We’re incredibly excited to welcome Tom Luddington as our Founding Designer at Outverse. Tom was previously Product Designer at Softr, a leading no-code platform. He’s also a seasoned community builder, having founded and scaled The Designers League (TDL), a global community of 70,000+ creatives. We sat down to discuss his design & community journey so far.

What excited you to join Outverse?

Tom: Community has been really instrumental to my growth as a designer and maker. Building my own community and actively participating in many others has shown me how much power there is in being a part of something where — no matter where you are physically located — you have the ability to connect with others like yourself.

Joining Outverse was a no-brainer knowing that we’re focused on solving the same big issues I faced when growing my own community. I’ve seen the limitations with other tools firsthand including the lack of real customisability. With a focus on enabling high-quality interaction and collaboration, Outverse is massively levelling up the experience for online communities — which I’m super excited to be a part of.

Tell us a bit more about The Designers League and your own personal evolution as a community builder?

Tom: I created The Designers League (TDL) when I moved from London back to my home city (which has a population of around 100,000). It felt immeasurably smaller and lonelier instantly. I decided to create a Facebook group to keep in touch with university friends and peers; upon seeing my friends and their friends join also it sparked the idea that this could be so much more than simply a coping mechanism!

Several years later the community has grown to over 70,000 members, with 0 ad spend. Building TDL showed me I could wear more hats and move beyond just my skillset as purely a designer to become more of a generalist maker type.

When I started TDL, community building was less of a trend — and we certainly did not have the same amount of options when it comes to tooling as exists today. It’s a great time to start a community, but an ever increasingly hard time to build something that lasts. That’s something we’re looking to fix with Outverse.

How did you get into design and what has your journey looked like since?

Tom: When I was a teenager I played in a couple bands. I found myself enjoying tweaking our Myspace layouts (remember that?) and creating branding / merchandise more so than actually playing in a band. I taught myself all the usual tools and techniques and have never looked back.

Moving into product design happened when I launched my community and decided to build sites and products for it. Being unable to code, I had to rely on tools like WordPress to get these off the ground. The later emergence of no-code tools like Webflow, Bubble & Softr really opened my eyes to what I could make and build without significant technical overhead.

This led me into really being passionate about building tools and platforms which enable users to create more easily. My previous role at Softr saw me helping users create software without code and my new role at Outverse is a return back to my roots, building tools for the next generation of online communities.

What’s your biggest recommendation to anyone looking to build a community today?

Tom: Start with a super specific purpose; worry about expanding the scope of it later. With TDL, my initial purpose was getting feedback on design work from university peers. As we grew in size, we became more of an ell-encompassing home for designers spanning across all stages of career and experience levels.

Keeping focused helps you pinpoint the type of community member you want to attract and it also means you can focus on just doing the main function of your community really well — which is integral to keeping your community healthy and active.

Once you have an active early community you have the perfect opportunity to expand your offerings by listening to your members and discovering what they want and need.

What’s your favourite thing you’ve built?

Tom: The Designers League as a community and its various accompanying websites & products over the years. It was an amazing learning experience which taught me how to be a marketer, developer (without code!) & community manager all at the same time.

Outverse is currently in early access — sign up to our waitlist. Follow us on Twitter & LinkedIn for all the latest updates. 🪐

Q&A with Tom Luddington: Founding Designer at Outverse was originally published in Outverse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a certain magic in online communities. At their best, they are places we can find joy, learn from others and even discover a sense of belonging.

A global health crisis only further highlighted the importance of internet-based community, with the ability to connect over shared interest & passions a refuge for many.

It truly feels as if we’re at a generational moment for online community building. More than two-thirds of us actively participate in online communities and that figure is only set to rise.

Yet the options at hand are poor — with people building communities on apps originally meant for workplace communication like Slack, legacy-feeling forum software or more chat-focused tools. There’s a better way.

Escaping the noise

The gathering places of the early 2000s Internet — forums & IRC channels, ‘the open prairies of the early web’ — had a special charm and neighbourhood feeling to them: each a little different & unique.

There’s been a turn against this in recent years with people flocking to closed communities & groups for both work and play: the likes of Slack, Discord and group chats rather than large social media sites. While these products were transformational in their time and have broadened out from their origins, there are drawbacks for communities.

A huge issue we see with synchronous chat platforms is the noise and loss of context which they invite. While great for casual connection, the format of instant, short-form response & lack of overarching thread-based organisation means that discussions are easily lost within the noise. Important topics & questions are buried under an avalanche of messages and notifications. As a result, people lose track of the conversation. And they churn.

There’s certainly a place for realtime chat, which can be great for kickstarting conversations, but we believe there are better primary foundations for connecting communities.

The other big issue with existing platforms is their lack of flexibility. Community forums of old, clunky as they often were, felt authentic and special places to gather. They looked and felt different because surprisingly enough the tools they were built upon often permitted much wider customisation.

There’s a creative energy and personality this unleashed — one that feels missing in the identikit Slack communities with their incessant notification overload which we all know too well.

Building better online spaces with Outverse

If you were building a platform for communities to gather & interact today, how it would look? Our answer is that it should be focused on enabling much richer, more thoughtful & better structured discussion — which is why we’ve built modernized forums as a key foundation of Outverse communities.

Rather than the free-for-all that is synchronous chat — where every message ‘shares the same compact shape, and worse, the same level of urgency’ — the result with structured, thread-based discussion is much more intentional community spaces where conversations are better organised and more discoverable.

In addition, through draggable text blocks, shortcut commands & native embeds, we are making it much easier for people to better express themselves when composing & contributing to threads — levelling up the forum experience massively.

The second important foundation for us is empowering people to better personalize their communities. That’s why we enable custom spaces within Outverse. Here users can add advanced functional blocks to their spaces, enabling real-time collaboration, content embedding and more — all as easy as editing a document. This reduces the need for using too many tools & means more holistic control for community builders.

It’s impossible to ignore the importance of live video for communities too. Especially since 2020, realtime video has become a cornerstone way that communities are connecting. There’s an amazing serendipity in live interaction and the chance connections it offers up.

For that reason, we’ve also built live video spaces as a major foundation of Outverse. Without the need for additional tools, using Outverse communities can connect either via scheduled sessions (with seamless calendaring) or drop-in ‘spaces’.

Ultimately, we believe in offering communities the ability to configure their spaces in a way that’s unique and right for them.

Our partners & the journey ahead

We’re delighted to be backed by a stellar set of investors who bring phenomenal expertise in building and scaling communities.

We’re excited to share that we have raised a £1M preseed round led by Seedcamp and joined by Connect Ventures. We’re also supported by Nicolas Julia (founder and CEO at Sorare), Foreword.VC and The Fund, as well as founders & executives from the likes of Revolut, Dropbox, Airbnb, Songkick, Grabyo, Lyst & more. All share an immense passion in empowering the next generation of community builders.

Over the past months we’ve been working hard on our closed beta and we’re excited to be opening that up to more communities. We have huge plans in store for the rest of the year.

If you’re interested in building a better space for your community, signup to our waitlist for early access!

Team Outverse 🪐

Outverse and the future of online communities was originally published in Outverse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.