Community Building Trends for 2026 with Becky Pierson Davidson

**Becky Pierson Davidson** (0:00)
This grad weekend experience is something that we've continued doing. The last cohort, we had 66% of the cohort show up, and we're close to, like, 100 people in a cohort, to give you an idea. And they're traveling from all over the world. Even the people abroad are, like, coming to this LA weekend.

**Jay Clouse** (0:30)
Hello, my friend, welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today, I'm speaking with my good friend, Becky Pierson Davidson. Becky was last on the show in episode number 197 in June of 2024 when we recorded with Chanel Basilio at Kits Craft and Commerce Conference. That episode was all about building raving fans, and it was a listener favorite, so we were overdue to bring Becky back. Becky is a community-driven product strategist and founder of Affinity Collective, helping six, seven, and eight-figure online businesses build transformative memberships and courses through design thinking and data-driven customer research. She also hosts a podcast called Build with Becky that's a voicenote style show all about community. Becky and I share a lot of beliefs when it comes to community and membership-based products, and she's really doubled down on this over the last few years, so I thought it would be fun to compare notes and see if there were any areas of disagreement between us, and spoiler, we found a couple. In this episode, we talk about the current state of online community, trends she's seeing in 2026, what successful communities are doing right now, and some warnings for anyone running or thinking about running a community business today. Becky has been a longtime member of the Lab, one of our first, and speaking of Craft and Commerce, we are hosting the Lab's next two-day offline event in Boise, ahead of Kits Craft and Commerce Conference again this year in June. We already have over 30 members of the community RSVP'd, and we'd love for you to join us. It's only available to standard and VIP members of the Lab. So to learn more and apply, visit creatorscience.com/lab. That's creatorscience.com/lab.
There's a link in the show notes to learn more. We'll get to that conversation with Becky right after this.

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**Jay Clouse** (3:19)
We're obviously going to talk a lot about community and memberships today, but I thought we would start by defining some terms. So everybody is on the same page. So when you say the word community, what does that mean to you?

**Becky Pierson Davidson** (3:32)
Well, in the broad sense, community is about bringing people together that have some kind of shared interest or goal. But when I talk about community in the context of my work, I think about community a lot as a product versus as a marketing growth engine to help grow a business or as like WhatsApp chat with your friends about your fantasy football league. Like I think about it more in the context of treating it as a product in your business and something that you really nurture and improve over time. But I think that's a me definition.

**Jay Clouse** (4:07)
Well, no, this is why it's useful because we're talking to you. So when you say community, we want to know what you mean by that. To kind of zoom in on that a little bit more, you've worked with folks who have very large audiences. And so what line do you draw between community and audience?

**Becky Pierson Davidson** (4:24)
I don't think about audience as community, which I know is maybe a hot take. But it's not a community unless you're nurturing relationships and connecting people to one another. So an audience is very, I think these are your words, actually. You always say one-to-many or one-to-one. It's a very one-to-many experience.

**Jay Clouse** (4:44)
It's like a one-to-one many times. Yes, yes, that's it. I agree, yeah. When I say community, I think there are inherent peer-to-peer conversations, connections, relationships happening. It's all of the connecting points inside of a network. Rather than a broadcast one-to-one many times. So I agree with that. Okay, cool. Well, I want to talk today about where community is, where it's headed, where it has left, because it's a new year and I do feel, I'm certainly thinking about this more and more in the age of AI, both because AI feels very anti-human in a lot of ways, and because I think it's going to have a very destructive effect on course businesses, and I think a lot of people are thinking, okay, this is where I'm moving. Are you seeing the same? Are you seeing community as a rising business model?