
From Instant Pot to Instagram: Critical Lessons in Startup Community Building - erdinc
https://firstround.com/review/from-instant-pot-to-instagram-critical-lessons-in-startup-community-building/
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erdinc
As an early stage starup founder, I always ask the same question, Why will our
users come? Should we postpone the community building to the future? We take a
step and start with hangout sessions, what do you think? Is it okay to try
with hangout sessions or should we directly start with meetups?

~~~
baileyelaine
Hey! Thank you for the question. This is Bailey from the First Round
interview. Here's my instinct.

When cultivating a community specifically, you need to have clarity on your
WHO and WHY before you start investing in programs or tactics.

If you don't have a clear understanding of your people and their motivations,
you won't be able to design compelling offerings for your community.

So, get clear on:

1) WHO are my most _passionate_ people? 2) WHY will they want to connect to
one another?

In the early days of building a community, a group of _passionate_ people is
crucial. If no one cares, no one will show up for this new tool/space you're
building.

So if I were you, I'd spend time pinpointing WHO cares the most first. This is
not insignificant work. Pinpointing the passionate WHO takes time. (Look to
all the research that went into Courtland Allen (@csallen)'s early 150 emails
that started Indie Hackers for inspiration: [https://research.people-
and.com/courtland-allen-wrote-150-pe...](https://research.people-
and.com/courtland-allen-wrote-150-personalized-emails-to-entrepreneurs-he-
admired-210c3b7e094b))

Once you have a cohort, then I'd do whatever I can to get their time so you
can ask questions that will enlighten their WHY. (IMO: Data can inform WHAT,
but not WHY?)

When we do these WHY interview sessions with cohorts of passionate users, we
always do them in groups because observing how they connect to one another is
enlightening for our community design process. We listen for: what they are
most excited to talk about with each other about. And we interview them,
asking where do they talk about these things now? What activities would they
like to do with one another?

Keep in mind, our recommendations are for building a _community_ , which we
define as a group of people who keep coming together over what they care
about. Take my advice for designing for a community-driven product
specifically.

~~~
erdinc
1) WHO are my most passionate people? 2) WHY will they want to connect to one
another?

do you have structure to find why? should we directly find those users and
shoot an email to them?

