I’ve never understood the concept of “product led growth”. There’s something about how the phrase centres the product that makes me imagine a gleaming white box out there, alone, doing the selling of itself for us.

In real life, that’s not how things work. It’s people that use products; people who buy from each other and people who recommend things they like to their peers. People trust people.

There’s this phrase that I’ve been using — products with community at their core — which people keep asking me to explain. That’s reasonable because I either invented it, or heard it somewhere and it lodged in my brain (if it’s yours, DM me — I want to credit you).

Products with community at their core; it’s so neat. But what does it mean?

This piece is the working definition I’ve come to, and it’s an evolution of something I wrote a few years ago — “Why you need to hire a Chief Community Officer or why community and scale are often opposites” — that has haunted me in the best possible way. It keeps getting rediscovered and each week I get emails from founders, investors and community leaders asking me about the foundational beliefs I included. Like:

• The best communities tend to bring people together around a shared identity, practice or belief (eg: playing football, I enjoy contributing to this product, time spent volunteering is important to me, I’m Jewish)
• Broadcast channels aren’t communities. You’ve got to participate and listen more than you talk.
• You don’t own a community; you influence, co-create and curate it.
• Community building is a skill but one tech has historically not wanted to pay for
• Community never has and likely never will be valued the way software engineering is in the industry, although I’d argue humans are at least as complex as code.

Writing this at the tail end of 2022, the first few beliefs are clearer to me than ever. And, excitingly, the last few are in the process of being disproved; of us understanding the skill that goes into community building, and valuing what that skill could add to your project or company.

Partly that’s because, in Figma’s multi-billion-dollar autumn exit to Adobe, we have a best-in-class example of how successful companies powered by community can be.

Rather than grow through conventional tactics like advertising, Figma found an early audience building trust with designers (shared identity). Designers loved the tool, and built both their peer network with other designers and their practise with clients and collaborators around Figma; here’s a great write-up on Figma’s tactics. You only have to look at the outpouring of worry from design Twitter when Figma announced the sale to see true fandom in place.

Which helps this piece start from a shared understanding of what community building in technology is. I’m not talking about social channels or places online where people get together like Slack or Discord. Both have their role in certain strategies but companies that can and do leverage community are much broader in variety.

Something I used to say to describe the work I do is; I build teams that act as the layer between the product and those that use it. We enable those people to interact with each other, to make the product, and their experience of it, richer.

Look at Monzo. As a first wave neobank, an early challenge the team faced was who would trust a startup with their hard-earned cash? By building a community right from the start, they built in coordination with the right group of early adopters who could provide constructive feedback, welcome in their friends as fellow early adopters and ultimately help the company find product-market fit faster. Making their first card a vivid neon orange to make sure others noticed when you slapped it down on the restaurant table (“oh, is that a Monzo?”) shows an understanding of status and recognition that was pretty forward thinking for the time.

So community building is the work of designing and deploying multiple tactics, from user research to group conversation or power user programs, with a goal of building out that layer between products and people.

As community building in technology is becoming better known, some people consider it a growth tactic. That’s partly true but it’s also limiting. Community building is a mindset.

Imagine working in isolation to build what you consider to be a perfect tool or product. Then imagine going on the painful journey to get people to use it, then learn if it fits a need; if they like it or not. Even writing this down sends a cold shiver down my spine.

Even now, when user research rules, some founding teams still fixate on a solution they’ve designed without consultation. And sometimes this disconnect between products and what’s really needed happens over time as companies become corporations; we all know, as people who move around the internet, how an experience starts to feel when we start to sense it hasn’t been built with care.

Speaking of moving around the internet, I keep sensing broader movement in the air.

Several of the internet’s longtime stars feel like they’re finally waning; whether it’s browser innovation coming from both new options like Neeva or Chat-GPT, or Twitter’s wobbles of the last year.

So much of the 2010’s startup scene was centred on this idea of growth hacking through leveraging online ads. But ads are costly and hard to attribute (and Tim Hwang’s Sub-Prime Attention Crisis is a compelling read that makes an analogy with the mortgage crisis of 2008). I’m not convinced ads work for all but the most shallow transactions.

We live in a noisy world with increasing choice and increasing potential for isolation. In this post-pandemic moment, care matters. From Browser Company’s Arc to Startupy, every product I fell in love with in 2022 had this artisan feel; you felt the craft of a person or team behind the choices made. And care doesn’t necessarily mean small scale; my AirPods feel crafted, too.

It’s my hypothesis that community-directed products are one way of maintaining this care and building things that matter to the group that seek them. So how should we define this kind of product?

