With the launch of Minds Networks, I want to launch a network for my headphone community Squiglink as a case study for the product's capabilities. Minds Networks is designed to give community leaders an alternative to free platforms like Discord that lets you grow your community and customer base, rather than growing someone else's. But it turns out Minds Networks isn't the only solution to this problem.

In talking with customers, we learned about the eerily-similarly named Mighty Networks, a product that also gives community leaders an alternative to free platforms with more ownership of customer relationships. So I tried it out.

By day I work at Minds, but by night I run Squiglink, a community-powered website for hardcore headphone nerds. We've got an active community of headphone consumers trying to better understand the hobby and make better purchase decisions, as well as data gatherers, who use specialized hardware to measure headphones and in-ear monitors (IEMs) and who make that measurement data available on Squiglink. Over the past few years, I've built an awesome community on YouTube and Discord, but to take it to the next level – in terms of value I offer the community and monetization value for me – I want to build on a platform that gives me more ownership. I want to ask the community to join my website, not YouTube and Discord, to build up my mailing list, and to monetize through my own Stripe account without the 10 - 30% platform fees charged by most free community apps. I want to own my community relationships.

Courses done well

Mighty Networks lets me do it, with an impressive set of community features like a community feed of posts, live chat, and custom spaces. Perhaps most impressive is their robust tools for building out text-based courses. For my headphone community, courses might make sense – I can teach consumers how to read headphone measurements and develop their own frequency response targets, and I can teach would-be data gatherers how to measure headphones and IEMs to get consistent, predictive data.

The courses on Mighty Networks offer nice tools for building out organizations of information. Basically you can organize text and video content into a list of links that your users or customers can click through to complete courses, and Mighty keeps track of individual progress. In contrast, Minds Networks enables you to build and sell courses by using members-only groups, but the organization and progress tracking is not as advanced as what Mighty offers.

So if courses are your primary method of monetizing your community, Mighty Networks seems like a pretty good solution. For my headphone community, I think courses can work, but they won't be my primary focus. Two reasons: (1) Courses require a lot of production effort, and my content production efforts are focused on reviews and live streams; (2) There are only so many courses that make sense for my community, and I want my community – and customers – to stick around after they've completed courses. I want to build strong connections with an enduring community that grows, rather than churn through customers with courses they can complete in a weekend.

Minds is better for community

This is where Minds Networks is better. Minds community features are easier and more familiar for members to jump in and engage with, to not just consume my content but to create and share their own, and to connect with each other and build a three-dimensional community.

On paper, Mighty has a lot of the same community features, like community posting and live chat, but the UX is a bit more rigid and boomer-y from the perspective of my members. On my Minds Network, community members get their own rich identities, can develop reputation, and even reach members of other ActivityPub apps like Mastodon and Threads. Not all of my members will, but the ones that do add real value to my network, both by being a content resource for my community and also by bringing in new members through their own reach and word of mouth.

Minds is better for existing brands

Minds Networks integrates much better with the rest of my brand. Both Mighty and Minds enable custom branding, but Minds goes much further than logo uploads by integrating with my existing Squiglink ecosystem. I can sync my network with my YouTube channel, so that new content I publish for my audience is automatically shared with my Minds Networks community. I can even integrate community functionality like commenting to my existing Squiglink website, and it seamlessly synchronizes activity with community members accessing the same discussions inside my Minds Networks app.

Additionally, while both Mighty and Minds enable selling memberships with my own Stripe account, there are two serious advantages to Minds: (1) Minds has zero platform fees, while Mighty takes a percentage cut of every transaction between you and your customers; (2) Minds integrates better with my existing membership products outside of my network. While I love that Minds Networks enables me to directly sell memberships without platform fees, I also want to connect the value of my network to my existing membership products (e.g. YouTube, Discord, Memberpress, Patreon) and Minds Networks does that natively. With Mighty, external integrations are handled through Zapier, which is yet another SaaS product I have to buy and manage.

All things considered, I'm going with Minds Networks. If my business plan was more focused on courses, Mighty might be the better option. And I do want to offer courses, which Minds can do, it just won't be the core of my business. And when it comes to supporting the core of my business, Minds Networks is the more powerful solution to build a monetizable, long-lasting community around my brand. A community that I own, on my own website and mobile app.

• Minds Networks does NOT charge a platform fee for transactions
• Minds Networks makes my own branded app much more affordable
• Minds Networks integrates better with my existing business and brand assets
• Minds Networks is open source: If I ever outgrow the hosted service, I can fork the code and run it myself

	Minds Networks	Mighty Networks	Circle	Patreon
Customization
Use your domain	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Theme control	✔	✔	Pro only	🚫
White label branding	✔	✔	Pro only	🚫
White label emails	✔	✔	Business only	🚫
White label mobile app	✔	✔	🚫	🚫
Custom navigation	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Custom landing page	✔	✔	🚫	🚫
Social
Text, image, video posts	✔	✔	✔	✔
Groups	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Group chat	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Direct messaging	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Export member data	✔	✔	✔	✔
Automated posting	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Reach the Fediverse	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Events	🚫	✔	✔	🚫
Custom roles & permission	✔	✔	🚫	🚫
Email digest	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Most similar to	Social media	Intranet	Message boards	Blogs
Monetization
Connect your Stripe	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Social ad platform	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Courses	🚫	Courses only	Pro only	🚫
Paid memberships	✔	✔	✔	✔
Memberships
Platform fees	0%	1 - 3%	0.5 - 4%	8%
Membership tiers	✔	✔	✔	✔
Paywalled posts	✔	✔	✔	✔
Paywalled groups	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Monthly memberships	✔	✔	✔	✔
Annual memberships	✔	✔	✔	🚫
One-time payments	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Website integrations
Single sign-on	✔	Business only	Enterprise only	🚫
Comments embeds	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
RSS sync	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Social ad embeds	✔	🚫	🚫	🚫
Mobile app
White label app	$18,000 / year	$40,000 / year	$30,000 / year	🚫
Android & iOS	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Push notifications	✔	✔	✔	🚫
Your own app store accounts	✔	✔	?	🚫

Learn more about Minds Networks