Building Communities That Drive Growth
How to think through and implement a community-led growth motion
Introduction
Gen AI and Gen UI are driving product commoditization faster than ever, making SaaS websites and apps virtually indistinguishable. If you add that saturated, costly acquisition channels have eroded traditional differentiation, the real challenge becomes how to break through the mold and build a distinctive brand.
One answer lies in embracing community-led growth, a strategy that moves beyond one-size-fits-all marketing to harness the power of authentic user relationships and third-party endorsements.
By creating a vibrant community around your product, you foster deep connections, cultivate loyalty, and earn trust from users who become your most passionate advocates. It’s easier said than done, but what it means is that instead of competing for attention in crowded channels, you stand apart through genuine engagement, meaningful dialogues, and long-term value exchange — ultimately establishing a brand identity that thrives on collaboration and shared purpose.
In this post, we’ll dive deeper into community-led growth, frameworks to think through your community strategy, and execute on it with top-tier, real-world examples from leaders like GitHub, SaaStr, Clay, Strapi, and more.
1. Understanding Community-Led Growth
By shaping a go-to-market strategy that places a passionate network of users at its center, community-led growth aligns a company's goals with the needs of its members, creating a self-sustaining flywheel where every participant is motivated to contribute and collaborate.
Imagine a new member joining your community, immediately feeling welcomed, and soon finding ways to exchange value — whether by sharing insights, leveraging new templates and integrations, or offering support.
This steady stream of member-driven content and resources naturally attracts fresh participants, further strengthening the entire ecosystem. To understand this, we can reference the CAMPER framework by Lloyed Lobo, which he used to bootstrap his startup boast.ai to $10M ARR.
Connection: Build strong relationships through shared values and goals.
Autonomy: Empower members with control over their contributions and growth.
Mastery: Foster learning and skill development.
Purpose: Align the community with a clear mission and vision.
Energy: Infuse enthusiasm into every interaction.
Recognition: Celebrate member efforts and successes.
Another similar framework to understand community is Late Checkout’s founder Greg Isenber TRIBE:
Togetherness: How (often) are people coming together?
Rituals: What are people coming here to do? Are there recurring things they do?
Identity: How do people identify in the community? (eg. name, image, aesthetics)
Belonging: What are people's shared goals, interests, beliefs, and status?
Engagement: How do people engage with each other?
As Greg mentions:
“The difference between an audience and a community is which way the chairs are facing”
What Greg means is that, unlike audience-focused social channels where you broadcast content one-way via platforms like Twitter, or Substack, a true community thrives on two-way dialogue, making tools like Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Circle, or Telegram better suited for active engagement and networking.
2. Why Community now?
In an era where growth hinges more on authentic relationships rather than brute-force growth tactics, investing in community-led strategies has never been more important.
As we return to more and more in-person work environments and seek IRL human contact, communities that foster shared identities and enable strong emotional ties can evolve into brands people genuinely care about.
Additionally, as AI and bot activity is emerging in content and search engines, people are hinging more and more towards peer-to-peer feedback — they seek human thought and conversation.
Especially if you’re targeting younger, Gen Z audiences value authenticity and peer insights over traditional review platforms — engaging them through community, bottom-up narratives resonate far better than stale, top-down ones.
And regardless of demographics, with innovation moving at a breakneck pace, members increasingly look to communities of peers for education, mentoring, and skill-building that keep them ahead of the curve.
Communities are not just about targeting and branding, but also about business impact. Well-executed and managed communities can massively increase brand awareness and deliver higher conversion rates at lower CACs, relying on member enthusiasm rather than expensive paid channels. And unlike AI-generated content and advertising, communities built on deep trust and active participation become incredibly harder to replicate, granting you a lasting moat that nurtures retention and compounds back into acquisition.
Harnessing collective knowledge from members doesn’t just contribute to growth, but can also offset support, R&D, and hiring costs, transforming your community into an engine of growth, feedback, and an extended workforce of product advocates.
3. Community Types
Communities aren’t one-size-fits-all; they can embody different forms to meet different goals. When thinking through your community-led growth strategy, consider how each type can fit into your go-to-market strategy:
Community of product: Centers around a specific product, where members share insights, solve issues, and offer feedback. By enabling community-led support, content creation and product insights, they continuously differentiate their products and brands, while building a strong acquisition and activation muscle.This approach not only reduces support costs but also builds trust among users, just like Strapi, Clay, Webflow, Salesforce Trailblazers or GitHub’s community.
Community as the core product: Platforms like Circle, Discord, Skool, Stack Overflow, or Dev.to position community at the heart of their value proposition, enabling users to co-create the product experience through active participation and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
Community of practice: Focuses on shared professions or skills, helping members advance their expertise through collective learning and knowledge exchange. Established references of this category is Reforge for growth and product, whereas a more emerging one is Cargo’s GTM Engineering community.
