Community as a Lean Startup

Developing a community entails a cornucopia of risks; even more so if you hope to unite their individual contributions.  No, for you to iterate through the validation of all of your assumptions, you'll need to carefully mitigate all risk.  The best tool to resolve assumptions is testing.  Some type of metric which aims to confirm or deny a single assumption. 1 by 1.

Lean manufacturing; rapid prototyping, agile software development, lean startups, & so on; they're all the same.  Any complex task involving critical unknowns must evolve (learn how) to replace unknowns with data.  Every test must confirm or deny an assumption. 1 by 1.

The victors spoils go to those who can cycle through their tests most efficiently. Fail fast. Evolve even faster.