When do you think is the right time for a SaaS co. to create a user community on socials?

Question

Would you recommend it? and if you do what platforms would you choose. also, what would you consider before taking this decision.

Dragos Bulugean · Accepted Answer

As soon as possible, it will help you to interact more with your first customers and keep engaging. I recommend creating a Facebook group, they work quite well

Alex Leroy · Answer

I would recomend to do it right from the start. Facebook is quite good for it. The new UI puts enphasis on hte groups.

Abe Winter · Answer

if you can create a parallel community that provides social / network value for your target customer, but exists independently from and feeds your lead generation, you're in really good shape

are your customers in a narrow industry? or in a narrow job description across many industries

Yeshaswini · Answer

@dragos_bulugean  Thanks for the suggestion! I'll start working on it.

Yeshaswini · Answer

@alex_leroy That's great. Thank you!

Yeshaswini · Answer

@abewinter I work with a B2B SaaS company, so it's mainly marketers, strategists in businesses that we interact with, or in the case of small businesses or startups, it's the founders and the CEOs. So it isn't narrow in the sense. But please, go ahead share your thoughts!

Richard Shepherd · Answer

When we launched DID.app (no longer working on that) we created a community called forgetpasswords.com.  To do this we used Discourse and paid their $100 a month fee.  We sunk a lot of time into the project.  It certainly had an audience but it was about 7 people.

For us it wasn't the right approach.  We took inspiration from challenger banks that have very active communities of users that like to talk about how banking should be more open (etc etc) and we tried to create similar discussion around authentication.

I am open to the idea of starting a community again for a SaaS but I'm not sure what framework I would use to assess whether it was the right choice depending on the industry or vision the product has.

Having said all that, it certainly pays to have your distribution channels in place before someone upvotes you on Hacker News and you accidentally get half the internet visiting your website so maybe the answer is as soon as you've validated your basic idea and you're starting to market.

Interesting discussion point.

When do you think is the right time for a SaaS co. to create a user community on socials?

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