Using online communities to validate ideas, find customers, and build an audience

Online communities can be an excellent resource in various stages of a startup's journey:

• Ideation: If you know the market you are going for, you can go to online communities to find what they are discussing to find problems to solve
• Validation: Once you have a problem & potential solution, go find your target users in online communities and try to interview them about their problems & current solutions. Don't try to sell to them just yet, but confirm that they have the problem you are solving, and would be willing to pay for you to solve it. Read "The Mom Test" for tips on how to validate your idea without describing what it is and risking them lying to you
• Feedback - Once you have your product, engage the community to make sure that what you've built actually solves their problem
• First Customers - If you're just getting started, you can offer a price discount on your product specifically to the community you are a part of. Ideally, you'd get feedback and maybe even first reviews in return
• Growth - Turn the customers you've found into your marketing team. In a PLG model, your customers will be sharing your product in other online communities they are a part of. Make sure that you make it easy for them to do this.
• Support Moat - Once you get to a certain stage, you can start your own community for your customers. They can help each other navigate around your product, and provide you with product feedback as you continue to expand your startup.

I made a small website called Hive Index to help entrepreneurs find & engage with their target audience in various online communities. It's completely free to use and post communities on, and the list of online communities is growing every day.

Oh, and in case you're looking for more communities to be a part of (even though IH is and always will be #1 in my heart), check out this list of 55 Online Communities for Entrepreneurs or 19 Indie Business Communities. They are tagged by platform and by feature, so you might find some new ones that have what you need.

I'm also curious if this you guys:

• Has used online communities to ideate/validate/grow/maintain your product. How has it worked out for you?
• Knows any additional awesome online communities that should be added to Hive Index?