When Complexity Breeds Community - Making Connections by Jax

These communities provide the perfect entry point for new sign-ups, bridging the complexity gap by providing hints and tips on how to get to your aha moment quickly.

In fact, if these teams had onboarding templates and tool-tips at the start, they wouldn’t have achieved the viral growth and depth of UGC because, for the early users, that complexity turns the onboarding into a game.

You need to invest time and effort to understand how the game works and unlock new levels.

This is such an interesting way to look at product design, and it really runs counter to the general advice you hear all the time.

What if I told you simplicity didn't have to be the goal?

What if I told you your users will make all of the on boarding tools you ever need? They would be happy to do it!

And this does help create die hard fans. As a blogger and YouTuber, I'm always looking to create content that can help people, and services like Roam and Notion need their communities to do that, and when you write a post or make a video about one of these things, it makes you more invested too.

Complexity won't work for everyone, and I'd probably argue that it only works in rare cases, but the rise of these services in recent years sure has been fun to watch.