September 24, 2026
Ditcherville Classic
Are you old enough to remember the New Coke debacle of 1985?
If not, here’s a quick summary:
New Coke was a reformulated version of Coca-Cola, introduced in April 1985. Coca-Cola had been losing market share to diet soft drinks and non-cola beverages for several years. Blind taste tests indicated that consumers preferred the sweeter taste of rival Pepsi-Cola, leading the company to reformulate its product.
The change was met with widespread negative public reaction, and New Coke came to be regarded as a significant failure. Within three months, the Coca-Cola Company reintroduced the original formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic”, which produced a notable increase in sales.
I think there’s a lot to learn from this story - particularly with regard to measuring the wrong things - but the reason I bring it up is that I’ve been having a similar experience, albeit on a smaller scale.
Story time...
In September 2017, I started a group coaching community in Slack. It was just called “Group Coaching with Jonathan”, and the Slack room was mostly just for announcements about when the next group coaching Q&A call was going to be.
At some point, we reached a tipping point, and it started to feel more like a community than a notification platform, so I changed the name to Ditcherville and started thinking about fostering more community engagement.
The more I thought about this, the more I felt limited by Slack. I use Slack all the time, and I like it a lot as a messaging platform, but it’s not purpose-built for hosting an online community. I started looking at Circle and Mighty and Kajabi and all those.
In late 2025, and after much testing, I concluded that Circle would be the best fit. I started planning and then building a migration path from Slack to Circle.
It was a lot of work, but I felt like it would pay off with even higher engagement. In January 2026, we cut over to “Ditcherville 2.0”
You can probably see where this is going, but I’ll say it anyway...
This turned out to be my New Coke moment.
Almost immediately, engagement tanked.
Members weren’t logging in, weren’t posting, and weren’t commenting.
Attendance at the Ditcherville LIVE Q&A sessions dropped so much that calls went from an average of about 90 minutes down to about half that.
Nine months in, I had to admit that the move to Circle was a mistake.
It’s still true that Slack has lots of limitations when it comes to running a community, but the fact is that Ditcherville engagement is higher in Slack than in Circle. And I consider engagement the key success metric for a community.
So... Ditcherville is moving back to Slack.
As you might imagine, I feel pretty bad about making everyone jump through all the hoops required to move to Circle only to then say “Whoops, my bad... never mind!” but it’s clearly the right thing to do given the new information.
Here’s the thing...
Based on the information I had at the time, moving to Circle made sense.
Nine months later, I had new information.
New data, new decision.
Gotta do it.
(Fortunately for me, Ditchers are super cool, and I didn’t get a single “I told you so!” from any of the original Circle skeptics - even though I richly deserve it LOL!)
Yours,
—J