Community Launch Plan: 30-60-90 Day Strategy for Community Kickoff
In this article, you'll learn a proven 90-day strategy to launch a successful online community.
Launching a community is most effective when done in three focused phases:
Days 1–30: Foundation
Define your purpose, set up the platform, seed content, and invite a beta user group.Days 31–60: Launch
Launch your community, onboard new members, kick off conversations, get feedback and spark engagement.Days 61–90: Growth
Analyze performance, refine your strategy, and accelerate growth.
This 30-60-90 day community launch plan gives you a clear roadmap to move from zero to a thriving, active space your members will love.
Make yourself familiar with the concept of Minimum Viable Community before you start working on your new community.
Introduction
Launching a community is often overwhelming. There are several tasks you must complete before you officially announce your community to the world. It includes picking up the right community platform, getting initial members, seeding content, writing community guidelines and many more.
This guide breaks down the community launch process into a step-by-step, 90-day action plan so that you can launch your community with confidence.
Let’s start!
Days 1-30 | Foundation Phase
The first month of your community launch is all about building strong foundation. You will focus on planning and preparation for a successful launch. Following are the key steps of laying strong foundational pillars of your community:
1. Define Community Mission
The most important part of launching a community is to define “why” your community should exist. What value will your members get, and what business goals will the community support.
A well-defined mission gives you focus and clarity for community growth. It also helps align the internal stakeholders (marketing, sales, customer success) and helps potential members understand why they should join the community.
2. Identify Community Platform
A good community platform can make or break your community. Decide whether you want to build an open community or closed community. At Jatra, we advocate building hybrid community - where at least 80% of the content is open to everyone without logging-in. Open communities help drive organic sign-ups using SEO.
In general, look for a platform that goes with your community’s mission and growth strategy.
3. Identify Target Audience
Identify the ideal members of your community. Build a member persona for your community. Ask the following questions:
Who will find your community valuable?
What do they care about?
What are their top motivations?
What are their personal and professional goals?
What is their biggest pain point or fear?
Answers to these questions will help you define community structure, content strategy and various user-engagement activities.
4. Build Painkiller Content
With a clearly defined mission and knowledge of target audience, start seeding the content. Focus on building “painkiller” content.
What’s a painkiller content?
Painkiller content is any content that immediately solves a pain-point for your users. It could be in the form of a “discussion”, an “article”, a “webinar”. Figure out what type of content works the best for your audience.
No one likes an empty community. Building the initial content base is the job community managers must do. Before we enter the phase 2; aim to have at least 20-50 pieces of unique content on your community.
By the end of first 30 days, your should have a launch-ready community foundation. You may even setup basic community analytics using tools like Mixpanel, PostHog or Google Analytics.
Days 31-60 | Launch Phase
The second phase of community launch requires implementing growth strategies. The focus is on building momentum. You will introduce the community to the world, seek feedback and double down on content.
It’s also the time to set community guidelines and rules in place to ensure a positive and welcoming culture.
1. Execute the Official Launch
Kick-off this phase with official launch of your community. You may choose to launch the community on popular launchpads such as “Product Hunt” or “BetaList”. If you want a more cautious approach, you can do a ‘soft launch’ for your existing customers or users.
Prominently display the link to your community in your support-widget, website top-menu and in the footer. Make it easy for people to discover your community. This will also help search-engines to crawl your community.
Keep in mind that you will have to launch your community every few months. So don’t freak-out if your community doesn’t get immediate response. It’s normal to have a slow start.
2. Onboard New Members
When onboarding new members to your community, ‘personalization’ is the key. Make it a special experience for each new member who joins. You may delay implementing automation in this phase.
Initiate one on one conversations through direct messages. Conduct live orientation webinar or direct calls / virtual meetup with your early members.
Read our “Community Onboarding Guide” to understand how to setup a proper onboarding flow.
3. Encourage Content Creation and Member Networking
Even with high-quality content, people will hesitate starting new discussions. That’s okay.
Following are some of the ways you can encourage people to create content and network with each other:
In your comments on existing threads, ‘@mention’ new members. Ask them for inputs.
Send DM to members and ask them to express thoughts on important topics
Publicly acknowledge a member’s contribution
Take lead in introducing members with similar interests and profile
It’s lot of hard-work; but the results are often compounding. Your goal is to create a group of ‘core members’ who will feel connected with the community and drive growth.
4. Gather Feedback
Be active in collecting feedback. Your early members will give you insights into what they expect from the community. At Jatra, we introduced an entirely new post-type to make collecting feedback easy; with upvotes. Read - Jatra is Upvoty Alternative.
Feedback will help you refine your community-growth strategy. By the end of this phase, you can check following metrics:
Total registered members
Total discussions / topics created
Number of replies per topic
Number of active members
Make sure to focus on top KPIs for your community.
Days 61-90 | Growth Phase
The third phase of community launch roadmap focuses on growth strategies. Your community is already live for 2 months and you have valuable feedback from members.
It’s time to step back and assess how are things aligning with your community and business growth goals.
You will set your community for accelerated growth during this phase.
1. Analyze Data
Start by analyzing the data you’ve gathered in the last 60 days. It will give you insights into what’s working and what needs to be worked on. Rely on data instead of intuition.
Identify the content type, theme, topics that your users are engaging more with. Building a content calendar (like editorial calendar) is highly recommended.
2. Optimise Content for SEO
Of all the communities we created, SEO was the #1 growth hack. QnA content has the ability to target long-tail keywords that users search all the time. It means you can get traffic and member sign-ups on your community on autopilot.
Our community SEO guide covers this in detail. But here’s a TL;DR version:
80% of your content should be QnA to target long-tail keywords
20% of content should be in long-form article format
Submit XML sitemap to Google Search Console
Rewrite thread titles if required.
3. Setup Referral Program
Make it easy for your core members to invite new members from their circles. Introduce a basic user-referral program so that users can invite new members to the community. This is one of the best growth hacks to grow your member and active user count.
4. Setup Basic Gamification
Make sure that users are rewarded for the positive actions they perform in the community. It could be creating a useful discussions, offering a helpful reply, inviting new member or sharing a resource.
Most community platforms offer gamification in different forms. You could simply offer ‘likes’ on their posts, or award points / virtual badges. Small and meaningful gestures will help drive engagement.
Final Thoughts
You are towards the end of your community launch program. With some painkiller content in place, an SEO-optimised platform and a few core members - your community is all set for growth.
Double-down on the content for the next 3-6 months and actively engage with your community members. Listen to the feedback and keep improving your community.
Stay committed and stay responsive! Watch your community transform from a small group to an ecosystem of connection and collaboration.