How do you grow a community around the product?

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

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.

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

@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.

- 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.

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).

I built the product on side while I was working full time in pharmaceutical out of curiosity. I didn't think of anything about marketing and sales. Now I am trying and learning all social media and community building around the product.

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). 😀

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

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.

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.

Talk about topics related to your product and industry. Answer their questions, comments and DMS. Educate and entertain your audience on social media platforms. It can help a lot!

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

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 :)

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.

It is not that easy, but I believe once valuable content is produced and suggested in the field that the business specializes in, it opens a door to creating the right community composed of people with the same area of interest. :) Once the community already exists, it is important to maintain the space where these people gather, regularly bring valuable content to participants, and be active within the community.

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

As a Solo developer, building a community is exhausting.

There are a minimum of three perspectives to think through: 1. yours: what are your product motivations? (looks like you're got a strong handle on this: leverage it to increase sales, grow product) 2. passive members: what makes it worth the effort to visit it? 3. active members: what makes it worth the effort to contribute to it? (comments or posts; also comment & user moderation) Communities live or die by the interplay of content and member's involvement with it, especially if they generate it. In an extreme but not implausible case, it can get out of hand quickly and shift into something that runs counter to your brand (especially if there aren't people involved with moderation). What's far more likely is that it quietly struggles with engagement, and that happens when those core reasons (#2 and #3) aren't strong. There's a time-based aspects to these perspectives too. A community of aspiration/hype pre-launch is likely to turn into a community of support post-launch. If you plan for that, great! If you're not ready to shepherd it as such, it might make more sense to find existing communities to participate in.

There is no magic bullet to get a community. What works best is a powerful personal network of the founders. It's not smth accessible to any founder - but wee what you could leverage given your existing network.