What are you using to build a customer community?

Question

I am building a side-project and have about 30 active beta testers, a few paying customers who found the app themselves and paid for it, and number of people who are just interested in being part of it and follow up on updates.

With some of the beta testers, we are using Discord, some of them reaching out via Twitter DM, etc. This is a bit too complicated to have too many channels open as the user base is slowly growing. I would like to get on top of this now rather than later.

I wonder what are you using (I would prefer one channel) for building a community where there are:
- early access users - a dedicated place just for them
- customers
- trials (including those who expired)
- visitors

Any tools you would suggest that created a space that proved to be more useful than being a distraction? Where people can easily find topics, follow up on them (anytime), or join discussions?

Marek Sotak · Accepted Answer

@tyhitzeman I am not in a favour of a chat interface. You can't create categories or topics, you can create channels, but.... It is all a bit too noisy, or at least it feels like it. I think I am looking more for a forum. So far probably the best seems to be https://www.discourse.org/

Marek Sotak · Answer

@nataliekarakina Thank you Natalie, will look at it.

Marek Sotak · Answer

@ab80 Thank you Aleh. For the customer feedback collection, did you have those as different channels for customers to join. E.g. Slack group, Discord group, where your customers were interacting? I would kind of like to avoid Facebook for various reasons, but might reconsider. It is a B2C product after all.

Marek Sotak · Answer

@bogomep good morning Bogo, thank you, but this looks more of a productivity tool for a company rather than community? The pricing per member won't work either, because there are already ~50 people that would be invited. :)

Cathleen Turner · Answer

@sotak there are closed communities. you just have to set it up so people can request to join

Marek Sotak · Answer

@cernikromain You should! I would read them. :D

Aleh Barysevich · Answer

@sotak Once we had a launch when we provided multiple feedback channels for beta testers and it turned a bit nightmarish for our support team :) There were similar questions, constant notifications and chats, etc. So now we try to stick to one major platform. I understand your concers regarding Facebook, it's just the most popular platform among our software users.

Marek Sotak · Answer

@cernikromain Thank you Romain, do you have any articles or anything that would describe more in detail how it works, before trying it out? :)

Marek Sotak · Answer

@ab80 Do you have any links with best practices or how to's for running a community on FB?

Marek Sotak · Answer

@audrey_rampon thank you Audrey, I am not liking the chat interface. It is hard to follow and embraces the chat behaviour, etc. (using Discord at the moment).

Aleh Barysevich · Answer

Hey Marek! Our biggest user community is in the private Facebook group. We also used Trello boards, Slack, and Discord to collect customer feedback.

Cathleen Turner · Answer

reddit?

Vijaya Jeyakumar · Answer

Depends on what type of business you have, a B2B or B2C model? Do any issues raise that you track with require big fixes or is it more process based? Depending on what’s wrong with your current method of communication I’m sure you can find products to suit your needs.

Romain Cernik · Answer

@sotak Unfortunately no... I should write about it ^^'

Romain Cernik · Answer

@sotak sure when i'll write it, you'll be the first one be informed :D

What are you using to build a customer community?

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