Cultivating a Foreigner Mindset: Key Steps to Start a Community from Scratch
Embodying the Foreigner Mindset will help you better understand your community (and yourself) before throwing events and activities at them.
Note: this article contains a ton of content from my book Hacking Communities, chapters 4 and 14 meshed and updated into one thing.
Building a community from scratch is like hosting a house party after moving to a new city where you feel like a complete stranger. You'll have a hard time finding people to invite unless you go out and make some friends first.
When starting anew, picture yourself as a foreigner and do your homework:
First, explore. While building a home for yourself (defining your core values, crafting your story), go out and explore the city.
Find people and places that resonate with you. Relevance is crucial at the start, start from those that represent you the most. Make friends, not contacts.
Honor the elderly, respect your peers. Respect existing key players, influencers and community leaders in the area (learn from them). Don’t compete, collaborate.
Give first. Once you learn where and how you can add more value to people, start taking action. Invite people to your “house warming party”.
In more detail…
First, get to know the city. While you get settled at a new house, making yourself at home, go out and discover places that feel good. You'll have a hard time finding people to invite unless you go out and make some friends first.
On the way, your choices will lead you to meet people you resonate with, and these people may lead you in the right direction.
If you are an artsy person, you'll probably make more friends by exploring a few exhibitions in town, finding and following your favorite artists, than by going to the same local sports bar every day. While you might meet some interesting people at the bar, or anywhere, there's a higher chance of serendipity if you intentionally find places and people that speak for the things you care for, the most.
When building communities, you're not alone: someone has either thought about it, started, or grown a community bringing together a similar profile of people. Even if you are starting anew with a different value proposition to the same group, I highly advise connecting with those who stood before you and with other community builders, influencers, and creators in your space.
Most importantly, offer gratitude and respect to those who resonate with you and help open doors that, without them, would take weeks to find.
New York is the 11th city I have moved to (since 2010). This learning recounts of all the times in life when being a foreigner felt like an advantage, instead of a fallback.
While living in Malaysia (2014-2018), I hosted three different gatherings some weeks and bumped into someone wherever I went. Then, my connection to the local and global startup community extended beyond borders to places like Bangkok, Tokyo, and Singapore - where I landed knowing a few people and soon partnered with local friends to host gatherings from small to large.
I emphasize the importance of adding value to the community and organizing friends who'd help me "hack" my way into a new city.
Find your masters and peers. That's the first step of Community Mapping.
Embrace the Opportunity to Begin Again
Every new start is an opportunity to surround yourself with people who bring you closer to your best version. It is essential to curate by relevance when starting a new community. In the process, dive deeper into your mission by aligning it with the greater context. Examine the problem you are here to fix.
Who else is currently addressing this problem?
How are they now solving the same problem?
If you did not exist, how else would people solve this problem?
Write down the names of people, places, and products related to your core, solve a similar problem, or share the same ideals for life. They could become friends, partners, or speakers in the future.
Facing Competitors as Collaborators
Making friends with people who are trying to solve the same problem you are is beneficial - both for a faster solution and satisfaction of all parties involved.
Easier said than done, this is more common in a community-first context (e.g., grassroots or government startup ecosystem building) than in business, but a mindset of collaboration over competition could be lucrative.
I learned this first-hand when I built my first business (8Spaces, an online marketplace for flexible workspaces). While it was one of the first in Southeast Asia, competitors soon started to pop up with similar offerings. At first, I was ready to fight — this time, it was about business, not community. But soon, I realized that my competitors were doing two things: making me work at my best and trying to solve the very problem I was passionate about solving. They made my entrepreneurial journey more exciting and pushed me to provide a better customer experience.
Essentially, my business sought to increase the quality of life at work by offering a more comprehensive range of conducive, flexible, and collaborative workspaces. If my competitors managed to solve it better or faster than me, I still won.
Moreover, the Southeast Asian market was big enough for all of us. Our real competitor was an obsolete commercial real estate industry. We pushed it to innovate and provide better office space solutions by optimizing idle spaces.
In time, my business was acquired by my largest competitor, thanks to whom the company I started has been thriving across Southeast Asia since 2015.
