Growing a Facebook Group to 14,000 Members: Community Management Tips with David McCan

I recently had the chance to sit down with David McCan. If you’re active in the WordPress space, you likely know David. He runs the Dynamic WordPress Facebook group, manages the WebTNG YouTube channel, and is generally known for his thoughtful, deep-dive reviews of WordPress tools.

This post is a bit of an experiment, and David was gracious enough to be my guinea pig. I asked if we could jump on a video call, record it, and then use the transcript to write up this blog post. We ended up talking for nearly an hour about how his group grew to over 14,000 members, his surprisingly academic approach to online community, and why WordPress is still a pretty remarkable place to be.

TL;DR: David started his group after watching an inactive admin let a community die. Five years and 14,600 members later, his approach boils down to a few principles: broaden your scope when the niche gets too narrow, moderate more than less, make sure every post gets a response in the early days, build a team with different expertise than your own, and stay fueled by curiosity rather than commissions. Oh, and he has a doctorate in anthropology, which turns out to be surprisingly useful for running a Facebook group.

The “Accidental” Community Leader

David didn’t set out with a master plan to build what Dynamic WordPress has become. He was an active member of a different Facebook group, but the owner of that group, “did not post or do anything at all.” David and a few others were basically keeping the conversation going on their own until one day he thought, “Well, this is silly,” and started a new group. He was joined by Michael Edwin, a longtime agency owner, and Nelson Therrien who is a trainer and developer.

Five years later, that spur-of-the-moment decision turned into a community of 14,700+ people. I think that’s what makes the origin story so good. It wasn’t a calculated move. There was no growth strategy or content calendar. It was just a guy who got tired of watching a good conversation slowly die in a neglected space and decided to give it a home.

There are some parallels there to how the Beaver Builder Facebook Group started. At the time, we were handling our support through a clunky bbPress forum. One of our regular users thought that a Facebook group would be a better hub for discussions about the software, so he started it up himself. Not long after, the group took on a life of its own and is still active to this day.

Finding (and Expanding) Your Niche

Originally, Dynamic WordPress had a very specific technical focus: custom post types, custom fields, and dynamic data. David has done more than 20 videos on creating custom post types and displaying them with different tools. That was his thing, and it attracted many advanced users early on. About 25–30% of the initial membership were developers or product owners.

But as David put it, there isn’t necessarily breaking news about dynamic WordPress “every single day.” To keep the community alive, they started sharing broader web development and WordPress topics.

This shift changed the makeup of the group. The developer ratio dropped to around 20–25%, and a lot of what David calls “normal users” joined the conversation. Some of the early hardcore members probably miss that hyper-focused technical vibe. But broadening the scope is what fueled growth to where the group sits today, about 14,600 members.

It’s a tension I think a lot of community builders face: stay niche and risk stagnation, or broaden and risk dilution. David chose growth, and it worked. As the group grew, so did the need for help. Elvis Krstulovic and Gen Herres joined as moderators. Elvis teaches university courses on graphic design and visual communications, and Gen is a web accessibility expert.

Managing Humans (An Anthropological Approach)

One thing that really surprised me is that David has a doctorate in anthropology. His research focused on Maori land claims in New Zealand. And he doesn’t just have that background as an interesting bio footnote. He actively applies it to how he runs the group.

He talks about online communities through the lens of “tribalism” and “in-group markers,” the way people use specific language or references to signal which camp they belong to. If you’ve spent any time in WordPress Facebook groups, you know exactly what he means. The Beaver Builder camp, the Gutenberg camp, the “I hand-code everything” camp. David sees those dynamics playing out in real time and moderates accordingly.

His approach is pretty different from many tech groups: he advocates for moderating more, not less.

He told me a story about a PHP group he was part of years ago. The organizer was aggressive and outgoing and let things get rowdy. Eventually, this person asked why participation was down, and a woman in the group spoke up: she’d been raised not to curse in public, and she wasn’t going to participate in discussions where people were cursing. She just went quiet.

David’s takeaway is that a “rough and tumble” atmosphere doesn’t create freedom. It creates silence. The loudest voices dominate, and everyone else disappears. His goal is to make sure the quieter members feel comfortable enough to actually share their work and ask questions.

He gave me a recent example that brought this to life. A member named Supa Mike posted a question: instead of asking what builder everyone was moving to (the usual framing), he asked what builder people were using and wanted to stick with. The result was a thread full of people speaking up about tools that rarely get attention, because for once, the question wasn’t designed to spark a fight. David loved it, because that’s precisely the kind of conversation his moderation style is designed to protect.

The Early Grind (and the Tipping Point)

In the early days, David made a point of ensuring that every single post got a response. If someone posted and nobody replied, he or one of the other admins would jump in. That consistency, just making sure nobody felt like they were shouting into the void, is what he credits with sparking the group’s initial growth.

There’s a specific number where things shifted: somewhere around 9,000 to 10,000 members. Before that threshold, David and the admins were posting almost everything. After it, the community started generating its own content. People were asking questions, sharing work, answering each other. The group became self-sustaining.

That’s a useful benchmark for anyone building a community. The early phase requires real, sustained effort. You’re basically keeping the lights on by yourself. But if you stick with it, there’s a point where the community starts doing the work for you. David says reaching that point is one of the most rewarding parts: you get to step back and watch people help each other.

The Mistake He’d Take Back

I asked David about tips and things he’s learned over the years managing the group, and he was honest about a recurring mistake: not moderating fast enough. He’ll see something that should be addressed, think, “I’ll handle that when I get back from the gym,” and by the time he returns, the thread has blown up.

His advice: if you see it, handle it. Delayed moderation almost always makes things worse.

Curiosity Is Better Fuel Than Clicks

Seeing how consistently David posts news coverage and reviews made me wonder about burnout. I know from experience that keeping that pace can eventually feel like a slog.

The cool thing is that David doesn’t frame what he does as a hustle. His primary drive is just curiosity. He loves seeing people’s creativity, the “aha” moment when someone builds something new and cool. He traces this back to reading a column in Byte magazine by the science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, who wrote about life at “Chaos Manor”: tinkering with hardware, wrestling with software, and clearly having the time of his life doing it. David thought, That’s something I’d enjoy doing. And that impulse has carried him for decades.

He’s leaned so far into that philosophy that he recently walked away from affiliate marketing entirely. He removed all affiliate links from his site and YouTube channel, stepped back from co-administrating the WP LTDS group (which was focused on lifetime product sales), and decided to just focus on the group and the learning.

That hit home for me. When you’re fueled by passion and curiosity, it changes the way you show up. The work feels less like a grind and more like a hobby.

Appreciating the Platform

We wrapped up with a story from David’s youth that I think is a perfect note for where we are in the WordPress ecosystem right now.

When he was about 19, he used to hitchhike from Maryland to Pennsylvania to visit friends. One night, he got picked up by an FBI agent. Just a guy giving him a ride. The agent asked where David was from, and when David mentioned Baltimore (a “heavy city,” as he described it), the agent told him, “Baltimore is a pretty cool place. People don’t appreciate a lot of times what they have.”

David draws a direct parallel to WordPress. It’s easy for us to rail on the problems, the drama, the bugs. We get distracted by the “shiny ball” of new tools or frustrated by changes we didn’t ask for. But when you zoom out, we have a fantastic platform and community that lets us build cool things, whether you’re using Beaver Builder, block themes, Elementor, ACF, or custom code. The platform is the thing worth appreciating.

It was a great reminder to take a step back.

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Big thanks to David for being my first interview guest. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend joining the Dynamic WordPress group on Facebook or checking out his new project at dynamicwp.co.