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23 Comments

Do you have a community for your users?

And if so - on what platform? Slack? Discourse? Something else?

Personally, I like Slack - but that doesn't allow for additional SEO and often results in duplicative questions / discussions.

I've used Discourse forum - but those types of forums seem old and less engaging. But, it does help with SEO and avoids duplicate discussions.

What are your thoughts? What medium/platform do you use for you community? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it?

  1. 7

    I think there is a market here for anyone that can deliver a solid solution that would combine the advantages of slack and discourse. Imagine you could deploy a community site like indie hackers for your niche.

    1. 1

      Solid! But potentially difficult to execute. Huge opportunity for sure.

  2. 7

    I'm currently using Spectrum, but I have the feeling it's no longer being improved since their Github acquisition. It has some major issues, like email notifications not going out anymore to alert users when they have a reply. I'm considering moving to Slack or Discord, but not totally sure. Interested to hear some other people chime in.

  3. 4

    I really want to start a community to improve the relationship with our users. As a job board, it would be great to share tips with job hunting etc, but juggling multiple communities at once is difficult as a solopreneur. Currently only doing facebook group and twitter

  4. 3

    yes! we've built our own small platform (you can see a screenshot here) and we're using that for our community.

    what's great is that we've also ditched slack entirely... to save money and to keep things much more simple operationally.

    and... this keeps us really close to our customers and community! win-win.

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      Any plans to make this into a SaaS for others to potentially utilize? Seems quite useful!

      1. 3

        yes, eventually, that's actually the master plan... who told you?

        :P

        1. 1

          If you have a great asset, why not utilize it ;)

    2. 1

      question on the "save money on slack part" — if you there was a discount would you pay?

      i ran a startup community in university and we got a 90% discount, $12/user/year and I did pay for about 30 people.

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        no. because it's not actually useful. even at a discount, our solution is working perfectly... why pay for something that we wouldn't use?

        :P

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          got it! what's your take on the different software platforms for community?

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            i think a lot of them are great! as long as they keep working for the user / community / customer... then, i'm all for it.

            i think there are many opportunities for improvement — that's what i'm looking into right now.

  5. 3

    Anyone have any luck with reddit? The reddit community for Notion seems amazing, and we were thinking of going down that route as well.

    1. 1

      i am continuously amazed by the notion community. make me fall in love with the product/company more and more every day :) i think it's an outlier but a goal. what is interesting is that that community emerged spontaneously/organically!

  6. 3

    Circle is worth a look, it's in private beta atm - https://circle.so/

    I got a look at it, it's kind of like a mix between Slack and Facebook.

    1. 2

      i've seen that and it looks amazing!

  7. 2

    This came to my mind recently.

    Why not make subreddit around your product?

    You can converse with your community much more easily and many people already have reddit accounts.

    Joining slack or other similar platforms is often pain in the ass and quite frankly I quickly forget all the slacks I have joined.

    On reddit if I joined I would see new content from r/<your product> constantly on the main page.

  8. 2

    I've been thinking of starting a classical mailing list via mailman. And then creating a custom interface which renders that into a site, for SEO and discoverability.

    I do also have a matrix chat room. It's the FOSS version of Slack. It has a lot of rough edges and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're userbase comes from the FOSS community.

  9. 2

    Also, I think this podcast/resource can be helpful:https://www.people-and.com/

  10. 1

    nothing smart to add, just following. ;-)

  11. 2

    This comment was deleted 7 months ago.

  12. 3

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      I think about Telegram too.

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