Welcome to the Community-Driven Growth Revolution
As AI levels the playing field, the best products turn users into communities. This newsletter is your guide to growth through connection, trust, and advocacy—not just funnels.
A few years ago, I started noticing something interesting in the companies that were quietly outgrowing their competitors. They weren’t the ones with the biggest marketing budgets or the most aggressive sales teams. They weren’t necessarily the ones with the most features or the lowest prices.
They were the ones that had figured out something profound: the fastest way to grow a product isn’t to acquire more users—it’s to help your existing users find each other.
Discord grew to 150 million users without a traditional marketing budget. Notion went from productivity tool to cultural phenomenon largely through user-generated content and community advocacy. Figma became the design industry standard by empowering individual designers to bring the tool into their companies.
These weren’t accidents. They were the predictable results of a different approach to growth—one that treats community not as a nice-to-have, but as the engine that drives everything else.
The Problem with the Traditional Growth Playbook
Most companies follow a predictable pattern: build features, acquire users, optimize conversion, reduce churn, repeat. It’s linear, measurable, and feels controllable. But it’s also expensive, exhausting, and increasingly ineffective.
This approach treats users as isolated entities moving through a funnel, when the reality is that people make decisions within the context of their communities. They ask friends for recommendations. They trust peer reviews over marketing copy. They stay loyal to products that make them feel part of something bigger than themselves.
The companies that understand this have a secret weapon: while their competitors are fighting for attention in crowded markets, they’re creating spaces where users naturally want to spend time. While others rely on expensive customer acquisition, they benefit from organic word-of-mouth. While most struggle with customer retention, they achieve rates that seem impossible.
The data tells the story: companies with engaged communities see retention rates of 90%+ (versus industry averages of 30-40%), turn over 80% of community members into brand advocates, and watch community-engaged users upsell at 3x higher rates than non-community users.
Why Now?
Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by this subject. While building Replyke, a SaaS that helps developers integrate social features into their products, I wanted to understand the true importance of social features and community for product growth. What started as research to better understand my own offering turned into a deep dive that revealed just how transformative community-driven strategies can be.
But there’s a bigger reason why this matters more now than ever before: we’re entering the age of AI-powered product development. In 2025, with AI making it easier than ever to build products, the traditional competitive advantages are disappearing. If before products could attract users based on functionality alone, that’s becoming increasingly rare. There will be more and more products offering similar capabilities, built faster and cheaper than ever before.
In this new landscape, community isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s becoming the primary differentiator. While features can be copied overnight and pricing can be undercut by competitors, communities create switching costs that go far beyond rational decision-making. They build emotional connections, create network effects, and establish moats that are nearly impossible to replicate.
The companies that master community-driven growth won’t just outperform their competitors—they’ll make competition irrelevant.
What This Newsletter Will Explore
Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll dive deep into the strategies, tactics, and mental models behind successful community-driven products. Through real case studies, research analysis, and practical experimentation, we’ll explore questions like:
What makes certain users become community catalysts and how to identify them early
The specific features and experiences that create genuine belonging and drive long-term engagement
How different companies have built and scaled their communities across various industries and business models
The psychology behind why communities work and what drives people to become advocates
Platform strategies and the evolving landscape of community-building tools
The common pitfalls that derail community efforts and how to navigate them
This isn’t about me delivering a preset curriculum—it’s about exploring these concepts together, sharing discoveries, and building understanding through both successes and failures. I’m as curious as you are about what works and what doesn’t.
Who This Is For
This newsletter is designed for:
Product leaders who want to build retention and engagement into their core strategy
Marketers looking to move beyond traditional acquisition tactics
Founders building their first community or scaling existing ones
Community professionals who want to understand business impact
Anyone curious about why some products inspire devotion while others are quickly forgotten
Whether you’re at a startup trying to find product-market fit or an established company looking to reignite growth, the principles we’ll explore apply across industries and business models.
A Personal Note
I’m not writing this newsletter as a distant observer. Through building Replyke and my own community-driven initiatives, I’m learning alongside you. I’ll share what works, what doesn’t, and the messy realities of putting these concepts into practice.
This is also an invitation to join a community of practitioners who are redefining how products grow. I’ll be sharing insights, asking questions, and highlighting the work of others who are pioneering this approach. Your experiences, challenges, and successes will make this newsletter better.
What’s Next
In upcoming posts, we’ll start diving into specific aspects of community-driven growth—from the psychology of user retention to the tactical strategies that turn users into advocates. We’ll examine real case studies, explore emerging trends, and tackle the practical challenges of implementation.
But before we dive deeper, I want to hear from you: What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to user retention or community building? What companies do you admire for their community strategy? What questions do you want us to explore together?
Hit reply and let me know. Your input will help shape what we discover together.
Welcome to the community-driven growth revolution. Let’s build something extraordinary.
Good luck! :)