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I've been asked a number of times this trip how to cold start a community (in a place, a field, etc). There is no one answer, but if you want a reproducible pair of questions:
Who do you have in abundance?
What do you have which is scarce?
Introduce the two.
Repeat.
Who do you have in abundance?
What do you have which is scarce?
Introduce the two.
Repeat.
Note that you do not have to be / produce that which is scarce; the community gets 100% of the value from you connecting to it if it already exists if they were unaware of the existence, could not access it themselves, doesn't know they want it (but actually does), etc etc.
Experts are something which is often scarce and *very counterintuitively* experts often have a surfeit of opportunities to talk about the thing they devoted their career to in front of an engaged audience, so that's a repeatable offer you can make.
(Example: what do you think the median number of speaking requests outside academia the 100th most awesome professor in the United States gets per month, for some suitably squishy definition of awesome? My estimate is *zero.*)
