Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Long-term (6+ months)
When I started working with B2B SaaS clients, every founder had the same dream: "We need to build a community around our product." The vision was always identical - a thriving Slack workspace or Discord server where customers would naturally gather, share tips, become advocates, and generate organic growth.
But here's what actually happened across multiple client projects: we'd spend weeks setting up the perfect community infrastructure, crafting welcome messages, organizing channels by topics, and writing detailed community guidelines. We'd get an initial burst of sign-ups from existing customers - maybe 100-200 people who joined out of curiosity or politeness.
Then reality hit hard. Within 30 days, engagement dropped to near zero. The community manager we hired was essentially talking to herself, posting daily updates and discussion prompts that got one or two polite responses. Founders would obsessively check member counts while ignoring the fact that actual conversations had died.
The breaking point came when I realized we were approaching this completely backwards. We weren't building communities - we were trying to extract busy professionals from their existing networks and convince them to join yet another notification-heavy platform. Here's what I learned about building SaaS communities that actually work:
Why the "build it and they will come" approach fails for most SaaS companies
The difference between community building and network building
How to identify where your customers actually spend their time online
A framework for becoming valuable in existing communities rather than creating new ones
The metrics that actually matter for SaaS community success
Industry Reality
What every community consultant tells you
Walk into any SaaS conference or browse community building courses, and you'll hear the same playbook repeated everywhere:
Step 1: Choose your platform (usually Slack, Discord, or Circle)
Step 2: Create topic-based channels (#general, #feature-requests, #success-stories)
Step 3: Hire a community manager to facilitate discussions
Step 4: Host regular events, AMAs, and user spotlights
Step 5: Implement gamification, badges, and member rewards
The logic sounds solid: give users a dedicated space to connect, provide structured conversations, and facilitate valuable interactions. Create a sense of belonging around your product.
This conventional wisdom exists because it worked well for consumer platforms like Reddit or gaming communities. When Discord built communities around specific games, they had passionate users who genuinely wanted to spend hours discussing strategies, sharing clips, and connecting with other players.
But here's the fundamental problem most SaaS founders miss: your accounting software isn't someone's hobby. Your CRM tool might be essential to their work, but they don't wake up excited to discuss CRM methodologies with strangers on Slack.
The traditional approach assumes your product is central to your users' professional identity and that they have spare time to engage in yet another online community. For most B2B SaaS tools serving busy professionals, both assumptions are false.
What's worse, this approach treats community building as infrastructure rather than relationship building. You create the technical foundation and expect organic engagement to follow. But real community isn't about platforms - it's about value exchange and natural gathering patterns around shared problems and interests.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
One of my B2B SaaS clients was building an analytics platform for marketing teams at mid-size companies. Think 50-500 employee businesses where marketing directors needed better reporting than Google Analytics but couldn't justify enterprise-level tools like Adobe Analytics.
When I started working with them, they were convinced they needed a community. Their reasoning seemed logical: customers were constantly emailing support with implementation questions, sharing creative use cases in feedback calls, and requesting similar features. "If we could get all these conversations in one place," the founder told me, "we'd reduce support tickets and create network effects."
So we followed the traditional playbook. Built a beautiful Slack workspace with channels like #implementation-help, #feature-requests, #wins-and-celebrations, and #general-discussion. We crafted personalized invitation emails, created helpful bot responses, and even offered exclusive early access to new features for active community members.
The launch went well initially. About 150 customers joined in the first month, posted introductions, and asked a few implementation questions. I thought we were onto something. But by month two, the pattern became clear: the same 5-6 power users were responsible for 80% of all activity, while everyone else became passive observers.
By month three, even those power users had mostly stopped participating. The community manager was posting daily prompts like "What's your biggest marketing analytics challenge this week?" to an audience that rarely responded. We were spending $4,000/month on community management for what was essentially a very expensive support ticket system with 10% of the engagement of our actual support channels.
The harsh reality: we had confused customer support with community building. People joined hoping to get faster answers to their technical questions, not to build relationships with other marketers they'd never meet.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of trying to extract people from their existing professional networks, I completely flipped the approach. Rather than building a community around our product, we started building relationships within communities where our ideal customers were already actively engaged.
