The basic tips and tricks to growing your community when you’re just starting out

Communities are the future, there is no doubt about that. In a world where there exist communities for people who love cheese to TV shows, you might want to create a community that stands out among others and want yours to be the first one that your target audience want to join. 

Due to this boom in communities, there are multiple resources out there to help you start your perfect community which can be confusing and overwhelming. Here is your cheat book with a few tips and tricks to help you start your community without being overwhelmed.

Before we get to the cheat sheet, let’s look at the barebones of how we start a community.

1. Find a problem: First identify a problem which you are either facing, have faced before, or know how to solve. 
2. Find your audience:  Find your people, who is your community geared towards?
3. Create your community: Select a platform to create your community on, either a social media platform like Instagram, Facebook or twitter or a more formal platform such as Reddit or Discord etc.
4. Get fancy with it!: Don’t forget to add visual aspects to your community, use various design websites such as Canva to create sunning visuals for your audience.
5. MVP: Create a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for your users, while this may seem extremely daunting and sounds like something that might put a strain on your finances, there are resources which can help you create these for less or even free! It’s more about the thought process that goes into creating it rather than the price of it.
6. Try, Try, Try : Your community might not succeed on your first try, or your second or it might succeed on your fifth only to fail at the last minute. All you can do is keep trying until it works out. Communities work on the subtlety and fickleness of human nature, that’s why no one can tell when it might or might not succeed. 
   
   
   

Cheat-sheet

Try whatever you want!

Don’t be in the mindset of what if this does not work? Maybe this will not be work for me. Maybe my community won’t be able to work with this. Banish the thoughts of self-doubts and take risks! See a new tactic? Apply it! Found out about an exciting new tool? Try it. 

What’s stopping you?

Be Selfless.

You might expect your community to grow immediately, and to gain loyal members soon, unfortunately this is not the case, especially in the starting, it will be hard to grow your community, you need to toil and work yourself literally to the bone by keeping all your expectations aside.

Listen, Listen, Listen!

Be a people person, always listen to what your community is saying and respond accordingly. Be empathetic, treat them as real people who you meet and see every day, instead of just names or another analytic.

Be yourself!

Just because you're creating a community, doesn’t mean you have to hide yourself away or change yourself in any way, you want your community to be full of people who want to be around you, not some version of you. 

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