Community Seeding Method
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A breakdown of how successful communities like Reddit and others bootstrap their initial growth through careful community management and orchestrated interactions.
Core Strategy
- Create artificial activity in early days to overcome the "empty room" problem
- Focus intensely on first 150-300 members to establish culture
- Manage engagement until organic activity takes over
- Aim for "critical mass" where community becomes self-sustaining
Reddit's Early Approach
- Founders created ~30 different accounts
- Posted content themselves initially
- Commented as different personalities
- Maintained conversations between fake accounts
- First real user comment was a major milestone
- Set cultural tone through early interactions
Modern Community Building Examples
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Trends (The Hustle)
- Founder personally active daily
- Wrote posts on behalf of others
- Asked 40+ people to comment on specific posts
- Carefully orchestrated first impressions for VIP members
- Managed first 2000 members intensively
-
Hampton
- Required hands-on management for first ~300 members
- Created surveys to drive engagement
- Used landing pages to filter quality members
Key Principles
- Can't expect organic activity initially
- Must "fake it till you make it" appropriately
- Need to actively stoke engagement
- First impression management is critical
- Culture gets set early and sticks
- Numbers needed for self-sustaining activity are surprisingly low
- ~300-2000 members depending on community type
- Only need to manage intensely for 6 months typically
Warning Signs
- Dead rooms don't attract dancers
- Without seeding, communities often fail to launch
- Can't be passive in early community building
- Must maintain energy until organic activity takes over
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.