Phase 1: Community Archaeology
I spent two weeks mapping where our customers actually spent their time online. Instead of asking them to join our platform, I researched where they were already having professional conversations:
Marketing operations Slack groups with 2,000+ members
LinkedIn groups focused on data-driven marketing
Reddit communities like r/marketing and r/analytics
Niche Facebook groups for marketing directors
Industry-specific forums and professional associations
Phase 2: Value-First Participation
Instead of promoting our tool, I started contributing genuinely helpful content in these existing communities. When someone posted "How do I track attribution across multiple campaigns?" I'd write detailed, tool-agnostic explanations of attribution modeling approaches - never mentioning our product unless directly asked.
Phase 3: The Customer Question Pipeline
Every support ticket and customer question became content for these broader communities. When a customer asked us how to set up cross-domain tracking, I'd turn that into a comprehensive guide that helped everyone in marketing analytics communities, not just our users.
Phase 4: Expert Positioning Over Product Promotion
The key shift was positioning our founder and team members as helpful experts in marketing analytics, not as vendors selling a tool. We focused on teaching concepts, sharing frameworks, and solving problems that existed regardless of which tools people used.
This approach took longer than launching a Slack workspace, but it created something much more valuable: authentic relationships with our ideal customers where they were already spending time. Instead of asking people to come to us, we went to where they were already gathering and became genuinely useful participants in their professional conversations.
The Measurement Framework
We tracked success differently than traditional community metrics:
Quality of conversations started in external communities
Inbound leads mentioning they knew us from X community
Invitations to speak at industry events
Direct messages from potential customers asking for advice
Organic mentions and backlinks from community members
Community Research
Map existing professional networks where your ideal customers already engage actively, rather than creating new platforms
Teach First
Focus on providing genuinely helpful, tool-agnostic advice that solves problems regardless of which products people use
Question Pipeline
Transform every customer support question into valuable content for broader industry communities where prospects gather
Expert Positioning
Build reputation as knowledgeable industry experts first, vendors second - this creates much stronger relationships and trust
Within six months of shifting to this network-focused approach, we saw dramatically different results compared to our failed community attempt:
Relationship Quality: Instead of shallow interactions with existing customers, we built meaningful professional relationships with potential customers, industry influencers, and complementary service providers in the marketing analytics space.
Lead Generation: About 30% of new trial signups started mentioning they knew us from specific communities or had seen our helpful content in professional groups. These leads converted at nearly 2x the rate of other sources because they already trusted our expertise.
Thought Leadership: Three speaking opportunities at marketing conferences came directly from people who had seen our contributions in community discussions. This positioned us as industry experts rather than just another software vendor.
Content Distribution: Our blog posts and guides started getting shared organically in multiple communities because we had built relationships with active community members who found our content genuinely useful.
Most importantly, this approach was sustainable. Instead of requiring constant community management to keep our own platform active, we were participating in communities that were already thriving and would continue to exist regardless of our involvement.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
The biggest lesson from this experience: community building for SaaS isn't about building communities - it's about building relationships within existing communities.
Here are the key insights that completely changed how I approach SaaS community strategy:
Distribution beats creation: It's more effective to become valuable in 10 existing communities than to try creating 1 new one from scratch
Teach, don't sell: Focus on solving problems that exist regardless of your product, and trust will follow naturally
Patience pays off: Building authentic relationships takes 6+ months but creates much stronger business results than quick community launches
Quality over quantity: 50 meaningful professional relationships trump 500 passive community members
Customer questions are gold: Every support ticket represents content that can help hundreds of prospects in industry communities
Expert positioning works: Being known as the helpful person in marketing analytics communities generated more qualified leads than any paid advertising
Sustainable growth: This approach gets easier over time as your reputation builds, unlike community management which requires constant feeding
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, replace "community building" with "network participation" in your growth strategy:
Map where your ideal customers spend time professionally online
Join 5-7 communities as helpful experts, not vendors
Turn every customer question into educational content for broader audiences
Focus on teaching industry concepts rather than product features
Track relationship quality and inbound mentions rather than vanity community metrics
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce brands, adapt this approach to customer lifestyle communities:
Find communities around the problems your products solve (fitness, productivity, etc.)
Share helpful tips and advice related to your product category
Build relationships with complementary brands and influencers in these spaces
Create educational content that helps people achieve their goals
Focus on becoming a trusted resource within existing communities