How do you grow a community around the product?

I'd suggest hyper-personalization - by that I mean connecting with people on a human-to-human level as much as possible. Then, you have a firsthand uderstanding of your audience, people's needs, fears, and values. Once you do that, marke - the right content, relevant product updates, engaging social media posts, and so on.

Talk about topics related to your product and industry. Answer their questions, comments and DMS. Educate and entertain your audience on social media platforms. It can help a lot!

You can rely on early adopters of your product and help them grow as experts by creating useful content for your audience in the very beginning. This helps you take a look at the content that your audience find useful from the other perspective and reveal something that you might miss

The best way to grow a community would be to ensure that there's highest 1-1 engagement between the members. Otherwise it eventually becomes a ghost town. I've been a part of a lot of communities. And the thing I've observed is that atleast in the early stages, the community manager takes a lot of efforts to organize events, activities to make sure people get to know each other :) It becomes a separate activity apart from the product. But the best part about communities is that they invert the funnel & create exponential sales by word of mouth :)

Send out goodies if you have a budget. Make an exclusive community and give them deals they can't get elsewhere. Make your users a significant part of your content strategy. Be there when your users come across an issue. Reward them with gifts whenever there comes a special occasion. Etc.

It is not that easy, but I believe once valuable content is produced and suggested in the field that the business specializes in, it opens a door to creating the right community composed of people with the same area of interest. :) Once the community already exists, it is important to maintain the space where these people gather, regularly bring valuable content to participants, and be active within the community.

Hey Ksusha. You inspired me with your topic and I decided to write a post based on my experience https://medium.com/@andreylipkov...

As a Solo developer, building a community is exhausting.

There are a minimum of three perspectives to think through: 1. yours: what are your product motivations? (looks like you're got a strong handle on this: leverage it to increase sales, grow product) 2. passive members: what makes it worth the effort to visit it? 3. active members: what makes it worth the effort to contribute to it? (comments or posts; also comment & user moderation) Communities live or die by the interplay of content and member's involvement with it, especially if they generate it. In an extreme but not implausible case, it can get out of hand quickly and shift into something that runs counter to your brand (especially if there aren't people involved with moderation). What's far more likely is that it quietly struggles with engagement, and that happens when those core reasons (#2 and #3) aren't strong. There's a time-based aspects to these perspectives too. A community of aspiration/hype pre-launch is likely to turn into a community of support post-launch. If you plan for that, great! If you're not ready to shepherd it as such, it might make more sense to find existing communities to participate in.

There is no magic bullet to get a community. What works best is a powerful personal network of the founders. It's not smth accessible to any founder - but wee what you could leverage given your existing network.