Ask IH: Does anyone have a community here ?
I'm curious to know indie hackers who have communities, how they manage them and what are the hardships they face.
I personally find it a bit difficult to keep a community 'alive' or grow it. Would love to know your take on this.
I used to host a discourse community on a Digital Ocean droplet for the aviation industry. I'm now restructuring it.
What I learned was, the chatter only existed among a certain type of users.
So I slapped that project, gathered up the email list and told all my visitors that I'll be starting a forum for them.
Specifically, taking out the rest of the 'noise' (what didn't apply for them). Relaunching soon.
Use discourse, it's fantastic and user friendly if you're not techy. Always start a forum with a partner, it makes it so much easier to get feedback and momentum.
Create interesting posts for that niche, try to pull people in by going to existing communities or new sources for them and insert those posts in intriguing ways.
A forum/community is a hard thing to get going.
Communities grow when people have the proper areas to express themselves.
You need to nurture a 'culture'.
You can do that through custom emoji's, content, and contests. Help your members have fun.
Some of my hardships are managing it all myself, growing consistently month over month, and creating new content for a very stagnant industry that is afraid of tech.
If you have more specific questions, tweet or email me. :)
Thanks for taking time to reply. I find your insights very useful and indeed expect an email from me coming soon. I am planning on starting and running a community and I have a lot of questions!