Map online communities where target customers are active

Map online communities where target customers are active

Founder-led product discovery and early-stage growth where authentic community participation builds user feedback loops and early adopters before scaling to paid channels.

• · Target customer profile: role, industry, interests, seniority
• · Product category and problem solved
• · What founder wants from communities: feedback, users, partnerships, awareness, beta testers
• · Founder's bandwidth for engagement: lurk-and-post vs become a regular

• · Community landscape map: Reddit, Slack, Discord, forums, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, niche forums, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups
• · Per-community qualification: relevance, activity level, size, promotion tolerance, discussion quality
• · Categorization by engagement type: Promote (allows product mentions), Contribute-first (organic mentions after establishing credibility), Listen-only (research and voice-of-customer only)
• · Engagement plan per community: observation period, norms, first 5 contributions, product introduction timing
• · Community map output with tier prioritization: Tier 1 (engage weekly), Tier 2 (biweekly), Tier 3 (monthly)
• · Engagement calendar with week-by-week actions

• · Slofile, Slack directories (find Slack communities)
• · Disboard, Discord.me, Google search (find Discord servers)
• · Subreddit search, Google search (find Reddit communities)
• · Web search (find forums, Indie Hackers, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, niche communities)

• · Target customer profile is defined (not 'everyone')
• · Founder has time to actually participate (lurk + observe + contribute, not just blast)
• · Product category and problem are clear

• · Founder pitches product before establishing credibility (banned from community)
• · Communities selected based on founder's habits, not customer's actual presence
• · No observation period — moves straight to product pitch
• · Engagement is one-off promotional blasts instead of genuine participation
• · Contribution quality is low or irrelevant (gets downvoted, ignored)

• · 10:1 rule: 10 valuable contributions for every 1 product mention (prevents spam reputation)
• · Engagement tier framework: Tier 1 (weekly), Tier 2 (biweekly), Tier 3 (monitor only) by community fit
• · Promotion tolerance assessment per community (explicit vs implicit rules on self-promotion)
• · Multi-platform coverage: Reddit, Slack, Discord, forums, hackernews, indie hackers, github, stack overflow