Community of interest: Revolves around shared passions or hobbies, allowing users to connect and learn organically. These communities foster brand trust and attract like-minded customers — think of any subreddit for the most niche or disparate topics.
As we’ve seen in these examples, communities aren’t just for one type of company; they bring value across various sectors by forging trust, sparking dialogue, and encouraging members to invest emotionally in a brand’s journey.
Developer tools: Enable developers to share expertise, solve complex problems together, and gain recognition for their work, making your product ecosystem more appealing and resource-rich.
SaaS & Enterprise software: Scale user onboarding and training efficiently through peer support, expert Q&A sessions, and user-generated tutorials, reducing reliance on high-touch sales and support channels.
Consumer products with cult followings: Cultivate brand advocates who share testimonials, tips, and inspiration, much like dedicated communities around Peloton or Duolingo, amplifying word-of-mouth growth.
Crypto & Web3: Nurture trust, transparency, and active participation by involving members in governance and decision-making, driving engagement and stable token economies.
Creator economy & education platforms: Empower creators, learners, and mentors to network, collaborate, and showcase achievements, keeping audiences engaged longer and encouraging sustainable growth for your platform.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of community-led growth, we can move onto the strategy and execution part of the playbook.
Need help thinking through your top community-led growth strategy? Our seasoned advisors can help.
4. Setting clear Community goals
To build a thriving community that truly drives growth, start by setting clear goals. In the context of community, that means guiding members from low affinity to high affinity, gradually building trust and commitment over time.
Consider trust as a rechargeable “battery” that fills slowly with every positive interaction and can deplete quickly when expectations aren’t met. Inspired by community practices at Shopify, the battery framework highlights the importance of nurturing credibility and reliability.
To get started with your community goals, you have to also define a minimum viable community that articulates who you’re bringing together, what support or knowledge you’re offering, and why they should care.
Strengthen this foundation by crafting a powerful manifesto that speaks to your community’s purpose, its overarching vision, and a compelling backstory that resonates emotionally. By aligning these elements, you create an environment where members feel genuinely welcomed and intrinsically motivated to engage, support each other, and ultimately help drive sustainable growth.
Who: Identify your target members, such as entrepreneurs or developers, so you can tailor content and discussions to their needs.
What: Define what the community offers — support, knowledge sharing, or mentorship — so members know exactly what to expect.
Why: Articulate the benefits of joining, like accessing resources, networking, or even influence within the industry.
Once these basics are established, this guiding narrative will not only inspire potential members but will also provide existing ones with a sense of purpose and belonging, setting the stage for long-term engagement and sustainable growth.
5. Choosing your community platform
Once you have the foundations laid out, the big next steps of your community strategy is about selecting the right platform to host your community.
Doing so effectively means understanding your audience’s needs, familiar stack and UIs, communication styles, and desired level of interaction. For example, if you’re targeting enterprise software business users, they might be more used to MS Teams as a chat platform and rely on multiple Zoom meetings for sync interaction. On the other hand, if your community is made of indie developers, they might prefer more async comms styles like Slack, Discord, or Reddit to share info and keep in touch with each other.
Before committing to any platform, work back from your community MVP outlined above:
Member needs: Determine if members require support forums, content libraries, peer networking, or event hosting.
Engagement frequency: Consider how often your community engages and pick a platform that accommodates their rhythm.
Affinity spectrum: Factor in the level of affinity you want to build within your community, and work back which medium of communications is best for that.
Synchronicity preferences: Decide between real-time conversations or asynchronous threads to match member schedules.
Openness: Also think about openness — do you envision a public forum or a private, invite-only group? Pick your balance of accessibility, privacy, and exclusivity.
Cost: Factor in platform pricing models to align with your budget without compromising member experience.
By carefully evaluating these elements, you ensure that your chosen community platform not only resonates with your members but also fosters meaningful connections that drive sustainable growth. Also, your community could run on multiple platforms — you could have a Discord or Slack for synchronous communication, a Discourse Forum for async knowledge transfer, and a public GitHub repository for actual product feedback and contribution — all running in parallel.
Just make sure each has a different purpose or serves a specific segment so you don’t dilute your growth loops and increase operational complexity too much.
6. Building community engagement
Community Engagement Cycle
Crafting a thriving community means not only attracting members but also guiding them through a journey of increasing involvement and value creation. Think of your community-led growth strategy like a growth loop, or as CMX defined it, a community engagement cycle. This is another great framework that helps to break down and execute on a community-led growth strategy.
