Trying to build a community down the line. Is a Slack group a good stepping stone or not?
https://marketingexamples.com
Hola,
I'm working on a marketing site Marketing Examples. Currently it's all content based but the email list and twitter are ticking over nicely. I know want to try and make the leap to a community down the line. This would include user profiles, a forum etc ... This is probably 6 months away yet though.
So the question I have today is will a Slack group be a good stepping stone? Or will it actually cause problems for me once I try and build out the community.
PRO's
- people have requested it
- allows me a better relationship with users now
- is a short term solution to community ...
CONS
- the slack might overshadow the community (not allowing it properly flourish). Users may just be happy sitting on Slack ...
- do i close the slack when i make the community?
An easy parallel to draw would be Indie Hackers. @csallen + @channingallen decided not to go with Slack and it worked out. I wonder what would have happened if they did?
Would love any advice. Thanks.
Hi Harry,
I'm actually planning to create a Slack channel myself later this week. The product I'm working on is developer oriented and in my point of view developers are more keen on joining a Slack channel than for instance submitting to an (almost empty) issue board.
I have no experiences with hosting a public Slack yet, so I'm interested in other peoples responses.
Yeah that's the thing. Definitely better than just an empty issue board haha!
My concern would be the feasibility of migration from Slack to Forum
I use Slack for work. I don't understand the non-work use case for Slack. Doesn't it becoming unmanageable very quickly? Telegram seems like a much better platform for this use case.
A little bit offtopic but how you guys find Slack useful? I had some experience with it and it was... awful. Just one thread for everything... or several threads but still for all the participants of the thread.
I couldn't find my questions, I didn't see responses, the whole thread is just a mess. I thought maybe it's okay for a group of 2-5 people, but it's just very inconvenient for real communities.
Hmm interesting. The only good Slack group I'm a part of is the Indie Hackers London one. Most descend into blog spam
I've tried at least a couple of times to get an invite to the Indie Ldn Slack, never got it :(
O - well that sucks. Did you ever fill in this form?
I've just messaged the group. Hopefully tomorrow is the day :)
I believe I did.
ok - should get an invite to rosie@indiehackers.com later on :)
I love slack, but another option would be https://spectrum.chat/ which was acquired by GitHub. I haven't looked closely, but they opened source'd too https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum
I don't know about Slack, but I've seen a good chunk of Facebook groups trying to move their communities to a website but as far as I know ultimately all of them failed. In the end almost every of them pivoted to a paid Facebook group.
Interesting. Thanks Andrea. Certainly a very difficult task to successfully migrate to an IH style community.
Appreciated the vote of confidence on Reddit earlier today as well! Was coming under fire aha
Yeah, Reddit can be quite a toxic place 😉
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Thanks Jas. It's more a stepping stone to a forum. A short term solution.
My concern would be the feasibility of migration from Slack / Discourse to Forum down the line. Would people be willing to change from something they feel comfortable with.
You probably wouldn't migrate, imho/probably, if you wanted a forum then you end up supporting both. As long as they are providing value, I suppose.
Slack and forums provide very different offerings. Slacks are great for casual conversation and a great way to avoid email. They can also be a great source of inspiration for more permanent forum discussions, or general content ideas.
At Ministry of Testing, we started a forum and then added a Slack to the mix. 3 years or so later, we have 2 slacks (don't ask why, lol), 8k on one, 5k on the other. 20k+ on our forum.
I love Slack, but the biggest down side is paying if you want to keep the content. Our chat history disappears pretty quickly :(
Sometimes it's not about what you want, but what the people want! They'll probably end up deciding at the end of the day. I wish everyone would just participate in our forum, but they don't, lol. But it's great to see some of the fun casual conversations in Slack, you really get to know people on a more personal level.
Great insight. Thank you Rosie.
Is the Ministry of Testing Slack paid? I might try and join up if that's alright just to check it out.
What you said about wanting people to participate on the forum resonated. It's seems a shame in a way to have everyone DM privately on Slack, when if that was in public a greater sum value would be created.
In my shoes, what would you do? I guess the question is how much of a short term win would Slack be (if I got it to work)?
And also, why did you add in Slack after the forum? My intuition would say it would normally go the other way around.
If I were you, I'd start with Slack, take note of things that are being discussed and use those as starter discussions in a forum.
Forums are great for long term value, content, seo, usefulness, but they need people participating.
Easier to launch a forum if you have a Slack and mailing list where you can drive good traffic to each discussion.
You can also use a Slack for really getting to know your community, friendly chats 'n' all that. Harder to do that in a forum.
The Slacks are free, testers would never pay for that. I've only paid for one slack and I regret it, it sucks. See 'Connect' menu on our website, they're both listed there.
We added Slack, because if we didn't someone else would've done one and we wanted to be first (best and biggest too) :) Also, our forum started in 2007 (way before Slack existed!), though we restarted it 2-3 years ago with Discourse.
I think there's a certain pressure that people have with permanent conversations on the internet. Many people are hesitant. Slack can be a great way around that, they can say stupid things and search won't pick it up. People in our Slacks actually prefer for the history to disappear, they don't want that permanent trace.
We often take ideas or conversations and post them to our forum, or encourage people to do it themselves, especially for the questions that are asked over and over again.
Really helpful - thank you. will get back to properly later. At work now :)
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