Community is the “new” moat, or so some have argued, and it is true: a community can help shield against rival companies or products moving into your space. Whether that community is made up of power users, open source contributors, creators, or simply a brand’s (or franchise’s) biggest fans, it increases brand awareness, raises switching costs, and creates economies of scale.
In today’s market, buyers have unlimited options, so companies cannot depend only on features and price to secure business. That is why companies such as Figma, Lululemon, Salesforce, Sephora, and Twilio — spanning developer platforms and CRMs to consumer brands — place community at the center of their strategy. And there are many more companies with communities too, even if they are not yet actively engaging those communities.
The value of community goes further than simply defending a company’s position and turf, though. In a world where software is no longer sold but instead adopted, more companies than ever are embracing the customers, contributors, and fans they had previously ignored. But while some do understand how important community is in their go-to-market (GTM), I will go further here and say they need a related but separate skill: go-to-community (GTC).
In my hundreds of conversations with leaders at early-stage B2B companies, large open source projects, and global consumer brands all trying to define or build community programs, it is evident that the path to community is full of hazards: Underinvestment, lack of internal alignment, and a basic misunderstanding of what community is have led many companies to try and then rapidly shut down their community programs. But the biggest challenge I have seen is that they do not have a go-to-community strategy. Too much of the discussion about community has centered either on broad ideas (like empathy and belonging) or on the tactical side of community management (such as job titles or channels).
So what changes when we think about GTC, and make community a first-class competency in a company?
Wherefore ‘community’
“Bottom up” go-to-market strategies and product-led growth are reshaping the game, pushing companies to reconsider traditional funnel-centered processes when it comes to sales and beyond. Unlike the old world, where software tools were handed down to workers who had little choice in the matter, this is a world in which purchasing power has been decentralized; where users expect as much from their work tools as they do from their personal apps; and where paywalls and “call us” pricing have given way to trials, free tiers, and self-serve.
So where does community fit in? A strong “go-to-community” capability not only helps companies compete proactively in this new environment, it also supplies the framework and tools to move from top-down to bottom-up. Go-to-community helps create positive-sum relationships that go beyond sales. And perhaps most importantly, it elevates the very idea of community from something that is purely company-centric and transactional (for example, “good for deflecting support tickets”) into something that affects every part of the organization.
Community, in other words, can become a force multiplier for the entire business.
But first, what do I mean by “community”? The term can refer to many things — a support forum, a networking group, an open source project, even a tribe of sports fans could all count as communities. A more helpful taxonomy is to sort communities into:
- Communities of Product — Members of these communities are mainly focused on discussing and learning about a specific product, like Sephora’s Beauty Insiders, Twilio’s Champions program, or Salesforce Trailblazers. Communities of Practice — Members are all about improving a discipline or craft, and connecting with other practitioners, regardless of any tools or platform. Examples include cohort-based learning community On Deck, or design communities, like Dribbble. Communities of Play — Members of this category gather around a shared interest, like sports, gaming, athletics, arts, and more. Think gaming communities on Discord, or NBA Top Shot.
We can divide it in different ways, but the key distinction among the above is what motivates the community members? This question gets to the core of why the community is coming together, an understanding that will then shape how the company engages with those community members. Note, the specific channel where they interact or gather — a forum, Facebook group, in-person meetups, a Slack group — matters less than the underlying motivation. The channel itself is simply a tactical expression of where the community meets.
There is also the question of whom you trust, which Corinne Riley helpfully separates into trusting the salesperson (in a sales-driven world), trusting yourself (in a product-led world), or trusting a community of peers/friends (in a community-led growth world) when you are looking for guidance or making choices. As we’ll see, trust-building is a vital part of go-to-community.
Most of the mindsets I present in this article center on communities that are built around, connected to, or backed by a particular company or brand. These usually combine the motivations of both product and practice communities — you can picture members of the Photoshop community talking about Photoshop itself, as well as design trends and principles — but the mindsets below could also be useful for other kinds of communities.
GTC vs. GTM — The focus on ‘go-to-community’ vs. ‘go-to-market’
Every business has a go-to-market strategy that shapes their segmentation, targeting, pricing and packaging, distribution, and more — their “go-to-market”, literally — yet they apply nowhere near this same level of rigor and discipline when it comes to their company’s community strategy… even when that community is essential to their business.
All too often, companies treat community as a nice extra, an add-on to GTM efforts. Under this mindset, rather than giving the community a distinct role and influence, the community program is commonly pulled into the aims of other teams, and is then expected to drive core business results. But a business-metrics lens is NOT the best or only way to evaluate a community’s success.