Define community identity: help users find their role, identity and sense of belonging within their community. Tactics like introducing themselves publicly, setting their handles, PFPs (profile pictures), recommending specific channels based on interest, language or geography, use shared vocabulary, or using role tags are great for establishing strong community identities.
Earn community trust: once your members know their role in the community, you need to build trust with them quickly to avoid churn. To do so, ensure you have a strong yet simple onboarding, and provide free upfront value to hook them in.
Encourage participation: after building trust, you have to keep your members engaged and expand their level of engagement within their community. Use rituals, games, challenges, hackathon or quests — and hint the promise of rewards — to get them to action.
Give recurring rewards: blend a mix of social, financial, knowledge, time, mastery, or joy incentives as rewards for their participation. This reward is the basis for strengthening their community role and identity, and going through the loop once more.
As with every framework, this is just a simplification of reality to guide your strategy and execution. Where in real life people move fluidly along this journey as their interests and schedules, it’s important for your team to think through each engagement state deeply.
By thoughtfully orchestrating every phase — from initial onboarding to advanced contributions—you create a sustainable cycle of growth, loyalty, and shared success for your community.
The Commitment Curve
Designing a community engagement model involves defining clear participation and commitment stages and guiding members through an ever-growing and rewarding journey that encourages lasting involvement. David Spink’s Commitment Curve is a great model that helps articulate each level’s commitments and related engagement states to give participants a transparent roadmap for deepening their connection.
As mentioned before though, flexibility is key — your members should feel free to explore and advance at their own pace, reflecting the natural ebb and flow of their interests and schedules.
Clearly define stages: Outline distinct engagement levels and package them as “roles” or “milestone” so members know what each entails, and get them.
Set commitments and rewards: Communicate what members gain at every stage, from exclusive content to recognition.
Ensure flexible movement: Allow individuals to move forward or step back as their priorities shift.
Incorporate rituals and challenges: Add structured activities that lend meaning, excitement, and purpose to each level of involvement.
Attach custom roles and badges: Celebrate achievements and give members a sense of status and identity within the community.
Keep a visible leaderboard: Display roles and progress through a directory, leaderboard or profile indicators, providing recognition and motivating members to learn, advance, and inspire others.
7. Combining the two engagement models
You can interlace the Community Engagement Cycle and the Commitment Curve models together to chart your community programming and define each key component — from identity to reward.
Let’s take Clay creator program as an example.
Bootstrapping engagement — Community Onboarding
Design a clear onboarding sequence that welcomes them, sets expectations for culture and purpose, encourages personal introductions, and points them to valuable resources. This approach is key to bootstrap initial engagement and avoid churn — one of the biggest risks in community-led growth models.
Make sure to check these use cases when onboarding your new members:
Welcome message: Gree them immediately upon joining.
Set expectations & resources: Share expected member goals, next steps, and useful links
Member intros: Encourage people to connect, sharing their stories or goals.
Engagement incentive & recognition: Recognize supportive individuals and give people a strong incentive to help each other.
Resources: Guide members to valuable content and prompt participation.
Expanding engagement — Community Programming
Once the foundational initiation is laid out, maintain momentum with a well-structured community programming and calendar that keeps members engaged at a steady rhythm.
The goal is to use your community programming to guide members through increasing levels of engagement and complexity. Work back your programming by helping newcomers reach their “community aha moment,” then gradually introduce more frequent interactions and higher-stakes activities.
For example, as we saw above with Clay’s example, a member might progress from reading a weekly newsletter to sending daily messages on Slack, to creating and sharing content, attending a meetup, or eventually organizing an event themselves.
As you chart your community programming, you can use these strategies to expanding your member engagement:
Use case transition: use incentives to transition members to progressively more complex use cases. For example, from reading your manifesto, to attending an AMA, or create a LinkedIn post.
Increase frequency: expand engagement by transitioning members to progressively more frequent use cases. For example, from reading a weekly newsletter to sending a message in the community on a daily basis.
Increase intensity: encourage members to progressively higher effort/rewards use cases, like creating a X post, which is short and sweet, to a LinkedIn post, to a long-form playbook. Or from attending a webinar, to an IRL meetup, to eventually organizing a meetup themselves.
To bring the above strategies to life you can chart a community programming so that your members keep engaged and are always looking forward to the next interaction.
Having a recurring program sets a rhythm, helping members plan their commitment and deepen their relationships. By mixing online and offline touchpoints, you encourage natural conversations, meaningful connections, and a sense of belonging that transcends the screen.
Here are some of the tactics in your kit to consider.
Stable foundations: Ensure everyone feels safe by establishing clear community rules, setting expectations, and providing examples of good and great behavior. Define specific contribution roles — who plans events, who moderates discussions, who runs weekly sessions — and support these roles with recognition. Ensure moderators engage at least once a day, and consider hiring a community manager if needed to moderate content and guide member interactions. By doing this, you build a strong cultural backbone that encourages trust, motivates learning, and ensures your community thrives over the long term.
