Community driven growth — a commentary on the Moon Board and “The Business of Belonging” by David Spinks
We were walking up the street at Anja’s aunt’s place in Reno, and Renate (Anja’s aunt), walked us to their neighbor’s (Gerald) house who has a large in-door 40 degree connected climbing wall in his garage, called a Moon Board.
Gerald is a huge climbing geek and works at Mesa Rim Climbing in Reno.
This got me thinking around two threads:
- Maps and territories. I’m in the middle of reading Farnham Street Mental Models, and they explain how maps are abstractions of territories. The territories are the physical space and maps are just explanations of those territories. The Moon Board has built a baseline territory (through their climbing wall) and users help build the individual maps (i.e. the climbing routes) on top of the territory.
- Community drives leverage. I’m also reading David Spinks debut book: The Business of Belonging and how to make community your competitive advantage. The Moon Board is a textbook example of how they’ve been able to build an entire community around DIY rock climbing training walls (especially during COVID where gyms were closed).
I’ll go into more detail below with these two threads.
What is the Moon Board?
The Moon Board’s super simple tagline from their site is:
Advanced indoor training for climbers since 2005
A quick primer on indoor climbing
So, climbing is pretty simple (you’ve probably been to an indoor climbing gym, but for those that haven’t). There is a series of holds on the wall, and your goal is to climb a problem. A problem is basically a pre-defined set of holds (called a route) that you climb.
Routes are rated in terms of difficulty, which I won’t go into too much detail here- but the scales for bouldering are on a V-x scale, i.e. v0, v1, v2, v3…etc.
Ok, back to the Moon Board
The Moon Board takes this indoor climbing experience, and brings it to your home, classroom, garage, anywhere you would want to place this.
A freestanding Moon Board begins at £8,000 and the DIY kit starts from £2,100.
The Moon Board App
The Moon Board App is an entire community of international climbers that can create their own routes, and share them with everyone (that has a Moon Board). Users can then rate the routes on its difficulty. The routes light up on the LEDs on the wall.
This is the interesting link I thought of regarding territories and maps. The Moon Board has given climbers a territory, and the product is the maps. User generated routes (maps) are what flood the app and allow the Moon Board community to massage and discuss the difficulty among many other things.
If you’re interested in a deeper review, you can check out this post from Gripped.
An interesting quote:
Perhaps what has made the MoonBoard most famous is its international community. Anyone that downloads the free Moon Climbing app has the ability to set any boulder problem of their choosing and grade it whatever they wish to. However, the grade of the MoonBoard problem is not fixed. Instead, it is dependent upon what other climbers think of its difficulty. As such, any user can upgrade or downgrade a climb.
The hardware
I build hardware (at Sutro), so the beauty of how easy they’ve made the DIY kit to deploy is absolutely amazing. Simply, there is:
- The holds are all standardized, and every Moon Board is the same (except for 3 vintage years they have [REPHRASE]).
- There is a WiFi I/O connector that connects the LEDs on the wall to the Moon Board cloud (and thus the app)
The standardization of the Moon Board drives community
The standardization of the Moon Board allows the hardware and software to be commoditized and brings out the real product in the Moon Board which is the community.
As is with all passionate sports, rock climbers are definitely a highly concentrated demographic. And building a community in which they can trade and build connections around the routes places a moat around the actual intellectual property which are the routes.
The next phase of community
This brings me to my latest read, The Business of Belonging by David Spinks.
The internet, social networks, and customer service drove the first phase of community engagement
In The Business of Belonging, Spinks mentions that customer service, technology, and social networks have driven users and customers to have more awareness and power on a 1:1 communications advantage.
What does this mean?
In the 1:1 communication — customers and brands can communicate with each other. If there are issues, problems you can Tweet a brand, send an email, reach out via Zendesk, or hop on a Facebook group.
The next phase is many to many communication
From Spinks:
This next phase is all about helping customers and other stake-holders connect to each other. Companies are setting themselves apart by tapping into the collective energy, knowledge, and contributions of your most passionate customers, fans, and partners. When people feel like they’re part of a community it becomes their home. They don’t want to leave. And they’ll step up to contribute and grow the community in ways you can’t image.
The real value that leverages the community is in this next phase of community building, which Moon Board has definitely tapped into.
Through distributing standardized hardware, the Moon Board was able to build an actual product around the community itself.
A conclusion
It was so great to see Gerald practice a sport that he is so passionate about. To be able to tap into community during a time when many of us were detached (through 2020). Especially in a physically communal sport such as climbing, the Moon Board has shown the advantage of building community through technology.
This is day 11 of my #90DayOfProse challenge
