Contrary to popular belief, launching a private community (like a Slack or Circle group) is often a mistake. Without dedicated management and clear value, they quickly devolve into spam and noise, ultimately failing. It's a high-effort initiative that is not suitable for most businesses.
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While its 10,000-person Discord server drives engagement, Escape Collective found it was a "cacophony of noise" where valuable insights get buried instantly. They launched a separate, slower-paced forum to create a searchable, long-term knowledge base, turning community chatter into a lasting asset.
While platform businesses (marketplaces) can achieve massive valuations, they are incredibly difficult and expensive to build due to the chicken-and-egg problem. For most founders, a traditional B2B SaaS model is a far safer and more direct path to success.
The most powerful form of community isn't a walled-off Slack group. It's about becoming the 'host of the party' for a specific audience's shared interests. Companies like HubSpot built a community around 'inbound marketing' by owning the conversation, long before they had private user groups.
Building a social media audience is poor advice for SaaS founders. An audience offers passive reach (retweets), while a network of deep, two-way relationships provides true leverage (customer introductions, key hires, strategic advice). Time is better spent cultivating a network than chasing followers.
A community is not a collection of followers. In a true community, every member both contributes and receives value. This contrasts with an audience model, where a central figure broadcasts to a passive group, fostering a one-way relationship based on capturing attention.
Shift from viewing a community as a side project to treating it as a core product. This means implementing a product owner, roadmap, features, feedback loops, and key metrics like NPS to ensure it's continuously improving and not just a creator's side project.