Why you need to build a community around your startup
What is the purpose of building a community?
1. Feedback: allows you to gain incredibly valuable feedback to not only validate your idea but to make improvements. The feedback stage of a startup is so commonly skipped, yet is it absolutely essential- if there is no need for your idea, you have no users.
2. Learning: a community can teach you new things, allow you to find mentors/ advisors and surround yourself with interesting people.
3. Distribution: once you have a community built around your startup, these people are likely to purchase your product/ service. A community is also a relatively cheap way to market your startup.
Ok, a community seems pretty useful! Now for the hard part:
How do I build a community for my startup?
My advice is to find a platform for your community and focus all your efforts into that one platform. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Discord, YouTube or another platform, focus on it.
On that platform
- Consistently create tonnes of valuable content (e.g. a few times each week).
- Genuinely engage and network with others
- Help people!
Expand
Once you’ve had success with that one platform, then you can start growing to other platforms. This is exactly what I have been doing for the Tech Startup Community (TSC)- we focused on Discord and are now expanding to Twitter (and hopefully other platforms in the future). However, be careful not to overstretch yourself too much! If necessary, ensure you always have your base platform to return to.
Conclusion
Just remember that it takes a lot of work to build a community and consistency to keep the community active! But I can tell you that it is worth it!
If you want to join an awesome community of entrepreneurs (currently over 600), I would love it if you joined the Tech Startup Community: https://tech-startup-community.vercel.app. Here you can get feedback, build a team, discuss and promote your startup!
