Ron and Kathlyn Lindeboom: Twelve Years of Innovation and Community Building

Ron and Kathlyn Lindeboom celebrate twelve years of online community building this week! And to imagine, it only seems like--well, twelve years ago, actually. A lot has happened along the way. They've earned every gray hair, and felt every bump in the road along the way. But this is a great time to look back at their first 12 years to see how far the entire industry has come by following their lead.

Personal History, part 1
I confess that I didn't exactly get in on the ground floor for all the fun. I came in toward the end of the first year of the festivities, still early enough to watch everything I'm about to tell you unfold with my own eyes.

I may be fuzzy on a detail or two, but I feel that I contributed my small part to making it all happen. And I can tell you this with absolute certainty: this community, this kind of community, was absolutely pivotal in building our business, and tens of thousands of businesses just like mine.

Going back to the days just before all this began, most of us started with linear editing. In our case, the first few years of the business went quite well, but it was obvious where the future was. Obvious yes, but far from obvious to see how we were going to get there.

The first few steps were a freaking nightmare. The quality and reliability of the tools was unproven. Everything -- and I mean EVERYTHING -- took longer than doing it the old fashioned way. Work didn't flow. It crawled.

Let's add one more degree of difficulty. This massive shift in professional production from linear to nonlinear was often fueled by home equity loans and second mortgages. We gambled the roofs over our heads that NLEs were the future and that we could figure out how to use them before it was too late.

If you were there, you remember. If you weren't, I hope you can understand how nerve-wracking it was, and what relief we felt to discover that we weren't entirely alone. Comfort is fine, but the clock was ticking: we needed help NOW.

To understand what a challenge this was, and how pivotal a role the Lindebooms played in establishing our industry online, you need to understand where the whole world was at the time.


Public History
Netscape Navigator was less than a year old, the World Wide Web itself barely three. It was revolutionary enough to want to start a community here.

Up until then, peer-to-support was mostly handled by newsgroups and small, scattered forums at AOL. The signal to noise ratio was off the charts, in exactly the wrong direction. Conversations flew every which way, as did the fur. Conflicts degenerated into the vitriolic personal attacks called flame wars.

If you could wade through those, you could at least try to see if anyone had answered your question already, but you had to search by hand. Those venues didn't have search engines. The web barely had search engines. Forget Google. The Lindebooms started their first online community the same year Yahoo was founded!

Theoretically focused email groups were every bit as prone to flame wars as their predecessors. They also took a step backward: earlier emails were flat-out unavailable, so no chance of looking for previous answers. You had to ask every question as if it was the first time. Brutal.

Simply put, it was nearly impossible to solve our most pressing problems without running into brand new headaches.

Ron and Kathlyn had the same experience. Ron needed help with his own editing gear. Kathlyn had her hands more than full with trying to keep Ron sane. (Despite superhuman efforts, she had only mixed success.) They started their first online community for themselves as much for anyone else.

The community they established was entirely unlike anything that came before, but laid out the blueprint for every significant industry community to follow. Here's how.

They started a web-based forum. Remember when I just said about where to find peer-to-peer to support in 1995? There wasn't a single web-based community for our industry.

Not one.

Theirs was the very, very first.

This was especially critical because many of the companies we talked about didn't have their own websites yet. In fact, keep in mind that this was a time when the word "website" was barely used at all. They had a "home page," so-named because they were literally a single page.

So the information that we gathered and shared was the only place you could find this information anywhere on the web! It's almost impossible to imagine now, isn't it? But it was true.

I'll say it again this way: within a matter of days, the community the Lindebooms founded in 1995 was the biggest collection of industry-specific information that the web had ever seen.

Turns out that, 12 years later, it still is.

You could see what was going on. This seems obvious now, but seeing discussion topics listed as visual threads was still new anywhere on the internet, and had never been done on the web for our industry before.

You could find what you wanted in one place. Apart from an AOL forum or two--which were still mostly a mess--it was nearly impossible to find what you wanted to know about any particular thing. The idea of multiple, clearly organized forums for our industry available at a single URL? It started with Ron and Kathlyn.

They moderated the conversations. On-topic discussions and professional strength help doesn't happen by accident. Founding a community around pros helps, but it's not enough. It takes moderators to help guide the conversation, to fight fires, to keep legitimate disagreement from degenerating into personal attacks on individuals or companies.

