How do I kickstart my community?
Johannes Pittgens
30 replies
Do you have any tips on how to start a community and get traction?
Replies
Ryan Hoover@rrhoover
Product Hunt
Most important first step is to have a clear definition of who you're building for and what their goals are. Everything else draws from that.
Share
Be clear on where you are heading and who your people are, but understand that ultimately community comes from understanding your people through conversations.
I find that people get stuck when they don't throw themselves into the worlds that their people live in. The answers come when you immerse yourself — you'll find people's joys, struggles, complaints, etc...and then be able to take a bunch of ideas, discussions, events, products back to your community.
A couple of interesting things I've written on these ideas and generally in starting community:
https://rosie.land/posts/start-b...
https://rosie.land/posts/a-guide...
Warmup Inbox
This is an old article but it can be a good source of inspiration: https://medium.com/@theunixbeard...
What type of community is it?
@maxwellcdavis It's a community around data platforms that emerged from a tool-specific community. Now we're trying to reposition it as a more generic community. Any ideas?
@johannes_pittgens Have a listen to the community Experience Podcast or maybe think about trying to apply to @rosiesherry new Minimum Viable community course - https://discover.coleap.com/buil...
Best tips I know 👇
1. Focus on quality of content
2. "Steal" the audience from bigger creators 😅
Log Harvestor
@giacomo_bottoli Do you have an example of how you would do this?
@giacomo_bottoli @solomon_bush Agreed - what do you mean with your second point? :)
@johannes_pittgens @solomon_bush apologies for the huge delay 😵💫
I missed this 😱
1. It's quite self-explanatory - do the Mr. Beast of YouTube ... every time you publish something you should aim to create the best content possible
2. It means 3 things: (i) be active on big accounts (ii) comment under their posts to promote yourself in a smart way and attract attention around your community - don't just spam (iii) create tailored content that focuses on capturing big accounts' attention (one of my friend for instance, created a Twitter thread summarising all of Paul Graham's essays - Paul Graham retweeted that and my friend got 1,000 followers in 3 days)
Does this help?
Apologies again for the delayed reply 🙏🏻😅
Log Harvestor
@johannes_pittgens @giacomo_bottoli No worries! I feel like PH spams so many notifications it's hard to keep track of comments and threads lol.
But this is great advice. I am going to try this. :) Thanks!
@solomon_bush Feedback relevant for @rrhoover ? :)
Userdome
Hey Johannes! Just recently I put together this list of my favorite guides how to build a community: https://entrepreneurlist.io/comm... Maybe, you find it helpful.
@jakub_piskor Love these resources - would you be free for a quick chat about your project?
I think it's super important to find where your target audience "hangs out" and engage with them as much as possible there. After establishing trust with this audience and offering value to them, you'll eventually be able to build a sort of following there.
Here, it's mainly important that you engage regularly and often. For example, if you join a slack/discord/discourse forum you should often ask questions, respond to others' questions, post your own content, etc.
@taliambender Thanks for sharing this! Do you have an Ultralytics community that I could check out for inspiration?
@johannes_pittgens sure! We've recently migrated our slack forum to Discord, so we're still in the process of getting our users to move here: https://discord.gg/bNc8wwx7Qy, but I would also suggest looking at our repo, we are very active on here with a decent following: https://github.com/ultralytics/y...
Once you start providing quality content to your users, you will automatically build a great community. But for that you need to know their problems so that you can give them right solution.
@srishty_chaudhary Cheers! Any tips on what type of content?
Great question!
Wisdom Community
create content, valuable content and figure out who do you want in your community. Then start reaching out, be it on twitter, reddit or linkedin or whereever. Hijack existing posts and comment, join groups and participate without selling your group actively. message people that are active in similiar communities and connect with them. Once you have a bit of a connection invite them to your group. And from there, once you got a couple members try to get a network effect. Find reasons/incentives why people should invite their friends, share your community.
If you want to learn more on how to create an online community you can also get this free e-book here: https://getwisdomcommunity.com/e...
I think social media or having a chat platform (e.g., RumbleTalk, Arena, etc.) on your website is a good start. Members can mingle with each other and your community can build from there.
@siena_romes There is also discord and github ?