How do you build a community around your Saas product?

every startup needs some form of community because they would be their first users

Yes, you are right.

Do you have to build it?

Heck no!

You are trying to validate your idea, you don't need to spend money, time and energy on building a community. You have tons already!

Any single Facebook group related to developers. Any other community related to developers. Or even here on IndieHackers.

Replace the X and copy this:

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Hi, my name is X.

As a developer I'm sure you have faced X problem. Because of that you X and X, and nobody wants that!

So I've built X. It's a simple tool that X so it helps you to get X faster/cheaper/easier.

I only can invite 5 person to the private beta, say yes in the comments if you faced these problems and want access.

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Done. There you have a community already built.

You don't want/needs fans. You need customers. Validate your idea ASAP and get customers.

You are an IndieHacker, you need to optimize your time, money and energy and this is the way it's done.

Hey, if you're just getting into community management, you might find this playbook super helpful! It’s got some great tips to get you started: https://talkbase.io/guide/community-newbies-playbook

We use LinkedIn, and Substack to lead people into our developer community on Slack for https://sahha.ai

Before community comes things that don't look like community, like conversations.

Honestly, find your people, hang where they hang, and have conversations.

Be attentive to what they talk about and try to build relationships. Building community is a big pressure, it's much nice to think of it as relationship building which will naturally lead to community should that be what is wanted (from both ends).

Though it's not for SaaS product, I built one for my Micro SaaS Ideas newsletter subscribers at Micro SaaS HQ primarily for Micro SaaS builders.

Based on the short description of your product I guess your target audience are developers. So when choosing the platform to build your community on, you should keep this in mind.
Probably github would be a great fit, as developers use it frequently. You can also set up a discord server, so those who need immediate assistance can go there instead of github.
But the most important thing you need is a good documentation and great tutorials.

1. Enroll in Facebook and Slack groups for SaaS community building
2. Stay active with your community
3. Answer their questions, and post social media content to get more engagements
4. Conduct frequent webinars for customers
5. Prepare a landing page and invite potential customers by email and newsletter
6. Do healthy marketing

I think there are a few tricks to building a community.

• Posting 2 posts a day on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Replying to tweets that may go viral about you on Twitter.

• Creating a slack community and inviting people there (without disturbing it).

• Regularly posting #BuildInPublic content on your own slack community and on indie hackers, hacker news, subreddits, etc.

(not trying to be too spammy)

I'm just working on a new project: https://www.socialsaas.io

It's a plugin for SaaS companies/websites to add a community to your site for your existing customers (message board, knowledge base, DM's, the whole shabang).

Get 6 months free is you pre-register now!
(sorry, that was really spammy)

Hey @keosariel,
At Casa (https://trycasa.app) we help startups turn their early adopters into customer advocates.

You should get your first users from online platforms such as:

1. Twitter
2. Linkedin
3. Product Hunt
4. Indiehackers
5. Slack communities (specific to your niche)
6. Betalist
7. Reddit
8. Hacker News

Focus on building in public, and getting feedback as quickly as possible. Once you get feedback, improve on that and ask for testimonials

I'm still new as well ($50 MRR). One thing I'm doing that is working well for Keep Track of My Games is using Discord. The people in my Discord are all power users and help me figure out if I'm going in the right direction as I build.

I cater to gamers so Discord is usually fairly common to have installed (but even some don't). Since you cater to devs, Slack/Discord/GH Discussions could work. Most professional devs I know use Slack or Teams; less use Discord but I still think it's common enough.

I also use it to power an internal newsletter for paid members which works well for anyone not in Discord.

For example, as I work on features, I post screenshots, code snippets, and my train of thought in Discord. On Sunday, a background job rolls through the messages, injects them into an email template with nicer formatting, and mails it out to all my paid supporters.

The way I got my first customers was by posting in "watering holes" like Reddit, forums, and Twitter threads. I actually found targeted Reddit ads work well for low-budget paid marketing. But the best marketing is solving people's problems directly so I sometimes watch Twitter searches or Reddit threads for pain points my app solves (backlog management, missed release dates, etc.) and either cold DM people (surprisingly works, if they are having pain) or try to be helpful in the thread in some way. It's a muscle that needs building.

One of the best resources for me in understanding marketing and my audience was subscribing to Seth Godin's daily list. I also recommend resources created by fellow indie hackers: Deploy Empathy and Marketing Examples.

Hope that helps!