
Ask HN: How do you create a successful community from zero? - rorocoeur
Successful online communities like dev.to seem to come up every now and then, in all kind of topics. They reach a stable and high growth, and then they die at some point.<p>What makes these communities different from the one that did not succeed?
======
andreasklinger
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

~~~
Malcx
> the community already exists, you just create a communication platform for
> it

That gave me a minor epiphany, it flipped my understanding of communities and
their relation to tech. Thanks

~~~
gweinberg
Does it really though? The individuals with a common interest exist already of
course, but if they don't meet in some common physical or virtual space, how
is there a community?

~~~
vokep
There is a sort of proto community. A community that wants to be, but isn't
because nobody started doing that yet.

The point of it of course is that, if such a proto community doesn't exist,
its going to be very difficult for a community to grow.

------
tonystubblebine
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.

~~~
bikeshaving
What was the reasoning behind not letting anyone from Google see it? Was the
startup kill zone known and in full effect at that time as well?

~~~
tonystubblebine
They were the big gorilla at the time and he'd come from there (they'd
acquired his previous company, Blogger). In hindsight, it probably didn't
matter at all. The only people I can think that it would have been worth
hiding from was press because Twitter rightfully made us look unfocused and we
weren't willing to say publicly that Odeo was dead and Twitter was now the
thing.

Also, nobody actually thought Twitter was definitely a hit. We just thought
Odeo was not working and that Twitter was worth continuing to explore.

------
JohnBooty
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.

~~~
wool_gather
> Your community cannot represent a Stack Overflow-sized massive knowledge
> base.

Worth noting I think that Stack Overflow started (relatively) small itself,
_and_ that it followed your two points. The membership "seeding" was the
readers of Jeff and Joel's blogs. Both of them, Jeff and Joel, were very
visible and active at least in the meta aspects of the site. Jeff in
particular was happy to discuss how the site worked or should work with anyone
who was interested.

I think you're right that these are key elements.

~~~
mattmanser
Joel also had a community going already with the "business of software" forum
(imo the spiritual predecessor of HN, patio11 was very well know there) and
the comments sections of Jeff's blog was a great place for discussion too.

They also had a really good podcast going as they were developing it.

And a good 'bad guy' too, the site with a dash (experts-exchange).

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

[https://www.amazon.com/Get-Together-build-community-
people/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Get-Together-build-community-
people/dp/1732265194/)

"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. "

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

[https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-
the...](https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-network)

------
neves
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...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-successful-online-communities)

Once I found its content in a series of PDFs in the authors page, but didn't
manage to find it now.

~~~
Alex3917
The PDFs were from the pre-publication draft version, and I think only the
first few draft chapters were in PDF form. But yeah, if you want to understand
communities, Kraut is the #1 researcher in the field and this is clearly the
book to read. It's extremely dry though, if you're expecting a Seth Godin book
you're going to be disappointed.

------
at_a_remove
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?

------
KhalPanda
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.

~~~
tootie
How do you fake it while staying plausible? Did you just create a dozen sock
puppet accounts and post yourself? Or pay/incentive for content?

~~~
marcosdumay
I don't think one can fake an entire community with sock puppets. Reddit
famously paid for some content (professional redditor would be the most seeked
job today).

~~~
ksec
>I don't think one can fake an entire community

I remember that was how plentyoffish started.

------
bubblehack3r
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!

------
markkat
I created [https://hubski.com](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](https://hubski.com/pub/219234)

~~~
spencerflem
Hubski! <3 Really appreciate how it feels like hanging out with a few friends
as opposed to the general crowd feeling of most other sites

------
clarkevans
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.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
There are probably thousands (definitely hundreds at least) of communities for
various hobbies that don't fit all the requirements 1-3 of your description
yet they have healthy and active online communities.

------
CM30
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://theadminzone.com/ams/)

[https://www.feverbee.com/richs-blog/](https://www.feverbee.com/richs-blog/)

[http://www.managingcommunities.com/](http://www.managingcommunities.com/)

~~~
adventured
I agree with most of what you said, except I'd increase this:

> and willing to put in potentially weeks of unpaid work getting the site off
> the ground.

To a minimum of six months as an assumed grind. Anybody going into building a
community should regard that as the absolute minimum. Sometimes you get lucky
and lightning hits, however more often you're going to struggle along for many
painfully dry months trying to get a self-sustaining momentum rolling.

------
AlphaWeaver
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](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.

------
onion2k
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.

~~~
fastbeef
Didn’t Stack Overflow piggyback on the existing and quiet sizeable audiences
of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky?

~~~
fergie
Yes. Spolsky in particular was a content marketing genius- his blog managed to
garner a large audience, which in turn generated far more sales of Fogbugz
than the software itself ever deserved.

Marketing is an important part of any business, so fair play to him.

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

Create a community and be the largest contributor for the community

------
sixhobbits
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.

------
ArtWomb
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](https://observablehq.com/about)

------
ArmandGrillet
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.

------
sct202
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.

------
katzgrau
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.

------
CiPHPerCoder
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...](https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement?language=en)

------
chiefalchemist
Suggested readings:

"The Culting of Brands" \- [https://www.amazon.com/Culting-Brands-Turn-
Customers-Believe...](https://www.amazon.com/Culting-Brands-Turn-Customers-
Believers/dp/1591840961)

Blueprint for Revolution (as mentioned in Adam Grant's Originals) \-
[https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Revolution-Nonviolent-
Techn...](https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Revolution-Nonviolent-Techniques-
Communities/dp/0812995309/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=blueprint+for+revolution+popovic&qid=1576703555&sprefix=blueprint+for+revolution&sr=8-1)

Tribes by Seth Godin -[https://www.amazon.com/Tribes-We-Need-You-
Lead/dp/1491514736](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...](https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-
Movements/dp/0062930869)

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.

------
brikmaster
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.

~~~
lucb1e
Note that single newlines make your text into a wall of text, you need

a blank line in between two paragraphs or items.

~~~
brikmaster
Ack - thanks...I don't post often...

------
6510
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.

------
buboard
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

------
3dprintscanner
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](https://onlythebestevents.com) and have been
pleased with the results so far.

------
davefp
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/](https://runyourown.social/)

------
frank2
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](https://lesswrong.com) got any traction is Eliezer
Yudkowsky's essays.

~~~
punnerud
For me it is the moderators and all the algorithms to keep the Troll’s away
(that you first notice have a good effect after a long time usage, if you are
looking for them).

Examples: Up/down-vote, flag, push down posts with a lot of discussions
without new up-votes, republish posts that gets votes late...

~~~
frank2
OK, but you need a stream of comments and submissions to moderate, and most
attempts at creating on online discussion site never achieve that.

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

[https://www.jonobacon.com/books/artofcommunity/](https://www.jonobacon.com/books/artofcommunity/)

------
mvkel
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.

------
gao8a
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.”

------
adawg_4
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.

------
benjamaan
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824495)

------
brailsafe
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.

------
chasd00
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.

------
mbesto
Fake it initially.

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

------
memn0nis
This is great timing. I'm trying to launch a slack community for founders and
will use all the advice in this thread.

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

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

------
cslarson
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.

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

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

------
new_guy
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.

------
bastijn
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

