The ‘tiny experiments’ playbook: build a thriving community without burning out
Do you find it easy to support and encourage your members but hard to give yourself the same grace? You’re not alone. When growth slows or an event doesn’t land, many community entrepreneurs blame themselves and rush to “fix” it.
But this is where they often get stuck. Linear goals like “grow to 500 members by June” or “hit 40% engagement every month” assume predictable progress and a clear path from A to B. Communities don’t work that way. They shift with member needs, timing, relationships, boundaries, and the invisible dynamics between people.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff sees this mismatch often. As an author, cognitive neuroscience researcher and founder of Ness Labs, she studies how people learn and experiment. What she’s found is that when you’re working inside complex, ever-changing systems, progress isn’t linear. Learning is. That’s why she encourages an experimental mindset for creators and community builders.
As she shared during her Creator Path Summit session: “You need to figure out what works and what doesn't as you go. There is no blueprint or step-by-step plan you can copy and paste to build a successful community.” (Watch it below!)
This article will show you
- how to apply her “tiny experiments” approach to your community,
- why traditional success frameworks fall short,
- how to think like a scientist, and
- build learning loops that support sustainable community growth.
The paradox of success in community building
Spend enough time in the creator or community space and you start to feel the subtle pressure to keep up. Everywhere you look, people are posting their launch numbers, milestones, and growth screenshots. It’s inspiring… until comparison-itis creeps in.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff calls this “the giant leaderboard” effect.
“We measure our success based on the success of others… asking ourselves, am I going fast enough? Is my community big enough?” she says.
When success is so public, you might assume you should follow the same playbook or chase the same outcomes. But community growth doesn’t follow a straight line. Member needs shift. Building relationships and trust takes time. This difference is why the classic “clear vision + hard work = success” formula, borrowed from traditional business thinking, often breaks down in community work.
You can’t only “grind” or “plan” your way to a great community.
Anne-Laure learned this lesson firsthand. She saw friends thriving on YouTube and pushed herself to grow a channel too. It worked on the surface (i.e., her subscriber and view count), but filming drained her and she dreaded being on camera.
This is the core paradox. You can:
- Follow the same strategy as someone else and feel worse, not better.
- Hit your goals and still feel behind.
- Do everything “right” and still not feel successful.
A healthier path starts with curiosity-driven growth. Instead of chasing the same outcomes as everyone else, run small tests, pay attention to what fits your community, and let those insights guide your next steps.
The ‘Head-Heart-Hand’ framework of systematic curiosity
Every community builder knows the feeling: you want to launch something new, yet you keep putting it off. You tell yourself you’re busy or “not in the right headspace,” but rarely is that the actual issue.
This is where Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s idea of systematic curiosity comes into play. As she explains, it means “being curious about absolutely everything, including the uncomfortable stuff you might not want to look at too closely.” Instead of forcing yourself to power through, use an experimental mindset and treat the resistance as data.
Anne-Laure’s Head–Heart–Hand check helps you pinpoint the source of the friction:
| Where the resistance is coming from | What it looks like | Questions to diagnose | What to do next |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head = The strategy isn’t clear | You keep second-guessing the task or avoiding it. | Is this the right approach? Is it aligned with our goals? Am I the right person to do this? | Revisit the plan. Clarify the “why,” refine the strategy, or delegate before moving forward. |
| Heart = You don’t want to do it | The task feels heavy, boring, or emotionally draining. | What would make this feel easier or more enjoyable? | Change the setup. Try a café, a co-working session, or a short, timed sprint to make the work feel lighter. |
| Hand = You don’t feel equipped | You want to do it, but don’t know where to start. | What tool, skill, or support am I missing? | Get help. Watch a tutorial, ask a teammate, request training, or gather the resources you need. |
By treating resistance as information, not a personal flaw, you uncover what needs to shift and design experiments that fit your way of working.