Events and prompts: Consider adding regular highlights like weekly AMAs, recurring Q&As, or recurring prompts that inspire show-and-tell moments. Offer daily technique classes, run monthly masterclasses, or organize annual retreats, and even parties or concerts. A variety of gatherings — whether that’s to gather product feedback or give back value to your members — keeps them curious and engaged.
Personal connections: Foster introductions and networking by incentivizing members to meet over Zoom or in person at IRL meetups. Maintain a visible community directory with basic info, tags, backgrounds, and goals so members can easily discover shared interests. Promote member spotlights, challenges, and quests, then congratulate and reward positive behaviors and contributions to reinforce community values.
Automated engagement comms: set up helpful reminders — notifications, emails, digests, and social alerts — to keep people informed and motivated without overwhelming them.
Want to get expert feedback on your community engagement models? Hit us up.
8. Tactical examples of effective community-led growth
When you create transparent communities, you foster a sense of ownership that leads to sustained engagement, loyalty, and advocacy. Here are some of our favourite real-world examples that bring community-led growth to life.
Building trust and safety — Strapi
Strapi’s public roadmap lets users track and influence product direction, while its handbook offers a window into internal operations. By using RFCs on GitHub for community feedback, Strapi builds trust and shows that member input matters. They also foster transparency through forums, AMAs, and regular updates that keep members informed and valued.
Empowering members through autonomy — Airbyte
Airbyte indexes Slack discussions on public forums, boosting its SEO with user-generated content and compounding an additional growth loop on top of their community.
This approach not only amplifies brand discoverability but also harnesses member expertise to enrich the community’s knowledge base. It ultimately allows members to take ownership by enabling them to contribute code, create content, and organize events.
Cultivating a learning ecosystem — GitHub
GitHub connects developers through its Community Exchange, encourages leadership via the Campus Experts program, and supports skill-building with training resources, workshops, and office hours. Badges and prizes reward engagement, further fueling collaborative learning.
With their learning ecosystem, GitHub makes mentorship, training, and continuous learning part of their community’s DNA. Recognize achievements to motivate members and reinforce a growth mindset.
Recognizing and rewarding champions — Docker
Docker turns highly active members into brand ambassadors called Captains by providing tailored rewards and VIP opportunities, organically increasing loyalty and advocacy.
Understanding that a small group often drives most community activity, they offer personalized rewards, exclusive experiences, and unexpected gestures to show appreciation and keep VIP members inspired.
By applying these tactics — establishing trust, granting autonomy, encouraging learning, and celebrating top contributors — you create a thriving community that grows stronger over time. The result is not just user satisfaction but also a sustainable engine for product feedback, brand advocacy, and market differentiation.
9. Measuring Community-led growth
Measuring and validating the success of your community initiatives is about more than just counting members — it’s about understanding their engagement, trust, and willingness to contribute over time.
Focus first on right-sizing your audience, aim to grow it to 25,000 to 100,000 members, then closely monitor growth trends and spikes in interaction.
Assess participation quality through member interviews and community surveys, gauge affinity and engagement levels by tracking the shift from low to high engagement states, and keep a close eye on trust by observing how often members interact and rely on one another for support.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a dynamic environment where members move naturally from initial curiosity to enthusiastic participation, validating their journey through clear metrics like conversion, retention, and growth in both influence and activity.
Closing thoughts
In an era where products are commoditized and acquisition channels are crowded, a vibrant community becomes a powerful differentiator.
It’s not just another marketing channel — it’s a living ecosystem that thrives on member input, feedback loops, and collective learning. By anchoring your growth strategy in community building, you earn lasting loyalty, higher-quality feedback, and a support network that drives sustainable success.
Getting started doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are five steps to recap this post and get you going with confidence.
Understand where: Begin by pinpointing where potential members already gather, then immerse yourself in those spaces to understand the culture, motivators, and pain points.
Meet leaders: Engage with the most involved individuals to learn the community’s unwritten rules, goals, and preferences.
Choose the right fit: With these insights, select the best community type and platform aligned with your business model, industry, and company stage
Prioritize initiatives: Focus on programs that align with member interests and help you achieve your business targets — whether product feedback and contributions, brand awareness through content creation, or events, and overall user support and retention
Measure success: Track a north star metric to validate the impact of your community-led growth efforts.
By investing in community-led growth and adopting a thoughtful, metrics-driven approach, you not only deepen relationships with your audience but also empower them to play an active role in shaping your brand’s future.
The result is a resilient, trusted, and ever-evolving community that consistently delivers value, boosts your market presence, and sets you apart in a highly competitive landscape.
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