When you have just launched a community the uncertainty is high so it is not easy to fully understand the details of the solution you are suggesting to work on. To make the mission less abstract, you can describe your community in terms of what it is definitely not, an antagonist project. If the problem you want to solve is real, there are bound to be specific projects that benefit from the problem. The antagonist will be a project that dominates the reality that you do not like and want to change. Having an antagonist project will make it easier to find people who share your views and are ready to act. In addition, the simplest public success metric of the early stage of a community can be the measure of the community’s progress against the antagonist’s position.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.