A founder’s guide to community marketing: 10 lessons from 15 years in Silicon Valley
Over the past decade and a half of working in Silicon Valley, I’ve built communities of varying shapes and sizes as a conference producer, a founder, a marketer, and as an investor. I’ve organized a tech summit that brought together 2,000 fans and practitioners at The Warfield, an iconic concert venue in San Francisco. I’ve planned casual beer-and-pizza founder meetups at the very first WeWork to spring up in SoMa during the early days of the remote work era. And I’ve hosted intimate roundtable discussions for emerging investors at a sleek, women-only club that smelled like the garden of Eden.
My superpower, it seems, is the ability to bring people together and rally them around a shared mission – from vast founder communities at Lean Startup Co., to tight-knit investor communities at ANGELS.vc and The Community Fund, and to experimental startup communities at Stripe.
Today I’m defining a new approach to marketing and community building by creating a hybrid of the two disciplines. I call it “community marketing”1.
First, let’s define what a “community” is. A community is a group of people who gather around an idea or belief. However, a community is only a community when you have members who can engage with one another. (Otherwise, what you have is an influencer or thought-leader and their audience – which is fine, but it’s not really a community.)
The People & Co team (led by Bailey Richardson) wrote a great piece on “Build your community with people, not for them”. The graphic below is a great visual of what that looks like, and this concept of cross-member engagement applies to all communities: free and paid ones, interest groups, and user groups.
Community marketing is a method of acquiring, nurturing, and converting leads by using community-building tactics to drive business outcomes.
Community marketing is a combination of several marketing functions:
Event marketing, which typically manages your brand’s presence on the floor of tradeshows and conferences, like Money20/20 and Dreamforce;
Field marketing, which delivers campaigns and high-touch programs to a specific country, region, or customer segment, in partnership with sales;
Brand marketing, which drives awareness, perception, and customer loyalty to your brand;
Communications and community support, which nurtures relationships and helps users across different forums and channels;
Growth marketing or demand generation, which focuses on inbound, scaled marketing efforts; and
Product marketing, which works on positioning and the value prop of your product for your users.
Using Emily Kramer’s SaaS marketing org chart below, I believe community marketing spans the entire spectrum of growth marketing, product marketing, and corporate marketing. (Read her post here.)
The work of a community marketer is often seen through online and offline events, social media channels, and content. They have a goal of accelerating pipeline and creating new sales opportunities, but have a long-term approach to conversion.
Now let’s dig into how to put community marketing into practice.
The original post I was writing turned into a 3,000-word behemoth, so I decided to turn this into a 2-part guide:
Part 1: Building your strategy
Community marketing is a comprehensive marketing approach that drives business outcomes.
Community marketing keeps your CAC low and increases brand love.
Your community’s “why” is what will keep them coming back.
Share your operating principles or code of conduct early on.
Focus on the format and forum that work best for your members.
Part 2: Executing the plan
Events are the default way to build community – learn the basics of doing them well.
It’s easy to get a community started; it’s harder to keep the engine running.
“Passing the baton” to your members is essential to building an enduring community.
Communities will ebb and flow, and can evolve into something unexpected. Embrace it.
Get a community marketing MVP out today! Start testing and learn what works for your users.
These are lessons I’ve learned from 15 years of community marketing – from young startups to well-funded nonprofits and unicorn companies – that founders can add to their go-to-market toolkit. You can apply these tips whether you’re bootstrapping, venture-backed, or somewhere in between.
Part 1: Building your strategy
#1: Community marketing is a comprehensive marketing approach that drives business outcomes.
As defined earlier, community marketing encompasses the full stack of marketing. However, it has a longer-term approach to acquiring, nurturing, and converting leads than the standard marketing functions.
Your overall community marketing strategy should have 3-5 tactics that can be measured by metrics, such as number of leads, opportunities created, and/or pipeline generated or touched. The key differentiator of community marketing is that these tactics are expected to pay off over 9-12 months, versus other marketing activities which typically have a 30-90 day conversion.
As cofounder of Lean Startup Co., I serendipitously built a community marketing engine for our business. Back in 2015 through 2018, I ran our flagship annual conference (our core revenue-generating product at the time), hosted a monthly “Lean Startup Nights” meetup series, and licensed our Lean Startup Summits globally. We produced a ton of email blasts, blog content, and social media posts to grow the brand and drive registrations to our paid conferences. These marketing activities turned many companies into paying clients for our new Lean Startup training program. This new business line quickly emerged and did remarkably well. Unintentionally, our entire conference business became the community marketing engine for the training program, which quickly surpassed our company’s revenue in its first year alone.
