A new startup is setting out to help companies build and harness communities around their products, enabling them to side-step multiple disparate tools and manage everything in a single platform.

Founded out of the Czech Republic in 2021, Talkbase launched out of stealth just a couple of weeks back, backed by $2 million in pre-seed funding from a mixture of Czech and U.S. funds, including J&T Ventures, Credo Ventures, Mxv Capital, and Plug & Play Tech Center. The Prague-based company represents one of the Battlefield 200 startup exhibitors at TC Disrupt this week, and TechCrunch caught up with the cofounders to get the lowdown on what Talkbase is all about, and the problem that it's looking to solve.

Community meets product

Much has been written about the various strategies companies pursue for growth, from traditional approaches such as marketing-led and sales-led, through to what is arguably one of the biggest buzzwords of today -- product-led growth (PLG), where the product itself does the selling and onboarding.

However, community-led growth is also an increasingly popular approach to driving new and repeat business organically -- this is where a product's users serve as advocates and a support network for other would-be customers. Community-led growth is actually closely aligned with product-led growth, insofar as a user has to first be made aware that a product exists, and then convinced that it's worth checking out and remaining an active user. The "community" that performs this task can be anything from social media influencers and review sites, to dedicated forums such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, Slack, or Facebook Groups.

If companies can harness these types of channels through active engagement, and get millions of people banging the drum about their product, they can sit back (more or less) and focus on building rather than selling. As TechCrunch wrote last year, in many ways, the chief community officer is the new chief marketing officer.