by sharing ownership and governance of the platform they helped building.

From Go-to-Market to Go-to-Community

Recently, we’ve been focused on a simple sequence, borrowing from Greg Isenberg’s ACP model:

Audience → Community → Product

(ACP)

Traditional go-to-market inverts that: you build the product first, then you market it to an audience, and only then do you hope a loyal customer community somehow forms around it.

ACP turns that order on its head.

You start with a vision and a clear perspective.

You reach out and activate an audience of believers around that story.

From there, you invite the ones who resonate most deeply to rally around a shared purpose by joining an early, founding Minimum Viable Community (MVC).

A go-to-community approach asks different questions than a traditional GTM:

• Who are the people already wrestling with the problems we care about?

• How do we gather them in a way that builds trust and shared language?

• How do we let them co-shape what we build, instead of just testing it?

Clan OS, for us, is downstream of that. It’s not “the thing we launch to the world,” but the infrastructure we co-architect with those communities who are already living our thesis.

Community–Market Fit: your MVC

In traditional product-centric organisations, everyone talks about product–market fit.

In community-led worlds (like Web3, for example), the product often is the community. Steph Alinsug makes this point beautifully in “A Culture of Intimacy: a thesis for building enduring web3 communities,” recasting product–market fit as community–market fit: does this community, as it actually exists, fit something real in the world?

That’s where the idea of a Minimum Viable Community gains life.

Your MVC is not just “the first 50 people who joined a Discord server”.

It’s a small, representative slice of the larger market you eventually want to serve.

For us, that means:

• Communities and clans that already hold some version of our thesis: agency, co-creation, shared upside.

• Different contexts, but similar needs: coordination, contribution, value flow, governance.

• Enough diversity that what we build together isn’t over-fitted to one niche.

If your MVC is off, your community–market fit will be fake.

You’ll think you’re onto something special, but you’re really just building for a niche corner of the internet that happens to enjoy your vibe.

At the same time, if your MVC is too large or too open, you lose the one thing you absolutely need in the early days: cultural intimacy.

So the design problem becomes:

How small can we start while still being representative of the world we want to serve?

That’s why we’re starting with a handful of clans—not friends in a group chat, but communities that mirror the broader ecosystem we’re building for.

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Member-Community Fit: Builder-Believers First

Community-market fit is half the story.

The other half is member-community fit.

It’s not enough that “this kind of community” fits “this kind of market”. Each early member also has to fit the community in terms of its values, questions, tempo and expectations.

We think a lot in terms of builder-believers.

These are people that:

• Share our thesis of people-powered communities, agency, clans, We-Economy.

• Are already building something, whether it’s a product, a collective, a practice or a story.

• Are willing to do the work, not just consume updates.

Early members codify the culture. Whether you write it down or not, they become your doctrine in human form. They decide what “showing up” means. They define what gets rewarded and what quietly dies. They set the tone for how disagreement is handled, how decisions are made and how care is expressed.

When we talk about starting with “a few clans”, what we really mean is starting with the builder-believers who feel like an inevitable part of the story.

They are the ones who make go-to-community real. Without them, ACP collapses into yet another marketing funnel.

Why We Optimise for Depth, not Headcount

Steph Alinsug’s piece on a culture of intimacy lands a crucial point: early communities that chase rapid member growth often destroy the very conditions they need to survive.

If you optimise for “number go up” in the early days, what happens is that people join, but don’t have the context to contribute meaningfully. As a result, connections stay shallow, trust never really forms, and the space you’ve created turns into a noisy feed instead of a room where something real happens.

A culture of intimacy is the opposite: you allow for small, repeated interactions between people, tolerate friction and slowness because that’s where trust is built, and you accept that not everyone who is “interested” should become a member right now.

Simon Wardley’s doctrine work lines up with this — in his doctrine table, Phase I emphasises things like common language, challenging assumptions, and situational awareness. None of that happens in a stampede.

It only happens in small groups who have enough shared context to:

• call out when something doesn’t make sense,

• ask “obvious” questions without shame,

• map the terrain together.

Esther Perel writes that “the seeds of intimacy are time and repetition. We choose each other again and again.” That applies to communities as much as to relationships. Intimacy is what happens when a small group keeps choosing to show up for each other.

