There are some AWESOME podcasts for community builders who are looking for education, inspiration and even just some moral support when building communities.
I have listened to all of these podcasts and there’s something for every community builder in this list below.
Whether you’re building community for companies, your own startup, web3/NFT/DAO community or a membership subscription based business, then you’ll want to check out this list!
#1. In before the lock
This podcast is hosted by Erica Kuhl and Brian Oblinger.
I absolutely love this podcast! They talk all things community, customer experience leadership at scale. They’re both incredibly experienced in the community management world.
You can search through all their topics on their website and find podcast episodes that relate to exactly what you’re looking for.
The podcast series cover a ton of topics, hitting all the major challenges that community managers face – from the day to day ones to big strategic ones.
#2. Masters of Community with David Spinks
David Spinks is the founder of CMX. He is definitely one of the “OG” community folks that I’ve learned a lot from over my own career.
David is probably one of the best podcast interviewers that I’ve listened to when it comes to the community space. He asks the important questions and digs deeper, not to mention that he also gets some incredible guests to feature on his podcast.
#3. The People Experience Podcast
What I appreciate about this podcast is that they interview thought leaders from organisations such as NASA! They have a ton of really interesting guests on their podcast.
They also have these series called Alumni in 5, which are meant to be just quick five minute sessions with some guiding thoughts on building alumni networks.
If you’re focused on the corporate side of building communities: including building internal communities and/or alumni networks, this podcast is definitely for you.
#4. Get Together
So this is run by People & Company. They’ve actually written a book as well on how to build a community with your people, and have some crazy impressive experience in community themselves (Instagram, Creative Mornings, Ebay).
Awesome guests include Evan Hamilton from Reddit, and Todd Hansen from SXSW (South by Southwest) on how he created programming.
They talk about metrics they deep dive into the BTS army. If you don’t know who BTS is, they’re a major Korean boyband that has a huge community of fans who really rally together and have some seriously impressive achievements under their belt as a community (such as internationally translating BTS songs, supporting each other with mental health issues).
I definitely recommend adding this to your podcast list.
#5. Cohere
I really like some of the topics that Cohere cover. You can see they’ve got designing comfortable digital spaces exploring the open metaverse. I’m huge on web3, so I love topics like this.
If you’re interested in building web3 communities, then you should definitely give this podcast a listen.
#6. Community Signal
This podcast is really for more experienced online community professionals. They say if you’re working in audience engagement, association management, Dev Rel moderation dealing with trust and safety issues, then you should consider listening to their podcast.
I really liked this episode: “the community management jobs you turn down” so if you’re looking for a career in community or are a consultant it may be worth taking a look at that episode.
#7. Community Conversations
This podcast highlights community success stories from a variety of industries.
The one I want to highlight here is actually the interview with the Director of Community Documentation and User Education at Zapier. If you’re interested in learning more about how Zapier community team uses Zapier to manage their community workflows ( how Meta is that?!) I think that’s an incredible episode for community managers to listen to.
#8. Ashley Ashbee
Ashley has a podcast for entrepreneurs looking to build online communities
This podcast definitely has a heavy startup focus. So if you’re in the entrepreneur space, then you should get this podcast or listen, there a few interesting episodes in there to check out.
#9. The Community Strategy
This podcast really focuses on online community strategies. There are quite a few episodes focused on physical events (one of their latest episodes talk about the CMX summit- CMX being the community managers professional network).
There’s quite a bit about wellness and the topics are pretty varied, but as you can see, they’ve got 87 episodes so they’ve really stuck it out with tons of content shared!
#10. Membership Geeks
If you’re running a membership website and you really want to geek out on how to build a membership based community, then this is the podcast for you.
Bonus: Learning from Open Source Communities
And a little bonus episode that I recently listened to. And it really got me thinking actually, it’s an episode from the A16z podcast called Learning from Open Source Communities. If you’re interested in how web 3.0 is playing a part in community building, then this podcast episode is definitely worth a listen.
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Want to watch my video about these podcasts instead? Check it out:
If you listen to an awesome podcast about community building (or even a random episode in a podcast completely unrelated to community!) and you think I should be adding it to this list, please comment below or DM me on Twitter!