Starting a Coterie can feel deceptively simple. You know ten people, they all create content, so you put them together and see what happens. That might work for a while, but the Coteries that become genuinely useful tend to have something stronger holding them together than the fact that everyone happens to post online.

Think instead about the room you would actually want to return to each week. Who would you be interested in hearing from? Whose work would you naturally want to read, watch or respond to? Who would understand what you're working on without needing the backstory every time? Somewhere in those answers is probably the basis for your first Coterie.

The common ground could be an industry, profession, location or stage of business. It could just as easily be a shared ambition. A group of SaaS founders will have plenty to talk about, but so will a group of first-time founders trying to become more visible alongside building their companies. Independent consultants selling into professional services might make sense together even if they offer completely different services. The point is not to make everyone identical. It's to give everyone a genuine reason to care about what the other people in the room are doing.

This is where being specific helps. “Business Owners” could mean almost anyone. “Auckland SaaS Founders” creates immediate context. “Independent Agency Founders” does too. The right person should be able to hear what your Coterie is about and recognise why they belong there.

A useful test is to describe the idea to someone who fits the niche and see whether two or three names immediately come to mind for them. If they start saying, “You should invite Sarah,” or “I know exactly who would be good for this,” you've probably found something real. If you have to spend five minutes explaining why this particular collection of people should support each other, the idea may still be too broad.

The niche doesn't need to be defined by job title. Sometimes where people are going is more important than where they currently sit. Ten people trying to establish themselves as recognised experts may have more in common with each other than ten people who happen to work in marketing. Founders building personal brands, coaches trying to publish consistently, executives becoming more visible in their industries and newsletter writers trying to grow their readership all have a shared journey that can create a natural reason to show up.

That shared direction also makes participation easier. If a founder in your circle writes about hiring their first salesperson, another shares what they learned from changing their pricing, and somebody else announces a product they've spent six months building, the subjects are different but the context is familiar. Members don't have to manufacture an opinion just because another link has appeared. They understand the world the person is operating in and are more likely to have something worth contributing.

This matters more than it might seem. If your Coterie regularly asks members to respond to content they would never otherwise read, the experience will eventually become a chore. You can create a schedule and make it easier for everyone to remember to participate, but you cannot manufacture genuine interest. The closer the interests of the room are, the easier it is for thoughtful interaction to happen naturally.

It is also worth resisting the temptation to build your Coterie around follower counts. An established creator with a large audience might be a fantastic member, but audience size alone doesn't tell you whether they will make the circle better. Someone with 3,000 relevant connections who consistently turns up can contribute far more than someone with 100,000 followers who is never there.

The useful question is not simply, “How much reach does this person bring?” It is, “Would I want this person in the room?” You are looking for people who create things worth paying attention to and are willing to pay attention to others in return. Reach can be a benefit, but reliability, relevance and genuine participation are what make the Coterie work over time.

This is also why smaller can be better, particularly at the beginning. When there are fewer people, familiarity develops quickly. Members start recognising what each other is working on. They remember the company someone launched last month, the opinion they shared last week and the idea they've been developing over several posts. That context makes future conversations better because people aren't encountering each other as strangers every time.

There is accountability in that familiarity too. It is easy to disappear from a group of hundreds without anyone noticing. It is harder to disappear from a circle where people know your name and notice that you haven't shared anything lately. For someone trying to become more consistent, that can be surprisingly valuable.

There is no magic number that every Coterie should aim for. The right size depends on what members create, how often they participate and what you expect from them. What matters is that growth remains deliberate. Every new person changes the room, so an invitation should make sense for the people already inside it as well as the person receiving it.

Before adding someone, think about whether they bring something relevant to the circle and whether they are realistically going to participate. Consider whether you would be happy if every member approached the Coterie in the same way you expect this person to. A smaller group of people who reliably care about each other's work will usually create a better experience than a much larger group waiting for everyone else to go first.

