Ask IH: How do you grow a community?

Growing the Indie Hackers community in the early days involved several things. The most important was to form the community around a topic that (a) many people (b) find significant value in discussing with others (c) frequently (d) over the long-term. Starting and running an online business certainly meets all of those criteria. If you're missing any of those, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle in trying to grow your community.

The next thing was to kickstart the discussions. The discussions are what provide value, and so a community with few discussions provides little value, even if the topic it's organized around meets all the above requirements. I used the Reddit strategy of creating some fake accounts and talking to myself and others for the first few months.

I kept this ball rolling by finding a way to consistently drive traffic to the community every week. This was the most important step, and it's also the hardest to replicate. I did it by publishing interviews that people enjoyed reading, building up a list of email subscribers, and sending out links to forum discussions alongside links to the interviews in my newsletter every week for months.

It looks like your community is your chatroom. (By the way, it's hard to find given the current layout of your website.) That's a bit different than growing a forum, because the discussions tend to be less substantive, and you don't have a mechanism to ensure the best discussions rise to the top so everyone will notice them. It's also hard because you don't have permanent linkable discussions that can get shared on social media, rank on Google, etc. But take my assessment with a grain of salt, because I've never been an active member of any chat-based communities nor tried to grow one.

I wouldn't spend much time revamping your UI. Rather, I'd find a way to consistently drive new traffic to your community on a regular basis, ideally weekly or daily. You need to provide value to draw people in, because your community discussions are likely not valuable enough given your current size. Maybe you do that by creating helpful content that you can advertise your community alongside of, like I did. Or maybe you do that by somehow making your community itself more valuable, e.g. inviting well-known people to become members or do AMAs. Whatever you do, you want a repeatable process that won't force you to be creative every time, and yet doesn't become stale to readers/participants over time, either.

Hi Dominic,

I don't have much experience growing my own community except communitymanagerjobs.co but I have worked previously as a community lead at DoSelect and also contributed to various communities in Bangalore (India)with their events and offline campaigns. Most of the things are covered by @csallen which are perfect but I thougth of sharing few points.

Building a community isn't easy. It takes time, a lot of hard work and persistence.

Things that worked out pretty well -

1. Bring small set of people first who shares a similar idea, thinking and grow it from there. Create discussions yourself.

2. Consistency - Things like welcoming new members, sending newsletters, talking to members one on one on why they don't jump on discussion.

3. Content - Keep pushing out more content that matters most, not just something that you write, content related to the domain, content that community finds it useful. Ask the community on what they would like to see or learn about.

4. Find your superusers or influencers in the community. This will make your work easier and they will bring more people in.

5. Offline events so that people feel it really is something. The crowd or audience who interacts in an offline event tends to be closer to the same member once they are back online.

6. Partner with different organizations for atleast giveaways or maybe host offline events in their office. Choose companies whose focus is on Machine Learning because they will also have developer community and by cross-sharing things they will get to know about you and the community.

Hope this helps.

Also, @mijustin shared his tips on building a successful community few weeks back and here are details - https://twitter.com/rafyasarmatta/status/970000199639683072

Cheers

I'm planning on growing a community soon. I think you're on the right track, especially with the 'create more content' and 'release edu material'. That's at the heart of my strategy.

I also think that video is essential. As the creator of the community, you want for your members to feel familiar with at least the 'leader' and later among themselves too, and that would encourage them to share more themselves. So yeah, I'm doing the Samuel L Jackson thing and filming as much as I can wherever and whenever I can. Currently posting on Youtube and probably Facebook soon, but IGTV looks promising as well.

The plan is also to offer rewards and freebies of my products to the members too, you could try that as well if it makes sense for you.

Hey Dominic! First of all, thanks for the product. I've found several good opportunities for myself through you.

Regarding the question, I'm a part of another ML community, ODS.ai (Open Data Science). It is a Slack for Russian (and not only) Data Scientists counting 13k+ members and growing.

Of course, there were many factors of growth but things I've noticed were:

1. A healthy environment for collaboration around solving Kaggle competitions.

2. Regular offline events for cities with a lot of members, i.e. "data breakfast" every Wednesday (20-30 people every week for Moscow, 5-10 for Berlin etc), ML meetups every second Saturday with several Kaggle winners sharing their experience and many other local meetups.

3. ODS ML MOOC (https://www.patreon.com/ods_mlcourse)! It was crowdsourced and attracted a lot of beginners to the community, at first only Russian-speaking but then it has grown.

4. We collaborate around co-writing ML articles, Kaggle competition reviews etc for our blog at "Russian HN" and have a lot of people learning about us through it (https://habr.com/company/ods/).

5. There are some slides with additional numbers on the website.

The community became indispensable for me. And the reason is simple: it supports my growth as an ML Engineer and I can always find experts in anything by simply searching through the chat.

Can you attract people that have something to say? Can you create unique content reccurently?

You are more than welcome to join us @ ODS.ai! Don't forget to introduce yourself in #welcome once you get an access.

How is this a community? To me you would need a forum to be a community or allow users to add blogs(with discussion)? How do members of the community contribute content?

I am no expert in this area by any means, but I have seen the FreeCodeCamp community grow by inviting members to contribute to their blog. As you are looking to make more content, have your current members contribute. They will then want to share what they have written with their network.