[HN Gopher] A tactical guide to kickstarting a community
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A tactical guide to kickstarting a community
Author : someproduct
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-03-10 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (orbit.love)
(TXT) w3m dump (orbit.love)
| someproduct wrote:
| Author of the post here. Happy to answer any questions!
| GarethX wrote:
| Nice article! You mention doing more events earlier, is there
| anything else you'd do differently?
| someproduct wrote:
| Thanks! We definitely could've started with events sooner,
| IMO. The simple practice of getting folks together to meet
| and talk shop contributed to the sense of momentum overall
| and the interpersonal connections in particular.
|
| I should note that all the events we've done to date have
| been small, and focused on our existing community. I think
| such focus made sense for us in year one, since we were
| building the community _and_ the product at the same time. In
| other words, we didn 't have the capacity to produce a
| broadly-focused event.
|
| That said, the intimate vibe in the early days goes a long
| way toward engendering a sense of ownership and belonging
| among community members. I honestly think it's more
| meaningful to do smaller insider events more frequently in
| the early days, versus casting a brand net and potentially
| diluting the group's nascent identity and culture norms.
|
| Now that we're scaling up, I anticipate increasing the reach
| of our events as well. But that's okay, as we have the team
| to support it on one hand, and on the other, the culture of
| the community is already well-defined.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Good luck!
| neatze wrote:
| Thanks for article, really helpful read.
|
| When slack was created how many users joined on the first day,
| what was total number of users in ~3 month ?
| someproduct wrote:
| First day? Maybe 5 people we harangued into joining?
|
| As for the first three months, it depends on when we start
| counting (I'd say May represented the first month we actually
| started working on community deliberately), but had 59 by end
| of July.
|
| You can see the growth curve here: https://res.cloudinary.com
| /dzello/image/upload/v1615409348/s...
| neatze wrote:
| This is exactly what I was looking for as reference point,
| thank you!
| rdpintqogeogsaa wrote:
| Lovely post that matches many of my experiences (admittedly with
| communities not directly related to a product). A few notes of my
| own:
|
| > _At the start, having just two channels was fantastic. First,
| it reduced the community ghost town effect by concentrating all
| activity into those two places._
|
| I'm surprised to hear people keep re-learning this lesson. Back
| when web forums were popular, this was basically the one big
| mistake I kept seeing people make. Way too much
| compartmentalization.
|
| > _After [being shown a project in private] a few times, I
| proposed a new channel: [...] We didn't try to force the
| community's hand._
|
| I think this could and should be generalized into "Avoid
| surprises". Communities generally do not react well to change
| with no announcement. Even if you know that a measure is strictly
| necessary (e.g. because your platform provider changed its terms
| of service in an impactful way), first give a heads up before you
| make a change. It goes a long way for public opinion. It's
| tempting not to, especially as time goes on and you feel like you
| have people's trust, but it's essential to ask first wherever
| possible.
| tinkertamper wrote:
| > I'm surprised to hear people keep re-learning this lesson.
| Back when web forums were popular, this was basically the one
| big mistake I kept seeing people make. Way too much
| compartmentalization.
|
| Ahh yes, the "General" section of phpBB. To be fair though a
| whole generation as come online since then, that never had an
| opportunity to learn for themselves yet. The internet itself
| moving away from small niche sites/forums to
| subreddits/groups/categories under big monoliths.
| someproduct wrote:
| _> I think this could and should be generalized into "Avoid
| surprises"_
|
| Great way of putting it. When we were considering moving our
| community from Slack to Discord[1], we actually did a Request
| for Comment[2] laying-out our rationale, and asked for comments
| on the doc. I think this went a long way towards building trust
| and buy-in around big community decisions.
|
| 1. https://orbit.love/blog/how-to-migrate-a-community-from-
| slac...
|
| 2.
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PFHhZyyYmiIHNufYpS6fX7gU...
| dzello wrote:
| So fun to relive this, what a journey! :D
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