“Community” is such an interesting term.
It’s a little like the word “partnership”. People use it to mean all manner of sins.
Many of these meanings are very good for your young product-led startup.
Some are a dangerous waste of time. Read to the bottom to find out which one is unproductive.
✅ Support Community
Group of people who use your product & help each other be more successful.
This can reduce support costs & give users/customers confidence that your tool is well adopted and supported.
✅ Ecosystem
Community of entities (typicsllly other companies and products) that plug into your product & make it more valuable.
This can be a powerful (if not unstoppable) moat around your business
✅ Marketplace Participants
Typically individuals who are either providing services (supply side) or buying services (demand side) inside your own explicitly designed matching environment.
This is core business. You typically monetize the transactions by clipping the ticket.
✅ 3rd Party Community
People already discussing the problem your product solves.
Finding a way to organically & authentically engage this community can be a great way to learn. It’s also a great way to promote your product.
✅ Testing Community
People who have opted in to using early versions of your product & provide detailed feedback.
This can be valuable if you’re quickly & consistently shipping versions of your product with an intent to distribute it more widely in the short or medium term.
✅ Social Network
If your product is designed to facilitate the connection of people (typically around a social object like a photo or video or a topic like sport or cycling) then engaging communities of people to migrate or spend some of their time on your product is essential.
This is core for your product & business. You monetize through ads or premium experiences.
❌ 1st Party Conversational Community
People that you invest in growing and nurturing outside of the context of a real and usable product.
Their primary interactions are to talk to each other (and you) but they are unable (because it doesn’t exist) or unwilling (because they just like talking) to use your product.
This might work for more mature companies that have time to plan and execute over the long term.
For startups, however, building a conversational community that is only tangentially related to their business - particularly when they don’t have a product and are not focused/resourced enough to have one in the short term - can be a giant distraction.
As a founder, it’s seductive to spend a lot of your time creating a conversational community. There are many tools and there’s a lot of opportunity for instant gratification.
But if you are operating a young product-led startup, you are not a typically not a community builder. You are a product and business builder. Your interest is in users - not “community members”.
Stay focused