What's a good number of seed users to have before creating a community?
I want to create a Slack community in one niche. So far I got around 8 people who expressed interest.
What's a good number of seed users (according to you) to have before creating a Slack community? 50? 100?
Also, are there any other factors I'm overlooking?
Would appreciate an opinion from fellow community makers.
I'm in the early stages of building a community off the back of a newsletter.
Personally, I just had a few random people ask (probably fewer than 8 people) before I started proactively asking frequent "repliers" if they'd be interested.
Random emails to engaged subscribers got to the first 50, then doing a little invite-only launch to the email list led to the second 50. It's got daily activity now with about 100 members, with a small number being exponentially more engaged than others.
I can imagine it's a bit different in Slack though because it's a chat? I'm using Circle so the pace is a bit slower. My guess is that the critical mass is smaller on Slack because of the quicker communication mechanism.
Not sure if that helps but it's a bit of my experience so far!
Hey Monica, how long has it been since you start the community? Typically, I have found that users start with a lot of promise & energy but soon life hits and they start having lesser time. Has that been your observation too?
What topics are you exploring on the community?
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions :)
I think it's definitely important to have ways to re-engage people, especially if the community is somewhere they wouldn't otherwise visit, e.g. not a Facebook or Reddit group.
Honestly I'm pretty new at this, my community has only been around for about 3 months. I find that the automatic weekly digest is helpful, plus bringing in new people is important. Because a small number of people are really the most active and contributing.
My community is for developers that blog to collaborate on growing their blogs and audiences. Main topics are on writing, SEO, monetization, and tech of course.
Hope that's helpful, tbh I am really not an expert on communities but learning every day!
Thanks Monica. I did see your product on PH - so did figure the direction the community might be taking.
If you do get to know an interesting way to re-engage people would be great if you could let me know. I am building remoteclan.com and it will super useful to me.