Spin a habit your community already has out into its own product

Some communities grow a side activity the host product never planned for. This tactic gives that activity its own product and brand. 99designs started this way. SitePoint business owners posted design requests with cash prizes.

How it works

1. Find the habit. Look for something members already do that your product was never built to handle, especially when money changes hands. On SitePoint, an education site for web developers, business owners began posting design jobs with prize money attached, and those posts became informal contests. Matt Mickiewicz describes this origin in his founder interview with Entrepreneur.
2. Decide whether it needs its own brand. Mickiewicz and his partner Mark Harbottle picked a new name. They believed a separate brand would spread faster by word of mouth and reach more small-business owners. A branding book had convinced them that two lines of business under the SitePoint name would be a big mistake.
3. Build the narrow product. Give the habit the structure the forum lacked: a brief, a prize, entries, a winner and a payment. At 99designs the result was a standalone marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design, launched in 2008.
4. Seed it from the host. Point the people already doing the activity to the new product so it does not open empty. This step is our recommendation. The sources do not describe how 99designs handled the move.
5. Let it grow past the host. The separate product exists to reach people who would never join the original community. Its about page says the freelance community has completed more than one million creative projects since 2008.

You can think of this as giving a growth loop its own home. Each finished contest gives a buyer a reason to return or tell a peer, and gives a designer a reason to enter again. The community-led growth playbook covers how to run the host community side.

What it takes

Our estimate: about 120 hours of work, and about 30 days before you can read a signal. Most of the hours go into a minimal version of the transaction (posting, entries, picking a winner, payment), a landing page under the new name, and moving the first active participants across. The signal takes about a month because the habit runs on its own cycle. A buyer posts, entries arrive, a winner is chosen, and only then can you see whether that buyer comes back or sends someone.

What to measure

Start with completed transactions per week on the spin-off, compared with how often the same activity happened in the forum before launch. If the dedicated product cannot beat the informal version, the structure you added is getting in the way.

Next, track the share of new buyers who never touched the host community. This is the reason to use a separate brand at all. A good reading is a share that rises month over month. A bad reading is a spin-off that only serves people who were already in the forum.

Repeat use tells you whether the habit holds up once it is formalized. Compare a cohort of spin-off buyers with forum-era buyers, and read the curve with the retention guide. A curve that flattens means the habit has stuck.

Finally, split signups into referral or direct traffic and traffic sent by the host. If almost everything still arrives from the host, the new brand is not yet spreading by itself.

When it backfires

• The habit is a few power users. A dozen enthusiastic threads can look like demand. Check how many distinct people take part before you build anything.
• The new brand starts cold. The 99designs founders bet that a separate name would spread better. That bet gives up the host brand's recognition, and the sources do not show how much traffic SitePoint still sent.
• The community feels taken from. Members who ran the activity for free may resent a paid product built on their habit. Tell them early and keep them involved.
• Two businesses, one team. The founders saw sharing one brand across two lines as a mistake. Running two brands also splits your marketing and support time.
• Thin two-sided liquidity. A contest site needs both buyers and entrants. If either side lags, early buyers get poor results and do not return.

Run it as an experiment

We recommend this hypothesis: moving the habit into a dedicated product will raise weekly completed transactions above the forum baseline within 60 days, and at least some of the growth will come from people outside the host community.

A clean split is hard because the habit lives in one community. We suggest a before and after with a fixed window: count 8 weeks of forum activity before launch, then 8 weeks on the spin-off. If you can, keep the forum route open for one category as a holdout.

Log every transaction with its source (host link, referral, direct, search), whether the buyer was a host member, the time to completion and repeat purchases. Use the experiment write-up guide and the growth experiment backlog template to set this up.

Our suggested decision rule: keep investing if weekly transactions beat the baseline and new-to-community buyers keep rising across the window. Fold the activity back into the host if neither moves.

How strong the evidence is

The grade is case with numbers. One company documented the tactic and published results as figures, through a named founder and its own site. 99designs carries the grade on its own. The founder reported revenue and a client list, and the company page gives a cumulative project count.

The evidence does not show a baseline of contest volume on SitePoint before the spin-off. The revenue figure is self-reported, and the project count is a later, undated total. Treat this as one documented success, not a tested rule.