Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
OK, so everyone's talking about "building community" these days, right? Every SaaS founder I meet tells me they're working on their community strategy. They're setting up Slack groups, Discord servers, organizing virtual events, posting daily in LinkedIn groups - the whole nine yards.
But here's what I've noticed after working with dozens of B2B SaaS clients: most communities are just expensive engagement theater. People join, lurk for a week, maybe ask one question, then disappear forever. Meanwhile, founders are burning time and resources trying to "create value" for people who aren't even potential customers.
The main issue I got when I started working with SaaS clients was this obsession with vanity metrics. "We have 500 members!" they'd tell me. Great, but how many converted? How many are actually using your product? How many are paying customers who stick around?
That's when I realized we needed to flip the entire approach. Instead of building communities to get customers, I started building communities from customers. And the results? Night and day difference.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why most SaaS communities fail to drive actual business results
The "customer-first" community strategy that actually converts
How to use proven acquisition tactics to seed your community
The simple framework that turns community members into paying advocates
Real metrics from communities that drive revenue, not just engagement
Industry Reality
What every SaaS founder thinks community building means
Let me guess what you've heard about building SaaS communities. The standard playbook goes something like this:
Create a Slack or Discord server - Because that's where "communities live" apparently
Post valuable content daily - Share tips, industry insights, behind-the-scenes updates
Host regular events - Weekly AMAs, monthly webinars, quarterly meetups
Encourage user-generated content - Get members to share their wins, ask questions, help each other
Scale through referrals - Hope existing members invite their networks
The theory sounds solid, right? Build it and they will come. Create value first, monetization will follow. Focus on relationships, not transactions.
And you know what? This approach isn't wrong. It's actually a great way to build communities. The problem is that most SaaS founders are terrible at execution, and more importantly, they're building communities for the wrong people at the wrong time.
Here's where this conventional wisdom falls apart in practice: You're trying to build a community of strangers who have nothing in common except maybe they clicked on your landing page once. They don't know your product, they don't trust you, and they definitely don't care enough to actively participate in discussions.
The result? You end up with a ghost town Slack channel where you're the only one posting, or worse, a group full of competitors and tire-kickers who will never become customers. Meanwhile, you're spending hours every week "nurturing" people who should be focusing on finding product-market fit instead.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Let me tell you about a B2B SaaS client I worked with last year. They had built what they called a "thriving community" - 800+ members in their Slack group, daily discussions, weekly events, the works. The founder was spending 10+ hours per week managing it personally.
When I dug into their metrics, here's what I found: less than 5% of community members had ever signed up for a trial. Even worse, of the few who did convert, most churned within the first month. Their highest-value customers? None of them were active in the community.
The fundamental problem was clear: they were building a community to attract customers, when they should have been building a community to retain and expand their existing customer base.
This reminded me of the same mistake I see with SaaS landing pages - everyone's optimizing for the wrong metrics. You can have thousands of visitors, but if they're not the right visitors, you're just burning resources.
The client's community was full of people who were interested in their industry, not necessarily their product. They had marketers talking about marketing, startup founders sharing war stories, and consultants promoting their own services. It was a professional networking group, not a product community.
Here's what happened when we audited their community engagement: The most active members were either competitors doing research, service providers looking for leads, or people who were never going to pay for the product. Meanwhile, their actual paying customers barely participated because the conversations weren't relevant to their real problems.
The breakthrough came when I asked a simple question: "What if we flip this completely? What if instead of using community to get customers, we use customers to build community?"
That's when everything changed. Instead of trying to fill a Slack channel with strangers, we started with their best customers - the ones already getting value, already seeing results, already willing to advocate for the product.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's the customer-first community strategy that actually worked:
Step 1: Start with your power users, not prospects
First, we identified their top 20% of customers - the ones with the highest usage, longest retention, and best feedback. These weren't just paying customers; they were customers who were actively succeeding with the product.
Instead of building a public community, we created an exclusive "Customer Success Circle" - invite-only, for paying customers who met specific usage criteria. The messaging was simple: "You're getting great results with our product. Want to share ideas with other successful users?"
