Why did you start your community?
@rosiesherry wrote an excellent post about community validation. Before any sort of outside validation, she asks the important question "Why should you start one?".
I'd like to know what communities you're all starting/running and why? What value are you trying to bring to yourself and others?
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I'm running a mastodon instance since last October. The reason I started it is the censorship on the social network we were using had gone out of control. (Chinese website, people weren't even posting political content still got censored till the point no one can talk normally) so I got to know Mastodon and then decided to start my own instance.
It has brought to me and others more value than I thought it would be:
Last month I started a private Discord community for Divjoy customers.
Why: My mission is to make it 10x easier for people to build and launch their product ideas. Divjoy does that by setting you up with a codebase, but I think providing a supportive community is just as important. There are a lot of maker communities out there these days, but very few where everyone is building with the same set of technologies. I'm excited to explore ideas that take advantage of this, such as monthly hackathons where people can collaborate on ideas.
So far 230 people have joined (around 1/5 of customers) and I'm seeing daily activity, so happy with how things are going.
That's really cool Gabe.
On a side note: do you plan to make divjoy subscription based in the future?
It's tricky when most of the value is up front. I'd like to try to later this year once the community is a bit more developed and I make it easier to pull code updates into an existing project. Hoping both add long-term value.
I'm curious about you decision to build a community. Did you consider launching a community before the product to validate/gain some subscribers? I'm guessing in your case since you knew your target audience that wasn't a priority.
To some degree the problem space was already validated. Myself and lots of other devs were vocally frustrated with how long it takes to build products with code. I felt the only way I could validate whether my concept would work and whether people would pay for it was to build an MVP and get it out there.
I think growing a forum or discord community in advance would have been hard. I did start usehooks.com while working on divjoy and it ended up being a big source of early users.
i'm building a community in and around my startup (software platform).
the value i'm bringing myself is... revenue. the value i'm bringing the community is a great network of relationships that can help them build their businesses / communities... and then a platform to help them do that too.
Hey, me and some other tourism students got the chance to host some workshops for small local tourism providers and give them tips for digitization and digital presence. We were surprised how low their knowledge about the topic was. And now because there is no tourists they are all out of work. And after some thought I decided that we have to keep in touch with these people and try to build community around it. I had no idea what building community meant beforehand. But with plenty of resources outhere we are making our first steps. Started with an email list and now we are moving towards a community platform ( I selected Tribe.so). I will even write my thesis about the development of our community. Hopefully we will create a whole support system for tourism professional for our small country of Slovenia. :)