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Alexander Buzin
Alexander Buzin

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How to build a community for Side Project?

One of the most proven and working ideas of how can a side project grow traffic is to build a project community.

A community can be built on top of platforms like Discord, Twitter, or Projectium and should be a group of people sharing ideas that will make the project grow & develop (feedback, insights, opinion).

The best way to grow it is to scale it group-by-group:

  1. “Friends & Followers” - 40–100 members
  2. “Target users & Early adopters” - 100–600 members
  3. “Thematic audience” - 600–4000 members

…and a few other groups that can scale your community to 25K members.

Same but in details read here.

In order to reach out to people you have to:

  • Pack your idea (elevator pitch / oneliner)
  • Define key values
  • Define your target audience
  • Reach out to people using websites like Reddit, IndieHackers, Projectium, or Twitter.

Building a community is very hard, but it will give you active users & retention. That’s why you should invest time into learning more about how project can build a community and start growing it as soon as possible.


From author: A few your years ago I had my own Side Project - A 3D Engine framework and I invested a lot of time to get noticed by other developers. A year later, with 5.5K stars on this project I decided to write a note and share some thoughts that can help.

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