Ask HN: How to create, run and grow a community?

2 pointsriksucks4y ago2 comments

HN is filled with people from different walks of life who have done various stuff, so thought of asking here :)

To give you a background, I am a second year CS student and I am thinking of starting a community (probably in discord) for catering to people who are interested in open source and hackathons (and development in general). I have seen too many people in engineering getting intimidated by development in first year and hence they only work on their leetcoding skills (and poor projects down the line). So the aim is to have a community that welcomes newcomers to the hackathon space and also open source space.

How would you have started? And if you have experience in building communities that are non-technical, you can still chime in, it would be amazing to listen to you.

Also can any kind of service be built around this community?

2 comments

NicoJuicy4y ago

I build the biggest Pokemon Go community in Belgium within 2 months, started 1 week before it launched ( to test Facebook ads), a long time ago by now.

I'd say Facebook ads is too expensive for a not hyped term ( we had / 10 the normal costs because of the hype).

Some giveaways grew it together with a lot! of content ( advertised) planned out ( i usually checked Sunday for content for the next week).

Starting earlier than others on fb was a pro too.

Finding good/interesting content was relatively easy.

It's not easy, cheap and very time consuming though.

A like doesn't mean they would join an event ( we had about 100-200 participants for events with entrance tickets for theme parks)

new_guy4y ago

I run a number of social sites (like Facebook but way smaller) the number one thing is just be involved. That's it really, be available 24/7, remember there's a person behind the words you see. That's pretty much it.

Edit: also stay off Discord, it's not your platform, you could be removed from there at any time. Build your own platform, and always implement whatever your members suggest. Since you're planning on having developers there, you could just open source it all.

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