The Hard Lessons of Building a Community as an Independent Creator

Hello, welcome to another episode of the independent creator. Tonight we're going to take a little bit of a break from looking at different projects, software, or platforms. Instead, we're going to examine the hard lessons learned from trying to make a community around whatever project you're working on. This is also a bit of self-reflection for myself, because I know many people out there are probably dealing with the same issues and trying to figure out what to do and how to get past these roadblocks.

One of the things that many creators, community managers, and creators of all sizes struggle with is trying to get a community to grow around your project or whatever you are trying to do. For myself, I'm trying to get a community growing around the independent creator space for people who are actually interested in alternative platforms like LiveSpace, OwnCast, SharePlay, places that are not Discord or Guilded. I'm also trying to build out websites and forums or community software. Getting a community to grow on any of these particular avenues is probably one of the hardest things that anybody can do really.

You pretty much have to believe in what you're trying to build yourself, and you're trying to convey that to other people to see what you are wanting to build. You're trying to get them into your community and have some kind of faith that they can see this working out.

The Reality of Self-Promotion

One of the hard lessons I've learned so far is that no matter how much you think you're doing, it's not enough really. I can say that I am really, really poor at doing any kind of self-promotion. It's just not in my personality. I'm really not the type to go out there and say, "Hey, you got to come to this place. If you want to do this, you really need to do this."

The problem is, as I know with a lot of you out there as well, you find yourself spread very thin trying to do all of the things. You're trying to be a jack of all trades, but master of none really. That's one of the guiding factors of why I wanted to do this episode. I want to bring to light that yeah, I know I suck at a lot of things, and you're probably thinking the same way. You're not alone. There's many of us that are just flying by the seat of our pants and trying to figure out what the hell to do.

There really isn't any kind of playbook that one can go to a store and pick up at Barnes and Noble that says if you follow steps one, two, three, you'll receive success within a month. There's no way that anything like that is going to happen at all.

The Problem with Generic Advice

I know a lot of people on YouTube constantly harp on the fact that if you just post on TikTok or if you do this on Twitter, you'll see success in no time. The problem is that yes, a large number of people do that and have received some success, but not everyone will see the same success by following those procedures. I think it's kind of disingenuous for people who are YouTube creators or stream coaches and content creator coaches to be putting out this information.

I don't want to say anything negative about them because I believe their heart is in the right place, but I think their actions are not in the correct place for a majority of people.

I've tried TikTok many times. I've tried different ways of going about it, posting videos every other day. I've tried it with a couple of videos, with basically small clips of previous episodes or shows or streams I've done. I got some movement on that, but TikTok is kind of like a hellscape. I saw a post on Blue Sky earlier today where someone posted a TikTok and only got like six views, while others were getting like a couple hundred or a thousand. This is crazy. This person puts so much great content into it, but they're going to get much less viewership while other people are putting out copies upon copies of other people's content and getting millions of views.

Setting Realistic Expectations

You have to put in your mindset that no matter how much hard work and dedication you put into a piece of content, you kind of have to expect that it is going to fall flat. Set that bar pretty low. If it goes above it, hey, that's great, but set your expectations low so you don't have that feeling of failure.

I know a lot of people say don't look at the numbers, but I want to say that in itself is probably not the best advice because you want to understand what the numbers are. If you're putting content out there and it's getting millions of views, you want to understand why this is working. Let's capitalize on it. Try to make some small changes or keep working on creating the secret sauce or whatever you did to capture that lightning in a bottle.

When numbers start falling, many people are going to go into freak out mode when they start seeing one, two, three videos or streams where the numbers start not getting as high as the previous one. That's why I think they say don't look at the numbers. Yes, I want to say don't look at the numbers, but try to understand why what you're putting out is not working.

You have to understand that your numbers will start to fall at the tail end of whatever you're putting out there. Don't expect to constantly have numbers beating previous numbers and those numbers beating previous numbers. That's not going to happen. It's not going to happen forever. You will have dips and valleys, and you just have to learn to not see yourself as a failure if you start seeing dips. It's just the nature of the beast with content creation.

Embrace Experimentation as a New Creator

The hard lessons that all of us really have to take into ourselves is to put out the best content that you really can and work on trying different things here and there. Especially as a new creator, because that is the best part of being a new creator: experimenting, trying things that you might enjoy doing or editing styles that you might enjoy playing around with.