Poof! Goodbye, flame wars.

Today, this seems head-slappingly obvious. Every single significant online community, including the few, small email-based communities that remain meaningful, every single one of them is moderated. Zero exceptions. Forum members across our industry even want to be moderators themselves. THAT's why it seems obvious now.

Yet The Lindebooms came under personal attack for years, and sometimes still do, for a practice now virtually universal in our industry, and in the hundreds of thousands of forums across the web that have been founded since Ron & Kathlyn started theirs.

By the way, it's not that nothing off-topic is ever allowed. Off-topic conversations are sometimes critical for keeping the community together--as long as they don't tear the community apart.

Please note that the following intends no disrespect whatever. But it's worth noting that one of the longest and strongest holdouts to moderation was our dear friends at the Avid-L, some of whom are also leaders in The COW. "The L" came to an acrimonious split in 2005 over the lack of moderation. The core of that group in its new incarnation moderates both its membership and topics.

Again, no disrespect intended. I'm just saying that moderation works. The Lindebooms started it in our industry. Others have followed.

I look back on all of this and remember what they say: history is written by the victors.

Well there you go.

Personal History, part 2
As the community grew, there was no way The Lindeboom's editing business could continue to grow. They held on for the first few years, running the server out of their house. But they ran out of hard drive space. Drives were small and expensive, so that happened pretty quickly. They also quickly ran out of bandwidth--small and expensive too, back then.

They funded what they could, pouring in tens of thousands of dollars, their entire savings. It had to come from savings because they had no income anymore.

We helped the best we could, taking turns paying their internet bills. It eventually became even more than we could manage as a group. That's when Ron and Kathlyn turned to corporate sponsors.

It wasn't because they wanted to start a business. They needed to start a business to keep the community from collapsing under its own success. And that roof over the head thing.

It's hard to overstate the importance of their personal relationships to that success. Even with the community as a whole to guide us, we still spent hours on the phone with Ron and Kathlyn, well into the wee hours for them in California, and on the east coast.

I was one of hundreds of people they did this with, with astonishing regularity. We knew it was hard on them in every way. But their personal investment in each of us generated the loyalty that that small group of us still have today, 12 years later.


Personal History, part 3
Remember when I mentioned bumps in the road? Well, here's the big one. What looked like a happy purchase quickly went south. The Boomies were dismissed from the new company that had bought their original website, and all of their investment crashed when the dot-com bombed.

(That nightmare, and their rescue from it, is an amazing story I'd like to tell you someday.)

Ron had been the major driver in phase one of their community-building, but he had come to the end of it in every way. He was exhausted and understandably emotionally depleted. If there was going to be a phase two, Kathlyn would have to be in charge, which she is to this day.

Her conversations with so many community leaders, her assistance with articles and other online content, and her continuing (nearly successful) efforts to manage Ron's sanity had kept phase one rolling smoothly. They were now to be the rock on which Creative COW was founded in 2001.

Kathlyn's the one who came up with the name, by the way. She's been collecting cows for years: stuffed cows, ceramic cows, cow clocks, cow art, cow refrigerator magnets, you name it. As she was trying to figure out what to call this new group of communities they hoped to gather, it came to her: Communities of the World. Since they were for creative people, they would collectively be called as Creative COW. Ron was raised on a dairy, so he loved it too. As Kathlyn put it, "Who doesn't love cows?"

Coming down the road to where we are today, phase two has already lasted longer than the first. It has also reached heights never imagined the first time around: growing to include newsletters, podcasts, DVDs, and a magazine. And some staggering numbers:

• 1.3 million posts so far (around 1000 a day, every day), in 150 forums

• 440,000 visitors monthly viewing 11 million pages

• Over 800 articles and tutorials as of today

• All fed by six servers in 2 locations, through the equivalent of 128 T1 lines.

In addition to the story I mentioned earlier, there are other amazing chapters in this tale that I look forward to telling But I have no idea what happens next, and I doubt that Kathlyn and Ron do either. I know that they continue to build on their experiences across the past 12 years. I know that they're still learning even better ways to do this from you.

So thanks to all of you in The COW for keeping it rolling, for providing daily inspiration. Thank you, Kathlyn and Ron, for creating a place where we could all find so much help from each other, so well, for so long. And thanks for showing the entire industry how it should be done for these past 12 years.

Happy Anniversary!