Who's building a community around its product here?
I've seen a lot of talks about building a community around your product and the benefits it has: feedbacks, engagement, word of mouth...
Who is actually doing it here and what tools are you using to do it?
How do you manage to get your users involved?
I was attempting to built a community around my product, but I just (last week) gave up on that idea and decided I needed to focus first on the product and user acquisition.
I liked the idea of building a community because 1) I was hoping that community members would create value for each other so that I wasn't constantly having to create content to provide value and 2) the product we're building is trying to change behavior in a sort of significant way -- prompting freelancers to essentially shift the balance of power in client relationships -- and it felt like a community would help support this / help these individuals support and cheer each other on.
Later I hope/plan to return to the idea of building a community, but it was HARD to get people to join, and I decided it was too much to try to do it all right now.
We were using Tribe. They had a good free tier to get us started, and I liked that I could arrange content in there kind of like a blog. Sometimes I feel like in communities that are very conversation-based it can be difficult to find information that was previously shared.
Would you have paid $100/month once you'd have gotten to more than 100 users?
I totally agree that communities made on Discord/Slack (which are conversation-based, or chat-based) are a mess when it comes to actually finding quality content, especially when you arrive just in the middle on an ongoing conversation.
On a side note, I'm actually building Dupple (https://dupple.com), a competitor to Tribe focused on startups with features especially developed for them, because I didn't find any platform to centralize all my user interactions (discussions, support, feedback, events...).
Also, it's less costly because I think about all the indie hacker who do not have $100/month to spend in a community.
So if you choose to build a community once again, maybe give it a try :)
Will certainly keep you in mind, if we get there! :)
We're using Slack (community chat) and Upvoty (roadmap). It's a slow process, but we have a few users who are quite active and provide feedback.
Very interested in any ideas on how to engage with people.
Are you using the slack free plan? How do you handle the fact that messages will get archived after 10k messages and you will lose data?
Do you use slack only for discussions or is there a channel dedicated to ideas/feedbacks/bug reporting… ?
Yes, we use the Slack free plan for the community. We haven't hit 10k messages yet but it's that's one of the main reasons we may look at other solutions in the future. Another drawback of using Slack is that we have to update the join link once a month.
On structure: We have channels for bugs, suggestions, and general discussion, but it gets messy pretty quickly.
Thinking about it, it would be nice to integrate our knowledge base (user guide) more closely with the community discussion and product roadmap. Any thoughts on good tools?
Well I'm actually building Dupple (https://dupple.com), a platform that allows you to centralize user discussions, feedbacks, support, events... in a single place, with features especially made for startups.
We also have channels dedicated to documentation, whose docs you can include inside other channels.
In your case, think of it as upvoty + slack (with no message limitation, SSO (incoming) and a dedicated subdomain) + docs all in one place.
If you think about giving it a try, please send me an email at louis@dupple.com, I'll onboard you personnally :)
Haha, I walked right into that one, didn't I. :D
Thanks for the offer. I'll have a look and connect to say hi anyway.
Ahahah it was so satisfying!! 😆
Build a community, and give it a product. In that order
What content would you give to a product community if you don’t have a product yet?
I've recently started a discourse forum and a discord for my webgl design tool Polygonjs.
Building a community is key for me, as there are so many ways to use the tool that everybody will be benefit if people can help each other, and learn from each other. That said, the beginning is slow going. So for now, I have best engagement on my twitter.
The reason I went for Discord+Discourse:
And I was initially wondering if I should use Slack or Discord, but this post made me lean toward discord. In short, Discord is better for videos, which are important for my tool as it is visual, and less expensive for communities.
Regarding discourse, what are the "categories"/"channels" you have?
I haven't set up any yet. I'll do that when there is more traffic.
So every topic is in the same "main" channel?
If you product is interesting enough that your users would like to join a community then start one. What I have found is that starting a community is not that hard but to manage it. keeping it active and fun is more the challenge. There is nothing worse then a community thats quiet really no fun at all..... oh and in terms of tool slack is not scaleable but professional Discord scales for users but it was made for video gamers so its pretty informal looking... hope this helps and all the best 👍
100% agree
Creating a community is 0.001% of the job. The rest is creating quality content/interactions and promoting it.
This is why at Dupple (https://dupple.com) we've stopped targeting too small companies/projects, because they don't have the user base nor the will or the content to actually activate their community and make it active and engaging.
Discord turned out to work really well for us. We started when http://acreom.com was in private beta, acquiring first users through other communities on reddit/HN etc. Overall, this worked well for direct engagement with users, collecting feedback & bugs, announcing releases / news etc.
How did you acquire users o Reddit without getting banned for marketing? What was your process?
we were more active in the comment section than posting. Trying to add value by reacting when someone had similar issues or was looking for a problem our tool is solving. But there are also some subreddits that do allow shameless plugs.
I got banned from a subreddit when I first joined because I did NOT contribute before promoting. Learned my lesson, and now I contribute daily where I can but am so gun-shy as to promoting a site I'm building in fear I will get banned from other subs.
Is it about having enough karma or just having participated enough in the subreddit?
I don't know. Like I said, I got banned from a very large sub that is 100% my target audience for asking user to check out my project. In retrospect I 100% get it and understand why since I was very new on Reddit and the specific sub.
Now I just spend time on other subs that contain my target audience and answer questions in comments. I try to be helpful. I write walls of text that other users always say are very helpful. I have a little Karma, and once in a while I point to my project in my comments/answers. So I'm not sure how mods determine if a plug is acceptable or not - assuming of course it is not in direct violation of the sub rules.
How do you manage the flow of feedbacks & bugs considering discord is a chat? Is it still manageable?
How do you manage multiple discussions happening in parallel into the same channel?
I started the WBE Space as a community around my indie hacking podcast. Now the community became a product of its own...
Your community is priced at $10/month, do you pay for slack premium with these $10?
nope. we are still on the free tier of slack but I have built a lot of tooling around it
I’m mostly using Twitter to talk about stormkit.io and we have Discord to communicate with the users. Also posting on indie hackers from time to time. It’s a slow process, I believe consistency and patience are required to build a community.
Where do you have most of your feedbacks and bug requests?
How do you find the content to publish on twitter?
Users reach me out through Discord or Twitter for issues, or use GitHub to open a new issue. I try to be friends with my customers - that’s how I get my feedback :)
Twitter is mostly random. I reply threads, sometimes share my experiences and now trying to build a community of like-minded people. Feel free to join: https://twitter.com/i/communities/1523269557816856576
Already joined lol
Awesome :)
I'm not particularly building a community but I talk about my products every now and then and that's because all my experiences, questions, achievements are happening in the course of building the products.
DoTenX (an alternative for Zapier) is what I talk about more recently.
Regarding the engagement I really don't do anything special, as long as it's something people can resonate with, benefit from, or are simply curious about they get involved.
I am and I just got supported by the Linux Foundation for building a mini pharma industry of graduate students on github.
https://github.com/Sulstice/global-chem
I want to show how we as a community of organic chemistry communicate. Show the software world how we communicate so they can learn:
https://github.com/Sulstice/global-chem/discussions/84