How to Leverage Community at the 5 Stages of Your Startup Journey
When it comes to online communities, I’ve seen a lot. 3413, to be exact
When it comes to online communities, I’ve seen a lot. 3413, to be exact. That’s how many are in the spreadsheet I’ve been manually curating for the past three years.
Weird hobby? Maybe. But it sure has been an interesting ride.
By now, the spreadsheet has a fancy frontend, and you can browse it at the Hive Index, my directory site. At this point, it covers over 200 community topics and 30 platforms, helping community seekers and startup founders find online hangouts for various niches.
After researching many online groups (and joining many of them), I’ve concluded that niche online communities can be a startup founder’s best friend.
By tapping into the right communities, a business can grow alongside the community, serving its members and themselves at the same time. Here are the 5 stages at which I’ve observed community-focused founders flourish.
1. Idea Generation
If you’ll entertain a huge generalization, a business’s primary objective is to solve customer problems. You start with finding a painful problem to solve, so painful that the person who has it is willing to throw money at it to make the problem go away.
The good news is that people love talking about their problems, especially online. Looking for a product to build? Find an online community full of your target audience, and you will find plenty of inspiration for product ideas.
Don’t know who your target audience is? I suggest considering a few groups of people with whom you wouldn’t mind spending the next couple years of your life. You could have a brilliant app idea for tax accountants, but if you’re not excited about spending a significant amount of your time talking to them about their problems and emotions, you probably don’t want to build a product for them.
Once you find these online communities, go deep! Do your research, and get to learn the lingo and culture behind them. Each community is different, and knowing how they interact will help you talk to the members and eventually build a business around serving their unmet needs.
If you can analyze the conversations in the community, look for emotional keywords that highlight pain points shared amongst multiple community members.
- “Any tools” / “Anyone know of” — product opportunity
- “Does anyone know” — knowledge/resource opportunity
- “I hate using” — competition opportunity
- “Does anyone else” — unbundling opportunity
If you’re considering a B2C business and your target audience hangs out on Reddit, I invite you to check out GummySearch. It surfaces these customer development conversations for you and analyzes them for common patterns.
2. Validate a Solution
You have a product idea to solve a problem. Next step — go talk to people!
Making a post in the community like ”I’d like to chat with you for 20 minutes if you’re ever been bothered by {{problem_you’re_solving}}” should get you some willing participants if you are working on a problem worth solving. If you can’t find people to talk to, and your problem isn’t worth talking about (let alone paying for), your validation is over.
Idea validation is an important topic, and there are many ways to do it. For my approach, you can see the full set of steps & resources in this idea validation guide, but the short version is:
- Define the problem
- Determine your biggest risks
- Find your target audience
- Request for interviews
- Do the interview
- Assess Feedback
3. Find Initial Customers
Once you’ve validated and built your product, you already know where to look for customers — the same communities that helped you generate your idea and validate it.
This happens in 2 flavors.
Announcing your solution
If you’ve built a solution specifically to solve a pain point for a particular community, you’ll want to let them know about it! When it comes to getting first customers, this is one of the highest impact and lowest effort things that you could do. No ad spend necessary, no months waiting for SEO to kick in, no effort necessary to build up an audience on social media. Just craft your pitch carefully and let the people know!
If you do this well, you’ll be greeted with appreciation, feedback, and, hopefully, some of your first users/customers. My tip here is to focus on the why and talk about the problem you’re solving for this community based on all of the research/conversations you’ve had.
What’s worth mentioning is that some communities have strict rules on self-promotion, so you need to be careful with how you frame it. Make it more about the community, and add a new tool to their toolbelt rather than try to advance your business.
This announcement will likely bring some great things your way but don’t push your limits. If you start posting your link multiple times, you turn from someone announcing their services to the community to someone spamming it.
Social Listening
It’s unlikely that everyone in the community saw your announcement and knows that you can solve their problem. Like you, not everybody in the community reads every single post.
If the problem you’re solving is prevalent in the community, it will come up in future conversations. You can search the conversations that contain keywords related to your problem/solution, and if the situation calls for it, let the community know that you can solve this issue for them.
The beautiful thing about online communities is that people are always asking for help or venting about problems. As someone who has studied this problem and built a solution for them, pitching that solution when someone asks for it is actually helping them get the resources that they need. Yes, it’s self-promotional. But unless you’re doing it shamelessly in non-relevant situations, it’s helpful.
This is what I call a win-win-win. The person asking for a resource asks for help and gets it. You offer your solution and engage with a potential customer. The rest of the community also benefits because those interested in the topic at hand learn of a new resource that they might find useful.
Most people think of posting to online communities to get their first customers, but they don’t realize the power of being in the right place at the right time. It works, trust me. And you’re not likely to get kicked out of the community for self-promotion because you’re contributing to helping other members.
Want to experiment with social listening in online communities? Here’s my guide on the 6 categories of keywords to track for sales opportunities.
4. Growth Engine
The above techniques are fantastic when you are getting started. However, the results are linearly correlated with the time that you put in. That works when you are in the “do things that don’t scale” phrase, but you might be looking to scale with exponential growth at a certain point in your startup’s journey.
That’s where a content strategy comes in. To establish trust with as many potential customers as possible, content is king. Write useful content for your niche and publish it in relevant online communities.
Good content is exponential in many ways. First of all, the community becomes your marketing team and shares your content with other target customers who aren’t aware of your solution yet.
Secondly, if the conversations in the community are publicly available (like Reddit, HackerNews, and IndieHackers), your posts will be indexed by search engines. This content will be discoverable by others searching for your resources, and if your website is linked in the content, it will build up high-ranking backlinks.
You can combine your content strategy with your social listening one. Building up some helpful blog posts on topics your target audience is interested in increases the number of conversations you can be helpful in. Now, you can not just post links to your solution when community members are venting about problems you can solve; you can also reply to questions on certain topics with your helpful blog posts.
People read your good content > People trust you > People buy your products.
5. Product Moat
At a certain stage in your startup, you’re at the point where you have your acquisition channels figured out. You probably are well-funded and have the cash to invest in advertisements or (even better) are running a profitable business already.
To stay on top, you need to keep your product a winner in the market. Well, guess what? Online communities can help with that as well.
By creating a community for your own users, you can keep up with the needs of your customers and the market. It’s your community; you can structure it how you’d like. You can share product updates, get open feedback, or tap into your dedicated customer base to bounce new ideas off of.
Your customer support needs have also probably grown as your business has grown. One of the best parts of having a dedicated online community for your users is that they can help each other with common questions, issues, and resources.
Creating a community for your customers can happen after you’ve reached product-market fit, or it can precede it! Owning a community dedicated to a particular niche is a big-time investment, but doing so opens up many opportunities for business ideation, validation, customers, and growth.
There’s a reason so many founders find themselves engrained in online communities. They are a handy tool in the toolbelt for any stage in a startup’s lifecycle.
For your next (or current venture), I urge you to keep community top of mind for your business strategy!
