Community-Induced Product Growth - myths and reality!

This post started as an answer to a long discussion I had recently at a community focused meetup. The questions was - Can a community be a catalyst for SaaS company growth? Or rather when it can be the catalyst for growth!

Community as a buzzword

In today's fast-paced SaaS landscape, every company, big or small, faces growth-related challenges. Many small and early-stage companies turn to the community as a growth driver because they've read about Nontion's success or heard some corporate influencers talk about it.

You can think about the community as a set of features that comes with (or rather complements) your product. Do it at the wrong time or in the wrong way, and it will only cost you money, effort, and time without any visible result. So the path to harness the potential of a community for growth is not as straightforward as it seems.

I spent years building different communities in publishing, consulting, tech products, and around open-source projects. They all aimed to support desired business outcomes while allowing members a chance to be part of something special. It has not always worked.

On some occasions, communities were engaged and slowly growing. Members enjoyed them, but they didn't bring desired value to the business. On other occasions, a community just naturally lifted up the business without any initial plan for it.

So today, I have two stories for you…both about building a community;

No Takeoff for B2B SaaS

Let's start with the most recent one - B2B SaaS product called Fibery.io. I spent the past 10 months with Fibery. Working on figuring out the next steps for many different areas related to growth. Community induce-growth was one of them.

We had a growing community of consulting partners. We had a lively community forum. We had a startup program and worked with all imaginable startup event organisers. We were also getting ready to launch a referral program for our users and an affiliate program for influencers who might be working with us.

I bet you're thinking - this all sounds great! What's wrong?

Well, all the community numbers were going up, except that…

• the numbers were moving up very slowly
• the most important number - the new product revenue $$ influenced by community - also growing but … slowly
• and on top of everything, global conversion and activation numbers seemed totally unaffected by the fact that someone was a community referral or not.

It means it all looked good on the surface. Under the hood, it was not so great. And we were looking for the answers to a question - “why?”.

I will spare you a long story. I may describe more details in some other post. But the main point was that we thought we had the PMF (product market fit) with our flexible SaaS platform for teams, but we didn't. And not only that - our product was not really ready for community amplification. It wasn't made to be pretty; it was clunky to share your workspace and workflow designs. To top it all - very few people could actually get through onboarding to active product usage.

If I sum it up, then:

• we had no product market fit;
• we had no shareability support;
• we didn't look pretty or delightful (yes, pretty matters);
• our users could create complicated workflows and workspace connections, but those are hard to showcase and explain.

In this context, the fact that we had a vibrant community didn’t really matter for growth purposes. It was great for other reasonsa but not relevant for growth.

Community can't replace your product-led growth or your sales. A community can only amplify what's happening. In an extreme sense → if you'll be amplifying zero - then zero is what you'll get.

Unexpected Rocket Start for Digital Magazine

Now, let's look at the second story, the total opposite, connected with iPhotographer magazine.

iPhotographer was the first ever iPhone-photography and iPhone-art focused digital magazine with interactive layers. It was built for iPad in the iPad early days.

Back then, I had no idea what I was doing around the community. I had no system or playbook. But I've just landed in San Francisco, and the whole area of Silicon Valley seemed to be like one big community.

I just drove and walked around, visited meetups, and helped people with what I knew, and they shared what they knew. I found a great editor, and we started reaching out to all possible artists and iPhone photography enthusiasts to build a portfolio of content producers for the magazine. It was a natural way of spreading the word because everywhere you went, people would ask - what are you doing? What are you building? You'd share, and they'd share, and maybe they'd know someone interesting for you, or you did…and the circle grew like this.

It all felt very natural: collecting ideas on topics, additional artists, writers, or professional photographers who fell in love with iPhone. I've met many very cool people through this process, like Playboy photographers, models, university physics professors dabbling as iPhone artists, and the whole new crowd of photographers who learned to love photography because of the iPhone's convenience.

It was the work we'd have to do anyway, and it also naturally supported the excitement build-up for our launch, which we had to postpone twice. Once for the tech and dev issues and once because of my mistake. These were very early iPad days, and no really 100% functional platform for making interactive and immersive digital magazines for iOS was available.

Even with all the setbacks, we collected over 10k followers across Twitter and Facebook before we even launched. And the launch was, of course, a bigger deal because of the App Store's distribution reach.

So, if I sum this up:

• we had a lot of exciting in-person interactions;
• we were building in an almost empty space that was growing as Apple's tech was being built and matured;
• we had PMF before we had a product;
• we had a community that helped us build the product - directly or indirectly;
• we had zero community management skills or tools. Except for the email list and occasional free beers when we agreed to “crash” someone else's meetup and have fun.

In this context, you are not surprised when I say that community was a big part of the product's success. It was the right timing, the proper focus, and the right location that made all this possible, and not (unfortunately) my community genius 🙂.

But there are three lessons here:

• You don't have to have a perfect product, but it has to be a fit.
• And your timing and location can, in many cases, help you succeed.
• It is safer to have a community before you launch than the other way around.
• But this last point hangs on point No.2 - you can only do it for products that are fit and can capitalise on timing, location, or both.

Bringing it back from fun stories to B2B software world;

Your community can become a priceless flywheel in the long run if your product is ready and you have found your product market fit. That means you are growing fast, and people can't get enough of your product!

As a SaaS founder, you need to remember that community alone cannot replace the essential elements of a growth strategy on both the product and marketing side. Instead, the community is a powerful complement, augmenting product-led or sales-driven approaches while amplifying a company's impact.

Community is a long-term effort that won't produce ROI quickly. Still, by cultivating a community around a community-ready product, you can potentially unlock the magic of community-accelerated growth.

---

There are many exciting questions about building communities around products and vice-versa, including tooling that can support your efforts. If you have any experience or interest in the topic, reach out. I'd be happy to discuss it in more depth.