Why 'releasing' ClubHub is better than 'launching' it
The launch that nobody came to
I’ve watched this happen more than once in volunteer organisations. Someone builds something good, a new website, a communication platform, a booking system, and then announces it to everyone at once. Big email. Agenda item at the AGM. Maybe a presentation with screenshots. The message is: look what we’ve built, come and use it.
And then almost nobody does. The people who do show up arrive cold. They’re responding to the announcement, not to a need they already felt. They poke around for five minutes, don’t immediately see the point, and leave. The handful of enthusiasts who helped build it are left wondering why nobody cares. The sceptics, who showed up specifically to find fault, now have ammunition: “See? Nobody wants this.”
The problem isn’t what was built. The problem is how it was introduced. A big launch invites everyone at once, which means the room is full of people at different levels of enthusiasm, different levels of understanding, and different levels of willingness to invest effort. The enthusiasts get drowned out by the indifferent majority, and the sceptics set the tone.
The room is ready. Nobody’s coming. Photo: Pexels
Release, don’t launch
There’s a useful distinction between launching and releasing. You launch a rocket. You release a bird. The rocket needs everything to be perfect at the moment of ignition, because the whole world is watching and there’s no second chance. The bird takes flight when it’s ready, finds its own way, and nobody needs to be impressed by the first wingbeat.
Taking flight happens naturally, when the time is right. Photo: Pexels
Seth Godin makes this point in This Is Marketing: the most effective way to grow anything is to start with the smallest viable audience, the people who already want what you’re offering, and let them carry it outward. “People like us do things like this” describes how ideas actually spread through communities. People adopt things because the people they trust have already adopted them.
A release works with that dynamic instead of against it. Instead of announcing to everyone and hoping for the best, you start with the people who are already interested and let them bring in more people like themselves. Each new person arrives having been personally invited by someone they know, someone who’s already using the thing and can explain why it matters. They arrive warm, not cold.
The invitation as a filter
This is the part that feels counterintuitive. Restricting access seems like it would slow growth. In practice, it accelerates it, because every person who arrives through a personal invitation is pre-qualified.
When a volunteer invites someone they know, they’re doing something a mass announcement can’t do: filtering for quality. They know the person. They know that person will appreciate the purpose of what’s been built. They know that person will contribute rather than just observe. The new arrival doesn’t need to be convinced or trained or sold to. They’ve already been told by someone they trust that this is worth their time, and that they belong here.
Access given personally, not broadcast to everyone at once. Photo: Pexels
Compare that to the big launch, where everyone shows up at once and the room includes enthusiasts, the mildly curious, and the actively hostile, all given equal weight. The enthusiasts can’t build momentum because they’re spending their energy managing sceptics. Everett Rogers’ research on how innovations spread through communities found exactly this pattern: early adoption succeeds when it happens within trusted networks, not through broadcast announcements.
How Facebook did it
Facebook’s early growth is the most famous example of this approach in action, and it’s worth understanding why it worked.
When Facebook started in 2004, you needed a Harvard email address to sign up. Then it opened to other Ivy League universities. Then any university. Then workplaces. It took years before the general public could join. At every stage, new users arrived and found a community that already worked, people they knew, conversations already happening, a reason to stay.
Facebook understood something that most organisations miss: a network is only valuable if the people like you are already there. If you open the doors to everyone on day one, the network is empty and nobody has a reason to come back. If you build it in layers, each new layer arrives to find something worth joining.
The staged rollout wasn’t a limitation. It was the strategy. Growth was exponential precisely because it was controlled.
What this looks like for ClubHub
ClubHub is in its early phase right now, and we’re deliberately taking the release approach rather than the launch approach.
The first people using it are the enthusiasts, the club committee members and CAQ volunteers from pilot clubs who see the value of having a shared space for club-facing resources, discussions, and operational support. These people don’t need to be convinced. They’re already in because they want to be, and they’re willing to put up with the rough edges that come with anything new. They’re building the conversations, testing the tools, and creating the content that the next wave of users will find when they arrive.
This is the embedding phase. The enthusiasts set the tone. They create the norms for how ClubHub is used, what kind of discussions happen there, what’s valuable and what isn’t. When the next group arrives, they don’t walk into an empty room. They walk into a working community with established patterns, useful content, and people who can show them around.
Think of your own club. When a new member walks in and finds an active, welcoming group already playing, they settle in quickly. When they walk in and find an empty clubhouse with a sign that says “members wanted,” the experience is very different. ClubHub works the same way.
The three waves
Every gradual release follows roughly the same pattern:
- The builders. The enthusiasts who arrive first, invest effort, and create the value. They tolerate imperfection because they believe in what’s being built. They set the example for everyone who follows.
- The middle wave. The people who arrive and find something that already works. They didn’t need to be there from the start, but they can see what the builders have created and they want in. Their arrival validates the builders’ effort and adds momentum.
- The last wave. The sceptics. They need to see a system that’s already proven, already populated, already obviously useful. They won’t jump over barriers, but they don’t need to, because the barriers have been removed by everyone who came before them. The benefits are demonstrated, not promised.
Each wave reaches further than the last. Photo: Pexels
The sceptics aren’t a problem in this model. They’re the final confirmation that the release worked. When the people who would never have joined early are joining because they can see it’s working, that’s the end game.
The discipline of patience
The hardest part of a release strategy is resisting the urge to announce. It feels slow. It feels like you’re leaving people out. Every instinct says “if we just told everyone, we’d grow faster.” But the evidence says otherwise, and the Facebook example is only one of many. Gmail launched as invite-only in 2004 and stayed that way for years. Slack grew through team-by-team adoption, not enterprise-wide announcements. The pattern repeats because it works.
Growth that lasts starts small and steady. Photo: Pexels
For ClubHub, the discipline is the same. Invite the people who want to be here. Let them build something worth joining. And when the time is right, the next wave will come because someone they trust told them it was worth their time.
That’s how you grow a community. Not with a bang, but with a steady, widening circle of people who chose to be there.