Depending on the constraints of your community, it can be quite effective just to go out and talk to people in the physical world and show them / get them to try your service.
You can use nearby meetups and similar events that already have your intended audience and a place which they will be happy to give you the time of day.
This gives you the benefit of immediate feedback and a local set of users that you've personally met and have built rapport with and will scale just fine to a few hundred users. I've been trying this approach with my London based events sharing community https://onlythebestevents.com and have been pleased with the results so far.
Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
31–40 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#32I've launched and grown/run a few forums over the years and the key for me was to always seed it with as much quality content as possible. Fake it until you make it. I believe reddit did the same.
How do you fake it while staying plausible? Did you just create a dozen sock puppet accounts and post yourself? Or pay/incentive for content?
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#33I created https://hubski.com, which has been around for 9 years. Hubski isn't big, but we have a quality community that brings joy.
To grow, my friends and I just started posting and chatting.
Personally, I think commercialization is antithetical to some types of communities. I wrote this post titled "The social aggregator is a terrible business model" a few years ago: https://hubski.com/pub/219234
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#34I helped building producthunt.com and overclockers.at (and other less successful ones) Here a few learnings: 1. the community already exists, you just create a communication platform for it 2. make it clear what the community is about [positioning/marketing] 3. make sure the communication/content is interesting [quality] 4. make sure there is enough engagement [perceived critical mass] (encourage people to post, post…
In your time, how much has producthunt's platform evolved and iterated? I mean, has it been worthwhile and/or necessary to add new features – anything from new functionality to design tweaks to social/API integrations – to keep the platform healthy and audience engaged?
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#35A nice book is Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design (The MIT Press) (English Edition) ASIN: B007RPF10U https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-successful-online-co... Once I found its content in a series of PDFs in the authors page, but didn't manage to find it now.
The PDFs were from the pre-publication draft version, and I think only the first few draft chapters were in PDF form. But yeah, if you want to understand communities, Kraut is the #1 researcher in the field and this is clearly the book to read. It's extremely dry though, if you're expecting a Seth Godin book you're going to be disappointed.
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
nickb thing?
Disputed but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535620
Haha here is the link to the original email thread with pg asking me to do this:
https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/a_SBCPYeTLGxeP37RRTpmw/
The last time this came up I couldn't share the email thread because PrettyFWD didn't yet exist.
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#37Wow, thanks for asking this question! This is a little meta, but I'm trying to create an online community to _answer_ these sorts of questions. It's called VC3 ( https://vc3.club ) and it's an exercise in seeing if I can build a successful online community. If it succeeds, its sole purpose is to discuss and debate the forming of online communities (like VC3 itself.) We haven't launched yet (because we're trying to ge…
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Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#38Friends are starting from scratch this week with r/suppapowa to restore democracy in India. Let’s see how the experiment goes.
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#391. Seed with high quality community members. Initially this might just be a small circle of friends or emigres from another online community. 2. Be really hands on with identifying, engaging with, and empowering the best community members. Typically, this would mean giving them some sort of moderation powers and/or giving them access to some sort of "backchannel" (ie, a mods-only chat or forum) in which they can be a…
> Your community cannot represent a Stack Overflow-sized massive knowledge base.
Worth noting I think that Stack Overflow started (relatively) small itself, and that it followed your two points. The membership "seeding" was the readers of Jeff and Joel's blogs. Both of them, Jeff and Joel, were very visible and active at least in the meta aspects of the site. Jeff in particular was happy to discuss how the site worked or should work with anyone who was interested.
I think you're right that these are key elements.
Re: Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero?
#40I can only speak frlm my experience. I have built multiple communities and they all started the same.
They all went something like this:
1) Somehow I met someone who is also passionate about the domain (online, friend recommendation kr meetup)
2) Create a meetup for the subject and have me and the other the speakers while finding a sponsor or two (not as hard as you think)
3) The meetup grows to a monthly meetup and a social media group gets created.
4) Sometimes a website is needed for mailing lists, blog posts and announcments.
Some don't last very long as they are based off a trend (Blockchain for example) and some have survived until today.
Good luck!