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14 Comments

When should you build a community?

When should we build a community? It seems like everyone is building a community nowadays in Indie Hackers and Twitter.

Do you start building a community when there's a subject that interests you and no one is talking about it?

How do you know that the idea for the community is a good one?

I'd like to get your thoughts about it. This has been in my mind for some time now.

  1. 8

    Here's my take: you can't and don't actually start by building a community. Weird right?

    But think about it: You can't actually control a community (you can only control the environment and constraints), and you can't manifest community out of thin air.

    Community is a result of doing other things, usually forming relationships, first 1-1 and then interconnected over time that leads to building trust, sharing knowledge and experiences, and people supporting one another.

    So community doesn't start with an idea. It starts with relationships. And if you do the rest of the work, truly listen and empower people, a community MIGHT be one of the results!

    1. 4

      👆 100% this. Even IndieHackers didn't start out as a forum. It just published interviews with successful founders who were willing to share their revenue numbers. While I'm not sure if it was @csallen intention the whole time, the forum was added later after the site was getting a critical mass of people. So first build something special that people want to congregate around and then later give them the space to do it.

    2. 2

      Really deep answer. So a community always appears organically?

      1. 6

        Think about it like gardening. A garden can "appear" organically, or it can be cultivated.

        But in both cases, you can't force the flowers to grow you can only make sure they have what they need to do the growing.

    3. 1

      We're starting our 1:1 relationship building right now.

      Stumbled across this approach after spending the past 3 weeks building a relationship who is turning out to be one of our most committed members.

      Now I've realized that this early work is essential.

    4. 1

      True, a lot of communities started as email lists.

  2. 1

    I started building a community from day 1 for tractific.com

    I think if your target audience engages in your community, then it is a good one.

  3. 1

    Great question @RubenJS. I now start building community from Day 1. So many times I created projects in the past without community or an initial customer base. I didn't have anyone to get feedback from or validate my idea with.

    I think this will look different for everyone though. Learning by doing is certainly the best strategy when building an audience starting out. Documenting and sharing your journey will naturally attract those who resonate with what you are building or the work that you do. It is then up to you how you decide to capture or put parameters around building a community of your own.

    You could utilize your own community tool like these here. Or you could continue to build a following on other social media sites and forums until a point when it makes sense to begin extracting value from them.

    I think the most important thing is to just start sharing what you are learning and building and you can worry about creating a more formal "community" further down the line. Hope this helps.

    1. 2

      Thanks, Gordon! I also feel like there's a great chance in building a community from day 1. Great post will take a look at the tools!

      1. 1

        For sure. By posting about your story and your journey of building, you are already starting to build a community around what you are doing! Glad you enjoyed it.

  4. 1

    It's a great question, I had been thinking about this since a few weeks.
    The right time would be when you are adding value to anything. Just think i started to blog today and have 2-3 blogs building a community does not make any sense.
    you should be building when there are enough people who like your content or product and you have completely explored about what you are doing.

    1. 2

      Thanks man. How do you know when you have enough people?

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

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