How do Indie hackers build communities?

Communities don't look like communities when they start, they look like research, conversations, relationships, email lists, seeking belonging and having empathy.

Most people aren't cut out for community, it becomes a full time job within itself. Doing research and having conversations will benefit you regardless, so I'd start with that.

Hey Manas,

If I may say, it's not really a community that you need per se but attention from your target audience.

You need to get potential customers to pay attention to your business and your product.

If that attention turns into a community then great! But if it doesn't, it's not the end of the world.

The question is then, how do you get attention for your startup?

Particularly given that the vast majority of your target audience isn't going to be looking to buy your product right now and therefore any attempt to sell them your product will be ignored.

The solution that has been tried for a long time is freemium - give people a taste of your product for free and they'll not only pay attention to it (cos its free) but also try it out and share it.

But it's super hard to get right.

There's an alternative however that is a spin on the freemium model that is much easier to pull off. Wrote an article about it here the other day. Rather than repeat the article, I'll share it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-belief-freemium-strategy-that-took-this-sideproject-from-0-8-million-a-year-3b465df4c0

Hope that helps!

Best

Chris

I have been building one of the biggest communities for Indie Hackers at Micro SaaS HQ where we talk about Micro SaaS, Info products, Newsletters, Productized services, Marketplace models, latest trends in SaaS etc.

Here are a few pointers on your questions around communities.

Building communities isn't easy. In most cases, they take years of efforts and communities are usually born out of an Info product, Newsletter, Blogs, product or a group of people. In our case, this Micro SaaS HQ community is born naturally out of a Newsletter.

Don't assume that community grows by itself. No, they don't. You need to spend enormous amount of time and energy and wait for a couple of years.

Here are a Tweet that might give you a better perspective.

The easiest way to validate this would be to find places where you can talk about this and see if people are intersted. A message as simple as - 'Hey, I am ABC and I am planning to build a small community of people doing XYZ. If you are interested, please signup here' Then get on a call with these people and see why they are interested. Validating an idea is also about validating your reach too to find those audience.

Thanks for the lovely answers on this thread. ❤️

I also asked this question on PH Discussions and got some really interesting answers.

Sharing the link on this thread to pass on the learnings.
https://www.producthunt.com/discussions/how-to-build-a-community-for-your-saas-2