I am providing value to a specific sector (freelancers) looking to build a community, what's the best initial move to ensure it isn't a ghost town?

When I built my first company, I targeted a niche and was able to corner it. Is attribute the success of the company to a few key factors: helpfulness, consistently excellent service, and high relevance. The best way to get the support of a niche is to be truly useful to that niche. Where do they hang out online? Be there, and help everyone you can with no expectations. When it makes sense, link back to relevant resources to give them the option to research more deeply. Keep a blog full of helpful information — this helps the resources you link to when helping more useful to you, because they're yours. And — most importantly — make damn sure the product or service is filling a gap in the niche. All your efforts are for nothing if what your selling isn't wanted or needed. Then you simply have to make sure you're treating every customer like a celebrity endorser. Their word will make or break you, so make sure every client is your most important client and that they finish the project ready to tell everyone how great you are. "Pretty good" won't corner a niche; "fucking awesome" will. If you'd like to talk strategy and/or marketing, hit me up. I'd really enjoy working with you on a project like this. :) Good luck!

Not necessarily. What's key is to build relationships with the organizations that work most closely with the munis and local leaders. Often times the money comes from them (i.e NGOs, local companies, social ent orgs). In some cases software can be piloted at low or no cost with muni leaders and from there, government sees value and invests accordingly. Where will you be working? Of course every region and location is different but building relationships with organizations that work globally and know how to tap into the local groups is a great first step. Happy to chat further if I can be of help.

I imagine a lot of it happens in private FB groups already. I'm a member of Dynamite Circle, which is a private community of location independent entrepreneurs http://www.tropicalmba.com/innercircle/

After looking at your site, I definitely belive that you have something that is extremely valuable and can definitely be popular in tech communities. Yes, your copy needs to be more focused. What is it? I would have a landing page (or a cover page) that makes it really simple for a visitor to understand what it is and why this will help them. Include an email field and offer a free eBook. I would highly suggest that you use Optimizely or Unbounce to A/B test your copy and call to actions. (Side Note: Keep in mind how much traffic you have when calculating test significance) Since you are focusing on a developers/engineers, I would reach out to 10 of your most passionate fans that have contributed or have shared your GitHub repo. Ask them if they would be willing to contribute to the site sharing their thoughts. The more influential these people are the better. Instead of assuming they have a login ask them to create an account right on that page. Also, include Twitter login. One point I would make regarding SEO: Include the name of the articles in the URL of the comment pages. This helps with sharing and rankings on SEO. Use Twitter as a growth engine and tweet out all the latest posts that you are curating to your sites Twitter account. Then if you have an active twitter following start engaging fellow engineers asking them questions about these posts. This heightens engagement and starts getting your audience engaged (some of which will convert). To take this one step further find the author of the posts you are sharing and mention them in the post saying that their article has been curated on your site (better yet you could say their article is being discussed on your site). The author will be inclined to retweet and share their post with their following. Have some variability in using this tactic, variability makes it more valuable. Use SumoMe as a really simple way to add email capture popups on the site. In regards to strategy, you may find it more sustainable to use the closed/invite only model for commenting like Product Hunt used. This creates a higher perceived value for those that access to commenting which in turn increases engagement. This strategy would go nicely with the initial outreach I mentioned above. I hope this helps. I would love to chat further here is my Clarity VIP link for a free call. https://clarity.fm/lipmanb/vip/t

This sounds like an exciting project! There are certainly a lot of points to consider when putting together anything involving memberships, especially something like you've described. However, I won't go into every possible course as I believe the most likely route that will bring you success will be leveraging WordPress' multisite capabilities. Essentially, I'd be recommending you setup a multisite where schools can sign up for their own subsite on your network. It is possible to pre-configure your new sites so that upon signup, each school gets a site with the theme, plugins, content, settings, etc. which you wish them to have. You can assign each new user with specific roles on their own site and your main site so that they will be able to participate in things like site specific or network wide forums. To facilitate this, I'd envision using several plugins including: http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/pro-sites/ http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/new-blog-template/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/join-my-multisite/ There are a number of reasons why I'd recommend this approach but I'll just mention a few important ones: - This approach would allow you to bill the organization rather than the individual user (if desired). - Allows for the simplest management of groups of users for active/inactive accounts. - Organizations can have their own environment, complete with private groups, forums, content, media, etc. Those are just a few reasons why I think this approach would be effective and appropriate. That said, I would say with certainty that a site like you've described could be built on single install of WP, simply taking full advantage of plugins like BuddyPress, bbPress, the many complimentary plugins for those and/or potentially some of the many other powerful membership plugins for WordPress. I hope this is helpful. Please indicate if you'd like more details on any specific point. I'm happy to help.