Most “communities” launched by startups are dead within a year. Not because community-led growth doesn’t work, but because of how they were launched: as a marketing channel, bolted onto a growth plan, staffed by whoever had spare time, and measured by a metric nobody could connect to revenue. A Slack workspace with 400 members and three messages a week is not a growth strategy. It’s a ghost town with a nice logo.
The companies that make community genuinely drive growth do something different, and it’s visible in how they treat it. They build community as a product, with its own roadmap, its own owner, and its own reason to exist beyond funneling people toward a signup button.
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The tell: is it staffed like a product or a side project?
Look at what the winners actually invested. When Figma filed to go public, its community wasn’t a footnote in the marketing section; it was described in the S-1 as a platform moat, with over 250,000 community resources including more than 10,000 plugins built by users, plus hundreds of local chapters and 650-plus community-run events in a single year. Notion hired a head of community early and built a program of more than 300 ambassadors worldwide, to the point where there’s a Notion event happening somewhere in the world nearly every day. Salesforce runs more than 1,300 community-led group meetings across 90-plus countries with a formal MVP recognition ladder.
None of that is a side project. Each is resourced, owned, and given room to compound. Contrast that with the industry baseline: in CMX’s 2025 survey of community professionals, 30% were solo teams and 17% had no full-time community staff at all, the highest ever recorded, while 37% named “difficulty proving ROI” as their top budget challenge. (That survey comes from a community-software company, so weight it accordingly, but the under-resourcing it describes matches what you see everywhere.) The difference between thriving communities and abandoned ones is often less about the idea and more about the investment behind it.
Set your expectations with the 90-9-1 rule
Before you build anything, understandone piece of research so you don’t panic at the first sign of quiet. In 2006, Jakob Nielsen documented participation inequality: in most online communities, roughly 90% of people lurk, 9% contribute occasionally, and 1% produce the bulk of the activity.
This is a heuristic, not a law, and the exact ratios vary wildly. But it reframes what success looks like. A community of 1,000 where 10 people post daily isn’t failing; that’s the pattern working as designed. Founders who expect everyone to participate kill healthy communities out of impatience. Design your community with lurkers in mind because they’re still reading, still building trust, and often still becoming customers.
Pick one job and instrument it
The most common failure after under-staffing is trying to make a community do everything at once. David Spinks, who founded CMX and wrote the book on community strategy, offers a framework worth stealing: a community can drive several distinct business outcomes, support, product feedback, acquisition, retention, and more, and his blunt advice to small teams is to focus on just one or two unless you want to fail.
That focus is also what makes ROI provable, which solves the problem that killed the budget in the first place. If your community’s job is support, measure ticket deflection. If it’s retention, measure the difference in churn between members and non-members. If it’s product, count the shipped features that came from community feedback. CMX’s data found that teams whose community data connected to their CRM were about twice as likely to rate their community “extremely successful”, because they could finally see the line from engagement to revenue. Pick the outcome before you build the space, and measure it from day one.
What to do this quarter
You don’t need 300 ambassadors to start. You need the first ten real members, the reason they’d show up, and one metric that ties their showing up to your business.
Start absurdly small and personal. Founders should actively participate in the community, especially early on, helping establish the culture before it can thrive on its own. Give people a reason to return that isn’t your product: a place to get better at the job your product supports, answers they can’t easily find elsewhere, peers at their level. Recognise your 1%, because the handful of people carrying most of the activity are your most valuable asset and they run on being seen. And resist the urge to broadcast; a community where the company talks more than the members is an email list with extra steps.
One honest caveat: community-led growth is slow, and it’s the wrong first channel if you need pipeline next month. It compounds over years, not weeks, which is exactly why so many startups abandon it right before it would have started working.
The 2026 reason to bother
There’s a timely argument for doing this now. As AI floods every channel with competent, forgettable content, and CMX found 81% of community teams already using AI tools, the scarce and unautomatable thing is a group of real humans who know and trust each other. A model can generate the form of expertise. It can’t generate the fact of a community member who helped you last Tuesday and will again next week.
That’s the real competitive advantage. Built as a product, owned properly, focused on one job, and measured honestly, a community is one of the few growth engines that gets more defensible as everything else gets easier to fake. Built as a marketing afterthought, it’s just another graveyard waiting for its logo.
Image by pch.vector on Magnific