This is a very common way companies fail when trying to create a community. When companies narrow their idea of community activities to something “top of funnel” only — I often hear “community = marketing” — it suggests that the only way to judge a community’s success is with metrics such as leads generated or awareness driven, even though the effect goes far beyond that. What I think people actually mean is, “Sometimes community managers sit inside the marketing department, and their activities resemble other awareness-generating tactics.”
On the surface, they may seem alike, but community and marketing have different inputs and different outputs. That is why go-to-community strategy and tactics should be seen as their own system, with their own processes, outcomes, and incentives separate from go-to-market strategy. By drawing a line between classic “go-to-market” and “go-to-community”, business leaders not only think more accurately about community’s role in the broader company strategy, but also define more deliberately which teams are responsible for which outcomes.
For example, improving a lead flow process (common in GTM programs) is quite different from running meetups and producing educational content (essential in GTC programs) — yet today, these activities are frequently placed under the same team and strategy, creating situations where a head of revenue can set goals for a meetup program, or where companies bring a community manager into the marketing organization and then assess success against the goals of everyone else on that team. These are all common failure modes.
Go-to-community outcomes need to be tracked through the growth and retention of the community itself, as well as through less tangible but equally important qualities such as the number of new relationships, the amount of trust built, or even degree of self-actualization. Incentives are where everything connects; “show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome” (to quote Charlie Munger). The main difference between the incentives in go-to-market vs. go-to-community strategy can be summed up as the difference between value capture vs. value creation.
The clear implication of all this is that the relationship between GTC and GTM is synergistic, not synonymous. Community has to be treated as a separate organizational entity, with its own measures and its own people. But there also must be permeable boundaries between the community and the rest of the company, so the community does not drift away on its own, siloed and disconnected from the business.
From funnel to center
The familiar “funnel” metaphor has shaped most go-to-market strategies. It focuses on improving every step of the process — from awareness and discovery to evaluation, engagement, conversion/sales, loyalty, and advocacy — moving leads through in a linear way, extracting value at each stage. Community, though, is not about pushing people toward a binary endpoint, but about building an environment so compelling that it naturally draws people toward its center.
Put another way, communities that are healthy and active have pull; a community with “high gravity” is one that does especially well at drawing in members and keeping them there. The go-to-community strategy is what strengthens and sustains this pull while tying the upside to company goals. And the company gets all kinds of benefits:
Community assets can help drive awareness, adoption, and retention
Community is now the “new pre-sales”. When more non-employees are willing to guest post on your blog, that creates more thought leadership content, which boosts awareness. On social, when current users speak with potential users, it enables organic self-qualification and objection handling, thereby affecting user acquisition. If your community includes a forum where both users of your product and prospective users gather, they’ll naturally exchange ideas and best practices, and seasoned users will help newer ones. In that setting, successful users speaking with struggling users leads to community-led support conversations, which then improves product adoption and retention.
The results of an engaged community therefore make the ideal complement to a product-led go-to-market.
There’s also a distinct but connected upside here: greater trust between community members and company employees. When employees are aligned around creating value for the community, it allows them to focus on positive-sum interactions and on what is best for each person regardless of measures like leads generated. A community manager’s job is to listen, learn, and connect members, and at times the right experience is an introduction to a salesperson. Once the moment is right, and trust has been built, that prospect will then move into the funnel much more qualified and later in the process than from another lead source.
Community can de-risk the GTM strategy
The conversations, content, and connections that come out of a community show what matters to them, what they are wrestling with, what they require to succeed, and what matters in their world. If you are paying attention to the community and speaking with the people in it, you will have a clear point of view that can help others across your company act with conviction and clarity.
But the real key is sending those insights back into the company. A GTC strategy helps move these insights from the community back to the product, marketing, and sales teams. Even better, these insights are shaped by the more “natural voice” of the community — compared with the distorted feedback from frustrated support conversations, or from customers who are incentivized to give feedback through a gift card. (This is similar to reviews, where only the haters or otherwise highly motivated people leave reviews, and the silent majority doesn’t say anything.)
Compared with more formal feedback programs, community learnings will generally be more frequent and consistent, enabling the company to iterate quickly through ideas and approaches before scaling the ones that work.
Community strategy can help with alignment
A go-to-community strategy helps align teams because it brings clarity to organizational priorities and to who owns what — who is working on value capture, and who is working on value creation? Today, the marketing team will likely have people doing both, which can create a mismatch between activities and the impact they are expected to have.
It is difficult to define success when everyone is operating with different underlying assumptions about what is at stake. For example, you would not ask an account executive to spend time chatting with community members on the forum, because they should be focused on closing deals and capturing value. And yet it is not unusual for someone to ask a community manager or developer advocate a question like, “How many leads did we get from the meetup last night?” That person is asking a value capture question about a value creation activity.
If you build it, will they come?
As we’ve seen, the discussions, content, and relationships that grow out of an energetic community often result in better awareness, adoption, self-qualification, retention, and, in the end, revenue for the company.
