From Zero to Community: Early Stage Growth Tactics
Want the full story? Listen to my complete interview with Kevin Xu, where we discuss building an 8-figure portfolio through Reddit and growing his new stock trading app.
The Challenge of Building Community in 2024
Building community isn’t what it used to be. Ten years ago, you weren’t competing with endless TikTok cat videos, AI-generated content, and the perpetual war for attention. Today’s landscape is radically different - and as Kevin Xu points out, “Growing an app, growing community, growing anything in 2024 [or now 2025] is insanely more difficult.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Through my conversation with Kevin, who built one of Reddit’s most successful financial communities before founding AfterHour (a verified stock trading social platform), I discovered there are still clear patterns to community building success. Let’s break them down.
The Three Paths to Community Growth
According to Kevin, there are three main approaches to building community in today’s landscape:
1. The Novelty Path
“You can lean into novelty,” Kevin explains. “Especially with AI, that’s what I’ve seen a lot of my friends and videos take off to - they create something extremely novel with AI and it creates a great demo. It makes a great video.”
The challenge? You have to keep one-upping yourself, Mr. Beast style. It’s exhausting and potentially unsustainable.
2. The Authenticity Path
This is the influencer route - sharing your genuine journey and building parasocial relationships. As Kevin notes, “You see a lot of influencers do this. Like, ‘I’m just sharing my life, I’m just sharing my work.’”
While this can work well initially, it may hit scaling limitations. Kevin points to newsletter writers like Lenny as examples who’ve done this successfully but questions if it can scale 10x or 100x.
3. The Platform Path
This is what Kevin calls “the current meta” - creating a platform where others can make money. “The current meta is OnlyFans,” he explains. “You provide people a way to make money on your platform, then they will market for you. They will be the ones that are creative and authentic or using AI.”
The Essential Elements of Community Building
Through Kevin’s journey from Fan Hero to Wall Street Bets to AfterHour, several key principles emerge:
Authenticity Is Non-Negotiable
“I think the most fascinating thing is honestly, it’s authenticity and a reason to exist,” Kevin emphasizes. “Too many marketers and business owners are trying to create community because it’s a buzzword as they see other people do it. But it comes across inauthentic because they’re usually not a part of it themselves.”
The leader has to be deeply embedded in the community. You can’t fake it.
Give People a Reason to Talk to Each Other
This is crucial. As Kevin notes, “The main key element of community is what is the community talking about with each other?”
He points to the Chat GPT subreddit as an example: “If you go to the Chat GPT subreddit right now, which I think is unofficial, it’s a lot of people sharing prompts and results with each other. And it’s very natural. People are just trying to discover and see what it does.”
Focus on Where Your Audience Actually Is
Kevin learned this lesson firsthand: “Going where your audience is, the number one most important thing.” He compares his success on Reddit to traditional media appearances: “Our success has been from Reddit and our subreddit and comments that I leave versus being on Diamond Hands [documentary] and Fox Business. I don’t think those led to any downloads.”
Build Trust Through Verification
In financial communities especially, trust is everything. Kevin built this into AfterHour’s core functionality: “The reason people follow me was because you knew this was their position. But you always had to double check.”
The Evolution of Community Platforms
An interesting insight from Kevin is how community platforms need to evolve: “Community needs to evolve into a community of communities.”
He explains: “That’s the benefit of the internet, which is that you can have the long tail of creators that talk a certain way, that have a certain idea, whatever, that you just kind of latch onto.”
Practical Steps for Building Early Community
- Show Up Consistently “It’s just a lot of repetition,” Kevin admits. “I feel like I’m beating the dead horse and repeating my story a billion times every day.” But it works because “every day there’s thousands of people who don’t know the story.”
- Start Small and Personal “From zero to 0.1 right now, doing things that don’t scale. It was me showing up, it was me DMing people, it was me getting invited to Discord and doing quick AMAs. The first couple hundred, first couple thousand, it’s a slog. It’s really getting one user at a time.”
- Keep It Simple When it comes to design and functionality, less is more. As Kevin puts it: “The hardest muscle to exercise is simplicity - just asking like, does this need to exist? What purpose does it serve both for the user and for the company?”
The landscape of community building will continue to evolve, but the fundamentals remain: authentic leadership, clear value proposition, and giving people a reason to connect with each other.
As Kevin summarizes: “If you can provide a trustworthy platform, and an audience as well, people that want to find others they can talk to…”
The key is finding the right balance between scaling growth and maintaining the authentic connections that make communities valuable in the first place.
Want to hear more insights from Kevin Xu, including his journey from YouTube PM to $8M Reddit trader? Listen to the full interview here.