'Building a Community Before Building a Platorm' is simply a waste of time, efforts and resources.
Here are my thoughts. Please feel free to put your thoughts forward or tell me if I'm thinking wrong.
Here is why?
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Let's say you build a community of 100, you will be obviously using a 3rd party tool such as Facebook Groups, Twitter, Discord, Slack etc (platforms) to do so.
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Once you think of moving forward to build your own platform, you will loose at least 50% of them during the transition.
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Once the rest 50% hop onto your platform, half of them will fall out as your platform is in the inital stages with bugs or some kind of Churn provoking element.
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You have technically acquired 25 people in your community & wasted the time, resources and efforts invested on those other 75 people.
I say, find a better way to validate your idea. Build the platform and then start building a community with real value to offer.
What do you think? Genuinely - I would love to be proven wrong here.
I write about Marketing and drop one Growth Hack everyday on www.Twitter.com/DASirur
What if you build that community on something you own?
I'm thinking of a Blog + mailing list + comments. You can build around that and grow it without having a big switch and migration where you lose half your community.
Exactly. Thank you.
Not sure why people prefer Community Before Platform.
Really good point, I think you destroy a group because half stay and half move, and the critical mass and energy are expended - now you have two groups on life support. migration is a terrible idea.
Exactly.
I spoke to someone on Twitter and here is what they had to say to me ---
"You work on the assumption that you know what your community needs, the reality is you think you do, but you don't. The only way to really find out is to have conversations with them and build up trust. Once you do that then you'll know better what community needs there are, or not.
Community churn is natural, just because you have 100 people, it doesn't mean those are the 100 people you need. Or that they will stay.
The point of community first is to understand the needs of people, and then design the community around that."
What do you think?
For the initial creation of the community yes I agree. Once it's running nobody should know it better than you. You should read every post and comment until it's beyond anyone's ability to follow. By then you should have acquired expert status among your members. Running one is a great way to establish E-A-T in the eyes of google.
Agreed.