How to Drive Business Growth By Fostering Your Community

Communities can impact product in other ways beyond raising issues or suggesting features, too. Managing an active open source community is a great way to have users directly contribute to product growth. 

When aligned, there’s a clear relationship between GTC and GTM, with community members transitioning to leads when the time is right. Until then, they’re gaining value from, and hopefully contributing value to, the community.

Ideally, this value creation drives community growth and, as we’ll see below, value capture for the business will occur as a second-order effect of that growth. 

A community provides a place for users to share their insights and fascination with others, often leading to more sign-ups and active users. 

Support forums can also be instrumental for helping users get their product questions answered, so they can get up to speed and discover value sooner. With community members volunteering knowledge and answers, there’s less overhead on the company.

Referral is one of the primary currencies of communities. It’s a deeper level of advocacy in which members are so bought into your community and product that they’re willing to put their own reputation on the line and refer it to others. 

Community, though, considers the entire audience around a product – even those who may not qualify as a qualified lead in the short term. And rather than capturing value from these people, GTC seeks to create value with and for them. Rather than discarding them to email drip campaign limbo, as you would in a funnel-driven GTM process, GTC embraces ... See more

Everyone’s familiar with the concept of a go-to-market (GTM) plan, but in the world of bottom-up adoption and product-led growth, a go-to-community (GTC) plan is equally as important.

In a GTC context, a company’s community should drive positive word of mouth (online or in-person) or create popular content that drives awareness.