Ask HN: Why a Great Product Won't Succeed Without a Community | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why a Great Product Won't Succeed Without a Community

6 pointsgonzar797 comments

I'm really tired, fed up, and angry. You can create the best product in the world, but people always choose what their favorite influencers tell them to. People don’t make their own decisions anymore; they always think whatever they’re told to think. It’s really frustrating to try to create something good—something better than what others are doing. And I’ve realized one thing: to achieve success, it’s better to have a community that follows you than to have a great product. If you want to launch a good product, you’re better off building a community first—it’ll make everything easier and faster. I don’t care what you think of this post—I just want to say what I feel.

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“Community” is just the contemporary solopreneur’s version of marketing and marketing is just the process of building an audience. You need a market before you can sell (or at least before you can sell a lot and sell consistently).

Great products have always needed an audience to succeed. It’s just that the early internet convinced a bunch of people that direct-to-consumer sales was possible without marketing and without creating an audience. The internet certainly makes selling easier and you can do so with a relatively small audience but some audience is always necessary. Building an audience is good because then you don’t have to work as hard for the second sale (or the third or fourth). Big companies have known and understood this forever. This is why they have insane marketing budgets.

There’s usually a very good reason for that. It’s called complementary products. You don’t use something because it needs something else to be useful. That something else is not being made, because there’s no use for it, because nobody uses the original something. Communities can be like that: a product doesn’t fly, because there is no community and there’s no community because there are no users.

This is why Apple Vision pro did not become popular. Without software make use of its capabilities, it’s just an inconvenient and expensive extra monitor. But nobody would revamp their UX for a product nobody has.

Have published on this exact issue: Kütt, Andres. "Technology diffusion in ecosystems: a new model." Procedia Computer Science 268 (2025): 34-42.

"idea guy" was one of the great misleading tropes of the last century.

not only do you need a community for a product, they need to like you too. i did a "hey i solved a lot of your job!" product once and it was received as well as it sounds.

do you have the respect or affection of others? of not, they wont want your thing no matter what it does. do you like them too? or is it something you think someone else should do?

the hardest part of make something someone wants is the someone part, and we have still made almost zero progress on solving that.

Having a community doesn't guarantee success, there are many examples of people with established communities not being able to convert that to a successful product. For example: https://longform.asmartbear.com/reputation/.

Besides creating a large community is probably just as hard as creating a good product.

A great product doesn't need to pay for advertising because its customers readily see its value. Building a community can happen organically, but it goes better when you have an evangelist and a marketing budget to support community building. Having great Product Managers and QE testing is everything.

How do you know your product is great without feedback from a community?

Have you tried reaching out to "influencers" to get the word out on your product?

Or don't build a community where idiots hang out

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