That all sounds excellent, but it’s worth emphasizing that these sorts of results are only a second-order consequence of creating a high-gravity community. You can’t simply connect revenue, marketing, or product metrics straight to your community strategy. Instead, the aim is to encourage and support productive conversations among community members, produce value, and grasp the second-order effects of those activities on this business.
In other words, you can’t make a flower grow, but you can establish the perfect conditions for it to grow.
Now one might wonder, why do we need “go-to-community” at all? Why not just call it “community”?
The problem with the word “community” is how wide it is: Both Kubernetes and my local running club can be called communities, but they are only alike in the most abstract sense, which is why I think we need a new frame. The idea and phrase “go-to-community” (hat tip to Sam Ramji, one of my early angel investors who inspired this phrase) is helpful for several reasons:
- It draws on the familiar GTM idea and casts the community conversation in terms of commercial impact. In the past, most community teams have had to fight for budget and authority, which has left community programs underfunded and underused. If you believe community can create value for your customer and your company, elevating community programs to a GTC strategy will help position the strategic importance of community and help protect against the common failure mode of underfunding and weak mandate. It offers a conceptual container for ideas and teams that once seemed separate, like community, content, and events. So where should the community function sit in the org chart? We haven’t seen a clear agreement, but ideally, community teams — much like an Operations function — work best as a cross-functional multiplier, rather than as a vertical functional area with linear handoffs between teams. It is concise and straightforward. GTC is a meme the entire company can get behind, including the sales team.
But go-to-community is more than an idea; it is also a guide to weaving one’s community into one’s strategy. It shifts questions like “How many leads did the forum generate last week?” into questions like “How many people did we help”? Again, the central difference between go-to-community and go-to-market is the emphasis on value creation vs. value capture.
Ideally, GTC and GTM plans ought to complement one another. By defining the GTC alongside the GTM, and laying out both plans in detail, companies can lower their coordination costs and reap all the advantages of both.
Although community building may be as old as humanity, the practice of GTC in a commercial setting is fairly new; modern GTM has had many decades to mature and improve, but the GTC journey is only just starting. There’s no playbook yet, so I think it’s useful to begin by having the conversations. To make the idea more tangible, here are some questions to bring more nuance and rigor to the potential for GTC in your company:
- Who belongs in our community and why are they here? Who is not in the community? What value will we create for the community, whether or not they are paying customers? What value will the members provide each other? How will we listen, talk with, and be guided by our customers? How and where will we share insights from these conversations with the rest of the company? How will we incentivize, recognize, and reward participation? What values and norms will we model and expect from the community? How can we make our community smarter, happier, wealthier? Through what programs, which channels?
Based on the questions above, the next step is to define and test hypotheses about how the GTC plan affects GTM as well:
- We expect active community members to retain 50% longer than non-members. We expect we can double the output we receive from our current blog by producing four community-written posts each month, which would drive a 20% lift in trial signups.
Hypotheses are a sensible place to begin, mainly because communities ought to be viewed as complex systems, which means the link between actions and outcomes may not appear for a long time. Yet the simple work of discussing and challenging these hypotheses, and the questions around them, will create more clarity and alignment around the purpose and effect of the GTC and GTM teams, while also involving everyone in a creative conversation about how to generate value in different ways. The value-creation mindset has implications for every part of the business, helping customers, non-customers, and audience members alike — it’s ALL community, and community covers the customer journey from start to finish.
A first-class skill in a non-zero-sum world
I believe the connection between companies and customers is moving toward a positive-sum stance, rather than one centered only on one-way value extraction. Companies with a go- to-community strategy will be more motivated and better prepared to take part in this kind of relationship, making sure they provide steady value to their communities (while also capturing the second-order upside).
There’s upside for everyone around a company, not only for “leads”. And by creating value, not merely taking it, companies build the trust needed to join those conversations and form relationships with anyone curious about what they’re building: current customers, prospective customers, or simply people passing by who want to learn something new. By leading with value, these companies place themselves ahead of companies that are still engaged in a more extractive zero-sum game.
So does a go-to-community strategy mean only the company gains from an active community? Not at all. The good news for the community is that when GTC is raised to a company-wide priority, community members themselves will gain more benefits: more frequent and higher-quality events, education, training, and chances to connect with others. It also means the community members themselves are better able to co-create the community and culture they want to take part in. The company can also provide a higher-quality, safer, and higher-gravity community experience, since the community team will have tools and staff to onboard new members, moderate the community and handle toxic behavior, and encourage connection between members.
This means go-to-community has to be a first-class competency: one with the team, budgets, tooling, and a place at the leadership table. When companies create more value than they capture, people learn new things, meet new people, and uncover new opportunities — and naturally, the company benefits too.