How do you grow a community around the product?

Lots of community comes down to having conversations with people and finding ways to help them. The hard part is knowing what conversations to have and how to help them, much of this is down to researching (community discovery), practicing and experimenting (Minimum Viable Communities).

You can rely on early adopters of your product and help them grow as experts by creating useful content for your audience in the very beginning. This helps you take a look at the content that your audience find useful from the other perspective and reveal something that you might miss

Hey Ksusha. You inspired me with your topic and I decided to write a post based on my experience https://medium.com/@andreylipkov...

Here are some tips for growing a community around your product: - Talk about the problem you're solving - Publish content frequently about the problem - Invite early adopters who identify with the problem - Ask them to share their experience about the problem - Identify your top community contributors - Ask them to invite their friends

This is hard, it's true :) Beta testing, useful content for the product's audience, socials, "velvet rope marketing strategy", etc.

Oh, and I remembered a tip from the official Product Hunt manual: build community first

Many great answers here already so I will just add to them (hopefully). Making sure people already in the community are sharing success (in whatever form that comes in), this helps validate the quality of the community and whatever the community is built around.

Most of the communities I've joined were actually when I was looking for support but then I stayed for other reasons.

- Challenge the status quo and have an enemy - Beat a bush about on socials - Get folks to your waitlist. Check out Microacquire, he does it well.

The best way to start discussions about the problems your product solves; without mentioning about the product. A product is a 'solution', and it has to be a natural solution to the problem people are facing. If enough people are interested, you'll know that there's actually a demand for the product you're building. Only when you know they're talking, you introduce your product as a 'possible fix'.

As a Solo developer, building a community is exhausting.

I'd suggest hyper-personalization - by that I mean connecting with people on a human-to-human level as much as possible. Then, you have a firsthand uderstanding of your audience, people's needs, fears, and values. Once you do that, marke - the right content, relevant product updates, engaging social media posts, and so on.

Send out goodies if you have a budget. Make an exclusive community and give them deals they can't get elsewhere. Make your users a significant part of your content strategy. Be there when your users come across an issue. Reward them with gifts whenever there comes a special occasion. Etc.

This all depends on the "Practical Value all the Community Members are getting consistently", you could refer to the STEPPS Framework for this-https://www.linkedin.com/posts/s...

It's really hard... We tried to use different platforms as Indie Hackers or Product Hunt Discussions to gain the community for our launch (we launched today LeaksID 2.0 and will be grateful for your support). 😀

The best way to grow a community would be to ensure that there's highest 1-1 engagement between the members. Otherwise it eventually becomes a ghost town. I've been a part of a lot of communities. And the thing I've observed is that atleast in the early stages, the community manager takes a lot of efforts to organize events, activities to make sure people get to know each other :) It becomes a separate activity apart from the product. But the best part about communities is that they invert the funnel & create exponential sales by word of mouth :)

@ksusha_golovchenko There's a great book and guide that I found very useful: Traffic Secret by Russell Brunson. The key messages are: - first, search for and discover the potential users and customers of your product. They are already congregating somewhere, e.g. FB groups, Twitter chats, Blogs, Communities, Forums, Instagram, ... Product Hunt :) - Cultivate and build relationships in such places where your potential audience is congregating, without marketing: provide as much value as possible to help them with the problems or requests they have - After the relationship and your trust are consolidated, you can start to "invite" them to "your party", by promoting your product to that audience - find and build relationships with top influencers, asking them to help you to promote your product (again, after you have built trust with them). It's a long-term play, not immediate we know. But once done, it opens a lot of doors and changes! @all: Book Reading (if not done) is highly recommended.

It is always hard but possible if you start generating and suggesting valuable content in the area you specialize in :) Community gathers around certain people or topics of interest; if you can bring anything useful and exciting to the table, people will appreciate it and come back for more.

@lssropo3 any thoughts here?