Designing tiny experiments
It’s easy to feel like every new idea needs to be polished, scalable, and fully mapped out before you share it with members. Launch a challenge? It should look professional. Starting a buddy system? It should work smoothly from day one. And with so many playbooks (yes, including the ones we publish), starting small can seem almost wrong.
Anne-Laure’s concept of tiny experiments offers a more straightforward, realistic path.
“You can design tiny experiments for literally anything. Work projects, creative ideas, routines, or the way you manage knowledge in your community,” she explains.
Tiny community experiments start with observation:
- What’s giving your community energy?
- What’s draining it?
- What patterns keep showing up in conversations?
Once you notice a pattern, use Anne-Laure’s favorite starting point: maybe.
- “Maybe we could host monthly in-person meetups.”
- “Maybe we could test a member buddy system.”
- “Maybe we could add a help board or regular spotlight.”
From there, you only need two ingredients: an action and a duration.
Experiment protocol: I will [action] for [duration].
![Template graphic on a dark purple background with the fill-in-the-blank prompt "I will [ACTION] for [DURATION]." Below, an example experiments box lists: "I will host one community office hour every week for 4 weeks," "I will run a 7-day member activation challenge," and "I will publish a member spotlight every month for 3 months."](https://cdn.builder.io/api/v1/image/assets%2Fd5e2d72a033944e1a916c5c34902a1ff%2Fd3e9878f6ed44db985ed3513b7498109?format=webp&width=2000)
Examples:
- “I will host one community office hour every week for 4 weeks.”
- “I will run a 7-day member activation challenge.”
- “I will publish a member spotlight every month for 3 months.”
- “I will interview 20 members over 20 days.”
The goal isn’t success or perfection, but to collect data. Running an idea more than once helps you see what consistently works, not just what happens by chance.
Reflection and learning loops
Tiny experiments help you take action without overthinking. Reflection reveals what worked and why. When you combine the two, you create a simple evidence-based feedback loop that turns every test into something to learn from. That’s the real power of an experimental mindset.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff uses a straightforward structure for this: Plus / Minus / Next.
Here’s how to put it into practice:
| Plus | Minus | Next |
|---|---|---|
| What went well. Anything that felt smooth, energizing, or effective for you or your members. | What didn’t go well. Any friction, confusion, frustration, or missing tools or support. | What you’ll change, keep, or adjust based on what you learned. |
| Ask: What felt easy? What did members respond to? What came together naturally? | Ask: What slowed things down? What didn’t land for members? What felt unnecessary or heavy? | Ask: What’s the logical next step? What small tweak will I test next? |
| Outcome: Keep and repeat what worked. | Outcome: Remove or rethink what didn’t work. | Outcome: Use your insights to design your next tiny experiment. |
Reflection doesn’t have to be a solo activity. Anne-Laure encourages learning in public with your team or, even better, with your members.
“Share what you learned with them. They might help you interpret the data in a way you hadn’t thought of,” she explains.
Redefining metrics and success
Community metrics like member count, engagement percentages, and event attendance only tell part of the story. They don’t show whether you’re understanding your members better or improving your community operations. And when you rely on them alone, it can feel like you’re either “winning” or “falling behind” with every slight fluctuation.
A community builder with a scientist mindset asks a different question: What did we learn that will help us make a better decision next time?
To answer that, you need metrics that reflect learning, not just output. Consider shifting part of your tracking toward indicators like:
- Experiments completed. How many small tests did you run this month or quarter? More experiments often reveal clearer patterns than one big initiative.
- Member participation in feedback loops. How many members voted in a poll, answered a reflection question, or joined a follow-up thread? This shows whether members want to help shape what comes next.
- Documented insights. Trends, notes, patterns, and observations to revisit later. Think of this as your internal “lab notebook.”
Over time, these learning metrics can give you a clearer picture of community health. Multiple small experiments help you spot reliable patterns. Feedback loops highlight which member voices are present and which ones are missing. And keeping track of your insights creates a reference to use for future programming, messaging, or member experience changes.
