#community#mistakes
The mistakes I made as Head of Community
I built the play2match community brick by brick. And I got plenty wrong (relax, it's not a bug in the journey: it is the journey 😅).
For months I was Head of Community while also doing everything else: marketing, operations, content. Now the play2match community is moving to a dedicated person, and before the memories fade I've lined up the mistakes that taught me the most.
For each one you'll find how it really went, what I figured out and what I do now. No theory: stuff lived on the field, in the group chats and sometimes at eleven at night with my phone in my hand.
Mistake 01
Growing before having a story
- How it went
- The community was growing, matches were filling up. But whoever joined didn't find an “us”: no origin story, no founding moment, no name. We had never recognised the first people who were there, in front of everyone.
- What I figured out
- A community isn't born when people take part, it's born when they can tell their own story. Without an origin, newcomers only find a service that works. And if all they find is a service, you pile up customers, not crew.
- What I do now
- We canonise the first ones: we celebrate them in public and keep an archive of the origins, with photos, messages and stories. Whoever shows up today has to be able to hear someone say “I was there”.
Mistake 02
Confusing an active community with a resilient one
- How it went
- Matches worked, and so did events. But only if those of us on the team were there. Take us out and everything stopped.
- What I figured out
- They're two very different things. An active community needs you every night; a resilient one holds up even if you disappear. The test I put myself through now is brutal: if I disappeared for three months, would the crew survive?
- What I do now
- Every ritual has to be repeatable without whoever invented it. If a piece only works when I'm there, it's a piece to redesign.
Mistake 03
Staying the engine of everything
- How it went
- For weeks I played a ton with people. It gave me a crazy charge and brought us direct feedback and real relationships. But the community was leaning on us, it wasn't walking on its own.
- What I figured out
- As long as people react to your ideas, you have engagement. When they start proposing, organising and creating without you, you have belonging. And always being on the field, as fun as it is, holds back the second one.
- What I do now
- We decided to play a bit less, on purpose. The community should live a life of its own. I stay close, but one step back.
Mistake 04
Leaving the people who lead matches without tools
- How it went
- Our Lead Matchers were good, really good. But they had no shared tools to read the mood of the community: everyone went by feel.
- What I figured out
- If the person running the evening has no method, quality depends on the person. And whatever depends on the person doesn't scale.
- What I do now
- Guidelines for the post-match, rules for rotating people before the game, written procedures for Lead Matchers. Not very visible and not very instagrammable stuff, but it's what makes the welcome the same for everyone.
Mistake 05
Making the most loyal people feel like guests
- How it went
- The people who showed up the most, the ones who were always there, felt like guests in our house. The line that reached us was more or less this: “but I'm nobody, you're the ones who count”.
- What I figured out
- If the people who are always there feel like nobody, you're the one who got it wrong, not them. We had never given them a place in the story.
- What I do now
- We bring them into tests, give them early access, listen to them more than anyone else. And we protect them from overload: they're not staff, they're crew with a status.
Mistake 06
Not distributing status
- How it went
- Someone who'd played dozens of matches looked no different, in any way, from someone showing up for the first time. Zero visible differences.
- What I figured out
- Without recognition, even the most involved people stay passive. Culture works like this: good behaviour, recognition, emulation, culture. Skip recognition and the whole chain stops.
- What I do now
- A visible, soft hierarchy: Newcomer → Matcher → Super Matcher → Lead Matcher, recognised in front of everyone and not just with a discount. Plus rotating micro-roles, like the photographer of the night or the one who welcomes newcomers.
Mistake 07
Taking trust for granted
- How it went
- People gave us things you can't buy: time, energy, reputation, friends brought along to matches. We handled that trust well, but we didn't make it visible.
- What I figured out
- Trust that never gets a thank-you becomes the norm. And when the norm gets let down even a little, the reaction isn't “oh well”: it's cynicism.
- What I do now
- We thank people in public, by name, often. It looks like a small thing. It really isn't.
Mistake 08
Mistaking frequency for ritual
- How it went
- We thought seeing each other every week was enough to create something. We saw each other a lot, but not everything left a mark.
- What I figured out
- Frequency creates routine, ritual creates meaning. A ritual isn't a repeated event: it has a shape, an emotional charge and a memory that stays.
- What I do now
- We design a few moments and do them well, with a recognisable beginning and end. Reset, the start-of-year event with the community in Turin and Bologna, was born that way.
Mistake 09
Not giving the community a home
- How it went
- The evenings were great, but they ended that same night. There was no place, not even a symbolic one, where what happened could stay.
- What I figured out
- A community lives in the present, but it's built on the past. Without shared memory, no culture. Without culture, no legacy. And without legacy, every new person walks into something empty.
- What I do now
- We tell the crew's story in our content, we give it a face, and at the office we've started thinking about a corner that tells our story, full of objects from a journey that's short today but that we imagine will be very, very long.
Mistake 10
Collecting feedback without closing the loop
- How it went
- We asked for opinions, read them, even worked on them. But we didn't always go back to people to tell them what we'd changed thanks to them.
- What I figured out
- Asking for an opinion and then vanishing teaches people that speaking up is pointless. Feedback is fuel only if the loop gets closed.
- What I do now
- At least once a month, per city, a “we changed this thanks to you” said in public, specific and direct. Since we started doing it, feedback comes in richer and more often.
Mistake 11
Treating a crisis as just an operations problem
- How it went
- In April a sports centre in Turin changed its court bookings and things got badly out of sync. I fixed the bookings by hand, contacted the people involved one by one, handled the refunds. And then I wrote in the group chat to apologise.
- What I figured out
- Solving the problem isn't enough. What counts is how people experience it: sentiment is part of the product. On crisis days you go from founder to customer care with no way to delegate, and that's how it should be.
- What I do now
- When something goes wrong, the first thing I do is talk to people, then I fix the rest. And once a week I sit in on customer care to see where the experience jams before it turns into a crisis.
If I had to sum it all up in one line: a community that always needs you isn't a community yet. The real work is making yourself a little unnecessary, one piece at a time.
I go into how to fix all this in How to build a legacy and Building community on the field.
MEMENTO MORI – Tabba 🔥