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If you're running a community, I want to promote it!

Hey IH! For the past 6 months I've been curating The Hive Index: a directory of online communities.

I got really inspired by the Indie Hackers community when I started my bootstrapping journey, and wanted to make sure that online communities are accessible to anyone who wants to find them. So I started keeping an organized list.

By now I've expanded it to include almost 500 communities across 70 topics. For each community, I tag it with platform + features (like forum, chat, newsletter, perks, job board, etc) so that folks looking for communities can find one that fits their needs.

It's been a fun little project to work on, and I've been enjoying growing it over time. I've definitely met some very cool people in the process, and it's inspired other projects for me to work on.

If you're running an online community, I'd love to list it! Also, if you know any good ones that I should add, or would like to request a new topic to curate, please let me know!

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    Not sure if this fits or not, but we recently launched a new site for Open Makers / Build in Public type people. The goal is to help promote makers and products over long periods of time through product milestones, versus something like Product Hunt where it's a burst of traffic that quickly fades away.

    https://openmakers.io/

    Thanks!

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      Hey Micah, wow what an awesome community for makers you have created! Congrats on the recent launch, I'm looking forward to seeing the community grow.

      Here's your Hive Index listing for Open Makers. As you keep building it up, if you ever want to update your listing just let me know!

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        Thank you for the nice comments! Also, thank you for adding the site to the hive index!

        Great resource!

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    Really great list! I'm impressed. Wanted to do a curated resource list before, but it's so much work. And I always find it hard to categorize things. I don't know how you manage to collect 500+?!

    I kind of want to start a community (still deciding...). Your list is very helpful for me to see what other similar communities are out there as that's certainly something to think about. So thanks for the good work!

    Do you plan to make money with this? Did you build it with code?

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      Hey thanks! Yeah it's been a good amount of work, but I've found it to be rewarding because the resource seems to help quite a lot of people.

      I'm not focusing on monetizing just yet, but eventually might push the sponsored listings for those that run paid communities and want to get more exposure. I wrote about building the site a bit here if you're interested.

      About starting a new community, it's definitely a lot of work but can pay off in several different ways. What kind of community are you thinking of starting?

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        Cool!

        I'm interested in the mental health space, because I have suffered quite much from it. The problem is it would be unsustainable for me if I don't charge. If I charge, then I need to figure out what kind of value I can provide for people. The dilemma: how can I help others if I myself don't have it all figure out.

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          Here's a secret - nobody has it all figured out.
          You should start talking to people in your target segment about their problems and you will eventually find something that people are happy to pay you to solve for them. There's a lot of amazing resources on IH about validation interviews, but if you want my take on it it you can find it in this thread.

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            100%. Gotta admit I have imposter syndrome to work on imposter syndrome...

            Appreciate your encouragement. Following you on twitter:)

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    One very interesting, exclusive online community I recently heard about: http://fwb.help/ (based on crypto tokens everyone has to buy before entering the community). But don’t know it that’s a good fit for your list.

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      Wow that is quite an interesting community. I'm going to be diving into the world of crypto, web3, and NFTs over the next week or so and adding some communities. Will include this one, thanks!

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    This is super cool! You've got a good list of communities out there. I, unfortunately, don't have a community yet, but am thinking about starting one soon around the productivity space.

    I took a look around and I'm not seeing any productivity communities on your site. is that about right?

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      You should do it and then we can start the productivity topic page :)

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          yeh I like the idea of being the first. To add some more color to my idea. I want to focus on building a community around tab management. So really niche down in the productivity space.

          Just a fun place to talk about our problems managing tabs. I'm actively building a product that helps with this aspect, mainly scratching my own itch.

          But I want to keep the community and product separate. Do you have thoughts on this? What do you think has worked well for communities that are backed by a product/company?

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            There are lots of communities that are moderated by product owners. As long as you're not shoving your product down their throat, I think it's a perfectly fine thing to do.

            If you're building a product around tab management, and that's what the community is all about, I think that you'll very likely end up talking about your product at some point, and so you might as well be transparent about it and not hide the fact that you're a product owner. What I'd recommend is to have a separate place (like a dedicated channel in your slack org for example) in your community to discuss & get feedback on your product. People can participate in that if they wish.

            Just my 0.02, do with it what you will, but I think that tab management could be too small a topic to sustain a thriving community. I agree that you can niche down from general productivity, but maybe something like "productivity for founders" or "online productivity" would give you enough options. And then tab management can also be a dedicated channel in the community.

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              good point about inevitably sharing my product, I put some thought into this scenario. I think the best steps would be being transparent about what I'm building and how I want to keep the community unbiased.

              My thinking with niching down is actually as a way to keep it sustainable. I was thinking of ways to branch out within the community. Like sharing concepts that go past tab management that help with taming tabs in the long run. Things like Personal Knowledge Management systems.

              But definitely good point, will keep that in mind and iterate if people are not interested

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              Don't just take my opinion on it. Test it. Go to a big productivity community like r/productivity and make a post about interest in tab management specifically, to see if there are enough people that would be willing to join a separate community just for that topic.

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                for sure! this is great advice. thanks

                It's funny because about a month ago, I shared a post just voicing my frustration about being a "tab hoarder" and had a few comments on that post.

                I do think there's an opportunity, my thing is about being engaging with the community. I guess I'll just use trial and error!

                Just been putting this on the back burner trying to wrap up development of my product's MVP.

                stay tuned! will reach out to you once I have a community going

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                  Right on, excited to see this happen :)

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    Any advice how to promote a community. I working for a club. I need to increase exposure for the organization

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      My biggest piece of advice for growing a community is to enable your existing community members to be your promoters.

      Make it easy to share, give them the resources to describe the community, and incentivize them to bring in additional quality contributors to your space.

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