Help with building a community!

Nice to see Mental Health products built with AI component. I wrote about this earlier in Micro SaaS Ideas and products in mental health has so much scope especially if you could get B2B attention.

I built SaaS Builders community for people working on SaaS products and small time opportunities. Building communities takes time. But the easiest way would be to ask your users join a Discord channel or a FB group and keep it simple by hosting weekly updates, AMAs, brining in speakers etc.

Building a community can be challenging, but there are various strategies to attract and engage people. I found success in starting by adding my friends and family to the community and then encouraging them to invite others.

To keep things exciting, we organised daily contents. Everyday we would share the accuracy score of everyone in the contests. And the score was quite good for everyone to showcase it as an achievement. People then started keeping this accuracy score card as their WhatsApp and Insta stories and new people started joining in.

Go on Twitter and interact with relevant accounts.

Simple. But it works.

I just started interacting with the indie hacker community on Twitter a few weeks ago and so far the response has been great. I put off this for way too long and wish I had started earlier.

Discover what these people need and want to talk about. Then create a space to have conversations around them to pull them in.

Start by identifying where do people needing something like this gather. Reach out, ask them to give it a shot and then offer X free months to anyone who joins your community hosted on X (X can be Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Slack etc).

Then, make sure to engage, ask for feedback, open new channels and anything that would increase sense of ownership among your users, and you should have no problem leveraging community to boost retention.

Just make sure to define where to host it based on your audience/user persona, what are you looking to get out of it eventually primarily (retention, referrals, user feedback, onboarding etc.) and adjust the community narrative accordingly.

I built communities where joining was incentivized in the "more the merrier" narrative, and also where there was added friction to ensure quality of discussion by all means. Depending where in between these two you want to land, you need to figure out the elements mentioned above.

Here are some thoughts/things I'm trying for my own SaaS:

1. Create a community page e.g. https://nas.io/creators-and-experts (doesn't need to be active at first. Just a place for people to sign up in advance if they're interested in being a part of the community. I like this site because it lets me filter bots with an application form and ask some questions about interests so I can tailor future live events and opportunities
2. Launch a weekly newsletter that people can subscribe to in advance to stay informed about the people using the SaaS, community wins, and community events, and then share with others who may be a good fit for the product/community
3. Add the community link in the website, content, help center footer etc. so people can find it easily
4. Growing a community takes time and care, focus on quality not on numbers. There are so many big dead "communities." Engagement matters the most, people want to build something together and co-create

Definitely take this with a grain of salt! Just my 2 cents