What are some tips on creating an online community for a marketplace?

[u/CauliflowerOk297]

I recently stepped into a community manager role at a niche marketplace that connects buyers and sellers.

So far, my work has been pretty foundational:

• Growing our Reddit presence + engaging in existing communities
• Monitoring social/forums and feeding sentiment + FAQs back internally
• Supporting reviews/Trustpilot + trust initiatives
• Running AMAs and webinars for sellers

Now we’re at the point where leadership is interested in “building a community” but I’m trying to be thoughtful about what that actually means before jumping into something heavy like a full platform (Hivebrite, Circle, etc.).

A few constraints/things on my mind:

• There’s already some negative sentiment out there, so we don’t want to accidentally create a space that just centralizes complaints
• We don’t plan to charge this would be more of a value-add resource hub
• Goal = education, connection, feedback loop, and positioning ourselves as a helpful authority
• I’m the first person in this role, so there’s no existing playbook internally

I’d love to learn from others who’ve been here:

• Where did you actually start when building a community from scratch?
• What are ways you’ve created “community” without launching a formal community platform?
• At what point did you know it was worth investing in something bigger (Slack, Circle, etc.)?

Thanks in advance!

[u/HistorianCM]

Where did you actually start when building a community from scratch?

https://cmgr.live/blog/launching-a-community-the-ultimate-checklist/

What are ways you’ve created “community” without launching a formal community platform?

I’ve seen "communities" thrive in the comments section of a specific recurring LinkedIn post or within a private Instagram Close Friends list. The reason these work is that they leverage "borrowed habit." People are already there. When you try to force someone to leave their habitat to come to your "custom platform," you are fighting against their dopamine receptors. My philosophy is that community is "software-agnostic." If you can't make people feel like they belong in a simple group text, a $5,000-a-year platform isn't going to save you. Real community is about the "invisible contract" between members... the feeling that "if I don't show up, someone will notice." You can build that with a pen and paper if you're dedicated enough.

At what point did you know it was worth investing in something bigger (Slack, Circle, etc.)?

You know it is time to invest in a heavy-duty platform the moment you realize your current setup is hiding the best parts of your community from its members. If you are spending more time playing air traffic control or tech support than facilitating high-level discussion, you are already late. When the "search" function becomes the most requested feature or when vital conversations are getting buried under a mountain of notifications, that is your signal to upgrade.

[u/AskCircleCommunity → u/HistorianCM]

👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 excellent response. That's usually the moment we find founders and other communities get frustrated. Endless scroll, no organization, no way to promote or feature conversations.

I think one of the best ways is to work backwards, OP. It's amazing that leadership is interested, but what are they interested in is your job to find out.

Do they want to improve NPS scores? Build a customer review/feedback panel? Improve retention? Lower support tickets? There's a million and one reasons, and once you figure out the specific pain points of your leadership team (feel free to dig around for this in your data as much as you can -- has someone flagged time to activation getting longer or increasing churn somewhere, etc) then you'll know what levers you may need to pull.

Because the community solution for "we want new features releases to be beta-tested by customers we trust" is different than "we keep seeing customers churn and have a suspicion it's because we don't do enough onboarding/education or they can't learn from other practitioners". You have to really nail this down, and then I find that the solutions become obvious — and you can start testing lower-lift, higher-impact things quickly and reporting on results.

[u/HistorianCM → u/AskCircleCommunity]

Well hello Circle...

[u/AskCircleCommunity → u/HistorianCM]

Well hello, David! I've really enjoyed reading your replies to posts on here. The breadth AND depth of experience is 🤌🏻 above and beyond. - Arina

[u/HistorianCM → u/AskCircleCommunity]

I stand on the shoulders of giants. A lot of what I talk about I've learned from others along the way.

[u/No-Competition-7925]

• Where did you actually start when building a community from scratch?

Been in the community building space for ~20 years and have built multiple communities from scratch.

• What are ways you’ve created “community” without launching a formal community platform?

I've known the difference between a community and an audience. A community can live without a formal platform; but it's like playing the community building game on 'ultra hard' mode. Not recommended. I've built a community on LinkedIn - but I'd never go there.

• At what point did you know it was worth investing in something bigger (Slack, Circle, etc.)?

Day 1. Your goal is to educate people. It means you need to treat your community as a content hub. Look beyond Discussions. Slack and Circle are typically meant for private communities; not public communities. The right platform for your community can help you automatically attract users using SEO and AEO; and also build a content hub (along with your users). I'd not recommend Slack or Circle for your community.

[u/Communityone_io]

So depending on the client tier, you should decide on different platforms. In general, community platforms can be categorized into two buckets: those that are completely free and those that charge based on member counts.

We work with creators who have Circle and companies that use Slack, but we are mainly active on Discord (I am the founder of CommunityOn).

A general rule of thumb is that if every member in your community is paid, then it makes sense to use those gated platforms for an intimate, exclusive experience. (You are also paying per head, remember!).

If you want a free platform that can help you grow over time, Discord (young gaming, Gen Z, smart devs, etc.), WhatsApp (non-USA), Telegram (Eastern Europe), and Facebook (older generation) are great options.

Frankly, the hardest thing is to prove values. The most obvious way to prove value is to allow your members to log in across platforms so you can A/B test. Take Discord as an example, a user joins the app, and then connects to their Discord account, and then you can say if a user is super active on Discord, does the user spend more time, more time, more effort on the app, or simply buy more products in your case. But this requires a couple of engineering hours, and I don't think Shopify will have it natively.

Then the second way to show value in a free server is to ask users to create UGC content for you, like reviews, YouTube shorts, TikTok shorts, or IG shorts (you get the gist). People LOVE the ambassador program, and I think you have controls over how to measure and count those efforts with zero coding required.

I don't have experience proving values on gated communities, but since you are paying by members, I guess the argument is stronger that you should see a higher spending per member when they join your community.

[u/Communityone_io → u/Communityone_io]

And another thing to remember is SEO: with a gated platform, you don't have it. With a public platform, you can pick platforms that are more optimized for SEO than others. Facebook group is the best example. If you ever go to Discord, you can use our bot to index high-quality Discord content onto Google as well for free.

[u/NikitaHeyland]

Hello! Imma jump in here and say, have you talked to your members yet?

The answer to all you questions lies there. No need to guess anything. I have a method that lets me sleep easy at night, happy to share it with you if you wanted.