Start a community in 2022? think value creation first, not infrastructure

In my earlier essay about if you do not know what to do, you can start a community.

Starting a community is a lot of work. Fred not! I will share more tips if you still want to go that path.

When I started Vietneer community 6 months ago. I did some research tools that helped me build an online community quickly. I did some prototypes and shared with friends for feedbacks. A friend even recommended me build an app for that.

I started registering a domain name, paid for small droplet on Digital Ocean and deployed Ghost — the open-source content management tool. I put the first few blog posts about the mission statement, announced the first event. I also turned into Eventbrite and subsequently Calendly for people to register for events. The subsequent tools I added to the tool belt is creating a Facebook page, a Youtube channel, a Discord group and a Mailchimp for sending the newsletter. I ended up using Google Form for event registration because I don’t have revenue yet to pay for Calendly.

Think about the audience who you want to serve

My target audience is Vietnamese software engineering students, junior software engineers that need career advice in tech. The advice will come from experienced Vietnamese tech leaders working in Singapore, Vietnam and other countries.

Focus your energy on keeping generating values

You will get wrong all the time about your hypothesis of what your target audience wants. The idea is you need to keep testing and iterating. Don’t get bogged down with the infrastructure. Once you have nailed down the problem statements from your audience, you can invest in the infrastructure.

It’s never getting easier with the plethora of no-code tools at your disposal to start a community in 2022.

Share with me what you learned in community building.

This post was created with Typeshare