Is building community sometimes harder than building the product itself?

Aditya Kaushik
5 replies
Everyone talks about building communities around product that you have up and coming, but I think sometimes building community becomes way harder than building the product itself. Let's face it, it's hard to get early believers and adopters. I think getting people's time is harder than investing your own time, what have you experienced?

Replies

Nico Spijker
I think this is something that a lot of people often think about. The ultimate goal is building both in parallel, so the awesome product comes as a result of community interactions, but that obviously isn't always the case. When starting from scratch, if a great product is already there it can definitely be hard to get a community going, but if you can manage to merge the two in some way you'll get the best type of community in my opinion :).
Rich Watson
NVSTly: Social Investing
NVSTly: Social Investing
takes a lot of time and energy into building a community and reaching the audience
Yassin Bouacherine
Hi! I think they are equally harder to build. I personally never met someone gifted at being great at building a product AND building a community. For me, that would also require an inhumane amount of energy and time to ever do both greatly. In my case, I am at the complete extreme of the spectrum, being a full-time product maker. Just getting to read and learn about building a community is literally draining my soul. I will be delegating the "community building" to someone else. Back then, I underestimated the amount of work necessary to build a community. But I recently realized the reality of it. If you are solo, that's a tough pill to swallow but it's never too late, I guess. If you are starting out, make sure to find someone who's gifted in what is not your forte. Cheers!