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I've spent 16+ years building communities. Ask me anything.
Back to PH after a long time and I thought I'd offer fellow hunters some help with their community building.
After spending over a decade and a half in this space; I've picked a thing or two about community building and community growth.
If you are stuck with your community growth or want to start a community around your brand; I'm here to help.
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Devon Katreskien
I am creating IndieTeamz, a platform for indie designers/developers/marketers to connect and build amazing products.
How would you recommend we get the first users and then keep building the community?
Thanks for the help
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@product_finder I think finding the first users seems to be common problem for all community builders.
The question you need to answer is - "What value am I offering to my community members?". In your case - why would a new member come to your community and want to come back again?
Assuming that you have something valuable to offer to your community's early members, you need to manually recruit first 50 members. It's easy to do; since (I assume) they don't have to pay for it.
The other approach is to create amazing content on your community that immediately solves a problem for your community member. When I built my community, I created pseudo accounts and built amazing discussions on the community.
Whenever a new member came to the community; they were impressed by the active forum and people chatting - basically my avatars chatting with each other :-).
Creating amazing discussions and exposing them to Google helped me build a flywheel that kept attracting users for years to come.
I hope this helps.
@shezzy04 - Do not worry; it's actually easy to start. I do not know about your brand. Assuming that you are building community around your service or product; I'd recommend creating discussions that are relevant and helpful to your users.
For example, if your users are asking a few questions repeatedly, you could create discussions around it and encourage people to answer.
I am helping build a community for SaaS product; and we're building it around support. Users who have technical question are encouraged to post them on the community. It works really well.
Of course, having some content written initially helped a lot.
Let me know what are you working on and I can be more specific about steps you can take.
