Targeting gay community online

[dado.d]

Hi

I'm gay but not a marketer, I'm a developer. Currently I'm working on non-adult gay website/community. I'd like to get potential users before I go any further. I'm not sure where to start advertising.

I don't know many online gay communities, except for dating apps, but I don't want to go there. Facebook seems like a good option for advertising. I'm not selling any products or such, I'm not targeting any specific gay niche, my plan is to target gay community in general because the plan is to create private online community for gay people with verified members. It would be invitation-based system, meaning that you can only joined if you are invited by another member and once you are verified you can start contributing and s get full access.

Can anyone give me some tips?

[rproffitt]

Why not add a marketer to your team?

[dado.d]

I'm not looking for a cofounder at this point. I'm still not for paying someone to do the marketing like: posting FB or Google ads. I want to get some users on my own and then maybe pay marketer to do it instead of me or with me

[Schol-R-LEA]

In my experience, most LGBT+ groups are local to a specific city or region, and are usually formed around private/hidden FB groups and/or Discord channels. Most of the more national and global groups are formed around web forums (or, in the distant past of the 1990s, Usenet groups), and generally these are focused on some specific sub-set of LGBT+ interests (e.g., trans folk, bisexuality, particular subclutures, political activism, support for trauma or other mental health problems common among LGBT+ people, etc.).

An app that isn't focused on a particular topic or area is likely to grow beyond any reasonably sized moderation team.

There are a number of LGBT+ focused apps around, some of which at least started out as the sort of thing you seem to have in mind, but sad to say a lot of them end up focusing on dating and hookups despite the intentions of the developers and moderators. The ones which don't fall into that trap seem to be support-focused apps (e.g., Pride Counseling), which doesn't sound like your aim.

All this is to say that you may need to focus the app a bit more than you seem to have, at least based on what you've told us so far. Also, moderation is going to be a primary concern with any community-focused app, regardless of the topic.

[rproffitt]

There's little to no magic about this area and going it alone while your choice means you limit your growth. Don't call them a cofounder. Look for anyone that will join your team. Tell them up front it's for exposure etc. Whatever it takes.

I'm skipping any talk about marketing because you can get a lot from google on that or take some courses on the subject.

[Dani]

Don’t listen to rproffitt. Don’t take any marketing courses! Nearly all marketing courses are scams. Not only that, but they won’t teach you any tricks to make your site popular. That’s because standing out from the crowd is all about thinking outside the box and being more creative than the next fella. School teaches you how to be a sheep. You can’t learn out of the box thinking in a classroom.

Go to your local LGBT center and say you want to start up a website for your local chapter and want to partner with them. After that, go to your next town’s over center, and do the same thing. One chapter at a time. Partner with them. Show them why their members need to be complementing their in person meetings and activities with your platform.

Remember, Facebook started one college at a time.

[Dani]

I should have noted the college courses here. But I get the feeling that's not acceptable.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. Have a feeling that what's not acceptable? I graduated with a major in Computer Science, a minor in Business Computer Information Systems, and was half way towards a second minor in Chemistry.

As part of my minor, I was required to take a handful of marketing courses. I already had DaniWeb at the time, and I found the marketing courses soooo absurdly comical how it was just memorizing from a textbook, and didn't focus on any real of the techniques I was actively thriving at doing at the time to grow DaniWeb its first handful of years.

[rproffitt]

My first thought was "they need to grow their team." Today's textbooks are not dead trees from what I've heard and let's hope schools have advanced from your admittedly bad coursework.

My own marketing years ago was dead simple. Focus on the products we would carry. Present them well along with the other store policies. We did quite well. Eventually after way too many 18 hour days, we sold the shops and moved on. I went off to other ventures, indenpendant developer and designer. It seems you never end selling your ideas and self.

[Dani]

My first thought was "they need to grow their team."

One of the biggest mistakes that young startups can make it to grow their team too quickly. In this case, the OP is first trying to prove out a market for his product, and to flesh out what service(s) exactly the site will provide and whether there is demand for that. He shouldn't even THINK about bringing on anyone else until he is able to prove that there's a demand for what he's wanting to build.

Today's textbooks are not dead trees from what I've heard

Even from seeing some examples of today's coursework in marketing, there's simply no way that you can teach out-of-the-box-thinking in a classroom setting. Classrooms are designed to teach information, and, admittedly, sometimes train their brain to be better at problem solving and that type of thing. But there's no way to teach creativity, I don't think. Either you're a very creative person or you're not. Some people are cut out to be artists. Some people are cut out to be musicians. I can take as many musical theory classes as you can throw at me, and that won't improve my overall musical ability by one iota. Ask my mom, who paid for 5 years of violin lessons every week, and who watched me painstakingly practice for two hours every single day for years, and I didn't show any improvement from the first time I picked up a violin, in all that time.

[rproffitt]

For the shops, I had an beginner's take on accounting. My partner however had that skillset and the shops would have never done as well without the skills we both brought to the table.

As to marketing? Much of what I learned was in my time in retail. Not front lines but inventory control, setting up the displays and working with management to share when a killer deal could be had so we could align advertising with product availability. Much learned!

[Dani]

Not front lines but inventory control, setting up the displays and working with management to share when a killer deal could be had so we could align advertising with product availability. Much learned!

All of that is great knowledge, and most of it can be applied to e-commerce shops. However, that's very different than the world of digital marketing today, which centers primarily around PPC and SEO.