Community Building 101 for the Bootstrapped Startup
Published in 2009, this chronicle by @Anon84 details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 14 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 6 comments
I call BS on this article.
Fact: Tipd has shown very strong growth. This is true. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tipd.com/?metric=uv
Claim: This growth can be traced to their great "community features" like an inviter, a top domains page, a top ambassadors page and "maintaining focus on community and continuously delivering tools to help them sort through the noise that has become an unfortunate side effect of today's information age."
Problem: If Tipd is so great at community building, why are there only 6 comments across the 15 stories on their front page? And all 6 of these comments are either Techcrunch style "Awesome article!" comments or spam comments promoting some other site.
Community = comments/discussion and they appear to be struggling mightily on that front.
What's more likely is that Tipd is powered by autosubmission scripts scraping feeds they like. That their traffic is all organic, attracted by the financial keywords. And that their comments are left by their own sock puppet accounts as well as financial blog spammers.
I run a social news site myself. These approaches are all very easy and tempting to take to boost traffic and activity. If someone does it, fine, but then don't pitch a phony story to Read Write Web, chalking your growth up to other factors. It hurts the cause by putting false information out there.
This article is nothing but fluff. The advice is essentially: use widgets, social sharing, and invites - nothing that really has to do with community building. The rest of the article is a giant ad for Tip'd.
If you're really trying to build a community, why not emulate Hacker News? Curate your content, encourage intelligent conversation, and define & enforce your community's culture. I feel like those ideas stretch farther than social news sites and, so far, it has worked.