How to build a community around your SaaS

This piece belongs to my ongoing Founders Guide. I’m jotting these notes while the memories of our first-year battles are still fresh.

I spent last Tuesday evening answering Discord DMs from people who all had the same question: “Do I really need a community or can I just ship features?” Short answer — yes, a healthy community helps. Longer answer — it took us roughly three years of bumps, false starts, and the occasional ghost-town Slack before ours turned into anything useful. (I’ll get to the why and how, but keep that timeline in mind.)

Getting people to show up is one hurdle; getting them to keep talking once the launch buzz fades is another; folding their feedback back into the roadmap without turning your backlog into a public suggestion box is a third. I’ll unpack the parts that worked for us — and flag a few that didn’t — but first, some context on why “community” suddenly shows up in every deck.

The rise and rise of community-driven SaaS

Paid, invite-only, open… call it what you want — groups of users talking to each other have been around since the PHPBB days. What changed is the density: COVID nudged everyone online, Slack and Discord lowered friction, and Stripe made recurring payments a one-click affair. Suddenly anyone can spin up a membership site overnight (well, more like a weekend of no-sleep if you want proper onboarding).

Consumers: the future entrepreneurs 

The line between “buyer” and “builder” keeps blurring. People reverse-engineer their favourite tools, tinker with Zapier, sell a template here, a plugin there. Patreon’s growth is proof that the crowd now funds – and expects – niche expertise. Communities are the backstage pass where that expertise gets traded.

That hunger for insider detail is why private channels stay busy long after the public docs go stale.

Community-ready platforms

Ten years ago I hacked together a phpBB forum for our first product. It broke every other week. Today I hook up Discord, pipe issues from GitHub, and surface changelogs on the marketing site — all via webhooks I wrote in an afternoon. The trick is cross-linking everything so users never wonder where the real conversation is. We publish a “heartbeat” post every second Wednesday — even if nothing earth-shattering shipped — just to keep the loop alive. Missing regular updates can lead people to assume the project is inactive. (Been there.)

Free knowledge vs privileged knowledge

The web is flooded with free tutorials. Paradoxically, that abundance makes curated corners more valuable. Folks pay for signal, not for another generic Medium post. One caveat if you’re targeting developers: the license you pick telegraphs your intent. MIT invites contribution, AGPL scares off some enterprise teams. Choose poorly and you gate-keep the very users you hoped to attract.

More open content means a louder craving for gated, high-context conversations.

Product-led growth turned into community-led growth

The PLG playbook still works, but only when your feature set is unmistakably better. If your product feels 5-percent different from the next tab in Chrome, community acts as the differentiator. I’m not entirely sure this scales for every vertical — a dev-tool with a lively GitHub will resonate, a non-technical HR SaaS might fare better with a tight-knit LinkedIn group. Format has to match persona.

Important footnote: a community will not rescue weak product-market fit. It amplifies whatever’s already there — painkiller or vitamin.

You’ve seen “build in public.” Post-pandemic, I’d argue it’s time to build with the public. Just don’t expect enthusiastic contributors on Day 1; most vibrant spaces you admire have been iterating quietly for years.

Why do you need a thriving community?

If you ignore the people orbiting your product, someone else will gladly host them. That’s the macro case. The micro case depends on stage.

Audience-first product

Traditional route: build → launch → pray. Audience-first flips it: observe → build what keeps them up at night. Sounds neat, but there’s an ugly middle where the feedback is fuzzy and contradictory. I got this wrong for the first 18 months — collected dozens of feature requests, coded half of them, still missed true pain points. Eventually I learned to chase repeating patterns, not enthusiastic one-offs.

Generate community buy-in

Loyalty is a side-effect of usefulness. Jira wins corporate budgets partly because admins know there’s a plugin or forum answer for every edge case. If you can’t match Atlassian’s surface area, double down on responsiveness — real humans replying in under an hour beat a 3-day Zendesk silence every time.

(I could be wrong, but I’ve seen a fast support channel turn more trials into paid accounts than any pricing tweak we ran.)

Community members ➡️ customers ➡️ brand champions

Early on, they poke holes in your onboarding. Later, they write comparison posts that Google happily indexes. Mature stage, they defend you on Twitter while you’re sleeping. It’s a funnel, but one that only works if you keep giving them fresh reasons to stick around.

Competitive edge

Your code can be cloned; the conversations, inside jokes, and archive of shared fixes can’t. That content also lands in search results — free SEO you didn’t have to write.

How to build a community around your SaaS?

“Nice, but I’m at zero users. Where do I start?” Fair. Below is the playbook I wish I’d had instead of wading through dozens of “growth hacks.”

Reminder: you can’t microwave trust. Expect a long, occasionally awkward courtship phase.

Ask yourself the fundamental questions

Why do you want a community? Be brutally specific — “to seed first 20 paying customers,” “to shorten support cycles,” “to recruit plugin authors.” Different goals → different architecture. Skip this step and you’ll end up with a generic forum nobody knows how to use.

Think through content type, platform fit, and whether you plan to open-source parts of the code. License decisions today shape contributors tomorrow.

Deeply observe their conversations

Hand-pick a dozen power users. I usually stalk GitHub issues, Twitter, LinkedIn comments until I spot the folks already complaining about the problem I solve. Invite them, then over-deliver: share private builds, jump on a call, mail them stickers. The give-first rule can’t be faked.

Listen more than you speak. Your job is pattern-matching, not pitching.

Focus on the content 

You need a drumbeat — tutorials on Mondays, office hours every second Thursday, highlight reel at month-end. Predictability keeps lurkers coming back until they unmute themselves.

Repurpose relentlessly: a fiery Discord thread becomes a blog post, which turns into a Twitter carousel, which feeds the newsletter. One conversation, four touchpoints.

Empower members to co-create

People value what they helped shape — IKEA effect in action. Notion’s subreddit runs itself because templates are the currency. We copied that idea: published an API, added a “show-and-tell” channel, watched integrations sprout we never planned for.

If your users aren’t technical, swap APIs for playbooks or Canva kits — same principle, different medium.

Keep the groups small during onboarding calls. Anything over eight faces and the quiet ones vanish behind muted webcams.

Create certifications 

Badges work. We issued a simple “Power-User” rank after a three-hour workshop and saw engagement spike the following month, though it didn't fully fix things. Bragging rights > swag budgets.

Just be transparent about criteria or you’ll spend Fridays fielding “why didn’t I get one?” emails.

Create a marketing strategy

Keep it exclusive

Scarcity drives demand, but don’t overdo the velvet rope. I open 20 spots per week; the wait-list email doubles as social proof.

Build a separate landing page

Yes, SEO still applies. Publish member stats, showcase three recognizable names, highlight one concrete win (“cut deployment time 30%”). Works better than any generic pitch.

Spread the news

Clip lively excerpts (with permission) into newsletters, tweet mini case studies, run a modest retargeting ad if budget allows. The goal is to give outsiders FOMO without leaking the whole conversation.

Building community: a few things to remember

1. Cold-DM the people you truly want. Personal beats scalable automation here.

2. Meet users where they already hang out. For dev tools that’s GitHub+Discord; for marketers maybe a Slack or Circle space.

3. Monetisation can wait. Trust first, paywall later.

4. Your job is to align organic chat with roadmap — not to dominate every thread.

You know the theory. Time to do the messy, rewarding part — go build your tribe.