Our Product is the Community. (Revisited)

As you may know, we’ve spent much of the summer reviewing our courses - going back over written feedback and having one-to-one conversations with former students about what worked, what didn’t, what they valued and what we could do better. It’s been incredibly helpful, and a huge thank you to everyone who has given us their time.

As part of this, we’ve been looking back over blogs we’ve written. I was re-reading a blog we wrote years ago and it struck me that, despite how much has changed at WildStrong - and how often over the years it has felt like we were feeling around in the dark trying to work out what we were building - this still feels true.

Our product is the community.

That was the title of the blog. So I thought I’d re-share it - what follows is some of what we wrote at the time. There are bits that feel dated now - we were still thinking about WildStrong largely as a network of local groups and experimenting with a franchise model - but I was surprised by how much of the thinking behind it still holds true.

We went to Dragon's Den in 2024. It remains one of the most toe-curlingly embarrassing experiences of my life. There was plenty about the whole farce of a filming day that I’d happily forget, but one thing from the grilling we received has stuck with us - they absolutely didn’t get it. Reading this now, you might think that should have been entirely obvious… And, in hindsight, it probably was. But at the time we thought they might get it - just a bit. But they kept trying to understand WildStrong as a fitness business. How many classes could we run? How many people could we fit into them? How could we standardise what we did? How could we make it more efficient? How could we scale it?  Not unreasonable questions and I understand the need for a clear definition, but was dismissive of this summary. They missed the thing that made it work in the first place - our aim is to build a healthy, supportive, sustainable community. It’s not a very sexy offer to the TV investors.

One of our main goals at WildStrong is to avoid the standard, top-down, pyramidal structures of other exercise groups. We emphasise that our coaches are facilitators, who provide the environment for other people to learn and grow. We want to avoid the cult of the ‘coach’ by building the knowledge and capabilities of our community members. Ultimately we hope that every WildStrong community can train other coaches from within and eventually shift to community-led classes, enabling the founding coaches to participate in classes as a member and not just think of their role in the community as another ‘job’.

One of the tenets of our system is that there should be elements of bi-directional learning. Coaches learn from their members, WildStrong HQ learns from the coaches, and we integrate those lessons into better systems and processes. This can’t happen overnight. A new WildStrong location may function much like a traditional, though more thoughtful bootcamp for the first few weeks. New joiners won’t have developed a sense of autonomy or ownership yet. They might expect to have everything explained to them. The new coach may feel like a lot of pressure is riding on them to know everything. But over the next few months, through peer coaching, skill development,  and commiseration, new joiners become contributing members. Designing people as passive recipients of coaching works against the community we're trying to create.

You might find that some members naturally pick up movements faster than other members and their growing confidence inspires others to push themselves more. Some clients shine during peer coaching sessions, inventing new cues or developing a coach’s eye. Some clients thrive during social time and can entertain the whole group during question of the day. Some clients are quiet but dependable; they will show up to volunteer sessions and endure the wettest winter days.

A lot has changed since we first wrote this. At the time, almost everything we did happened through local WildStrong groups, and we imagined growth largely in terms of helping more of those communities develop. We now run online courses, in-person training courses and Nature Moves programmes with partner organisations, as well as our own local groups. The structures look quite different, but the principle has held up surprisingly well with the strongest programmes being places where people start to build relationships with, learn from and support one another.

As new locations develop and various strengths emerge, the founding coach should be comfortable utilising the skills and capacities of their clients. Remember that the R in the PERMA model refers to ‘relationships’. People thrive in an environment of generous reciprocity. We often get more satisfaction from doing things for other people than we do for ourselves. Our goal is to maximise interactions between members, the Wildstrong group and the larger community. The more cross connections, the more robust the community.

One of the ways we tried to put this into practice in our early WildStrong groups was through what we called ‘uncoached sessions’. As the group matured, we wanted to create opportunities for members to take more responsibility for what happened, rather than everything continuing to revolve around the founding coach.

 An uncoached or ‘informal’ session is a much more casual affair than a general class. There’s fewer moving parts; generally just a warm up and conditioning portion. The peer coaching element is embedded in the structure of the class since all members are responsible for themselves and each other. There will be an accredited coach there, but they’ll be participating as a member. 

The idea was partly practical - it took some pressure off the founding coach - but more importantly, it was another way of increasing the autonomy and ownership of members. Some people naturally became interested in facilitating these sessions, and a few eventually went on to train as coaches themselves.

The exact structures we use have changed as WildStrong has grown beyond this original local-group model, but the principle behind it remains the same - if everything depends on the coach, you haven't really built a community. We want to create opportunities for people to contribute, support one another, share what they know and gradually take more ownership of the groups they're part of.

As every coach has their strengths and weaknesses, the more coaches and facilitators you have, the more robust the community will be. Strong communities will expand what’s possible. Eventually, the community could start a gardening allotment, organise volunteer days with local organisations, or go on group adventures like camping, wildswimming, or obstacle races. This is the essence of Wildstrong: people working together to build a community around being outdoors with a shared purpose.

We've seen the same thing happen in very different formats since. People join courses because they want to get stronger, move better, learn new skills or become better coaches. But when we ask them afterwards what made the experience work, they repeatedly talk about other people - their peer group, practising together, sharing ideas, seeing somebody else struggle with the same thing, or staying connected after the course has finished.

As we’ve just passed the five-year mark, we’re looking for more ways to work at a community level, both here in the UK and further afield in Canada, the US and Australia. We’re still not sure exactly what that model looks like, but we know that growth can’t simply mean delivering more classes, training more coaches or reaching more people. If we lose the relationships, reciprocity and sense of ownership that make a community work, then we’ve lost something fundamental to WildStrong.

So, as we make changes to what we do next, we're thinking much more deliberately about how we create the conditions for positive relationships to happen - and how we help them carry on long after a course officially finishes.