How do I find these first 5-10 members?
While the post Community: the new business model for indie hackers is already six years old, I think community building is still a very good method if you want to make an impact and not just build a product.
So I asked an AI chatbot for advice on how to start a community.
The answer:
Before you start:
- Am I willing to invest 10+ hours/week in community maintenance? Yes, check.
- Can I play on both the practical and political levels equally? Yes, check.
- Am I open to the community taking a different direction than planned? Yey, check.
- Do I have a network for the first 20 members? Oops, um, nope.
At first glance, it sounds so simple: find a handful of people who are really interested in the topic. Look on Reddit to see who writes about similar things. Write to people who publish interesting blog posts. Well, so far, no real connections have come out of it, let alone 20.
How did you do it, fellow community founders? Does it make more sense to approach people IRL, even if it's about an online community? Or have you found good ways to find people online who are genuinely interested in your topic?
Honestly, the first few people only came after real 1-on-1 conversations.
Cold outreach never worked for me.
The community part only started once a couple of people already cared enough to keep talking.
The "cold outreach to strangers on Reddit" approach rarely works for the first 10. Those people already have their own communities, priorities, and inbox fatigue.
What's worked for me is starting with adjacent conversations rather than direct recruitment. Find threads where people are already frustrated with the exact problem your community solves, then just... be useful. Answer their questions. Share your take. Don't pitch. If your perspective resonates, some will click through to your profile and find their way to you naturally.
For the very first few members, honestly your existing contacts are underrated. Not in a "hey join my thing" way - more like "I'm exploring this idea, would love to bounce thoughts off you." People who already know you are more likely to stick around and actually participate, which matters a lot early on when you need activity, not just signups.
IRL works weirdly well even for online communities, especially at small events or meetups where people are already in "I'm open to connecting" mode.
Thank you very much, those are very valuable insights.
That resonates strongly with me, it's definitely true.
But to be honest, it's much scarier to ask for honest feedback from people I know well than from strangers on Reddit.
Maybe that's the real problem, and I should start by only approaching people I already know. At least as a first step. Thank you for the encouragement, I'll keep you posted!
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Great question — and the reason this feels hard isn’t “finding users.” It’s finding the right first users whose problems your product actually solves in a way that’s obvious and urgent.
The first 5–10 members aren’t a random audience — they’re your validation cohort, and the way you land them should reflect that:
People don’t join because they’re “interested.” They join because they recognize themselves in a context you describe. Use concrete situations in your outreach:
“If you’ve spent >3 hours this week stuck on X…”
“If your current tool does Y but fails at Z…”
That specificity gets responses; generic “try this tool” posts don’t.
Don’t just look for platforms — look for moments of conflict or decision around your problem domain.
Examples:
GitHub issues where people are asking for a solution
Product Hunt discussions complaining about a gap
Reddit/StackOverflow threads where people are stuck
Those are active intent signals — the people there are much more likely to engage.
Ask yourself: if you were the user, what kind of exchange feels fair?
Founders who lead with something genuinely helpful get responses at much higher rates than “I’m building X, join my beta.”
The cohort you attract first will also shape your positioning. Early members want to feel heard and represented — which means your messaging has to reflect their language, not generic product talk.
This is exactly the kind of strategic clarity we help founders refine at Quratulain Creatives — making sure the first outreach doesn’t just generate traffic, but meaningful, engaged users.
A quick question for you: what specific outcome or signal are you hoping those first 5–10 members validate? That often clarifies where you should look and how you should talk to them.
I track site visits on my blog. I don't any subscribers yet.
Wow, one comment here is straight out of GPT, not a great choice.
About your question, I'd offer a different angle: don't try to talk to your audience, talk to those your audience follows and trusts. Example: you are working on a new service that makes the life of an older person better? Let influencers in this particular space know, find ways to make a collab interesting for some of them, contact doctors for the elderly, see if you can email someone at magazines for senior citizens, etc.
Not everyone will reply, but at least these are people who made staying up to speed with the market their living, and they have an active interest in finding new things to talk about and offering their audience the next cool thing. Not consultants who are interviewed by national television or influencers with 1 million followers. The smaller, the better.
You don't have to make it interesting for these people, they're already interested. But your product's got to be there, these can't be your testers. They'll tell you if you got something wrong, they're the experts after all, but the product has to be polished. If it is, they could be the door to your first few users.
I really like how you framed this because finding the first few users always feels harder than any later growth phase.
For me it helped to think less about growth channels and more about conversations. Actually talking to people one on one, even if only a few, gives you a ton of clarity about who actually cares and why.
I am also early with my own small tool and this idea of starting with real dialogue instead of chasing numbers resonates a lot. I’d love to hear what ways others here have found that let them have those first real conversations about their product.
I can relate to the situation you are in. ~
The first few people/early adopters (5–10) are typically the most difficult to get.
After that, gravity will begin to take over.
A key aspect for me to understand was that there are two distinct groups of users – founding members and early users.
Founding members aren’t using the site for the content that it has; they’re using it for the opportunity to be a part of something larger.
When you describe your community as “join my community,” that will be met with resistance; however, if you ask your founding members to “help create this,” it changes the entire approach.
Have you ever tried reaching out to people to ask for their help before asking them to join? For me, making that very small change had an immediate impact on the number of people that were willing to help me.
Concrete technique for me is as follows: Rather than looking for people who are interested in my subject, I look at who has been complaining about their problems with my subject and that has yielded much higher quality leads.