How to build a successful community from 0 to 10,000 | Community Building

The SaaS economy and the creator economy are two things on the rise today. If you take into account the pillars of growth of successful SaaS or creator brands, you will find one thing in common - internal community.

A community is a vital element today in a brand's success. Brands attain scaling via word of mouth and the easy way to achieve the same is by having your own community.

• It helps you drive new traffic
• It helps you in conversion optimization
• It helps in word of mouth
• It helps in reducing churn 
• It offers a short and direct feedback loop between your brand and users

These are just a few benefits, and they do offer more in return in the long run.

Now, building your community is one part of the game, keeping them active and engaged is another part of the game. Even if you have hundreds of members, it is important to maintain constant activity among the group members, to keep the information flowing.

A dormant community with thousands of members is of no use compared to an active community with ongoing engagement with a few hundreds of users. The activity within the community will help bolster the growth further.

We hosted a webinar recently with Ilya Asoztev, Growth marketer from lemlist to join us and talk about his experience in building a community from 0 to 10,000+ users over a year's time.

Here are some of the major takeaways from the session.

The first question that pops in our mind while we talk about building a community is why should we build one? Is it suitable for my brand and can I really leverage any outcome by investing my time on the same?.

Six main goals towards building a community

1. Understand the market
2. Get Initial feedback
3. Get Insights
4. Share your content
5. Use it as an extra channel for product updates
6. Decrease churn

It is not easy to get all of them at the same time, but with time you can.

If you wish to nail your product-market fit, then you need to understand your market very well. The most-common way of doing this is by performing a primary or a secondary research or outsourcing it to a company who can help you with surveys to do the same.

The alternative to this is to build a community. Build a community with your target market and ask them through posts and polls about your product fit. This will give you direct feedback and you can use it in the long run whenever you are launching a new feature or a version.

You don't know what your product should look like in the next 5 years. Even Mark Zuckerberg didn't know what Facebook should look like in the next 5 years.

This is where you can use the community. You get real-time feedback from your target audience in a short period of time.

Every time you do a new design or a new feature, the community can be your private beta list to test before you roll it to the global market.

If you want to get on a hyper growth curve, you need to be on top of new ideas around your market space. The community members can help you bring such info in a closed space, easy for you to look into.

Many product ideas and feature ideas are born out of such requirements shared by the community members as a question. What more? You also get the feedback on such ideas immediately from other members. Based on this it is easy to evaluate and shortlist the good ones.

If you are a new business, you might now have a lot of traffic coming into your website in the initial days. If you are competing with the giants in the market, it might take ages for yours to gain superiority in the results of search engine rankings.

This is where your community can help. It gets you the initial audience to your content directly and if they like it, they bring in more traffic from their audience.

Now, you have to make sure that your content is adding huge value and not another me too style content. I will be sharing more on how that is done in the upcoming lines.

This is a no-brainer - if the community can help you get a strong feedback, share insights for upcoming features and enhancements, they do become your additional channels or your product launches.

Apart from platforms like Product Hunt and your regular newsletters, the community is another place where you can share your product update news and gain quick feedback.

The best part about a successful community is it turns all your users into brand ambassadors. They start suggesting your product to others and even answer questions at times.

Once they develop a strong understanding of the product and as they start feeling special gaining access to a close feedback loop and being front-runners with access to new features, the churn rate automatically comes down.

If you want to check out more such interesting webinars, then go ahead and register for our upcoming events on our webinar page. If you miss that, you can check our YouTube channel. We upload the recorded version the next day.

You can also be a part of our Facebook and Slack community to participate in many conversations related to business, productivity, and growth.

Few of our previous Webinars

If you like our webinars do check out our previous webinars summed up below as blog posts.

How to Collaborate Effectively as a Remote Team
SaaS narrative: The Art of Storytelling for SaaS Companies
Building a Successful Creative Design Team in 2023
Mastering Communication For Agile Teams In 2023
What is buyer’s journey and how to leverage its different stages with videos?
How COVID Has Disrupted The Way Startups Operate
6 Proven Ways to Improve Sales Productivity in 2023
5 Proven Ways to Improve Customer Service in 2023