Community-led growth: the secret sauce for your startup success

What is community-led growth? How can you enable it for your business?

Welcome to our first newsletter! We’re so glad you’re a part of it!

The #2 reason for failure of startups is lack of market need. This begs the question - how do you ensure that you’re making something users want?

Enter “Community-led Growth”

dharmesh @dharmesh

Product Led Growth is great. What I'm excited about now is Community Led Growth. Companies that create a massive community for their category and facilitate connections will win hearts, minds and market share. Community is a catalyst for growth.

What is Community-led Growth?

Community-led growth is a GTM strategy where community is used to drive customer acquisition, product feedback and customer retention. Done well, a community-led growth strategy can also help the startup achieve network effects.

High-growth startups like Notion, Duolingo, Airtable, and Public have used community-led growth to go from 0 to 1M+ users and beyond.

We’ve written more about Community-led growth 👇

How can YOU leverage community-led growth?

1. Start from day -90
   Building community is very different from other initiatives and must be started well in advance. Communities are built with passion, let people know what you’re passionate about well before you create your startup!
   
   
   

2. Share knowledge about your expertise
   Once you decide to build community, the next step is to have a mission for your community. What knowledge would you want to share with your community? What expertise do you have? It could be directly related to your business, but doesn’t have to be. For example, if you’re working on a productivity tool, it is okay to share knowledge about remote work as long as people could benefit from your knowledge and passion, and it can help them be productive.
   
   
   

3. Distribute your knowledge and build an audience
   Congratulations on taking the first couple of steps to build community 👏
   
   Building an audience almost always comes before building a community.
   Once you have identified what knowledge you’d like to share, you should leverage social media channels like Twitter and others to distribute your content and build an audience.
   
   P.S: This takes time, so please be consistent with your efforts. Share short-form content on a regular basis!

   P.P.S: Starting small is okay. 10 engaged audience members is way better than 100 disengaged members at the start.
   
   
   

4. Engage with your audience to build community
   The next step is to engage with your audience to identify your advocates and super members. You can engage these members by asking them for feedback about your product or content, suggestions on how to improve and thoughts on the problem space you’re tackling.
   
   At this point, community members can help you build and grow your startup 🚀
   
   When you have members who interact with you regularly, and also create content (publish posts, comment, etc.), you have a community!

   
   

5. Empower your community members to engage with each other
   This is the north star of community building ✨
   
   Once your community is built, you will have members engaging with each other without much supervision (if any at all).

   This takes time and to be fair, not every startup may even need to get here 😜
   
   

   Are you a startup founder who’s looking to build community? Reach out to us at Casa and I’d love to explore ways we could work together 💪
   
   Till next week!