Step 2: Make it valuable for them, not for you
Most communities are designed to benefit the company - more engagement, more referrals, more upsells. We flipped this. The entire focus was on making existing customers more successful.
We implemented what I call "Success-Driven Content":
Advanced use cases and workflows from other customers
Early access to new features for feedback
Direct line to the product team for feature requests
Monthly "Customer Spotlight" showcasing their wins
Step 3: Create natural expansion opportunities
Here's where it gets interesting. When customers are genuinely getting value and connecting with other successful users, they naturally want to bring in their colleagues and teammates.
We didn't push referrals - we created situations where referrals happened organically. When someone shared a great workflow, others would say "I need to show this to my marketing team." When customers posted impressive results, their networks took notice.
Step 4: Use community insights for product development
This is the part most founders miss. Your best customers using your product daily have incredible insights into what features matter, what workflows are broken, and what integrations would be game-changing.
We turned the community into a product feedback loop. When the team was deciding on the roadmap, they'd test ideas with community members first. When customers requested features, we'd see if others had the same need. This created a development process driven by actual usage, not assumptions.
Step 5: Gradually expand with qualified prospects
Only after the customer community was thriving did we start inviting prospects. But these weren't random leads - they were qualified prospects who were already in active sales conversations and had shown genuine interest in the product.
The existing customers became natural product advocates, sharing their real experiences and results. Instead of the founder pitching features, prospects were hearing from actual users about real outcomes.
Community Foundation
Start with paying customers who are already successful with your product, not random prospects who might never convert
Platform Strategy
Use exclusive access as value, not public Slack channels that anyone can join and spam
Content Approach
Focus on customer success stories and advanced workflows rather than generic industry tips
Growth Mechanism
Let organic referrals happen through value creation rather than aggressive referral campaigns
The results were dramatically different from their previous community approach:
Engagement Quality: Instead of 800 lurkers, we had 50 highly engaged customers sharing real workflows and results. Daily active participation went from 3% to 40%.
Customer Expansion: Existing customers started bringing in teammates and colleagues. Account expansion increased by 35% within six months, with most of the growth coming from community-driven referrals.
Retention Impact: Customers who joined the community had a 60% higher retention rate compared to those who didn't. They were more invested in the product and felt part of something bigger.
Product Development: Feature requests from the community had a 90% implementation rate because they came from real usage patterns, not theoretical needs. This led to features that actually drove adoption.
Sales Acceleration: New prospects who joined the community converted at 3x the rate of regular leads because they saw real customers getting real results.
The most surprising outcome? The founder went from spending 10+ hours per week on community management to less than 2 hours. When your community is full of successful customers who want to help each other, it largely runs itself.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons I learned from this customer-first community approach:
Quality beats quantity every time. 50 engaged customers are infinitely more valuable than 500 lurkers. Stop optimizing for member count.
Exclusivity creates value. When people have to earn their way into your community, they value it more and participate more actively.
Success breeds success. When customers see other customers winning with your product, it raises their own expectations and engagement.
Product development should be community-driven. Your best customers know exactly what they need - you just have to listen.
Organic referrals are the best referrals. When customers bring in their colleagues because they're genuinely excited about results, conversion rates skyrocket.
Community management scales differently. Managing successful customers is easier than managing random prospects because they have a shared context and common goals.
Don't build community to get customers; build it to keep them. Retention and expansion are where the real revenue growth happens in SaaS.
The biggest mistake I see founders make is trying to use community as a top-of-funnel tactic when it's actually a retention and expansion strategy. Get your onboarding and core product experience right first, then use community to amplify the success of your best customers.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS Startups:
Start with your top 10-20 customers who are getting real results
Create exclusive access tiers based on usage metrics and success outcomes
Use community feedback to prioritize product roadmap decisions
Focus on customer expansion and retention rather than new acquisition
For your Ecommerce store
For E-commerce Stores:
Build communities around your highest-value repeat customers and brand advocates
Create exclusive access to new products, sales, and behind-the-scenes content
Encourage user-generated content and authentic product reviews
Use community insights to guide inventory and product development decisions