What I’ve learned about building community through building BIES
I’ve been thinking a lot about what we’ve learned over the last year building Build In El Salvador, especially what actually makes a community sustainable.
We definitely haven’t figured everything out, but a few things are becoming clear.
1. It has to start with purpose.
A community can’t just exist to sell people things or collect members.
There has to be a reason for people to belong.
For BIES, that purpose has gradually become clearer: bring together constructive, productive, solution-oriented people who want to build in El Salvador, contribute their skills, create opportunities for themselves, and hopefully create wins for the country at the same time.
Purpose also acts as a filter. It tells you who the community is for, what values matter, and what kinds of conversations belong inside it.
2. Media creates the signal.
Once you know who you’re trying to bring together, you have to find them.
For us, that started with articles, interviews, podcasts, builder spotlights, videos, social media, and everything else we’ve experimented with.
What I’ve realized is that the media isn’t just marketing.
It’s a signal.
You put ideas into the world, and the people who resonate with those ideas start finding you.
In that sense, media becomes the first layer of community building.
3. Proximity changes everything.
This may be the biggest lesson.
There is only so much community you can build through a screen.
Once we started bringing people together through dinners, roundtables, hikes, excursions, events, and just hanging out, the relationships became much stronger.
People became friends. They started working together. Opportunities started appearing. Introductions happened naturally.
The energy from one gathering carried into the next.
That’s when the community started to compound.
And I think this matters especially because BIES is tied to a place. We aren’t trying to create a purely digital community. We’re trying to build a network of people who actually live, work, invest, create, and spend time together in El Salvador.
4. The digital community should support the physical one.
Interestingly, we almost built this backwards from how many online communities are created.
We didn’t build a giant digital community and then try to convince everyone to meet in person.
We started meeting people in real life, hosting events, building relationships, and then the WhatsApp community grew around those relationships.
Now we’re trying to figure out how to structure that digital layer better.
Different interests. Different levels of participation. Smaller groups. Better signal. More ways for people to find each other.
But I think the important thing is that the technology should support the relationships, not become the relationship.
5. Sustainability probably comes from participation, not consumption.
This is the part I’m thinking about most right now.
At some point, a community can’t depend on two or three people creating all the media, organizing every event, making every introduction, starting every conversation, and generating all the energy.
The community itself has to begin producing value.
Members organize things.
Members introduce people.
Members share knowledge.
Members start projects.
Members help each other solve problems.
Eventually, the community becomes less of an audience and more of a network.
I think that’s the stage BIES is beginning to enter now.
And that’s why I wanted to share this with the contributor group.
I’d love to start a discussion around this.
What do you think actually makes a community sustainable?
What are we doing that we should double down on?
What are we missing?
What should we stop doing?
And most importantly, how do we design BIES so that more of the energy, ideas, events, projects, and opportunities can come from the community itself rather than always coming from the center?
I think there’s something pretty powerful taking shape here. Now the question is how we structure it without killing the organic thing that made it work in the first place.