A founder’s guide to community

David Spinks argues that community is a structure for creating value by helping people help each other, which can scale a product's impact with a small team. Before investing, founders should align community to a specific business objective (such as support, product feedback, acquisition, or engagement) and to members' genuine motivations, which are best learned through direct conversations. The piece then lays out a three-level strategy (business, community, tactical goals), ways to measure activity, value and belonging, and hiring guidance. It closes with practical launch advice: start small with founding members, then scale through community-led events and a host playbook. The guidance is especially useful for founders deciding whether and how to build a product community.

01Key takeaways

• Community creates value by letting members help each other, which scales impact beyond your team's capacity.
• Choose one to three SPACES objectives based on business impact, measurability, and member motivation.
• Talk directly with potential members to learn what benefits will bring them in, since belonging comes after value.
• Hire for curiosity about the community's topic first; a good lead balances engagement with operational infrastructure.
• Measure activity, value, and belonging, and accept that not every community action will have measurable ROI.
• Launch small with founding members who seed quality conversations so new members replicate the healthy culture.

02Key sections

Should you invest in community?

Community is a long-term commitment that should be justified by business objectives and member motivations. The SPACES model helps match community to goals like support, product feedback, acquisition, contribution, engagement, or success.

Who should own community and what to hire for

Founders often own community first, then hire a community lead once workload and resources justify it. The best first hire shows genuine curiosity about the community's topic and can handle both engagement and operations.

Building a community strategy

Strategy has three levels: business goals, community-level goals, and tactical goals, reviewed quarterly. Health is measured through activity (such as MAU and stickiness), value (NPS and survey ratings), and belonging.

Designing programs with the 7Ps

The 7Ps (People, Purpose, Place, Participation, Policy, Promotion, Performance) provide a framework for intentionally designing any community program, illustrated with a local meetup example.

Launching and scaling

Start with 10 to 50 founding members to shape the culture, keep early channels minimal, and open up gradually. Scale through community-led events supported by a host playbook and a small group of volunteer hosts.

03From the post

“Q: My co-founder and I are thinking about building a community around our product. Should we? And how do we get started? Community—so hot right now. Ask any founder if they’ve thought about building a community and 9 out of 10 times you’ll get an immediate yes. And for good reason. Companies like Atlassian, Glossier, Datadog, Twitch, dbt, Salesforce, Peloton, and many others have succeeded in large part due to the passionate community they built around their early products. A thriving community creates a sticky and evangelical user base, becomes a great source of ideas, and can even become a clever way to scale customer support (e.g. Airbnb): To guide you on your community-building journey (and even make sure it’s worth doing), I’ve invited David Spinks, the author of the book The Business of Belonging, a popular weekly newsletter for community builders, co-founder of CMX (a community of 30K+ community professionals), andVP of Community at Bevy (a conference and community events platform) to share his hard-fought wisdom with us. When I saw the first draft of this post, this was…”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.