How do I grow an engaging software product community?

"How do I grow our SaaS product community?". If any question passes for a frequently asked question (FAQ), then it would be this. That’s how often I get it when speaking to product leaders, developer advocates, and dev community builders.

Growing an engaging community is tough, and growing an engaging product community is even tougher. In this post, I’ll share seven practical ways I’ve grown a product community in the past and still do through Hackmamba. I’ll skip the popular bits, like having a community leader or structuring the forum efficiently. These strategies also apply to any community; however, I think software product communities are more difficult to develop.

Typical communities are formed based on a shared interest, whereas product communities are formed with the inherent (can be selfish) desire to grow a product’s usage and deeper adoption ultimately.

TL;DR: It’s all about the people in your community, not you or your product.

Like typical FAQs, I wish this warranted a brief response, but it doesn’t. Here are em’ gems.

1. Be a facilitator and moderator rather than an owner

Every community has a ‘community manager’, or at least I think everyone should - Someone tasked primarily with the community's growth. Often, the community manager falls into the position of owner, leader, administrator, and creator, whose job is to drive engagement through consistent content creation, share insights, provide support, and generally keep the community active. If you do this, you probably feel like this model isn’t sustainable and can be a tad overwhelming, especially when the community isn’t responding to your content.

You want to be a facilitator and moderator. In this role, you set a direction and guide others to provide other community members with value. Get people to post content, cheer each other on, and facilitate programs led by community members. A great community should survive beyond you. Occasionally, experiment with ceding community moderation to an active community contributor. When the community grows large, recruit other facilitators from the community. To display self-sustainability, it’s essential that they are from the community as well.

2. Provide on-time support

An important aspect of a product community is support provision. While there’s an objective to grow the community, support provision should be speedy. This is a given unless you risk churn. Providing product support on issues and questions also delivers instant value to new community joiners.

Piggy-backing on the ‘facilitation’ mental model, you also want to grow a community where other members feel empowered to provide support, and the members are incentivized for it. Explore incentive models like an exclusive access program or a point system to reward such members because, hey, they save you support costs. Give away that extra conference ticket to your community. Premium swag items are also great. Everyone loves a plush hoodie.

3. Have one-on-one conversations

This is a super valuable strategy. Like every physical or virtual community, it’s all about the people. Helping them feel seen, safe, heard, and empowered. Speaking to ‘everyone’ is the default, but speaking to each person makes the most impact. Make no mistake, community announcements are great, however, try to engage in 1-to-1 conversations with community members as much as possible. Make it a chore to welcome new joiners by their name, handle, or tag. Send DMs to connect and let them know you’re invested in their success within and possibly outside the community. This strategy has proven effective in getting timely and direct feedback from members who otherwise are afraid of speaking in public spaces.

4. Find a powerful common ground

You may think a product community already has a common ground: the product. Well, I’d say think deeply about why people care about your product, the value they get out of it, and the key transformation derived from the product. These are stronger themes to rally community members around. You care about your product, rightly so; you’re immersed in it daily, whereas your users care about the transformation your product delivers.

A goal as a community facilitator should also be to tell that transformation story through the community. You can do this through spotlights, case studies, or possibly a personal transformation. People bond better over a common enemy; the enemy, in this case, is the state before the transformation your product delivered. Capitalize on that common enemy.

5. Champion others

As humans, I think we’re inherently selfish. It's the hard truth, but that doesn’t make it false. People love to talk about themselves, share what they know, or share an experience. Maybe it’s why I write this. As I got the questions supporting this post, you can apply a similar strategy to your community by asking people to share their thoughts on a topic or an experience. They’ll happily do so if you ask the right questions. Then, you champion their response.

Make the person better, distribute their thoughts and content further, provide feedback, and get others to engage with their content. Over time, they’ll reciprocate this kind gesture by naturally contributing to the community. Also, when you ask the community to share their thoughts on a topic, mention a member directly rather than leave it open-ended for anyone to contribute.

6. Share content

You also have to put in original work. While the other strategies in this post help, your members must also trust that they can derive value from the community’s facilitators. If everything fails, you should be able to get a conversation going on a topic related to your product. Well-written medium-form content works. Between 150-300 words.

Sharing external content is also a good way to go. Try sharing tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. Find content that has an ongoing conversation on a different social platform because it has the potential to spur conversations in your community as well. When you share content, add your opinion as well, just as you would if it were a casual in-person conversation.

7. Make it a watering hole

If wildlife could speak, imagine what would be said at those watering holes in the savannahs we see on Nat-geo wild. Anything and everything. Watering holes are likened to bars; you probably can guess or know first-hand what’s said in those. With your product community, you probably don’t want to stretch it into an O’Learys pub, but you want it to be a place where members can have a light-hearted chatter about anything while staying within safe guidelines.

Ultimately, people want to have fun both on and off the screen. If they don’t, I guess you do. Curate a space in your community where folks can find and contribute to relatable jokes, share something personal, memes, or share cringey LinkedIn posts. It may be borderline against company policy, but from my experience, everyone loves a good laugh and, more importantly, comes back for more.

As far as conclusions go, I hope these insights from the front lines at Hackmamba help you grow your developer or product community, help others feel connected to your product, and, even better, connected to each other. If you’d like to chat about helping developers find your product and use it deeply through better no-BS content, talk to me.