Importance of building communities around startups

From whatever knowledge and wisdom I gained from starting up a project , I found community building is the most important part of any startups. It is the single starting point from which customers , demand inflows and idea generations and product development occurs. It answers the big "WHY" to your startup idea.


Startups such as producthunt, slack, whatspp and other famous startups have successfully associated their services with the online community. They all began their startup journey by building a community, because , it is here where their products gets accepted.

So, what is a community and what is its importance in the online startup world ?

Community is the meeting point of the services and the people. 

The whole internet can be hypothesized as a heterogeneous solvent solution, in which the solvent is not mixed with the solution homogeneously .

Here the solvent is the startup and the solution is the users spread around the whole internet.

The internet is full of chaos, because these two entities aren't able to meet anywhere.

But once you connect them, businesses, transaction and trading take place. Community is such a point where businesses or startups are able to meet their future customers. It reduces the chaos in the internet by maintaining a directory of ideas , business through discussions.

Effectively community is a point where people come to find their future customers.

Or you can say that people who are searching for services finds their appropriate partner.

Producthunt is a classic example of this hypothesis.

You may ask if I knew all about this , why didn't I start a business like producthunt ?

My simple answer would be, that I came to know about the importance of a community after producthunt was born. :D

Now the question remains what happens to the solvent solution ? :P

You can hypothesize many other startups from this idea itself. 

For example whenever you are letting the solvent and the solution to mix , you are creating a way to communicate between people and business or people to people or business to business.

Ok. I hope you have figured it out by now that 

people to business means forums 

people to people means IRC , hangout , skype , whatsapp , etc.

business to business means slack , gitter , etc.

Similarly, you can make out startup models out of this hypothesis .

Isn't it interesting to learn that you can hypothesize your startup model before actually starting to think about it ? :)

Think of any other startups and see where it falls into Solvent and solution hypothesis.

Give it a try and tell me whether you found this interesting or not . :)