Ask HN: What's your process for building a community around your product?

Go read Tribes. The following is my advice, not from that book.

Same as with creating a community around anything.

1. Define a group of outsiders, explicitly (politics) or implicitly (privilege).

2. This scaffolding sets up the emotional payoff necessary to motivate people to be involved and belong. The nature of community is also the essence of how you create it. Tap into people's reward circuitry. Their tribalistic instincts. If you find such notions repellant, you could be in the wrong business.

3. Apply optimizations, such as letting people advertise recognition and status (reputation), develop mastery ("my skills are improving"), and act autonomously ("I got this").

4. Make a safe space for them to congregate. You need boarder control / bouncing / moderation. You can take an editorial stance yourself, or work with the community to develop it collaboratively.

5. Let them communicate.

Do you really want to do this? A community is like a ginormous multiheaded baby. It will suck you dry and lay waste too all your other plans. But maybe it will also be among the most beautiful and amazing things you've ever helped create. Your call, buster.

Wrong question.

Community is your market, and crucially, you.

You should have found the community first. Then, if you're truly part of it, you'll know what your product should be.

If you're asking the question you're asking, it means you built a product without a market which is going to be... challenging.

I started a website, http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com, years ago. It now gets a few thousand visitors a day so usually I'm able to market my products there or whatever I have. I don't have success or fail numbers, but I've had plenty of repeat contributors, so something must be working.

As far as putting my own products on there, I did put a link up which is on every page of the website, and I do get clicks that lead to it. For my more prominent products, I tend to write an article about the product or find similar products and write comparisons. Pretty much rather than selling.. I'm just trying to "make known" that this product is here for you.

Platzi has a series of videos on this topic.

https://courses.platzi.com/classes/build-grow-online-communi...

Edit: Apparently it's no longer free. The course isn't really worth $100 in my opinion, so here's a short writeup of the videos http://cmxhub.com/article/product-hunt-erik-torenberg-commun...

Right now, I am just going person to person telling them about my food project. I enlisted a dining club to help me test. I have not really found product market fit, so its hard to say if my methods will ultimately be successful.

Building a community mostly consists of three parts:

1. Creating value for a specific target group. An early product/market fit lets word-of-mouth spread.

2. Let people participate. Giving people the feeling to be heard is crucial. A proper feedback management / cycle, helps.

3. Inform people what is happening. Let's call it "content marketing".

4. Start becoming an expert / create a personal brand

For step 1) you need to reach out to those people. Do things that don't scale. Go to meetups or wherever you find your target group. Talk to them, build relationships, ask for feedback, identify influencers. Try to understand the market, their problems, identify their needs, build relationships and build on that.

For step 2) have a proper feedback solution in place. Facebook Groups, an on forum are some options. We developed a platform exactly for this part. It's called STOMT (disclosure: i'm the founder). But we used our own product to build our own community. We invited anyone to checkout the product and leave us feedback on our profile: https://www.stomt.com/stomt - That way you can easily collect wishes, discuss, vote, manage and react on them. It works great and from time to time more and more people started using us. Have a public dialog and people get a community feeling. The question is which tool you are using and if you can efficiently combine it with feedback management. As this can create a huge overhead. Another example which works even better than ours: https://www.stomt.com/empires-of-the-undergrowth - just check out the stomt/reaction ratio. And those guys are not on the market with their game yet.

For step 3) This costs time. But to get feedback/engagement/participation and to get people excited you need to share your status on certain aspects from time to time. I like how Taylor Otwell (Laravel Founder) does it on Twitter. Bloggig is great.

For step 4) Share your knowledge, use your relationships to speak on a stage, be the expert. This works great for me => for us and let people follow you.

Edit: It is important to mention to start early. Be the expect (step 4) from the first second on. Talk to your customers (step 1) from the first second on. Invite them to a place you define (step 2) as soon as possible. And share if you have something to share (step 3).

That is the big question, isn't it.

It depends on so many things it's hard to define specific things, as each combination is distinct. It's like striking up and holding a conversation. How do you do that? That is what you are doing with the community.

Find out who they are. Find out what they want. Find out what they like Find out what they need. Try a bunch of combinations of these 4 observations that makes them happy enough with you to engage.