How to build a community?
How have you managed to grow and sustain your online communities. I am currently planning on launching my own soon and am wondering how these type of platforms grow (or not). The paradox is that a community is only useful to the user if it has enough engagement but to grow engagement it needs to have a solid user base.
What techniques have you used to start and "ignite" the engagement and life of your community? Do you have any advice?
You're right on point about the engagement aspect.
It's super important, not just in the early days but especially in the early days, for the founder of the community to be actively engaged in the community, and set an example for everyone else. It's the only way to create engagement and generate momentum.
Here's a similar question I asked a few months ago. Some really great tips in there: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-create-an-engaged-community-on-slack-cfa29af741
Remember. A community never independently exist. Instead, it is the collective success of community builders and different stakeholders within the community.
Start from small. Even it’s just 3 persons. Say startup community: Gradually deliver true value to help entrepreneurs succeed. Connecting people from entrepreneurs, tech workers, policymakers, co-working spaces, accelerators and investors all in one place.
You can check how other communities grew before. I have seen you have a developer community so you can check the history of "freeCodeCamp", "CodeNewbie" and "dev.to".
The first one grew from courses, the second and the third from twitter.
And maybe chose the similar path. Twitter is a really big deal in development communities.
I forgot where I read it, but I think it was actually on IH where I found 5 points on building a community.
Most of it focused on being consistent. A community is a long game for the most part.
Are you referring to this one @BryceV? 😁
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-create-an-engaged-community-on-slack-cfa29af741
Or maybe this? 😁
https://twitter.com/DavidSpinks/status/956957657197264896
HA YES Thank you @Merott! This comment in particular I have posted on my wall: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-create-an-engaged-community-on-slack-cfa29af741?commentId=-LqZmyZ6tbbo-EqFomn9
I don't have a ton of experience with this but I think you need something that keeps people coming back for reasons other than community in the beginning.
Look at Indiehackers. It's the interviews that got this place going to begin with. For a long time the community was really quiet here.
This may be a little edgy to say in this setting, but I also think one of the initial reasons 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr were successes is they were great places to find porn. People went to the site to look at porn, and then slowly became engaged in other communities on those sites.