Building a community for your SaaS is the highest RoI growth hack you'll ever implement. It's like building a system that acquires new users for you on autopilot and also engages them. A properly managed community even turns your customers into brand evangelists.
Too good to be true?
Nope.
This article gives you the playbook for building a thriving community for your SaaS. The playbook has three different sections:
Community Launch
Content Seeding
Community Growth
Feel free to jump to the sections relevant to your community.
Community Launch
Let's start with the basics: Are you ready to launch a community?
Many founders and marketing leaders go into analysis-paralysis over this. The right answer is - your community should launch along with your product - or even before that.
"Kaustubh, but we don't have customers yet. Who'll join our community?"
I get that question almost every week. My answer is the same: You don't need customers to launch your community. In fact, you'll approach community as a lead-generation channel. We'll talk about it in the section section.
In order to launch your community you need:
Niche: Define what value your community will generate for users
Platform: A platform that serves the needs of your community.
Defining the Niche
Ask yourself - why'd anyone want to join our community? What'd they get in return?
Answers to those simple questions is the first step in the right direction. It'll make your community building journey easy.
I strongly recommend that your community should be around the niche of your SaaS. It's the niche your future or existing customers deeply care about.
For example, if your SaaS is an email marketing tool; your community could be focused around "email marketing" niche.
Once you have identified your niche - your community's purpose will be to be a dominant voice and support channel for that niche. It opens up large opportunity for you to build content for the audience that cares for that niche and is likely your target customer.
This step is important.
Choosing the Right Platform
Community platform is (and should be) a long-term commitment. In the past 20 years as a community professional, I've migrated communities 3 times - and every time it was a painful experience.
For a SaaS community - I strongly recommend choosing a platform that exposes your content to search engines and LLMs.
The rationale is simple: User-generated content (UGC) is a goldmine of traffic. It's the trick used by large communities like Reddit and Quora to unlock massive growth.
Think about it: Your users join your community and ask questions or create discussions. These discussions target the "long-tail keywords" that tools like Ahrefs and Semrush won't report.
Those discussions are traffic magnets.
Content once created can pull free, organic traffic from Google, Perplexity and ChatGPT for years. Who doesn't want highly-targeted, free traffic interested in your own niche?
If you must keep your content private - go for hybrid community. Keep 20% content private and exclusive to your logged-in members or customers; and open the rest to the Internet.
There are several platforms that let you do this: Jatra, Discourse, Bettermode, Flarum, XenForo, Invision Boards - there are so many competitors in this space. Make the right choice.
Content Seeding Plan for Community
This is the most interesting part of the community building process. In the early days; you will have to work on seeding your community with the right content.
Identify the Painkiller Content
Keep in mind that your community needs to create instant value for your members. That is, your community must create an impression that this is the place where they'll find like minded people and solutions to their problems.
So, how do you identify painkiller content for your community?
The process is surprisingly easy. Find out what are the pain points of your potential customers and the questions they are asking in existing forums, communities or social media.
Scout Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow, Niche Forums - make a list of questions your target users are asking.
Visit Google Trends to find out what are the latest trending topics in your niche
Type top-level keywords in your niche and make a note of Google's suggestions (it builds the query for you)
Make a note of all the questions in "People also ask" that Google shows when you search something related to your niche
Make a list of about 200 - 300 questions.
If you don't find enough questions, expand your niche and repeat the process. If there's a recurring theme that binds all the questions; build your own set of questions in the niche.
Collect all the questions in a Google sheet and make sure that they are 1-liner questions asked by your target customers.
Building QnA Content
This is the most interesting part of seeing community content.
I was digging through all the Google Analytics data for the past 10 years of all the communities I built. The pages that drove traffic consistently were the questions and discussions with very long-tail keywords in the title.
Look at following examples:
How do I create an SEO optimized community as a solo founder?
What is the best community platform for D2C brands operating in United States?
What's special about these questions?
These questions are not general questions. They demand a very specific answer. Which means, these questions will have a very limited to no competition on the Internet.
All you have to do is answer the question in detail - better than anyone else.
SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs won't show these questions in their data; because they can't capture them. You'll be surprised how many people in the world search for such questions.
The math to building traffic works like this:
Let's say - only 10 people in the world are looking for "SEO optimized community building as a solo founder". This applies to each long-tail query you've compiled.
If your community has answered 10 such questions in depth - you're looking at 100 monthly visitors at least.
If you your community has answered 100 such questions - 1000 visitors per month.
But that's not the best part: You've created content once - and now you're attracting at least 100 - 1000 users every month. These are not just ordinary users. They are interested in the topic you care about - in the niche your SaaS operates in.
CAUTION
In real world, things don't move that fast. It'd be foolish to expect building 100 QnAs on your community in the first month and expecting traffic in the second month.
Remember - community is a long-term game. Your job is to answer about 200 - 300 questions with long-tail keywords in the first 2-3 months without expecting any traffic.
Yes, it's hard - but it's doable; and you should do it.
Ideal Content Plan
If you want better results - here's a hack you should consider. Split your content 80/20. That is 80% of your overall content should be in the QnA / Discussion format and the rest 20% should be long-form articles.
Each article should link to 2-3 discussions internally - and these discussions should link back to the article. Ensure that you are linking to the very relevant articles / questions internally to form "topical cluster".
A topical cluster helps search engines understand the content better and faster; and you'll be rewarded with traffic quicker.
Community Growth
Once your community has seed content, it's time to plan for its growth.
While the SEO / GEO will take some time to kick-in; you need to test your community. Invite about 5-10 people who you can personally talk to over the phone or email.
Invite them personally, introduce them to the community and observe their actions.
Actions speak louder than their words or feedback.
People usually don't give negative feedback to the people they know. However, their actions don't lie.
Observe:
What type of content are your users engaging with?
What type of questions or articles are they commenting on?
Are they asking questions? Which pages do they stay longer on?
Do they come back to the community at least once a week?
You might want to nudge them to post, engage and seek feedback. Analyze the data and find out if the community is creating value for your users.
Keep in mind: Your users will engage with community ONLY IF they find value in it.
Your job is to find out what kind of value are users deriving from the community.
Once your community has some traction, it's time for you to work on engagement and retention.
Community Members Engagement and Retention Activities
Even if your members are returning and contributing to the community; you will need to organize community engagement activities. These activities make the community human and lively.
Every community should have:
Member of the Month: Recognize and reward most helpful contributors
AMAs: Get domain experts from the industry and from within the community to host an AMA.
Meetups: Virtual or offline meetups - if possible.
We have created a separate guide on our community that talks about 11 budget-friendly ideas to boost activity and engagement in your community.
Concluding Thoughts
SaaS communities are built around specific niche that your business operates in. If done correctly, your community becomes your ultimate growth engine.
The benefits of a thriving SaaS community are beyond just new lead generation. It also gives you:
Real world feedback from users
Insights into pain-points users face
Helps you deflect customer support requests to community
Build a loyal network of customers
Shape your product roadmap
Create strong customer advocacy and more
If you have questions about community strategy - and how you can build your own community, my team members and I are always happy to help. You may book a free consultation call or ask questions in Jatra Community.