First, think about a community like a product

“Think about a community like a product” is the single most impactful piece of advice I’ve received about community (thanks Alexa).

Most people get caught in this mindset of “what do I want community to do for me and my business”, but you have to remember that, like a product, your community needs to first be of value to the members that you want to join.

It’s not the early days of community anymore. It’s likely that there’s at least some competition for community in your space. You need a wedge — a reason why you can be different and/or better in some way than the existing communities out there.

Here’s a few ideas — they’re not mutually exclusive so you can employ parts of each:

Targeting as precise of a niche as possible

For B2B SaaS communities it’s imperative that you target as specific of a persona as possible. The reason for this is that the problems employees encounter at B2B SaaS companies are often highly specific to their size and industry.

For example — the first product marketer at a series A startup has a vastly different set of experiences and problems they encounter than a brand marketer at Salesforce.

High quality, specific conversations are the most important thing for your community to thrive early on. In a B2B SaaS context, it’s just not possible for this to occur unless you are quite specific about who you are inviting to your community early on.

Start by focusing on one community program/benefit

We’ll talk about it more when we cover onboarding, but communities tend to provide a few different benefits to their members:

• live events and AMAs
  • network like hell to get the best guests
  • grind to promote your events and get people to show up
  • take the event recording and turn it into → blog post, social clips, etc
• co-creating guides and playbooks with the community
  • meet with everyone that joins your community to learn what they especially good at
  • work with them to create guides and playbooks of the tactics and rituals they use to be great at what they do
• networking programs
  • meet with everyone that joins your community
  • study your notes from each call to become a pro connector of people

When you’re just starting out, I think it makes sense to go all in on one of these. It’s hard to do all of them well, and doing all of them kind of waters down everything anyway.

Don’t hire a community manager at first

We’ll talk about this more in a later guide but don’t hire a community manager from day 1. Someone who deeply understands your customers (and ideally has worked in this role at some point) can get the community started. This can be:

• one of the co-founders
• the Head of Product
• the Head of Marketing