What Community Managers Know About First Users That Founders Forget

What Community Managers Know About First Users That Founders Forget

Disclosure: I do community work in the OpenNomos ecosystem, and 01MVP (https://01mvp.com) is one of the projects I help support. Opinions below are my own, learned the hard way.

Founders talk about their "first 10 users" as a milestone. Community managers talk about them as ten actual people with names. That difference sounds sentimental, but it quietly decides whether user eleven ever shows up.

Here are four things people who run communities for a living keep relearning - and founders keep forgetting.

1. First users don't join products. They join conversations.