People are naturally advice-seeking beings, which means that at every step of the process, even before they’ve even started looking for your tool, they’re soliciting external input. We are constantly getting input from friends, colleagues, and strangers on the internet on what we should eat, how we should dress, where we should live. This holds true for buying software too.

Community-Led Growth acts as a multiplier on top of product-led growth. By actively facilitating user interactions, and providing value past the product itself, Community-Led Growth allows a company to have a stronger pulse on their customer pipeline, feature requests, and real-time support, all while enabling users to get the most of their product. These users in turn become champions, creating a flywheel of active members strengthening the community.

COVID has acted as an accelerant for Community-Led Growth as people more than ever feel the need to find a sense of belonging online.

in this world of SaaS fragmentation, users are overwhelmed by choice, and look to influencers to choose tools; meanwhile the number of communication and sharing channels has also increased.

In a Community-Led Growth world, buyers turn to their community of friends and peers for guidance.

“It doesn’t matter how excellent the community tool is, if the person running the community doesn’t make it feel like a community, it won’t work. Throwing people into a Slack group chat isn’t building a community.”

what is changing is the role that users have in creating and participating in the content. This has a double impact: first is the opportunity to “educate” your users on the market you’re operating in, or the many use cases your tool has; the second is the network effect created by expanding your circle of ‘creators’.

With enough product love, your users might come to the rescue and start sharing these tutorials themselves (that’s a great sign). If people are posting DIY YouTube videos on how to use your product (e.g. Zapier), you should probably build a community around this!

With great community comes great responsibility: companies must take an active role in making community engagement a part of their company culture and identity.