Building a community has become a table-stakes requirement for startups today. 88% of founders say that ‘community is critical to their company mission’ and there are over 1 million Google search results that will try to convince you that ‘community is the new moat’.

In this essay, I explain why both of those facts are bullshit.

Most companies today build disempowered communities that contribute nothing to competitive defensibility or the company’s mission — but it doesn’t have to be this way.

By studying successful community-led startups like Notion, Airtable and Figma, you quickly realize that these companies have catalyzed compounding growth by leveraging one secret ingredient...

Push vs. Pull Communities

Of the 88% of founders who say that ‘community is critical to their company mission’, the vast majority are really just doing what we can consider ‘Community Value Extraction’. To keep things simple, let’s call these folks the push team.

The push team has gone to a lot of effort to build their community. They’ve set up and advertised their Slack workspaces, Facebook groups and Q&A forums to assemble as many like-minded people as possible. They hire more employees to answer Q&A posts, moderate the Facebook group, and respond to user messages on Slack.

However, as the community grows, a disconnect occurs which can lead to disastrous consequences — the value that the company earns from each new community member starts to decrease.

Each new question on the Q&A forum becomes a repeat of a previously answered one. Your Facebook group becomes increasingly filled with spam. It’s just as easy today to recruit a handful of beta testers from Slack as it was last year with 10x fewer members — but now you need 3 extra employees to moderate the ever-growing list of Slack channels.

At a certain point, community management becomes too much of a burden for the value it returns. So the community becomes less moderated and either gets filled with spam, goes dormant, or both.

Why could the push team, with all its newly hired Community Managers, not build the momentum to turn their community into a source of compounding growth? That’s because these communities lack the most important ingredient for community-led growth — autonomy.

What Community-Led Startups Uniquely Understand

The opposite of Community Value Extraction is the much-fabled Community-Led Growth.

What makes community-led startups special is that members of their communities independently take actions that result in the growth of the company.

These actions are not policed, moderated or controlled by the company. Instead, it’s the company’s job to build the systems that empower community members to take independent action, provide the right incentives to guide members towards your intended actions, and share the benefits of the resulting growth with the members responsible for creating it.

These three steps — empower, incentivize and recognize — are what allow a community to have a greater impact on company growth than any internal sales or marketing team. That external driving force from the community is what powers growth for the pull team.

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Comparing Real Life Push vs. Pull Communities

Pitch.com — Community as a communication channel

Pitch is an online tool that allows over 125,000 teams to collaboratively build presentation decks (imagine Powerpoint but made for the internet).

Like most companies on the push side, Pitch’s early efforts in community building were focused on assembling as many users in one place to make internal company tasks easier. The cornerstone of Pitch’s community is a public Slack workspace that’s used to make company announcements, recruit beta testers, and answer customer questions.

You can clearly from Pitch’s community benefits list that they created this community just to simplify communication with their users:

Screenshot (framed right) from Pitch’s Community Page with highlights added by me.

These benefits are all actions that are tightly controlled by the company internally. That’s because Pitch isn’t trying to build a community-led growth engine — they’re just focused on gathering a bunch of willing participants in one place to help each internal team extract value with minimal effort.

A quick look at the channels and most recent messages on Pitch’s Slack community confirms the same hypothesis — their community exists to help each internal team extract value from users with as little effort as possible.

Pitch’s Slack channels neatly map to their internal functional teams...

Pitch themselves even describe their approach to community as a way of getting value from their users. For example, check out the blog post summary below written by the Pitch team:

This is a clear example of a company that’s pushing the growth of their community, rather than the community pulling the company into new growth opportunities. Pitch isn’t unique; most companies that claim to be community-led look like this.

But there’s a little minority of startups that truly are community-led — let’s look at a company that flipped Pitch’s approach on its head and built a community that is core to the company’s growth and success to date (all without ever even creating a Slack workspace 👀).

Notion — Community as a core identity

If Google Docs and Lego had a baby, it would be Notion. It’s a collaborative workspace for writing, planning, organizing and sharing different types of documents that are all connected and nested together like Lego pieces in one easy-to-use platform.

