A few years ago, I launched a community for one of my early-stage projects. It ws an AI-based SaaS startup. I had users, a few conversations happening in support tickets, and a product roadmap that needed real-world input. So I opened a Slack group.
I thought people would just show up and talk.
They didn’t.
That experience shaped everything I now believe about building communities that actually grow, help users, and support product momentum.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
1. Know exactly who the community is for
Before anything else, define your ideal community member profile. Not just your customer. Not just your audience. The person who will actively benefit from being part of this space.
Is it your paying customers? Your power users? Builders who want to shape what you’re building? Your ICP doesn’t always equal your community.
Until you know who you’re designing the space for, you’re just broadcasting into another empty channel.
2. Community is not social media with chat
If your community only shares product updates and blog posts, there’s no reason for it to exist. People can get that on LinkedIn or Twitter.
A community has to feel like a space where something different happens:
Access to the team
Early feature previews
Real user stories and experiments
Honest feedback discussions
Recognition and involvement in shaping what’s next
Otherwise, it's not a community. It's a slower inbox.
3. Your community person should be close to product and leadership
The community function cannot live in isolation.
Whoever is managing your community should be sitting in product standups, reviewing roadmaps, and feeding live user insight back into the team. Some of our best features were born directly from repeated community pain points.
Companies like Figma and Notion excel here. Figma’s plugin system was seeded by their users. Notion openly credits community members in their templates and workflows. That feedback loop builds trust, and more importantly, builds a better product.
4. Embed the community into the product, not just around it
This is where the real growth kicks in.
If your product is entirely disconnected from your community, users treat it like an optional add-on. But if you make the community visible and useful within the product, like showing top discussions, linking to real user examples, surfacing shared templates, it stops being an extra.
Look at Canva. Their in-product community features (like template contributions and creator shoutouts) are a massive reason they’ve built over 2 million active community members globally, powering user-led growth and discovery at scale.
5. Set up systems that can scale without you
In the beginning, it’s founder-led. You host AMAs, answer questions, share roadmap ideas.
But eventually, the community should run on shared rituals, onboarding flows, content loops, and member-led interactions. I introduced a weekly digest, a live roadmap session every month, and gave two users mod rights. Within weeks, the energy shifted.
That’s when I knew we were no longer managing a space. We were growing a system.
Final thought
Community is not a feel-good layer you add on top of a product. It’s a function. And like any function, it needs clarity, ownership, and a clear role in the larger business.
If you’re building one, be honest:
Who is this for?
What value are they getting?
How will their input shape the product?
How will this space grow without you in the center of it?
Answer those, and you’re not just building a community. You’re building a durable, compounding advantage.
