How to understand that you have successfully launched an online community?

How to understand that you have successfully launched an online community?

In order to be able to work on community building initiatives, the community needs to have a foundation in place. The foundation is ready if your community satisfies the following criteria:

  1. The community has a stable influx of new users with no work from your side.
  2. All content on the platform gets created by the users themselves. You just moderate it and work on user engagement.
  3. The community has a group of regular users who know all social norms, help others to adapt to them and participate in meta-discussions.

If your community meets these criteria, congratulations! It was launched successfully! It’s time to move on to grow it.


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.