How do you kickstart a community?
It's easier to improve an existing community with some activity.
But how do you "kickstart" it, how do you solve the "0 to 1" problem?
It's easier to improve an existing community with some activity.
But how do you "kickstart" it, how do you solve the "0 to 1" problem?
I have a Slack community for founders/growth hackers that currently has over 5,000 members.
The way I bootstrapped it is by sending a cold email to around 500 founders, saying I plan to start a community on X. I got around 30% response rate saying they're interested. So I collected around 150 emails or so, and when the day of the "launch" came, I just sent a Slack invite link. Around 30-50% of people joined and that's how I "kickstarted" the community.
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Things I would do:
💜 1-on-1: Do things that don't scale, meet with the people you want to have in your community on a personal basis. Understand who they are and what they want to see in the community and add it to a master-tracker spreadsheet
💜 Send regular updates: whether it's newsletters, tweets, podcasts or other, find a medium to send out regular updates to your community
💜 Real-time collaboration: Twitter DMs, Discord or Slack or something else, you need a platform to talk to your community in real-time - get to know them on a day to day basis. Ideally somewhere on a platform they already all use! (SSO platforms are ok too but still tough)
💜Community gifts: Highlight members and send them gifts, like tshirts and stickers - make them feel like they belong by covering them with simple yet powerful rewards (up to you to strategize how those rewards are earned though)
Things I wouldn't do:
💔 Promote your community on social platforms
💔 Spam people to join your community: terrible idea gets you blocked and bad rep
💔 Purchase lists of emails to invite them in mass to your community: no go
💔 Let your community run dry: like a flower it needs to be watered constantly
Hey @rosiesherry is this something your new course would cover?
Yup!
People flock to place where they can get some value. So, create some value first. Then you can raise awareness about the community and invite people to join. You’ll get better results that way.
In the first days of Reddit, Quora, and other community platforms, their founding team members were the ones that created the content that jump started the platform.
I remember when I joined for Quora’s Spanish platform, Quora team members posted questions in Spanish and invited me to write Spanish answers.
The WBE Space started as a perk of my podcast but since I noticed that was having a lot of engagement I decided to start selling it as a standalone product!