u/No-Competition-7925

Back in 2022, I was building a community for SaaS that I worked for. When were looking to move our community off Slack.

I mainly focused on the UX and Analytics - and shortlisted a few platforms. Picked a platform that we abandoned after 8 months.

Most of the community platforms offer similar features; so I'm curious to know what do my fellow community builders, marketing pros look for in a community platform?

- Overall look and feel - UX

- Analytics - super important.

- Easy Signup / SSO - important

Would love to know what influences your decision - and why?

Thank you in advance.

So far, I've avoided cold mailing prospects. I've never tried it and don't know if it really works. I didn't send cold email because almost all cold mails I received were bad; and didn't solve any problem.

All my current customers came through Reddit and organic SEO and LinkedIn content. However, everyone says in B2B, you need to do cold mailing as it gives you clients fast.

Open to tips, suggestions and any advice you may have.

So, I heard someone in my family talk on this topic. The common theme was "Pune/Mumbai youngsters are generally smarter than those from Vidarbha".

- They have more exposure

- They are more aware

- The make better impression.

For the record's sake: I don't agree with this. I'd however like to hear from fellow members what they think?

Simply testing my assumption:

Assume that you are a community manager responsible for company's Slack / Discord based community group.

Whose job is it to get new members in the community?

Is it your responsibility or is it a marketing team's challenge?

Every second post in this sub is from people who are "bored" and "alone" and "looking for friends".

If you are lonely, let me tell you this:

1. You need to go offline. Talk to people around you. People will talk to you.

2. If you are in college - make friends.

3. If you are in an office - talk to colleagues.

4. If you are a student - study. This is not the age to get bored. Learn AI if you have nothing else to do.

5. If you don't belong to the above; and yet feeling lonely - call your family, brother, sister, mom, dad. If you can't - call your childhood friends. If you didn't have any - just go to a cafe and initiate conversation with strangers.

Then, there are people (lonely males) who are secretly hoping that they'll catch a pretty girl on this subreddit - I've a bad news for you. Your chances are 0.0001%.

Digital is ruining your life. Offline is where you'll find life.

I hope this helps. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I'll be honest, I'm losing sleep over this for the past few weeks. The uncertainty is at its peak and I can't pretend it isn't affecting me.

I'm someone who's got ~20 years of professional experience across domains. I've worked for corporates and also built a lifestyle startup that made money for good 10-12 years (and then something nasty happened). That's a story for another day.

Now, I'm building a SaaS. I'm good at SEO, marketing and development as well.

In the last year - building products has become easy.

The game is all about marketing and distribution. But those are getting disrupted as well.

Content: AI slop is flooding the internet.

Outbound: People are just spamming and response rates are down. I'm not an expert in outbound; but that's what I've been observing lately.

In near future; UI will probably disappear. Not tomorrow; but I can't guarantee we'll use Internet the same way as we do today.

Basically - the playbooks for SaaS have been disrupted. All the SaaS course-sellers are teaching the methods that worked until 2023-24.

Yes - you can still build SaaS. Frankly, that was never the hard part.

The hard part is marketing; and I'm not sure what the future holds.

.....so I keep thinking - with all my negative juices - what if this doesn't work.

Oh - the job markets are really (i mean REALLY) bad.

So my SaaS bros - what's your backup plan if your SaaS fails?

If you are in your 40s (or 50s) - what are you going to do? Live off your savings and investments?

OR build another SaaS. Or AI wrapper - and hope that things will work out?

Be 100% honest. Let your fears, hopes, ideas flow unrestricted. It may help / motivate fellow SaaS bros.

Addendum:

I'm looking for backup plans that my fellow bros have; to know what options are worth considering. Not asking for life advice.

We are in the process of revamping our community platform's layout and want to know from fellow community managers their preference for the layout.

I personally lean towards three-column layout.

On mobile - this doesn't matter. However, we're in the business of making community software for businesses where majority of the users are desktop/laptop users.

We're optimizing this for community managers - and I'd like to know from fellow CMs about their preference. Thank you in advance.

