How do you grow a community around the product?

This is hard, it's true :) Beta testing, useful content for the product's audience, socials, "velvet rope marketing strategy", etc.

It is always hard but possible if you start generating and suggesting valuable content in the area you specialize in :) Community gathers around certain people or topics of interest; if you can bring anything useful and exciting to the table, people will appreciate it and come back for more.

Oh, and I remembered a tip from the official Product Hunt manual: build community first

@ksusha_golovchenko There's a great book and guide that I found very useful: Traffic Secret by Russell Brunson. The key messages are: - first, search for and discover the potential users and customers of your product. They are already congregating somewhere, e.g. FB groups, Twitter chats, Blogs, Communities, Forums, Instagram, ... Product Hunt :) - Cultivate and build relationships in such places where your potential audience is congregating, without marketing: provide as much value as possible to help them with the problems or requests they have - After the relationship and your trust are consolidated, you can start to "invite" them to "your party", by promoting your product to that audience - find and build relationships with top influencers, asking them to help you to promote your product (again, after you have built trust with them). It's a long-term play, not immediate we know. But once done, it opens a lot of doors and changes! @all: Book Reading (if not done) is highly recommended.

- Challenge the status quo and have an enemy - Beat a bush about on socials - Get folks to your waitlist. Check out Microacquire, he does it well.

Lots of community comes down to having conversations with people and finding ways to help them. The hard part is knowing what conversations to have and how to help them, much of this is down to researching (community discovery), practicing and experimenting (Minimum Viable Communities).

I built the product on side while I was working full time in pharmaceutical out of curiosity. I didn't think of anything about marketing and sales. Now I am trying and learning all social media and community building around the product.

It's really hard... We tried to use different platforms as Indie Hackers or Product Hunt Discussions to gain the community for our launch (we launched today LeaksID 2.0 and will be grateful for your support). 😀

Most of the communities I've joined were actually when I was looking for support but then I stayed for other reasons.

Many great answers here already so I will just add to them (hopefully). Making sure people already in the community are sharing success (in whatever form that comes in), this helps validate the quality of the community and whatever the community is built around.