How do you build your communities?
In the past, I build a "community" through the following sequence:
- I write articles that provide value to my target audience
- I post the said articles to social media groups
- In each article, I guide them to sign-up for the newsletter by providing free valuable assets
- Write a newsletter whenever new articles come out
- Repeat
The reason I put the community in quotes is that I didn't feel like I knew the people on the email list.
This time with a new project, I am experimenting with Discord and hopefully, it gives me more opportunities to interact directly with people.
However, in the age of excessive online scams and lack of trust, I find it hard to make people believe I only want to help them and build things for them.
To be fair, I do want to make a profit, but that's down the line when I actually provide them with results.
How is everyone doing it? Do you have a similar sequence? How do you understand your audience more?
Trending on Indie Hackers
I built a 300-400 member community of Micro SaaS builders at Micro SaaS HQ and we have a pretty decent connected engagement truly supporting each other. The community access comes with deep-dive reports, Pro reports, founder insights, launch support etc too - all around one single ecosystem of Micro SaaS
I know what exactly you have been talking. It needs a lot of time build a community with decent engagement.
I think Newsletter -> Discord is a decent flow to build the community.
But it could also be Newsletter -> Circle or Newsletter -> Slack too depending on the audience/community type.
Some bullet points to make community building better
@upenv Wow, thanks for taking the time to give such an informative reply. A lot of takeaways here. Besides what you have written here, I can see that you provide value to your community by the density of thoughts put into this reply. Your community is lucky to have you. I will learn from this.
Thankyou!! We are all learning someway or the other way!!
I think that I have the same struggle. I have an utility app with a few users but find it difficult to understand what the users want. Right now I have no newsletter and I will maybe start one, but does that actually count as a community? It seems to be difficult to have conversations with users through a newsletter? Maybe I am wrong.
Another idea I have is to add social elements to the app. Users are not aware of each other as it works right now, but I am wondering if I should add discussion elements to the app. The users have a common interest, which is why they are using the app in the first place. So some kind of bulletin board built into the app might be a good idea, but I am a bit afraid of managing a community like that as well. I think my whole app will be open for spam in a whole new way if I add social elements…
Honestly, the best way to build community is just to have conversations with people. Then look for the patterns and the people that align with your goals/vision.
There's too much focus here on tools and audiences.
I don't build communities around fabform.io I just write what I hope is useful information for the peoples and pray to the Gods that people find our service.
It works and it doesn't.
haha, that's what I usually do too. Still trying to improve though
I guess it depends on the community. For Reddit, I've posted some stuff before and got a few customers from it.
Upon seeing my posts, some folks DM me on Reddit (instead of posting), asking me to join their Discord community. These communities are generally not that small and seems to be a good channel to build a community, especially if you're DM'ing folks in subreddits directly related to your community.
But it's risky though because you can get banned if many people report you.
And to keep your community, I say you should probably provide value to all users. Some communities run into the issue of having too much spam. And some communities run into nobody joining, because most that want to join would like at least the opportunity to shill their own thing before contributing (WIIFM).
I've found some places, like r/entrepreneur that does a good job of balancing the two: have a dedicated place where people can shill and the rest of the part of the community is about delivering value and contribution. Bucketizing this serves 3 purposes:
Thanks, @bobswinon. That's an interesting breakdown of the different motivations within a community. By shilling, do you mean people who want to self-promote or broader sense of getting what they want in a community?
I think that's a more realistic approach to a community. Some communities expect people to give value continuously, but the reality is most people have their own agenda to achieve.
Mostly self-promote. I don't think that self-promoters and providing value is mutually exclusive (a user can self promote and then go on to make 10 other really good posts to provide value for example).
Allowing users to fulfill their own agenda while mitigating spam I think allows for a user gap that wouldn't exist to otherwise be filled.
We are building Stemble [https://stemble.xyz] - an online platform where you can connect with random intellectuals on the internet & discuss anything STEM. Community is at the heart of our product. We started off building the community first when I posted about my idea of building an "omegle-like" site for discussing Space in r/PhysicsStudents subreddit & someone suggested building a discord server where people interested in the idea can join & we got around 30-35 members from that post alone.
@hammadnasir Thanks for sharing. I tried Reddit before, but I often ran into their self-promotion rule. Maybe it depends on the topics of the subreddit.
Hey David,
Great questions! As others have said, you should start by building an audience on social media.
Twitter is a great place to start and can be combined with IH and Linkedin.
Once you get enough people engaging with your content on Twitter, feel free to start share your product updates and get discussions started (Tweets + Spaces)
Finally, invite them over to Discord.
I'm building a product that helps startups do this - Casa (trycasa.io). Would love to have a chat, cheers
Good idea to run on top of Discord, I love the approach.
I'm going to test your product in my next community.
I take this opportunity to show https://customerstoryhub.com/ in case you want to add a unique space to your website to show how TryCasa helps grow communities on Discord.
Best!
Thanks a ton for the kind words! Customer Story Hub looks interesting, will definitely look into it
@north_star_says Thanks for introducing me to Casa. Seems like a great product. I do have a small following on LinkedIn + Medium. I still haven't gotten into the habit of posting on Twitter. If you were to start over on a fresh Twitter account, how would you do it?
Hey David!
Great question. Here's what I would do (and actually did):
Analyze results and repeat
@north_star_says
Thanks for the concrete tips. Will definitely try them out!
What's your opinion on building a community in tool like discord or slack?
@chrles_cc I have only started with discord recently. But looking at other discord servers, they can get a high level of engagement and quality discussion. It's a bit of a learning process to set up the server to be enjoyable though.
I mainly use slack for internal communication with my team, so I haven't really tried it as a community-building tool. From the ux point of view, discord seems more casual than slack. (maybe people feel less intimidated)
That doesn't sound like a community. You are rather building an audience.
A community is a network of interconnected nodes. For this to be a community there should be interaction between members. So a member would be able to "talk" (or whatever) with another member.
How you play is different on each.
@gokceozantoptas Thanks for the reply. Would you say that the difference between community and audience is the interaction between members? Or are there other factors?
Is my current approach more suitable for audience building?
That is the biggest difference. Audience is one-to-many, Community is many-to-many