Priya Parker adds another crucial lens in The Art of Gathering:

“Excluding thoughtfully allows you to focus on a specific, underexplored relationship.”

Choosing to start with a few clans is precisely that: thoughtful exclusion in service of a deeper, clearer “us”.

Instead of optimising for high-velocity member growth, we’re optimising for high-context intimacy between the people who will define what The Soci3ty becomes.

The First Wave as Go-to-Community

So what does this look like in practice?

We’ve convened a first wave of clans who represent the broader landscape we care about, are led by builder-believers who resonate with the We-Economy thesis, and are already wrestling with coordination, contribution, and shared upside in their own ways.

This first wave is our go-to-community in action. Our goal isn’t to “acquire users”. We’re building relationships with communities whose reality will shape the Clan OS.

Over the next 2-3 workshops, we’ll sit with them and do things that don’t scale:

• Map their actual rituals: how they gather, how thy activate their members, how co-creation is manifested, and how care is expressed.

• Name their real breakdowns: when people burn out, when contributions disappear, where resentment hides.

• Translate those into the smallest set of components that would turn their communities into spaces their members can’t help but contribute to.

This is not a private beta where we’re asking them to “test a product”.

We’re asking them to co-architect an infrastructure they actually want to use, and that benefits them: interfaces that feel like extensions of rituals they already have, metrics that reflect what they actually care about instead of vanity numbers, and flows that reduce friction without undermining culture.

This is what we mean when we say we’re starting with a few Clans, not “the masses”. It’s not an inner circle. It’s a design circle.

Intimacy and Representativeness

There’s a legitimate risk when you start small: you end up building for your friends instead of the world.

We’re taking that seriously.

And that’s why we put an emphasis on diversity. The first wave isn’t just one type of community, communities from one geographical location, or people that subscribe to one ideology. They all differ in what they’re building, how formal or informal they are, and exactly what it is their members need.

But they do share a few common traits:

• a desire for more agency, co-creation, and co-ownership;

• a willingness to explore and experiment;

• enough alignment with our thesis that we don’t have to sell them on why this matters.

And this is how we try to hold both intimacy — small enough groups that people know each other, build trust, and can challenge us — and representativeness — enough variation that the patterns we see aren’t just quirks of one scene.

We also keep a clear distinction between community growth and audience growth. We’re happy for the audience around The Soci3ty to grow faster, whether that’s through people reading, watching or following the journey with us, but we’re deliberate about who becomes part of the community that actively shapes the work.

As Steph points out, audiences are great for distribution. They’re not the same thing as a healthy community.

Why We’re Not Chasing “The Public” (Yet)

So why not open the doors and let everyone in?

Because going wide too early carries real costs:

• Cultural drift: if early members don’t share a core set of values and expectations, your norms fragment before they’ve even formed.

• Product confusion: you get conflicting signals and feature requests that pull the infrastructure in ten directions.

• Emotional exhaustion: you spend all your time onboarding and containing chaos instead of actually building.

By starting with the few, we gain:

• Shared language that can be taught, not just intuited.

• Real case studies of clans using the Clan OS in the field.

• Replicable patterns we can feel confident scaling when the time is right.

In ACP terms, we’re being deliberate.

We grow an audience around the thesis of people-powered, clan-based We-Economy.

We curate a community of builder-believers and clans who live that thesis.

We build product with them, not for them.

Only then do we earn the right to think seriously about “the public”.

If You Recognise Yourself in the Few…

If you’ve read this far and felt a kind of recognition, this part is for you.

Maybe you’re stewarding a small community.

Maybe you’re trying to build something that doesn’t quite fit into “startup” or “DAO” boxes.

Maybe you’re tired of hype cycles but you can’t shake the sense that we could organise and reward human effort differently.

In other words: you might already be one of the builder-believers we’re talking about.

The first wave is small by design. We can’t put everyone into the early workshops without breaking the intimacy that makes them useful.

But the thesis is open.

If this resonates, there are a few simple ways to step closer:

• Tell us what you’re trying to build, and where you feel challenged with getting your members to actively participate and contribute

• Share this with people who feel like “we” when you read this, not “they”.

The We-Economy won’t arrive as a feature drop or a platform launch.

When it does it will come woven, slowly, by a few builder-believers at a time, inside rooms where intimacy, trust, and shared agency can actually take root.

We’re starting there on purpose.