Hi Comm, I’m a solo-founder bootstrapping on an early-intervention wellbeing product, initially focusing on lawyer wellbeing as a B2C.
Most of the resources I’ve either read or listened to over the years emphasised avoiding paid ads as a way to awareness and customer acquisition, but to instead focus on organic and community-led engagement and building.
Problem I personally have is almost all resources, books and guidance on how to build this community tends to be via online channels; social media. Truth is I don’t engage with social media, and haven’t had many accounts like instagram. I left them all because of my own mental wellbeing (ironic, really). I find the idea of shouting into the void of Twitter off-putting (especially since Musk took over), and generally dislike social media in general.
I tried to engage with said community via Reddit, but it’s sun is hideously toxic (to my own surprise). LinkedIn is probably the only platform I use and I don’t mind it, but both cautious about being vocal (as this is a side project from my own role) and over the years, it feels like LinkedIn has been borked in a way that inhibits it’s organic outreach (like the decline of LinkedIn Groups over the years).
Would like to know how many others dealt with this, particularly if you’re trying to reach out to a community that you’re not in and generally isn’t overly tech-savvy as a whole, or if you ever had any success launching with paid ads.
In truth, this is the REAL question I want to answer. I keep seeing everywhere that it’s advised NOT to do paid ads until later and to focus on organic community building. I get it from a cost perspective, but the reality I’m experiencing from the organic community building is there’s a time-cost that feels VERY EXPENSIVE in terms of just the amount of time and effort just to get a handful of customers.
I’m very much want to know why paid ads aren’t advised.
I’ve been working with paid media for quite a while and I’ve found that while you need either time or money to prove an idea, the segmentation options available for paid ads are very interesting (e.g; say LinkedIn ads, for instance, if you have a B2B target).
About your point on the time-cost, I completely agree. If you’re spending about 3 hours a day on communities and it takes at least a month to generate one lead, the investment can add up quickly, even at a low hourly rate (your hourly rate, I mean).
Of course, paid media doesn’t provide the long-term results you see with community building and SEO (at least, that was the case before AI), but I think it’s a valuable tool for testing ideas and fine-tuning market fit - then, when this is done, you can spend time with solidifying your growth with organic.