If you started playing around with DaVinci Resolve, that's great. Try Premiere Pro for a week or whatever the trial is. See if you like that better. Not everyone is going to have the same flavors and tastes that you have. You might be a wizard at DaVinci Resolve and think editing is the best thing ever, while somebody else is going to see that and think, "What the hell are you doing? This is not how you edit video." They might prefer Adobe Premiere or Figma or any of the multitude of different editing software.

You just got to have that mentality that okay, this is what's working for me. It's not going to work for you. It's not going to work for everybody else. And that's a great thing to have because as content creators, we have to juggle so many different things that it's kind of ridiculous really.

Give Things Time to Work

A hard truth is to figure out what you want to do. If you like to do something, let's say somebody who likes playing Baldur's Gate 3 and they're good at it and they like to help teach or show people different builds or different ways to go about it, try that for a couple months. A lot of people try new things, but what I see is that they only give themselves a week, maybe two at the most. You can't really base what's going to work or what's not going to work off of two weeks of experience, especially if you're doing maybe three days a week. Six live streams or six experiences is not really going to decide your fate for the next six months.

I know some people back in last year tried streaming on YouTube. Don't get me wrong, streaming on YouTube is a completely different animal to streaming on Twitch or LiveSpace or SharePlay. But they gave themselves two to three experiences to stream on YouTube and then said, "Oh, it's not for me." It's like, well yeah, because you never really gave it a chance. You didn't experience everything that you go through.

YouTube is a completely different animal. There are ways of going about it and different things that you have to do, thumbnails and titles. It's a different world really. But they just said, "Nope, it's not for me. I'm going back to Twitch."

Avoiding the Wheel of Pain

That's why I don't like the term "grinding" with content creation. When people say "I'm grinding on Twitch" or "I'm grinding on such and such platform," I envision them stuck on a wheel of pain, going around in circles until they break you. You're not really learning anything. All you're learning is to go around in circles painfully. You're not trying different things.

Recently there was someone who was touted as having streamed to zero people for years and then all of a sudden found success. On Twitch, if you're streaming to zero people, you're not doing something right because all you got to do is have your Twitch streamer dashboard open and automatically you're at one viewer. So you're already above the zero viewers. But they touted this as a great thing because he persisted on that wheel of pain for so long.

What did they learn? Just to keep going. If you're going that hard for zero viewers for so long, you have to change something. Something is not working. After six months at the latest, if nothing's changed, change because you're not learning anything new or profound about you or your streaming career. You're just on that wheel of pain going around in circles, bleeding.

With content creation, you have to constantly be doing stuff, trying new things and learning. It's not doing the same thing over and over again, because that's the definition of insanity: to keep doing the same thing over and over but expect different results.

Finding Success in Helping Others

For a long time doing this, I was thinking to myself that I'm not helping anybody really with this alternative platform content, but there have been these little nuggets here and there. People leave comments on YouTube videos or I talk to people outside the sphere of what I do. Even if I can reach one person, I'm doing something that I know I enjoy doing and it's actually helping other people.

For example, there's Corey on LiveSpace who also does videos, painting, artwork and stuff like that. He wasn't enjoying his streaming experience with Twitch and was trying to find different things. He didn't want to go to Kick because of the reputation that Kick has. I saw him post on Mastodon about looking for alternatives, so I suggested he try OwnCast, something that he can quickly spin up that's self-hosted and he can control from the very beginning.

He says himself that he's not very technically inclined, which a lot of people are not. There are a lot of things I'm not technically inclined in either. The information about how I tried to explain OwnCast didn't click in a way that made sense for him. It's no fault of mine, it's no fault of Corey's. It's just that the way I tried to convey the information didn't make sense for his particular use case.

But what did make sense is that he found out about LiveSpace through my episodes and videos. One thing led to another and he found his new home. I believe he enjoys the live streaming experience on LiveSpace much more than he did elsewhere. Even though the OwnCast thing didn't work out, it's not going to work out for everybody. And that's what I try to emphasize a lot: this thing is out there but it may not be for everybody.

Avoiding Unhelpful Comparisons

Something I have to get out of my own mind is to stop comparing myself to somebody else or another community. Stop comparing what community you're trying to build to another community that is more successful than yours. You got to stop that because you're not only self-defeating yourself, you're giving yourself anxiety, self-doubt and frustration.

