Ask IH: How to build a community behind an idea
I'm working on a new idea related to searching for jobs (specifically targeting developers). Before I build the actual paid product though I want to build some community behind it. Besides blogging about about jobs etc, why would someone want to come to my site? any advice on how to get started with this?
In this case building community is almost guaranteed to be a wasted effort.
Most visits from search engines are ephemeral i.e. people land on your page, read and leave. They don't come back.
As someone who had a few posts land on main page of Hacker News or Reddit: you get a crazy 10-100x visitor bump for a day but it just slides back to regular levels the day after.
Additionally, job search space has been blogged to death. Your ability to break through the noise (and list high on Google search for anything related to job searches) is next to zero.
When it comes to websites for jobs, especially programming jobs, the trick is to build at least one side of the marketplace.
If you attract lots of programmers, you can attract companies who want to hire programmers.
StackOverflow attracts a lot of programmers because of their core product so it's easy to convince companies to advertise their jobs there.
On slightly lower end of this idea, a popular JavaScript newsletter http://javascriptweekly.com/issues/371 attracts lots of JavaScript programmers so they can charge $150 per job listing (https://booking.cooperpress.com/jobs).
Or https://www.behance.net/ is a place for designers to showcase their designs and they can charge for job postings for designers.
Building the other side of marketplace (getting lots of companies onboard) but possible. That's what e.g. https://triplebyte.com/ did or angellist.
The best way to get programmers to keep visiting your site is to provide a valuable resource.
Not a blog post about job search process but e.g. a newsletter for technology X, a book about technology X, a free tool.
Such resources requires a lot more work than a blog post but such is life: reward is often related to effort.
It would be interesting to figure out how everyone do it in the beginning, before they achieve fame and social influence.
I remember stackoverflow.com is started by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (correct me if I am wrong). Besides making a great product which they understand the problem well, both of them already have quite some social influence through their blog: https://blog.codinghorror.com/ and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/. The takeaway is that we could start writing a blog, but then again most of us might not achieve such popularity or social influence.
Does anyone knows how Indie Hackers gain popularity in the beginning?
in the last interview to @levelsio on IH podcast talk about the topic!
Ok i listeded to that podcast and it was very helpful and worth it!
Good suggestion, I've enjoyed a lot that podcast episode!
We've built a community around the "invoice fiscalization" thing in Croatia, the most significant and most influential community on that subject.
I think that the most important thing is: your knowledge and experience on the subject must be really great. And, naturally, you must offer knowledge that will help someone to solve his problem.
For our community, we've developed and published fully functional open source solution for "fiscalization". We also wrote blog posts, documentation, answers to the forum posts to help people.
And we succeeded - this open source project, in the end, landed many successful contracts for us, because we were "the #1 company" for that matter.
The project was initially published on Codeplex, and now it's archived.