A small community backing a project may be the right way to get initial traction
I´m starting to get the feeling that a small community backing a project may be indispensable to gain traction on a new IH project.
SEO is becoming impossible even for niches, with BS blogs taking top spots. Ads get expensive quickly and could slowly kill any startup even well funded. PH and the like are a hit or miss. So that leaves communities.
What are the main platforms out there to start a community and how do you promote them? Maybe it goes all back to step one if you cant grow a small community to support an idea.
I personally like Slack and FB groups, they are easy to get going and most people are aware of how they work.
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Hey! I am working on habitate.io - do check it out when you find time.
Reasons why I built habitate
Slack takes away conversation after reaching 10,000 messages. Value of a community grows with content re-usability.
Second, if the community is SEO friendly and on your website - that attracts new traffic too.
That looks amazing, the event management tool could be extremely useful. Also the newsletter. Maybe it could include a newsletter builder that allows for easy editing of a weekly newsletter. I have built something similar, but extremely basic for our internal team, still is difficult to move away from Slack.
Event management is actually done 😅 I need to update it on the landing page.
Newsletter hoping to get it done by October.
Does event management refer to online meetups? Or there's more I can't see.
Another way to go is to find an existing community and serve them, instead of building a new one from scratch. You're probably already part of communities full of people who are already looking for solutions.
For communities I've always preferred starting with a website and an email list. Then only if you start gaining traction you look into more sophisticated tech and tools.
And then looking at the reasons people often succeed, it's down to their investment in building their network. Not always, but there's a big percentage of people who spend time build up their own relationships online.
Thank you Rosie, the website and email list kind of take me back to the first step. You will need to get users into it, and to sign up for the newsletter. Maybe use social networks and other forums.
I got an idea on how to make it work! A system that will attract community members as part of a network effect. One-click to create a community and get your first users. The key will be to find a great community manager such as yourself.
I agree 100%. Once you see enough validation, you can go on to build a dedicated platform for them. Website plus email list serve the purpose till you have say 1000-5000 subscribers.
Uh, I wouldn't saw PH is hit or miss. I'm seeing hunters there who consistently hit the front page. One way to see if something is "hit or miss" Is to take a look at the profiles, see their submissions. If more than, say, 25% are going to the front page, there are some principles behind that.