Currently, I've started up Indie Creator Hub as a place for alternative platform exploration. Just before I started the show tonight, I answered two new comments on older YouTube videos, which is a great thing to see. People are still finding these videos and having some issues, and I'm trying to help them as best as I can. But YouTube comments are not a great place to do any kind of tech support really.

Building Community is Hard

It's really hard to get people to not only view your content, but also to comment or interact with it, and even harder to get them to go to your website. And it's even harder still, after they make it to your website, to have them make an account on that website to start interacting as a community member. People are so ingrained into the culture of the social networks they use, like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, that it's just something difficult to overcome.

That's the struggle that if not all of us constantly go through, from the very beginner just starting out to the seasoned expert. Once you get people in, it's a great feeling to see that the work you do actually has helped other people or has helped people look for these alternative platforms or other places that, if they were just left on their own, they would have just been staying on Twitch or stopped streaming or creating content altogether.

To see that people are finding these alternative platforms is actually a really great thing. It's something that I am extremely proud of, to know that just a little bit of work that I do to try to get this stuff out there has just a little bit of influence. I'm not going to call myself an influencer, that's a disgusting word. No, I'm just bringing to light what a lot of people actively ignore, don't know about, or have no knowledge of it ever existing.

Learning from Platform Hopping

I think what might have hurt my potential growth was the constant moving between different platforms. I know that now, but at the time I was thinking I should try new things because I heard from people on YouTube about first mover advantage on new platforms. I fell into that rabbit hole big time.

I could have been in a better position, but I'm also thinking that if I did not go through that struggle, I would not be where I am right now. I would have been still on Twitch, doing the same thing over and over again, continuing on that wheel of pain for years with no real improvement. So in the end, I think the struggling helped a little bit.

I would never have given Trovo or Mixer or SharePlay or LiveSpace a shot. I would never have looked for alternatives for live streaming. I would never have found OwnCast and started my journey on doing alternative platforms. If I did not go through the struggle bus at the beginning, I probably would not be here. To think of it that way is kind of like a blessing in disguise.

The Importance of Helping One Person

What I'm doing is helping at least one person. With Corey, helping him find LiveSpace and him having a better live streaming experience there, that's a great feeling to have. If I'm helping just one person, that's great. If you help just one person, that kind of snowballs. It helps two people, then four, then eight, and so on and so forth.

Eventually, after years of doing this, gaining more knowledge of alternative platforms like OwnCast, LiveSpace, SharePlay, PeerTube, Castopod, and failing at trying to get those items working and figuring out what's going on and what's new, over the course of learning, I can try explaining it a little bit better to other people.

That first step to get somebody into the door is the most important thing, and that's the hardest thing to do because there are so many people who say, "Oh, I don't want to do it. I got to work with a command line. I'm not a hacker. I can't do this. It's too scary."

You have to fail in order to succeed. That's something I'm learning. I'm still learning how to fail gracefully. There are some things where it's frustrating, like when I've been working on something for two hours and I have to walk away and get some lunch because I'm not working with a clear head.

Looking Forward

My plan for the next couple of months is to start branching out into small little branches here and there. I'm still focusing on independent creators in the content creation and live streaming space, but I want to find other people who are passionate about other avenues of independent creators and artists.

I want to start moving things into a singular umbrella called the Indie Basement. I'm thinking about having everything underneath that naming because it's going to make things a lot easier for myself if I'm focusing on that one thing instead of three or four different domains and brand names.

I want to start doing some other projects that are going to help me learn about different aspects, like a podcast idea I've had for a long time about looking at old TV shows, focusing mostly on canceled shows or ones that were canceled before their time.

If you're an indie creator, artist, or a person that's passionate about this creator space, you can join up at thisindiecreator.com. It's completely free. You don't have to start paying monthly. There's no subscription models or anything like that.

Thank you for joining me. If you learned anything, please let me know, or if you have any ideas about what we talked about today, definitely let me know in the comments on YouTube or on the podcast player of your choice or within the community itself. The audio version will be up on the podcast player of your choice tomorrow morning, and the video will be up on the PeerTube instance at video.theindiebasement.com.

I hope to see you on the next episode in two weeks. Have a good night and see you later.

The Independent Creator