Once you have the right people, give them a rhythm they can actually maintain. Most people don't fail to support others because they don't care. They get busy. A client calls, a meeting runs over, a post gets pushed to tomorrow and the link somebody sent on Monday disappears underneath forty other messages by Friday. Good intentions are easy to lose in the rest of the week.

A regular Coterie session solves a very ordinary problem: remembering to make time for people. The schedule doesn't need to be aggressive. A group of full-time creators may want to come together more frequently, while a Coterie of CEOs who publish once a week may need far less. A temporary launch Coterie might be active for a few intense weeks, while an industry circle could run at the same comfortable cadence for years.

Predictability matters more than frequency. Members should know when it is time to show up and roughly what is expected when they do. Once that rhythm settles in, supporting each other stops being another task floating around somewhere in the week. It already has a place.

The person who creates the Coterie has an outsized influence on what happens next. If you arrive only when you have something of your own to promote, other people will notice and eventually do the same. If you consistently show up, take an interest in what people are creating and contribute to the circle, that behaviour becomes part of the culture.

This doesn't require a long rulebook. In most cases the expectation is easy to understand: if you want people to show up for you, you need to show up for them. The important distinction is that reciprocity should develop into a habit rather than a negotiation. Nobody wants to keep a mental ledger of who commented on whose post last Tuesday.

Over time, the best Coteries should become more valuable precisely because members know each other better. A comment from somebody who understands what you've been building for six months is different from a comment from a stranger who has seen one post. A member might know that you're testing a new positioning, launching something next week or trying to speak more openly about an area of expertise. They have context, and context makes support more meaningful.

That is also where a Coterie begins to become something people identify with rather than another group they have joined. Give it a name that means something. Be clear about who it is for. Set a rhythm and maintain a standard for who joins. If it is connected to an existing business, programme or membership, let that identity carry through. If it stands on its own, allow the Coterie itself to develop an identity members are proud to be associated with.

This becomes especially important if you decide to charge for access. People are not paying for the ability to paste a link into another piece of software. The value is the room: who has been invited into it, why those people are there, how well it is run and whether members reliably participate. A well-curated circle of relevant people can be valuable in a way that an open group with thousands of members simply isn't.

Charging can also change how you think about your role as the person running it. If people are paying to be there, curation becomes part of what you are providing. Adding anyone who asks to join might increase revenue in the short term, but it can weaken the thing existing members are paying for. Protecting the quality of the room is part of the job.

You also don't need to design your first Coterie as though it must serve every purpose forever. Different circles can exist for different reasons. The founders you want around you every week might not be the people you need around a product launch. Your clients could benefit from their own circle. Members of a course or programme might want somewhere to continue supporting each other after it ends. A group of industry peers could coexist with a smaller, invitation-only circle of people at a similar stage to you.

Someone could eventually belong to a Coterie because of what they do, another because of what they are building and another because of the people they want to stay connected with. That is not particularly different from how relationships work offline. We have never expected one circle of people to fulfil every purpose in our lives, so there is little reason to expect it online.

Your first Coterie therefore doesn't need to be perfect in the sense of having every detail figured out before anyone joins. It needs to be specific enough that the right people understand why it should exist. Start with a handful of people who genuinely make sense together, choose a rhythm they can maintain and pay close attention to what happens once they start showing up.

You will learn quickly. Some people will contribute more than you expected. Some will be less interested than they thought. You may discover that your niche should be narrower, that sessions need to be shorter or that the people getting the most value share a characteristic you hadn't considered when you started. Use that information. A Coterie can become more considered as the people inside it reveal what makes the circle work.

The goal is not to assemble the largest possible network around yourself. It is to create a place where the right people have enough in common to care, enough structure to keep showing up and enough familiarity for their support to mean something. If you can create that, growth becomes a secondary question.

When deciding where to begin, think less about how many people you can invite and more about who would make you want to turn up each week. Chances are, the people you are thinking of already know a few others who belong there too. That's usually enough to start.