It’s a product whose evolution is deeply tied to the evolution of its community.

This could mean the product is directly created in response to a community’s need. That need could be anything from intellectual curiosity to genuine demand; think open source communities or DAOs like Aragon.

This could mean growth comes from bottom-up mechanisms (users buy or champion the product to buyers) not top-down (advertising or classic sales) like Otterspace.

This could mean the community actively works to improve the product.

This could mean the product enables exchange between community members, like The Lowdown

This could mean the product is a place where people want to go, and stay, and belong, like FATES.

This could even mean that the community itself is the product; like Friends with Benefits essentially productizing the curation of their global group.

Reading this list, you might be thinking “what’s in it for the community member?”

We’re so accustomed to our relationship to technology being transactional, or technology companies treating users as a thing to be extracted from, that it seems like an obvious question.

Years ago I worked on a user research study focused on why people participate online; why do they join groups, write reviews or otherwise show up? This must have been 2012 but so much of what I learnt still stands. A certain group, smaller than you’d think, are motivated only and primarily by financial reward; logically, if you’re a startup founder, this group can be expensive to find and won’t stay without continued reward. Maybe they’re just not your people.

For others, subtler rewards are preferred, whether that’s utility (I feed into this product which makes my work/play easier) or status (being associated with this product is part of my identity; I build recognition within my peers in this group then leverage that recognition outside that group). And of course utility or status doesn’t need to exclude longer-term financial reward. I’ve been increasingly excited about collective ownership and tokenisation, a web3 trend that I’m seeing begin to appear in the thinking of companies building far away from blockchain. Tokenisation is the distribution of tokens that denote level of membership, voting rights and potentially financial value that allow communities to collectively benefit from the product or community they’ve rallied around.

My theory is that we’re in the middle of a generational shift in internet behaviour. If you’re Gen Z, the internet has been dominated by some of the same players (like Google and Twitter) since you were in nappies. That’s wild.

To go deeper on Twitter; as a user, I’ve found immense value in their product for well over a decade. I’ve made friends, found new ideas and got great job opportunities mostly or solely because of Twitter. But I’ve also contributed to that value through my use of the platform; yet I have no ability to either influence the product roadmap or financially benefit from how much the product’s value has increased in that time. Twitter could shut down tomorrow; not your keys, not your coins as the crypto saying goes for borrowing digital land that’s not your own.

Cultural behaviours imported from previously niche communities like open source, and the right-to-reply of social media, has led to an expectation of participation from lightweight product feedback to much deeper contribution.

Composability is an idea I love, deeply present in both open source and now much of web3, that whatever you build can and will be improved or forked by those that use it. Think; product roadmaps or governance forums where the community can debate and vote on which direction to pursue.

Toby Shorin’s excellent piece on Life After Lifestyle made the case that “cultures have their own languages, objects and knowledge; their own stories, aesthetics, practices, people and places that make sense together in a coherent way. They have behaviour they condone and reward, and behaviours they deem unworthy”

Communities are themselves subcultures; built through participation. Each has its own building blocks; the pieces that are needed to build, reinforce and evolve the community.

Some of these can be determined by the founding team or ahead of time, but many can’t. Many can only emerge over time (and this post isn’t long enough to cover building communities that maintain their magic for the long-run; this is a great read on that topic).

As a founder, this makes you a steward or influencer rather than the absolute leader you might have been in a different internet era. And this approach isn’t for every founding team in the same way that community as an approach doesn’t work for every product.

Community can’t be effective if done shallowly or inauthentically; not every product can speak to people’s shared identities, practices or beliefs.

But there are so many that can.

I believe the next wave of great companies will be powered by community.

If executed well, it seems clear to me that products with community at their core are more resilient businesses; they can thrive in a downturn by remaining close to their customer or participant and evolve what they deliver as needs evolve.

It also seems clear that companies who genuinely listen to the voice of their community as part of a broader stakeholder group (rather than just listening to shareholder perspectives) will be more socially responsible businesses too.

Going back to my post, we still need more chief community officers, human-scale metrics and deep consideration of depth versus breadth. But, at core, it seems like much of 2020’s buzz around communities is here to stay, and that is very exciting indeed.

Cheat Codes for Your Software Startup

Circuitis a strategic growth company founded by the team behind In Plain English — a tech media company that we created and grew from 0 to 4 million monthly views.

If you want to build a better content strategy, scale content operations, increase product awareness and adoption, and grow a community, we can make all of this happen.

→ Learn more