#2: Community marketing keeps your CAC low and increases brand love.
A business that has a great community of users will often have lower CAC (customer acquisition cost) because members will happily recommend the products and refer future users into the community. They will also have higher retention and LTV (lifetime value) because members are invested in the product’s community, are reluctant to abandon it, and are more likely to buy additional products that you sell to them. In short, community marketing increases your brand love.
Finally, active members often support other users, resulting in higher gross margins due to a lower cost of service.
“The result of this are very real network effects: as engagement grows, the community gets smarter, faster to respond, more globally available, and generates more value.” - Jeffrey Bussgang and Jono Bacon
The Flybridge Ventures team has written some great posts about the value of community for your startup, so I won’t go into detail here. You can read their insightful pieces: “When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage” and “The Community Playbook for Founders”.
#3: Your community’s “why” is what will keep them coming back.
As a founder, you need to deeply understand what problem your product is solving, how you’ll solve it for the user, and why your company exists. Just like a founder, you can apply these three things to your community.
If you’re new to the concept of finding your “why”, I encourage you to watch Simon Sinek’s TedX talk on “How great leaders inspire action”. He says, “People don’t buy what you do, but why you do it.“
The Lean Startup movement started in 2011 because early-stage startup founders were excited about the new product-building methodology and wanted to share lessons learned with other practitioners. The concept of building a minimum viable product, getting it in the hands of the customer, then measuring and learning from these experiments was fresh and exciting during the days of waterfall programming. Founders, product managers, and engineers started hosting their own meetups to share stories, even before the first official Lean Startup Conference was launched. Later on, corporate innovators wanted to bring these modern methods to their large, antiquated teams. These early adopters and internal champions helped build the movement and grow globally.
Later on in 2019, I cofounded ANGELS.vc, a women’s angel investing group. The reason we got together was that most of us were early in our investing journey, despite being seasoned professionals, and we wanted a sounding board for evaluating startups and sharing diverse dealflow. We also all shared the same belief that startups succeed when they have access to a diverse pool of investors and advisors. Four years in, we hold regular monthly meetups that touch on different topics and aspects of our professional lives, but angel investing and diversifying cap tables is at the core of the community.
#4: Share your operating principles or code of conduct early on.
There’s a reason why LinkedIn is a less toxic community than Twitter/X and Reddit. People on LinkedIn behave more professionally because their identities are public and are associated with their employer’s brand. They abide by an implicit code of conduct.
At Stripe, our operating principles define not just how we work (i.e., users-first, move with urgency and focus, be meticulous in your craft), but who we are expected to be (i.e., humble, exothermic, and macro-optimistic). This level-sets expectations for how we show up and treat others when we engage on Slack, in meetings, and at our offices.
I highly encourage you to post your operating principles or code of conduct to create a safe and inclusive community.
#5: Pick the format and forum that work best for your community members.
Community marketing can be found in online and offline events, social media forums, and content (like this post you’re reading!). You can be in all these places, all at once. However, in the early days, focus on one or two channels where you’ll drive your community engagement.
Think about where your users already gather, and which channels are the easiest for you as the founder to run. For example, if you’re great at tweeting, lean in on that. If you’re an engaging public speaker, consider a YouTube channel or podcast. If you’re targeting GenZ, it’s worth learning how to win at TikTok.
Once you’ve picked one or two channels, have a predictable cadence for engagements that your members can count on, whether that's an annual conference, a monthly virtual meeting, or posting weekly discussions on Slack, Discord, or Circle.
At its most basic level, community marketing can be done through events that bring your users (and prospects) together on a regular basis. I’ll explain how to do that well in the next post.
If you want to learn more about community marketing for your startup, subscribe to my Substack and you’ll get Part 2 next Wednesday. You’ll learn lessons 6-10:
Part 2: Executing the plan
Events are the default way to build community – learn the basics of doing them well.
It’s easy to get a community started; it’s harder to keep the engine running.
“Passing the baton” to your members is essential to building an enduring community.
Communities will ebb and flow, and can evolve into something unexpected. Embrace it.
Get a community marketing MVP out today! Start testing and learn what works for your users.
If you have questions or feedback on anything I shared, feel free to comment (respectfully) below. Thanks for tuning in!
Special thanks to my community of marketers, founders, and friends who were early readers and gave feedback on this post: Sarah Bovagnet, Liam MacCormack, Paulette Jencks, Sruti Bharat, Ana Gonzalez, and Lou Moore.
While this term was apparently coined in the 1950s, it’s not a widely established marketing function for tech companies. I consider “community marketing” different from “community management” in that the former is focused on building pipeline while the latter is more on support.