A marathon, not a sprint

Prepare yourself for a long process of seeding, growing and weeding your community and watching it slowly take root. After the first initial burst of publicity and activity, you can expect your user figures to drop quickly and then slowly begin to rise again as you tune, refine and promote your offering. People take a while to adjust to a new technology and see where it fits into their lives. The growth curves for community sites are notoriously unpredictable (start-ups talk about the ‘hockey stick’ where slow increases suddenly become massive rapid viral growth) but if in doubt prepare yourself for a typical ‘web 2.0’ adoption curve like this:

Working with small groups of people is a good strategy for handling this: prove that it works for a core user group first, and then you can be more confident of scaling it later. Don’t set impossible targets for scaling your community quickly: give yourself some room to change things, talk to people and build momentum and attention slowly. (More on this later when we discuss What to measure)