How do you create a successful community from zero?

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 yourself a lot, fake accounts if needed, only create subforums once the main ones are noisy)

5. have a rhythm - some communities need daily good posts, some live of the weekly newsletter

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 not to let anyone from Google see it. So that was 50 people and maybe each of us had 3-4 close friends on the platform.

To someone else's point that the community already exists, you're just building the communication platform: this was still when Facebook was locked down. I invited in close family (existing community) and learned stuff about them that sounds trivial but was meaningful to me (communication platform).

Then the community ballooned again to maybe 500 people and suddenly there were interesting tech luminaries to follow.

And on and on.

1. 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 part of the discussions where you discuss community direction.

In general, treat your small (initial) size as an asset. Your community cannot represent a Stack Overflow-sized massive knowledge base.

So, what can you offer that a large existing community cannot? Chiefly, this would be an ability for members to get in on the ground floor and shape the direction of the community while having a direct line of communication to the founder(s).

Hands-on communication with a community founder can really reach people. Think about what it would mean for Paul Graham to reach out to you personally in response to an HN comment you made. In the early stages of your community, you can be the founder and make those connections.

Check out this book on the topic from Stripe's publishing arm:

https://www.amazon.com/Get-Together-build-community-people/d...

"Nearly every challenge of building a community can be met by asking yourself, “How do I achieve this by working with my people, not doing it for them?” In other words, approach community-building as progressive acts of collaboration—doing more with others every step of the way.

The throughline of our book is this simple concept: “build with.” It lives in each of the recommendations we make as we take you through three stages of building a community: sparking the flame, stoking the fire, and passing the torch. "

These articles have been posted in previous HN discussions. I think you will find them useful in answering your question.

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the...

A 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.

I am going to come off as a smart-ass here when I do not intend to be when I say, "Learn how communities die." Having seen many become moribund, wither, stagnant, or simply fall apart, and such, the causes of death are many and the sources of illness plentiful.

You have a minefield to pick through and compromises to make. Each choice is a tradeoff and you may find that getting what you want can kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Think of the places you used to hang out online. Why aren't you there anymore? Remember the other people you really liked there: why did they leave before you did?

I'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.

I 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!

I 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

There's a few aspects of successful communities that I've seen. First, there is a clear articulation of a problem/challenge that people can quickly identify with. Second, there is a urgency of action that draws people in, that if this problem is solved the world will be a better place. Third, there is an approach articulated that addresses the problem and has a reasonable chance of success. Fourth, there's room for engagement, and engagement has two parts: there must be enough structure so that a participant isn't overwhelmed and has a path they can follow; however, this path must afford quite a bit of creativity and freedom so that people can have a meaningful engagement on their own terms. Finally, and this might be obvious -- the community culture has to be fun and welcoming.

Okay, as someone who's run quite a few forums in the past and has written more than a few articles about community management, my experience here is that successful forums tend to have a few things in common:

1. A topic that hasn't been tapped into that much, but which has an existing audience just waiting to get involved. This was the case with Wario Forums, which had no competition whatsoever when it launched, and was started pretty much because myself and a few others in the fandom wanted a forum about the series and were willing to help get one off the ground.

2. An awful lot of dedication to the field from its founder. It's a cliche now, but forums and communities in general are usually not built in a day/week/month. So the founder needs to be super dedicated to the subject area, and willing to put in potentially weeks of unpaid work getting the site off the ground.

3. Unique and interesting content about the topic. Again, this was pretty easy for me on Wario Forums, the people I invited had experience translating games from Japanese, creating remixes of the music, making mods and level editors, etc, and I had a lot of knowledge of the series and what kinds of discussions would be interesting to a fan.

But yeah, this is where the whole 'passion' aspect comes in again. If you're not absolutely fanatical about the subject and don't possess a lot of knowledge about it, you'll struggle to create anything interesting enough to get people to join/take notice.

Seriously though, I'd recommend you check out some of the articles about this topic on sites like The Admin Zone, Feverbee and Managing Communities if you need some more in depth advice on the subject:

https://theadminzone.com/ams/

https://www.feverbee.com/richs-blog/

http://www.managingcommunities.com/

Wow, 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 get a solid group of people before we start.) If you find these sorts of questions interesting, please join us! It's totally free, not trying to make money with this.

The people who start then have built a significant following in their field over the previous decade or two (eg HN), or they have a large amount of money to spend on marketing (eg StackOverflow), or there's an existing loose community who are looking for a home (eg Shadertoy). Starting a successful community without any of those things is extremely unusual. "Built it, they will come" generally doesn't work.

This is a quote from Jeremy Howard the Founder of fast.ai

Create a community and be the largest contributor for the community

Start with a huge pocket book and some key early joiners who already have substantial individual followers. Be prepared to spend a lot of money on acquisition.

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.

One way to bootstrap a new community. Take an existing popular online forum. And create a "backchannel" on Slack / Discord. Results can be mixed. But in rare cases the new channel will supercede the old

One thing that does work is maintaining a critical mass of "influencers". Likeable people who post high quality content with predictable regularity ;)

Observable is one community I follow. I think a lot of people had the idea to create of network of Jupyter / Collab notebooks (like Tableau's Gallery). But few have gained mainstream reach outside of their niche

ps Observable is hiring in SF!

https://observablehq.com/about

The history of Designer News is quite interesting to see how a community dies after a few successful years, many threads in DN got posted trying to understand why it happened these past years. You could check that out.

An added note to this, I've been a part of communities that have been sold, and a lot of them fell apart after the charismatic and friendly founder that brought everyone together transitions away. So if you're thinking about doing that, make sure you don't overpay for a community that is just there because they like the founder.