They also keep you focused on what you can control. Member count may fluctuate, but the experiments you run and the insights you gather are tangible signs of progress.
When you track what you’re learning, you build a community that improves steadily, even as surface-level numbers rise and fall.
Case study: Ness Labs’ community-as-lab model
Ness Labs is one of the clearest examples of what an experimental mindset looks like in practice. For five years, Anne-Laure Le Cunff has treated her community as a living laboratory. Inside, she tests ideas, learns in public, and makes adjustments based on what she discovers.
How Ness Labs began: a personal learning experiment
At first, Anne-Laure used her newsletter to organize what she was learning in her neuroscience studies and better understand the material. But in March 2020, everything changed. Readers began replying to her newsletter saying they felt lonely, disconnected, and anxious during lockdown. Many missed having colleagues to think and talk with.
So she created Ness Labs: a community focused on mindful productivity.
“I did not create it because I felt like I had something to teach,” she explains. “I wanted a space where everybody could come and connect together.”
When organic growth becomes burnout
During the pandemic, the community was active from morning to night. There were three to four Zoom sessions a day, plus open circles for support.
“People would spend entire days hanging out on Ness Labs,” Anne-Laure recalls.
When the world reopened, Anne-Laure tried to maintain that same pace but it didn’t work. She burned out trying to keep up a level of community engagement that only made sense during lockdown.
“It was not sustainable at all,” she says. “But it took me a little while to realize this.”
The turning point: delegating, hiring, and finding balance
Her turning point came when she started applying the same experimental mindset to her own role. She delegated day-to-day operations, hired a community manager, and stopped trying to attend every event.
She also set clearer boundaries. She joins when she’s genuinely interested or available, and leaves when she needs to without guilt.
“These days I'm really participating in the community more like a fellow member than a community leader,” she says. “It's been really amazing and it's really made me fall back in love with the community.”
Learning in public as a retention strategy
A big part of what keeps Ness Labs strong is how openly Anne-Laure shares what she’s working on. She posts her own experiments, questions she’s exploring, and what she’s learning along the way. That openness sets a tone: curiosity is welcome, and nobody has to have everything figured out before they contribute.
Members naturally follow her lead. Inside the Ness Labs Circle space, they share their own experiment protocols, weekly notes, drafts, half-formed ideas, and early observations. These posts often spark discussions where members help each other make sense of their results or spot patterns they hadn’t noticed.
Ness Labs member Lucas Rosenstock explains the impact well: “As adults, it can sometimes feel like we always have to have the answer. I love that Ness Labs brings together people who are okay with not knowing, okay with discovery, okay with curiosity.”
Openness also makes the community stickier. When members feel like they’re part of the work, they stay longer. They’re not just consuming content, but contributing to a shared body of knowledge.
Make curiosity your growth strategy
Community building often feels like a constant attempt to stay in control—of member growth, engagement rates, event attendance, or whatever metric happens to spike (or dip) this week. But as you’ve seen throughout this playbook, control is rarely where the real progress happens. The turning point comes when you trade control for curiosity and treat your community as an evolving experiment instead of a destination.
The heart of the experimental mindset is to ask better questions, run smaller tests, and notice what each one teaches you. Anne-Laure describes this as using both internal and external curiosity.
- Internal curiosity helps you understand what’s working for you: your energy, boundaries, and definition of success.
- External curiosity helps you understand what’s working for your members and how the world around you is shifting.
When you make space for both, you get a clearer picture of what your community needs and how you want to show up inside it.
The core takeaways from the Ness Labs model:
- You don’t need to be the expert to lead. Learning out loud is enough.
- Members respond to the level of transparency you model.
- Sharing experiments creates natural member retention loops. People stay when they feel useful.
- Communities become stronger when you distribute energy and ownership, rather than concentrating them in one person.
You don’t have to build the perfect system. Start with a question, test a small idea, share what you found, and invite members to help you figure out the rest.
Ready to try this yourself? Start your first tiny community experiment inside Circle and see what you learn next.
