Community Landscape Sponge Mode
Map a community by interviewing insiders before choosing channels or partners.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Sponge mode is an exploratory research process for entering an unfamiliar community. The operator begins by admitting what they do not know and interviewing people across the team to collect their perspectives. The investigation then expands outward: locate where prospective participants spend time, identify the conversations and issues occupying them, and map the people or groups that shape those conversations. Creators, established communities, and distinct social bubbles become possible partnership or distribution routes. Manual observation is valuable during this phase because it exposes patterns that a predefined dashboard may miss. The resulting landscape map guides outreach and may also reveal a broader unmet need, as it did when Yuliya Bel and her co-founder found that teams lacked suitable community intelligence tools.
Origin
At a crypto startup, Yuliya Bel entered “sponge mode” to learn community building from scratch. Her questions led to a landscape-mapping process and ultimately to the idea behind Notice.
Core principles
- 01Enter an unfamiliar market as a learner rather than an expert.
- 02Team members hold different fragments of the community map.
- 03Finding people is insufficient without understanding what influences them.
- 04Creators, communities, and social bubbles can all provide distribution paths.
How to run it
- 1
Declare the Knowledge Gap
List what the team does not yet know about the target community, including its locations, concerns, and influential participants.
Pro tip Convert each uncertainty into a research question.
Watch out Do not begin with a fixed channel strategy based on assumptions.
- 2
Interview Internal Insiders
Speak with every relevant teammate and collect their observations, contacts, and hypotheses about the community.
Pro tip Ask the same core questions across interviews so patterns become visible.
Watch out One department's view is unlikely to represent the whole landscape.
- 3
Observe Community Spaces
Spend time in the forums, feeds, communities, and social bubbles where relevant conversations occur. Record recurring topics and prominent voices.
Pro tip Observe before pitching so normal behavior remains visible.
Watch out Follower counts alone do not establish conversational influence.
- 4
Map Influence and Partnerships
Connect target participants to the creators, communities, and subjects that influence them. Mark credible routes through which the team could contribute.
Pro tip Prioritize relationships where the team can provide real value.
Watch out Do not reduce the map to a list of people to cold-message.
- 5
Extract Strategic Gaps
Look across the map for repeated problems, missing tools, or underserved connections that could shape the product or go-to-market plan.
Pro tip Validate a suspected gap with multiple participants before building.
Watch out An internal inconvenience is not automatically a market-wide problem.
In the wild
A startup entering an open-source market interviews engineers, advocates, and support staff, then observes relevant GitHub projects, forums, and creator channels. It maps recurring technical concerns and discovers that users rely on two trusted maintainers for implementation guidance.
→ The company partners with credible maintainers and creates content around verified user concerns instead of launching generic promotions.
Common mistakes
Confusing a Contact List With a Map
Names alone do not explain relationships, current concerns, influence, or the spaces in which conversations happen.
Pitching During Observation
Immediate promotion prevents the team from learning how the community behaves and what it values without interference.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early-stage teams entering a market whose participants, influences, and gathering places are not yet understood.
Not ideal for
Teams seeking instant scale without allocating time for exploratory interviews and manual observation.
From the transcript
“I went into the sponge mode and I said, Hey, like, I'm gonna learn everything it is that it takes to run a community, it…”
“So I started talking to every single person on the team and just getting their thoughts.”
“How do we go and understand what influences them?”
From the episode
Becoming a Community-Driven Company with Yuliya Bel
Yuliya Bel