Be the Foreigner: Going From Strangers to Friends
Embodying the Foreigner Mindset will help you better understand your community (and yourself) before throwing events and activities at them. It includes:
Being curious. It's not about you. It's about them. You want to know everything about their tastes: what they like, who they are, and where they come from.
Being open to change. Try that new type of food, attend a music concert you otherwise wouldn't, or watch that movie you'd never pick. You are also getting to know yourself by accepting to listen and daring to do new things.
Adding value first. In understanding others better, you can offer experiences they might truly enjoy. Create spaces where you can be your most authentic self, allowing them to feel vulnerable and safe around you. Build a home for all of you.
Cultivate the Foreigner Mindset
When you are a foreigner, you learn to observe your environment acutely.
Traveling alone for several years taught me a lot about safety. I am physically unthreatening, with thin wrists and below-average height. I helped myself feel safe in different places by connecting with people.
I learned to scan my environment for similarities and differences between strangers and me. In a nutshell, for critical points of connection.
You don't need to dig deep to find that you both feel hungry frequently, and you probably enjoy sharing your meals with people you care for. You both have a heart and lungs. You're both humans. I know this sounds cliché, but we share a lot before even considering where we came from, the color of our skin, what causes us, or the team we stand for.
A quote often attributed to William Butler Yeats (except he might have never said it) cuts it to the chase: "There are no strangers here; only friends you haven't yet met." I'm grateful to the stranger who framed it so simply.
To belong fast, let go of predefined labels (anything that defined you in the place where you came from, because it might mean nothing where you're going). From my first experience living abroad, I learned to follow these practical steps:
Accept that you are a foreigner. The crazy one. Learn to listen and observe.
Identify ways to communicate (even if you don't speak the same language) and start by giving first. Make friends.
Always assume that people are willing to welcome you as one of them.
You Don’t Need to Cross the Ocean
"If you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself."― Joseph Campbell
You don't need to cross the ocean to start a new and better community.
While moving from a little town to a big city is a great way to welcome more freedom of expression into your life, it is not necessary to become more authentic.
Take small, daily steps that lead you closer to people you resonate with, wherever you are. It doesn't matter if you cross the ocean, move to a new city, or try a different cafe. Get out of the place where you feel stagnated with a specific brand or role. You don't need to fly hundreds of miles to have this experience. We can experience having a cultural abyss within our neighborhoods.
You don't need to cross an ocean to be curious about people. Look at people around you as if it were the first time. To build communities within a familiar context:
Start by erasing everything you think you know about yourself and everything you assume about your neighbors.
Break predefined labels that create an illusion of knowing each other.
Start anew and see what happens.
To start a new relationship, you must open up to getting to know the new person you're into. You might even be open to trying new things, like that Japanese restaurant you never visited because you don't like seafood. You might learn new things about yourself in getting to know the other person.
New people can bring out unknown aspects of you. It does not mean they are changing who you are, only bringing up the things hidden deep inside or fast asleep. Whatever resonates relates to something you already have inside. We are like pianos made of flesh and bone. Each person owns a collection of diverse strings, but we can live a life without some ever being played. When we meet people who strike one of those intact chords, the sound can either thrill us or scare us.
Building communities is like building collective relationships. Similar to making new friends or falling in love with someone new, it might challenge you to meet unique, unknown aspects of yourself.
Getting to Commitment
Getting into a new relationship with someone, from the moment of attraction to the moment you commit to each other as friends, partners, or anything else, means daring to find new versions of yourself. It means walking together from "what" brings you together to "why" you stay together. A relationship is only real when the people involved are constantly interacting, having regular conversations and listening to each other, sharing time, space, food, or experiences, daring to grow together, and never taking commitment for granted.
Commitment is a belief shared by two or more people. Underneath it, genuine care actually gets them to stick together, translated into continued interactions, conversations, and mutual exchanges. At its core, what matters in community building is building relationships based on authenticity, where everyone feels like giving their best and caring for each other.
Your community might have greater value than your product or service. In the end, it is what gives people a solid reason to stick with you through thick and thin.