Thigmo is the first CommTech platform that gives communities, content creators, event organizers, and businesses a unified, algorithm-free, ad-free hub to authentically connect, grow, and monetize their local audiences while maintaining complete ownership and control of their community data, relationships, and revenue streams.
The hidden tax on your community leadership
Feb 5
Why I focus on the people who bring us together
Jan 20
Building a tech startup is mostly a series of expensive mistakes.
Dec 30
The best growth tool for any organization is still the direct message.
Dec 29
Relationships should persist instead of disappear.
Dec 26
Most community organizers spend more time as data entry clerks than as leaders. It is the hidden tax of the industry that nobody talks about. You spend your day copy-pasting email addresses from a registration list into a spreadsheet and then into another email tool. By the time you actually get to talk to your community you are too tired to say anything meaningful. This is exactly how burnout starts and it is killing the passion in our industry.
The technical friction of running a community is at an all-time high. When you have to manage five different apps just to host one event things are going to break. People fall through the cracks and relationships that should have lasted for years end up disappearing after a single weekend. We are essentially building houses on sand and wondering why they don't stay standing.
We need to fix the chores that eat our time.
When we fix these friction points we give ourselves room to breathe. The goal is to get to a place where the tools work for us instead of us working for the tools. We should be building connections not just managing lists.
If your tools are making you tired they are the wrong tools.
By now, you can see how much I am invested in community building and bringing people together through events. And the people I would personally serve the most are community builders and event organizers because they took upon themselves to bring people together.
The event industry is hitting a wall right now. We are all pretending that things are back to normal but the reality is that most organizers are running on fumes. The demand for people to get together is higher than ever but the money and the help to make it happen have basically vanished. We are stuck in a cycle where we are expected to pull off miracles with half the budget and a fraction of the team we had five years ago.
The old way of just throwing a big party and hoping for the best is dead. Today if you cannot prove exactly why an event was worth the money you are probably going to lose your budget next year. It is a stressful time to be a builder because the stakes have never been higher while the support has never been lower. We have to stop treating events like one-off projects and start looking at the bigger picture of how we keep people together.
I have spent a lot of time lately looking at why some groups are thriving while others are falling apart. The ones winning are not the ones with the biggest venues. They are the ones who have stopped trying to do everything manually and started focusing on deep engagement. We need a way to make the technical side of this job invisible so we can get back to the actual work of connecting people.
This year has been a big learning experience for me. Not the kind you read about in books, but the kind you only learn by getting things wrong and fixing them.
One of the biggest lessons was realizing that we shouldn’t be building for “organizations” as an idea. We should be building for the people doing the actual work.
The person staying up late trying to coordinate 20 vendors for a gala.
The community manager working hard to keep a Facebook group from turning into a spam mess.
The organizer juggling too many tools just to keep things from falling apart.
These are the people who really feel the pain of broken and fragmented systems. Not in theory, but every single day.
Once we started thinking this way, a lot changed. We stopped asking what looks good on paper and started asking what actually makes someone’s life easier.
I’m still learning. Still making mistakes. But this shift has been one of the most important ones.
Curious to hear from you.
What’s the hardest part of the project you’re working on right now?
We spend a lot of time talking about content strategy, algorithms, and reach. But somewhere along the way, we stopped talking to actual people.
One of the biggest lessons I learned early on is that growth doesn’t come from posting more. It comes from connection. When people can find each other, talk to each other, and continue the conversation, something real starts to form.
After events, this becomes even more important. When a community member can message a speaker directly, ask a follow-up question, or connect with someone they met, trust builds. Momentum carries forward instead of fading.
Over time, I’ve come to rely on a simple three-step way to think about community activation.
Most communities focus on the first step. Some think about the second. Very few design for the third. And yet, that’s where relationships actually form.
Features matter less than we think. Access matters more than we admit.
So here’s a question worth asking.
What is the one community feature you use that no one else talks about?
One thing I’ve learned from watching communities grow and fade is that tools shape behavior more than we realize.
There is a real difference between systems that unify people and systems that fragment them. When events live on one platform and communities live on another, we are unintentionally creating distance. Each new link, login, or app becomes a small hurdle.
Most people don’t consciously decide to disengage. They just fall off along the way. Research and experience both point to the same pattern. Every forced move between platforms can cost you a meaningful percentage of your audience. This is what I think of as the migration gap.
What’s interesting is that this has very little to do with interest or loyalty. It has everything to do with friction.
When participation feels continuous, relationships deepen. When it feels fragmented, even the most engaged people slowly disappear.
This idea has shaped how I think about events, communities, and digital spaces in general. People shouldn’t have to keep starting over. Identity, relationships, and momentum should carry forward.
If you’re planning an upcoming event or thinking about building a community around what you do or even just an idea you’ve been sitting on, I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned. Feel free to reach out and I'll be more than happy to help.