Notion is one of the best examples of a tech company that’s driven growth primarily through community-led action.

With one quick look at Notion’s community page, it’s immediately clear how they differ from Pitch in community autonomy:

**Notion’s Community Page** (with autonomous community actions highlighted added by me)

Let’s look at how Notion achieved such strong community-led growth through the lens of our three previously mentioned autonomy categories:

Empower

Q: What systems did Notion build to give members autonomy?

A: Notion community groups aren’t centrally managed by the company. Instead, Notion allows its members to create and moderate their own community groups around different niches such as location, interest and profession. The same goes for events — not only does Notion support events and webinars run by community members with resources, suggestions and checklists, they even curate a community calendar to promote those events to the broader Notion community.

Incentivize

Q: How did Notion encourage members to focus on the right actions that would contribute towards their internally identified objectives and priorities?

A: There’s a bunch of great examples for this one:

Notion built a template gallery to give members a space to share their creations with other users.
They created a community translation program to give members a way to speed up Notion’s adoption of any unsupported language members were waiting for.
The previously mentioned curated calendar of community-run events and webinars.
The best one of all — Notion sends branded swag and goodies (which can’t be bought from any store or website) to the people who contribute to any of these community-led activities!

Recognize

Q: How did Notion legitimize and reward the members that contributed most to its community?

A: Other than the previously mentioned ‘Notion Swag System’, Notion has two main recognition systems in place:

Each month, Notion officially recognizes 20 new Notion Ambassadors by selecting members who are contributing the most to community building (events, webinars, workshops, courses, and user groups) and content creation (videos, templates, Notion tools/apps, translations). These ambassadors retain full autonomy and are even encouraged to leverage their new title and credibility to generate income from their existing work — for example, Notion has a directory to matchmake official Notion Certified Consultants with inbound client work.
Notion financially sponsors community members that share Notion-related content on their YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels (once they meet a minimum subscriber base threshold and are covering a relevant topic).

From Olivia Nottebohm’s (Chief Revenue Officer at Notion) keynote at SaaStr Annual 2021 titled: “Mastermind Masterclass: How Community-Led Growth Drives Product-Led Growth with Notion's CRO”. From top to bottom, we can see our three headings in action: Recognize, Incentivize and Empower.

What does all this autonomy add up to for Notion?

Community-Led Growth is not just about customer acquisition. By sharing autonomy with their members, Notion’s community members proactively contribute to the objectives of almost every internal team in the company. The community drives brand awareness by running events and webinars, it drives onboarding success by creating Notion walkthrough videos on YouTube, and it drives activation success by offering services like Notion Consultants for different niches and client types.

Baby Steps...

Any company can build a community and extract value from it, but the only way to turn that community into an engine for growth is to give members autonomy.

Almost every startup will naturally start on the push side. However, unless you design the right systems to incentivize, empower and recognize community autonomy, it isn’t guaranteed that you’ll ever transition across the gap to Community-Led Growth.

Pitch may have started on the wrong foot with their Slack-dominant community strategy, but they are clearly making changes to move in the right direction. In November 2021, they launched the Pitch Presentation Gallery which gives users a curated space to share and promote their best Pitch templates and presentations with other users.

I truly believe that the vast majority of startups have the potential to build community-powered growth engines. If you’re wondering how you can make the leap across the autonomy gap, the best place to start is by answering the following question:

What objectives am I internally controlling today that my community could do better if I only had the systems in place to empower, incentivize and recognize their efforts?

This essay was written by Daniel Kyne, Co-Founder & CEO of OpinionX — a research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities. OpinionX helps 1,500+ product and design teams at companies like Adidas, Instacart and Unbounce to measure what matters most to their customers so that they can make better decisions with real data.

Create a stack rank survey on OpinionX today (it’s completely free — no trial or credit card required!)

The Autonomy Gap: The Secret Ingredient for Community-Led Growth