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Ie reddit, 9gag, dev.to, medium etc.
There are definitely "more natural" communities like HackerNoon, Repl.it, etc but they grow more slowly and rely on at least some measure of luck to get the snowball rolling.
I worked on Twitter from the time it had six users (me) to the time it had 500. A thing that stands out to me is that it worked at every size. On day one, it was just the Odeo team that Twitter ended up spinning out of, maybe 15 people. And it worked that way as a group messaging thread where we felt more connected to the people we worked with. Then we let in close friends and family with a stern warning from our CEO…
What was the reasoning behind not letting anyone from Google see it? Was the startup kill zone known and in full effect at that time as well?
Also, nobody actually thought Twitter was definitely a hit. We just thought Odeo was not working and that Twitter was worth continuing to explore.
I worked on Twitter from the time it had six users (me) to the time it had 500. A thing that stands out to me is that it worked at every size. On day one, it was just the Odeo team that Twitter ended up spinning out of, maybe 15 people. And it worked that way as a group messaging thread where we felt more connected to the people we worked with. Then we let in close friends and family with a stern warning from our CEO…
so you were involved with twitter from day 1. what happened to odeo then. I remember reading a story about early employees being bought out and later regretting it when the company became worth billions.
Re: regret. People misunderstand the regret of not continuing to have stock. Twitter was nothing when we left. I didn't even bother to exercise my options. Then Odeo's CEO bought out all the investors and that return on their money was way more than whatever Twitter was worth at the time. Those investors were all using Twitter, so they knew what they were getting bought out of. But it was still basically nothing at that point, a few hundred users.
The things that made Twitter valuable were what happened after Odeo. Evan Williams bought the whole thing back and then relaunched it as a new company with funding from him and a new equity structure. Imagine if Jack & Biz had "co-founded" Twitter but had to stay on their existing Odeo option grants which were probably less than 0.5%. So just that alone was big.
Twitter had a solid year of grinding where it looked and felt just like every other nascent startup, i.e. worth continuing but not at all a sure thing. To me, the game changer was the way Biz managed to start making Twitter part of the media landscape and something everyone heard about on every half hour segment of cable news. Twitter basically became a core part of the internet at that point.
So Odeo people probably all have some amount of regret (I quit and then refused an offer to come back). But I don't think anyone really feels like they were entitled to the money or credit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I religiously follow producthunt now because of the Devo extension ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/devo/elkhalpmbmbae... ), but have noticed that the forum portion tends to be mostly pats on the back. With other endeavors have you been able to create a space where people are more critical?
Product Hunt isn't a real community as it's a very explicit marketing platform, hence the pats on the back, astroturfing, etc.
You don't start at zero. You start at one (yourself).
If you're trying to start at zero, that means you yourself don't believe in your own community, and you're doomed to fail.
You also need at least one other person who shares your values and/or interests. A "true fan", so to speak. https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_moveme...
1. Setup
1.1 Define / finalize plan and deployment timeline
1.2 Identify community leaders
2. Training
2.1. Define community best practices
2.2. Train community leaders
3. Kickstart community
3.1. Collect seed content with group of community leaders (e.g. repeating topics, questions, anything that resonates and is searched or discussed often)
3.2. Seed community platform with output of 3.1.
3.3. Open site to kickstart users; a cross-section of your target audience but in smaller amounts.
3.4. Let kickstart users expand community, both in content as well as being relaxed with them onboarding new members
3.5. Promote coming community to entire target audience
4. Full launch
4.1. Open site to entire target audience
4.2. continue promotion
5. Grow community
5.1. Monitor community usage, evaluate, expand
5.2. ongoing promotion
I 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…
That gave me a minor epiphany, it flipped my understanding of communities and their relation to tech. Thanks