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20 Comments

Platforms for community building for startups?

What's the best platform for building community of early adopters for the startup and how can we leverage them for consumer facing products?

  1. 5

    Love this! Building a community around your product right from the beginning is one of the highest leverage thing you can do.

    Using a no-code tool like Meeps, you can run an early-access program for your product (and receive payments).

    @joshuaanderton and I are using Meeps to:

    • Build a waiting list
    • Send out early-access invites
    • Get people to register, fill out a profile, and pay us ($99/year for early-access)
    • Automatically invite early-access members to Discord
    • Give people instructions on how to use our product
    • Send email updates to early-access members and waiting list

    https://meeps.app/newsletter/nddsog

    1. 1

      Thanks Justin for sharing insights about Meeps.

  2. 4

    Hey, I'm currently building a community platform for Startups that is aimed at engaging your users and collecting their feedbacks to make a product people really want. The goal is to turn your users into co-creators that will really work to create the best product.

    It may be what you're looking for ahah

    We should release a first version before october (and it will be 100% free for the early adopters) so feel free to check it! :)

    https://dupple.com

    1. 2

      This looks awesome. I'm building something in a very similar space with @jasonforrest we're calling Inter. Might be cool to keep in touch and share notes! Best of luck.

      1. 1

        Yeah, it seems we do not really aim at doing the same thing based on what I saw with "Freelancer News" (or you've pivoted), maybe we could discuss if you'd like to! :)

    2. 1

      Looks really cool. Your product is solving a for one of the modern product development frameworks of involving customer in the process of co-creation. Very useful for giving customers a sense of ownership about the product and making them feel heard.

  3. 2

    Most communities I'm part of are on Slack - few though use it well and create a really engaging community there (with community events happening on Zoom).

    I've also seen some communities on https://www.geneva.com/ and https://lu.ma. A new one I want to test out is heartbeat: https://www.heartbeat.chat/

  4. 2

    @jasonforrest and I are building Inter

    It's community software for product teams designed to help you build in public. We've used Slack for this for years and realized we were losing valuable customer and product conversations because of their message limit and inability to find the stuff we needed. Our goal is to give product teams a place to work, answer customer questions, and get feedback all in one place. You can check out the first community, Freelancer News, which just launched yesterday if you're looking for a demo.

  5. 2

    I find myself engaging with people on Twitter and ProductHunt to find early adopters and people to get feedback from. Twitter is amazing since I get to learn from those in their journey.

    Also I'm working on helping makers build in public and create an early audience. Here's the link if you would like to have a look https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/astramind-for-makers

    1. 2

      Yes Twitter is very helpful in interacting with potential early adopters. My bad, I am not very active on it. How has your experience been in using Reddit and FB in this regard?

      1. 1

        Reddit is interesting. There are certain niche communities who would love to try out new products. I found them to be enthusiastic when I built a project previously and interacted with them.

        If you find the right subreddit, you'll be able to get tons of insight. I don't use FB much so not sure about that.

        1. 1

          Yes Goutham, Reddit is useful if we can find a niche community willing to try out the product. But finding such a community with all those moderations and anonymity becomes an issue.

  6. 1

    Please check our website, you may get an idea on how to put up and gain other tips!
    https://www.saasjournal.io/

    1. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  7. 1

    Most of the startups I see are using Slack. It's free to start with, everybody knows how to use it and maybe even already have it installed and running all the time.
    But of course it's more a communication tools that helps you get in touch with your early adopters that really like to take part in the development.

    1. 1

      The problem I've run into with running a Slack community is the message limit really hurts your ability to save customer research and use it in the future. That's partly why I'm building Inter which is a community app that I hope will have a Slack integration soon.

    2. 1

      Yes, slack is a great tool to bring early adopters in an exclusive online space. I think for consumer facing products, even WhatsApp can work enough to bring early adopter and co-creator in product development and marketing process.

      1. 2

        The main issue with Slack's free version is that you're limited by the 10k messages limit (so you end up losing content), and that it's basically a tchat so it's always hard to manage all the more so if you have a few hundred/thousand users, because the answers tend to get lost under the "flood" of messages, which leads you to repeat the same answers again and again.

        I see a lot of projects using discord, but it tends to be the same situation with devs replying the same things again and again. Also, discord/slack aren't made for that purpose so we can't really blame them for that! :)

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