As someone who's been in the community space for over a decade, I declear that I'm done with chat-based communities.

Here's the thing - chat-based works amazing for two types of communities:

1. Gaming communities

2. Small family, friends, office groups

...basically, the ones that do not value the collective knowledge a community creates.

Yesterday, I had a meeting with a DevTools founder who launched a Discord based community about 6 months ago. The community got about 400 members quickly (most joined within the first 2 months). But ever since, the group is almost dead.

There are a few enthusiastic posts from the founder and his team mates; but no one responds.

We explored their channels and they do have some really good content. But there's no way for the new member to discover it. Unless they click on the the channel and scroll up for at least 2 minutes.

The founder had no answer when I asked - how do you expect the new members to get value from this community? When they enter - all they see is a dead room.

It's a common theme I see across most of the communities hosted on Discord and Slack. Some are even worse - they're on WhatsApp or Telegram. Mostly flooded with encouraging messages from owners.

...and then everyone thinks community building is hard.

You are playing the community building game in the Super Hard mode!

Show value first. Then ask members to join.

What do my fellow CMs say? Please don't defend Discord and Slack for community building.

I'm an advisor to a white-lable community platform for businesses. This question is a result of my recent discussion with the founders.

FIrst - we're talking about owned communities. Not the ones that live on Reddit, Facebook, WhatsApp and other similar platforms. We'll focus on platforms like Discourse, Circle, Mighty Networks etc. - basically, the 'business' community platforms.

Do you think businesses think of community platforms as a 'nice to have' vitamin solution or a 'painkiller'?

The community platforms market seems to be growing. Reports suggest the market is growing at 10% and will grow from $5B -> $12B soon.

When people buy community platforms - do they buy it because there's an urgent need or they do it because it's cool to have a community?

I ask this - because I've been in the community building space for ~20 years. Until recently, I was the head of growth at a startup where I built a developer community as a part of our GTM strategy.

The idea was simple:

1. Identify the pain points in our niche. Drill down to the lowest niche - that no one was talking about.
2. Create an open community - and create QnA / Discussion to answer ultra-long tail queries. The queries that no one else bothered touching.
3. We then built strategic backlinks from our community to the articles we wanted to rank. Basically, we formed a topical cluster around the blog posts using content on the community.

Result:

1. Articles that were on page #3 rose to page #1 within ~30 days.
2. Articles that ranked on page 1 began ranking for 50% more keywords.
3. The traffic to overall landing pages grew by ~3x within 4 months.

I left the company about 2 years ago and have been testing this strategy with multiple companies. It works all the time. Some companies take 3-4 months, some take 7-8 months. It all depends on how much effort you put into building topical clusters.

The key is to use the community to build topical clusters. Happy to talk about this. Let me know.

Requesting fellow CMs to share the #1 pain point as a community manager. It could be about maintaining engagement in the community or convincing your management or getting new members into your community.

Thank you in advance.

Finally GMR has began issuing tenders and I'm super excited. Hoping to see a world class Airport developed in Nagpur.

Does anyone have renders of how it will look?

Reminder to everyone - forums aren't dead.

As AI takes over, the importance of authentic human responses and experiences will skyrocket. There's no better place than forums and niche communities to host these.

Zuck knows this and is making investment. Right now Forums app is an interface for the FB Groups.

I don't like FB groups; but they do host some nice communities.

Guys, I'm going for a coffee date tomorrow. I've already finalised the venue. Could you please suggest a nice girl to go out with? Thank you in advance.

I'm in the middle of setting up onboarding flows for our community platform. The goal is to make the user comfortable, and motivate them to take a simple, low-effort action within first few minutes of signing up.

I'm however, exploring multiple ideas:

- asking users to complete their profile
- ask them to choose areas of interest (from a preset list, customized per community)
- nudge them to like / comment on existing post
- offering a reward (I don't like this; but I'm willing to experiment)

Is there anything else - that has worked? I'm open to all ideas. Thank you in advance!