Also a lot of the community forums were bought by investors that saw advertising dollar signs but didn't know how to actually run anything (issues with portions of the CMS / forums / etc breaking down) so that could also have to do with it.

I run a pretty active community of about 650 in the local news publishing space. Start when you have a handful of smart people with a common agenda (we originally called it "the thinktank").

Then organize them using software that stays in their day to day workflow like an email list or social media group. Despite its shortcomings, I used Facebook groups and it works kind of well.

Then link to, market, and promote your group wherever appropriate. Ours is still approval-based to keep the quality high and the users engaged.

Minor point:

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...

Suggested readings:

"The Culting of Brands" - https://www.amazon.com/Culting-Brands-Turn-Customers-Believe...

Blueprint for Revolution (as mentioned in Adam Grant's Originals) - https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Revolution-Nonviolent-Techn...

Tribes by Seth Godin -https://www.amazon.com/Tribes-We-Need-You-Lead/dp/1491514736

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements - https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movemen...

I've read the first three. The fourth is on my short list. The common theme? Start in a tight niche and establish a core of "fanatics". With a niche and a core your odds of traction and sustainability drop off.

If it helps, use any major religion as a reference point. That is, Christianity wasn't always the dominate (?) force it is today. But it started very small and tight.

A community isn't much different. Perhaps less extreme (?), but the same basic elements remain.

We started ScoreStream from zero to last month where we hit 2.5 million uniques. I would echo a number of things that others have said but the key things for us were:

1. Doing things that don't scale. We have a community of fans following local scores and we wanted to get people to crowdsource scores. Initially that meant us seeding the community and then finding ways to onboard folks to scoring games. 2. There was an existing community of people who cared about local sports and with the death of newspapers we thought there was a chance to get them to crowdsource and share the information with others. 3. We made a lot of tools that created incentives for folks to score games and share that information with others. 4. We did a lot of partnerships with potential consumers of the score data which made an incentive for folks to share scores to highlight their teams.

Ultimately one thing that we thought that would motivate people was money, fame and narcissism and since we didn't have a lot of money we focused on the other two.

It's been fun seeing it grow and there are a ton of other good thoughts from others in this post. Thanks for posting...great to see others experience.

I imagine the not-dying part goes something like this: Keep the long well researched quality contributions in sight and the [what I call] "guaranteed audience" type of submissions out of sight. Some people just make a ton of noise. One should probably encourage that but limit exposure (not let them drown out the rest of the users) or make quality posts hard to find.

Usually communities arise around something useful. Dev.to is different , they must have insistently promoted to developers and curated the list of initial users. Indiehackers has community promoters who constatnly try to get people engaged. it's work, but it works, i guess. just by building it, doesnt mean they will come

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.

I don't know if this is what the OP is after, but I found this guide on running a social network for a group of close friends to be a good read: https://runyourown.social/

My guess is that the most important factor in the success of HN is Paul Graham's essays, and the only reason https://lesswrong.com got any traction is Eliezer Yudkowsky's essays.

Jono Bacon has a couple books on this: People Powered and Art of Community

https://www.jonobacon.com/books/artofcommunity/

I‘ve been working on community event software for a decade now.

Here are the consistent elements I’ve seen across virtually any kind of community that’s starting out.

1) a community begins when two people who are passionate about a purpose meet together. They don’t need to be captains of industry, or politicians. They just need to be passionate about some unifying thing.

2) The “Big Bang” moment for a community is its first event. The best way for these types of people to meet is by attending events (virtual or in person). Events are human connections at scale.

Kant had good advice:

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

Fake the supply side (aka content) as much as you can if you are trying to reach the existing community as your seed, if possible make sure people are noticing said content (via social/seo). Or simply reach out to said group or person to get a network started. Make sure engagement is kept high and differentiated as people change so being constant is not always the best scenario.

I am busy defining a role for myself within my company as a Community Engineer and wrote this little article recently to share some of my thoughts on the matter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824495

As many condo developers would probably deny, communities cannot be created, they can only be destroyed ;)

All joking a salad, communities imo just occur, though their concentration can perhaps be affected or enabled. Conceptually similar to a market I think.

most of the communities ive been a part of (random hobbies) are built on the backs of a handful of high quality and active members. these are the people who help out new members with questions and post frequently re: their own projects.

Fake it initially.

Friends are starting from scratch this week with r/suppapowa to restore democracy in India. Let’s see how the experiment goes.

This is great timing. I'm trying to launch a slack community for founders and will use all the advice in this thread.

Content is king... good and interesting content serves any given market niche and acts as your hook to aggregate people?

Typically there's a seed dining that your start with. Harvard undergrads, Stanford Greek society, etc.

In r/ethtrader we are currently running an experiment where contributions are collated bi-weekly and tokenized on Ethereum. The tokens are also part of a dao with a number of features integrated directly into Reddit. Voting, tipping, subscribing to special features, harberger assets, etc. Basically the contributions people make turn into voting weight and the currency for a local economy.

Peter Thiel has a good book on this [1].

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050143-zero-to-one

You need to be active with your site, so many people think they can throw up a website/app and the community will run itself, it really doesn't.

You've gotta be hands-on and engage with all the members, listen to them, especially over small things (what's nothing to you is a potential deal breaker for them) You gotta post, keep the discussion going, start the discussion etc.

Reasons I've seen communities die 1, incompetent/not bothered admins and 2, micro management. So many admins become mini-Hitlers when they have a little bit of 'power'.

Most importantly though is community, your users will stick with you through the worst buggy code so long as you show that you care about them.

Another take on this:

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