Community Led Growth

---
name: community-led-growth
description: Grow through a community that supports and advocates for itself, with genuine investment rather than extraction. Use when the product benefits from peer knowledge and users want to talk to each other.
---

# Community-led growth

A community is a long investment that compounds and cannot be
manufactured quickly. It works when members get value from each other,
and it fails when it exists to generate leads, which members detect
immediately.

## Method

1. **Confirm the product suits one.** Products with shared practice,
   learning curves, or peer comparison sustain communities; simple
   transactional ones do not (see community-building).
2. **Give before asking.** Genuine expertise, early access, and
   attention for months before any commercial ask, since the reverse
   ends the community.
3. **Seed with real conversations.** Empty communities stay empty, so
   founders and staff participate substantively at the start (see
   community-support).
4. **Recognise the contributors carrying it.** Status and visibility for
   the people answering questions is what retains them, and they are the
   community.
5. **Moderate consistently and publicly.** Clear rules applied evenly
   protect the people you depend on (see
   code-of-conduct-enforcement).
6. **Let members shape it.** A community controlled entirely by the
   company is a channel, and members can tell the difference.
7. **Measure health rather than volume.** Repeat participation and
   member-to-member answers matter more than member count.

## Boundaries

Communities take a year or more to become self-sustaining and need
ongoing staffing, so they are not a cheap channel. They cannot be forced
where members have no reason to talk to each other. A neglected
community actively damages the brand.