Communities 2.0: Built Around Action, Not Small Talk

01 /The Concept

Most online communities are built for conversation. Soofte is betting that conversation alone can't keep members active – and that AI-driven daily challenges are the actual engine of engagement, retention, and revenue.

The startup claims its tools can move those metrics by 5x.

The mechanism: the AI helps community administrators create daily "challenges" – prompts that motivate members to do or share something, which in turn sparks new discussions. The AI automates all the operational work around challenges: publishing them in the community feed or sending them as direct messages to members.

When a challenge lands, a member can tap a button to ask the AI for more context or clarification before deciding whether to accept or skip it.

The AI also collects performance statistics for each challenge and analyzes how it affected overall activity metrics – feeding those learnings into the design of subsequent challenges.

This works for product communities as well – communities built around a specific app or service, not just interest groups.

The default cadence structures the month into four weeks, each with a primary goal: engagement, retention, sales, and reactivation of inactive members. Within each week, the AI proposes daily challenges calibrated to advance that week's goal.

The platform is currently in beta, but communities already in the test program are seeing measurable results. Here's one community's before-and-after:

- Engagement: 368 posts/month before, 1,656 after.

- Sales: 32 per month before, 154 after.

- Reactivation: 53 lapsed members reactivated per month before, 302 after.

- Churn: 41% monthly churn before, 11% after.

Pricing is $99/month per community, or $150/month for communities using crypto-based payments.

The platform in its current form launched very recently, with the announcement posted on Product Hunt a few days ago.

02 /Why It Matters

Soofte launched earlier this year as a community marketplace – a place where people could discover communities to join and community administrators could find new members.

One month after launch, the startup pivoted. Conversations with community administrators revealed that the real pain wasn't acquiring new members.

The real pain was the daily grind of keeping existing members active. Administrators have to come up with something every day to spark engagement. Miss a day or two, and the community goes quiet and starts dying.

This problem is old and well understood. So is one of its most reliable solutions: regular challenges.

A [review from 2021](/review/soobshhestvo-na-avtopilote) covered Vibely, a platform that did exactly this – simplifying the creation and distribution of community challenges – and raised $2M. In 2022, Vibely was acquired by Kajabi, a community platform that had raised $550M, and its challenges feature was folded into Kajabi's product.

That same year, Framework ([related review](/review/obshhatsja-i-dostigat)) raised $3M for a similar platform – community challenges across topics like fitness, personal development, and more.

Framework has since evolved into a platform for building learning communities around educational courses. Its thesis: "You can only learn by doing" – so instead of encouraging passive content consumption, the platform pushes learners toward active participation. That still takes the form of challenges: sequences of simple actions learners take and receive recognition for – watch a video, complete a poll, post a journal entry, take a quiz. Simple, but effective: participants have completed more than 300,000 challenges, and course creators using Framework to boost learner engagement have collectively earned over $10M.

All of which points toward a broader insight: communities that actually work aren't built for conversation – they're built for action. The conversations follow naturally from the actions: what did you do, what did you run into, what did you learn, who needs help, who can offer it.

This is the main message of Root ([related review](/review/boltovnjoj-polzovatelej-ne-uderzhish)), which raised $9M in its first round earlier this year with the tagline "Built not just for chat, but for action."

The key insight behind Root: if a community is organized around doing things, it needs more than a chat interface – it needs good tools for planning and executing those things. Root provides an environment where community administrators and third-party developers can build action-specific apps, which are then listed on a Root marketplace and installed into any community that needs them. Root started with gaming communities, but the concept works for any community centered on doing something rather than just talking about it.

03 /Opportunities

The traditional online community model is built primarily around conversation. That was genuinely engaging once – but it's increasingly looking like it isn't anymore. Which suggests the moment has arrived to move to Communities 2.0 – built not on talk, but on regular action toward shared goals.

Those goals can be local or global, short-term or long-term, collective or individual. What they have in common: inside the community, they should decompose into a clear sequence of simple actions for members to take. Those actions then generate the conversations – what did you do, what did you encounter, what conclusions did you draw, who needs help, who can share their experience.

In Communities 2.0, engagement doesn't need to be manually sparked and sustained. You spark and sustain the actions – and the conversation takes care of itself.

One path in: start a Communities 2.0 community in a topic you genuinely care about – ideally one connected to a product you're already building or planning to build.

The other path: build the platforms that power Communities 2.0. Because – looking at what's out there – those platforms barely exist yet.

The beauty of this direction is that these platforms will likely need to be domain-specific. Every type of community activity has its own requirements and its own toolset. That's very different from Communities 1.0 platforms, which only needed profiles and a chat room and could serve any topic. The result: there can be orders of magnitude more successful Communities 2.0 platforms than there were successful 1.0 platforms.