Comments on live “Patrick McKenzie (patio11)”
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
Hi Patrick, thanks for joining us today. What top tips can you share with us for growing a successful community?
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe
@ems_hodge People can be members of many communities at once, and this is true of nearly everyone you know. Unless your time horizon is long enough that you can achieve growth in your community by literally raising children, your target members are presently involved in other communities. Accordingly, user acquisition for your new community is largely going to be a matter of going to the communities where your prospective users already exist and creating value there, then bringing folks back to your own community.
That's the very early stage. The real "and here is where the magic happens!" part of growing communities is a) creating outstanding value inside of the community and b) creating the perpetual motion machine, where community members themselves create the value inside the community, and then bring in outsiders to share in it and potentially become community members.
If this were easy, it wouldn't be valuable. Functional communities are really, really valuable because they are really, really hard to do right. (Seen in a certain light the entire history of humanity is basically "How do we build a successful community?" writ large, right?)
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