The “Three Essentials of Community Operations” is a framework Raymond Hou presented in a series of long articles on the 柚智夫妻 WeChat public account from late 2019 to early 2020. At the time, Raymond worked in product operations at Beijing’s sports-internet company Keep. Before that, he had worked in customer success at a Taiwanese enterprise collaboration SaaS company. These experiences led him to break the operations role into three components: human nature, marketing, and business. This was his earliest developed methodology for a Community Manager, and one source of the ideas he later used to run the Raymond Weekly subscription community and paid memberships. Related concepts appear in Business Thinking and Super Individual.
The Problem: A Misunderstood Role
The series began with Raymond’s observation of the market. After looking through job sites and workplace communities, he found that “community operations” in the Chinese-speaking world was almost synonymous with “WeChat group operations.” Daily work meant sending red envelopes, holding prize drawings, dropping product links, removing and adding members, and organizing check-in activities. Raymond called this using a traffic mindset to cover up strategic laziness: repetitive work requiring little skill or thought, and work that could eventually be replaced by machines.
He attributed this partly to limitations inherent in WeChat. Group chats create pressure for immediate replies, content cannot be accumulated, and the product’s friend-based social structure means that forcefully adding strangers often creates a “dead group.” Marginal costs rise, leaving only a numbers game driven by more people. This is Raymond’s core judgment about the constraints of the WeChat ecosystem: mainstream social products lack good ways to hold content, making it difficult for communities to develop trust and shared identity; they eventually fall back on in-person gatherings.
Core Framework: Three Essentials of Operations
Raymond argues that the operations role consists of three essential elements. All three are necessary; splitting them into overly narrow specialties creates fragmented thinking and an employee mindset.
- Human nature: Understand why people gather. People are not only looking for a product; they are looking for shared identity and a sense of belonging, and want to contribute to things they care about.
- Marketing: Use thoughtful design to give users immersion, memorable peak experiences, and topics worth discussing, rather than sending content one-way.
- Business: Understand the brand and business model, and manage users’ long-term value (LTV greater than CPA) through retention, repeat purchases, and referrals that generate long-tail revenue.
On this basis, he distinguishes two roles that are often confused. A Social Media Manager handles “content problems,” aiming for steady publishing and user growth. A Community Manager handles “the connection between people and the brand,” aiming to turn users from buyers into active builders. Raymond sums up the difference between community and media this way: a community “gathers a group of people to do something,” while what most people do is “you do something for a group of people”—which is really just media. 1
A Test: Which Companies Should Build a Real Community?
Raymond offers three criteria to determine whether a brand should build a real community rather than a private traffic pool:
- Brand values: It has values that can make society better, which provide the community’s driving force.
- Product structure: It can control user data online and hold real gatherings offline.
- Long-tail business: Its business model relies on retention, repeat purchases, and promotion, rather than advertising revenue earned purely from traffic.
He compares this with alumni associations at prestigious universities: a prestigious university already has brand values and a long-tail model, so graduates voluntarily contribute to building the brand without pay. Conversely, a brand that mainly earns from traffic has less need to operate a community.
Supporting Cases
The series cross-references several brands. Lululemon turns retail stores into community spaces through “brand ambassadors” and weekend yoga clubs, using the value of “self-growth” to build a brand following in a crowded market. Taiwan’s electric scooter brand Gogoro turns both “brand” and “community” as two wheels, with owners organizing “flash-mob Taipei Bridge” events and adopting battery-swapping stations, making users into brand ambassadors. Raymond also discusses Keep and the Dedao app from that period: both had strong values, owned user data, and long-tail business models, making them brands with community potential in his view.
Connection to Later Practice
This people-centered approach, emphasizing belonging and long-tail value, foreshadowed Raymond’s later choices in the Super Individual direction: leave one-off traffic tactics behind and use newsletters and paid subscriptions to build long-term relationships with readers. Judgments such as “treat users as individuals, not as traffic or a user segment” and “letting users contribute to a brand is more valuable than offering discounts” became enduring principles in his later subscription and membership operations. They can be compared with Two Paths to Monetizing Writing.
“A true Community Manager converts a traffic mindset into a people-centered mindset, focusing on human connection and building real relationships between a brand and its users.” (柚智夫妻 public account, 2020-01-08) 2
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “A WeChat Group Is Not a Community! How Do Lululemon and Square-Dancing Grannies Build Communities?” WeChat public account, 2019-11-27. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “The Misunderstood Community Operations Job,” WeChat public account, 2020-01-08. View original ↩