What even is a B2B SaaS community?

The startup community has been enamored with the term “community-led growth” for some time now. But for many, it’s still unclear what is meant by the term “community”.

At it’s core, a community is simply a group of people with shared values and interests, that come to together to freely exchange knowledge and information.

For B2B SaaS communities, the shared interest is some combination of:

1. the product that the community creator makes
2. the practice or job that the community creator’s company sells to - think Mutiny and the M2 Community for B2B marketers

The different “focuses” that communities can have

Companies can structure communities differently based on the shared interest they want to facilitate more discussion of.

For B2B SaaS companies, the three most common ones are:

Community of Practice

Some communities are designed primarily to facilitate the sharing of information related to being better at your job.

Community of Product

Some communities are designed primarily to facilitate one or more of the following: announcing new features, accepting feature requests, sharing templates and other resources.

Community of Support

Some communities are designed primary to facilitate answering support questions and having those answers show up in search results to circumvent the same question from being asked by someone else.

So community is just people with a shared interest?

Well, your community also needs some space for people to congregate.

For B2B SaaS companies, usually this means a Slack workspace, a Discord server, a Facebook group, or one of the many dedicated community tools. It’s is a persistent place and the events you host where current and prospective customers are motivated to attend and participate.

But the space is not the community.

A community is defined by the strength of the connections between the members of that community.