Show HN: How to Build Community – my 4 years research
flawlessapp.io
flawlessapp.io
1. Give the best learning opportunities for the community.
It can be guides, e-books, podcasts, newsletters, courses. Learning content not only gives you SEO-traffic. It helps to position your brand\startup as thought leaders and industry experts.
So when someone from the community has a question, you already have an answer to that. Firstly, companies nurture community via useful educational content. And you'll see that all companies in the design space do that.
If you look at design companies, they provide handy design resources to work faster, right inside the tool. So users have no reason to leave. UI kits, icons, mockups, and fonts — all that is waiting for any user who comes to Sketch, Figma or Marvel.
That additional value keeps the community hooked inside the company brand.
Enable users to talk on behalf of your brand via a company blog, promo-projects, and social media.
Design companies are great in motivating the community to share design tips, articles, assets, designs, and even positive vibes. If you open the research and check visual, you'll see it :)
Some design companies focus on content, inviting opinion leaders to share their knowledge through interviews. Others run community-driven blogs, openly inviting contributors by prominently positioning “submit content” call to actions. Another tactic is to motivate the community to share more of their design work made with specific design tools. The more the community contributes to anything brand-related, the tighter the connection formed between brand and users.
this is something specific for the design & development industry, but can be applied to many startups as well.
Plugins enrich the tool capabilities, providing huge value by giving end users the opportunity to build the features they need. At the same time, this forms a loyal community of plugin makers, who can even build their own small businesses on top of it. The main question is how to motivate the creative community to make plugins.
For the last 4 years, I’ve been working with community building in design & development industry while running my startup.
We used many community-building techniques by ourselves and learn from great companies in our space — from Sketch, InVision, Figma, Marvel.
Based on our learnings and things we noted form other companies, I made a community-building framework. You can see it in the research (https://flawlessapp.io/designcommunities) I shared with many visual examples.