The structural decisions you make when setting up your collective matter more than most first-time managers understand. Get them right, and you start with the foundation that attracts the right people into your collective and sets you up to succeed.

Here's what you need to get right before you start a collective.

How Do You Want to Grow? Public or Private

When you set up your collective on Borderless, you'll need to decide whether it will be public or private.

A public collective is visible to users on Borderless. When someone creates an account, your collective shows up on their timeline, and they can apply to join. Your community can grow beyond the people you already know. However, you still get to decide who joins, as you, as the collective manager, will approve or deny all applications.

A private collective gives you full control over who sees your activity. Your collective won't appear on a non-member's dashboard timeline so deal flow, updates, and member activity stay within the group. It will still show up in the collectives section, so interested investors can find it and apply to join, but they won't see any internal activity until you approve them.

Both are legitimate choices. If you're building something exclusive and curated, private makes sense. If you're still building your membership base, the public option gives you the visibility you'd otherwise have to work hard to earn. The platform's timeline feature also highlights your collective, so new users can find you easily.

Free vs Paid Collective

You'll also need to choose whether your collective charges membership fees or is free to join.

A free collective means people can apply to join without paying a membership fee. They only get to participate in opportunities when you post them. For a first-time collective manager still establishing a track record, a lower barrier to entry can work in your favour. Your most important job at this stage is to show people your collective is worth being part of.

For a paid collective, on the other hand, members who pay to join tend to be more committed, and this helps cover the cost of running things well. If you have a strong offering and a clear value proposition, there's nothing wrong with charging from day one. One observation about a popular collective is that it promises its members two curated opportunities a month and charges a $100 annual membership fee.

What doesn't work is charging before you've given people a reason to believe in what you're building. Fees should reflect value that already exists, not value you're promising to create.

What Borderless does and doesn't do

Borderless provides the technology. What you do with it is entirely yours.

How you manage your members, how you communicate, what investment opportunities you bring, that's your domain. Your members are joining your collective.

The platform provides the tools and support that makes it possible to run it efficiently, but the decisions are yours to make.

Borderless makes sure you're not figuring it out alone. Every collective manager gets a dedicated support channel with the Borderless team. We've been through this process with enough collective managers to know what the questions tend to be, and we'll be there when they come up.

The next step

Most people who want to start a collective get stuck waiting until they feel more ready. The details become clear once you start.

We've already onboarded over 20+ collective managers onto the platform. Those who got set up well made clear decisions from the start. They knew who they were building for, chose the right structure for their collective and went live.

If you're ready to take the first step, fill in the collective onboarding form here, and we'll take it from there together.