21 Ways to 1,000 Leads to Join Your Community

In this article, you will learn how to leverage community-led growth to acquire new users and drive revenue, supported by real-world examples from successful software CEOs. These founders have masterfully built communities around their products, turning users into evangelists and creating a powerful, sustainable growth flywheel. You’ll get the 6-part playbook to launch your own community, complete with dozens of case studies to inspire your strategy.

These examples are collected directly from CEOs of companies with combined revenues in the hundreds of millions, speaking at Founderpath events. You’ll hear from top founders like Guillaume Moubeche at Lemlist, Ketan Anjaria at Hireclub, and Sarah Hawley at GrowMotely.

The 6-Part Playbook For Community-Led Growth

1. Find Your People (And Where They Hang Out): Before building your own community, become a trusted voice in existing communities where your ideal customers already gather. The team at Factors.ai did this by becoming a top marketing analytics voice on LinkedIn, which helped them build an initial audience and authority before launching their own focused community.
2. Build Your ‘Watering Hole’ With a Clear Purpose: Create a dedicated space for your audience—like a Slack channel, Discord server, or Facebook Group—with a mission that is bigger than just your product. Lemlist’s CEO Guillaume Moubeche created “The Sales Automation Family” Facebook group, which grew to nearly 10,000 members by focusing on helping salespeople succeed, fueling Lemlist’s growth past a $2 million run rate.
3. Seed the Community With High-Value Content: An empty community is a dead community. Kickstart engagement by creating and sharing high-value content that sparks conversation and provides immediate value. Mode’s CEO Derek Steer shared how their “SQL School” tutorial became one of the most popular on the internet, attracting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors and establishing their brand as an authority, helping them grow to over $19 million in ARR.
4. Co-Create With Your Founding Members: Turn your early adopters into true partners by involving them in the product development process. Their feedback is invaluable, and their involvement fosters a sense of ownership that turns them into powerful advocates. Sarah Hawley at GrowMotely built a pre-launch waitlist of 5,000 people by engaging them in a community-driven survey to “co-create the future of work,” converting hundreds into registered users on day one.
5. Host Exclusive Events & Experiences: Create unique opportunities for connection and learning that members can only access by being part of the community. This solidifies the value of membership and strengthens relationships. Weekend Club, a community for bootstrappers, grew out of in-person meetups and now hosts weekly virtual sprints, creating a highly engaged, paying membership base that reached over $2,000 in MRR.
6. Bridge Community, Product, and Revenue: A thriving community is not just a support channel; it’s a powerful growth engine. It drives top-of-funnel awareness, provides critical feedback for your product roadmap, and surfaces monetization opportunities. Sophie Buonassisi of GTMfund explained their “Product, Media, Community” flywheel, where the community of 350+ GTM experts provides direct support to portfolio companies, fueling their success and the fund’s growth.

40+ Examples of Community-Led Growth

1. Find Your People (And Where They Hang Out)

• Pavel Ershov of Directual shared that his low-code platform grew to its first 50 customers by engaging with existing no-code communities, providing tutorials, and running webinars that offered a 30% rev-share, helping him reach $2k MRR.
• Srikrishnan Swaminathan from Factors.ai detailed how they established themselves as a top marketing analytics voice on LinkedIn before building their own community, which was key to scaling past a $2 million ARR.
• Mariam Hakobyan of Softr explained their growth to over 10,000 users was almost entirely organic, driven by word-of-mouth within Twitter communities of no-code enthusiasts, leading them to a $2.2 million seed round.
• The team at Topic got their first 10 customers by going to SEO events and engaging with marketing leaders in Slack groups like Traffic Think Tank and Demand Curve, which helped them scale to $21k MRR.
• Will from Side-by shared that they built their initial 300-person waitlist by engaging with potential users on Product Hunt, Reddit, and Twitter, providing value and unsolicited advice to build trust.
• Anthony Kennada explained that before Gainsight hosted its own massive conference, they first engaged with a small, local meetup for customer success managers, validating the hunger for community that fueled their growth to over $100M ARR.
• Adam Robinson of Retention.com shared that before building his own audience, he joined relevant communities and used their insights to validate his ideas, a strategy that helped him bootstrap to $22 million in revenue.

2. Build Your ‘Watering Hole’

• Hireclub’s founder, Ketan Anjaria, started a Facebook group in 2011 to solve his own hiring needs. This community organically grew to over 32,000 members and became the foundation for a SaaS business now doing $25k MRR.
• Guillaume Moubeche from Lemlist launched “The Sales Automation Family” on Facebook, a community that grew to nearly 10,000 members by focusing on helping salespeople succeed, which fueled Lemlist’s rapid growth from $600k to over $2M in ARR.
• Rob Fujita, CEO of Zuberance, explained how they help brands build “advocate armies” in dedicated online communities. For Intuit QuickBooks, this strategy cultivated a community of over 250,000 advocates, helping Zuberance scale past a $12M run rate.
• Jared Robin grew RevGenius from a LinkedIn chat into a thriving Slack community of over 15,000 sales and marketing professionals. By focusing on member value, the community now generates over $500k annually through sponsorships.
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Ness Labs built a community of 1,500 paying members by launching a private forum alongside her neuroscience-based content, creating a space for discussion that drives over $75k in ARR.
• Prabhat Sahu, CEO of SAWO, grew a community of 12,000 developers on Discord and Slack by providing immense value first. This developer-centric approach fueled the company’s growth to over $130k in MRR.
• Aneto Okonkwo of Chatdesk built a community around a free automatic tagging solution that provided immediate value to customer service leaders. This created a trusted entry point that allowed them to triple their ARR in one year through upsells.
• Cliff Simon from Carabiner Group explained how being hyper-responsive and helpful in communities like Pavilion and RevOps Co-op built a powerful word-of-mouth engine, attributing 80% of their revenue growth to $6M to community-led efforts.
• Stefan Smulders of Expandi created an exclusive, closed Facebook group for users, which became a key driver for feedback and created a loyal “army” of advocates. This strategy was central to their bootstrapped growth to a $7 million run rate in 20 months.

3. Seed the Community With High-Value Content

• The Mode team created “SQL School,” a highly popular tutorial that approached learning SQL from an analyst’s perspective. This content attracted hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month, building a strong brand and community that powered their growth to $19M ARR.
• Michal Malewicz of Hype4 turned his university lecture notes into a successful ebook, “Designing UI,” which has generated over $170,000 in revenue. This content-first approach built a massive community and a newsletter with 15,000 subscribers, fueling his agency’s growth past $500k.
• Kyle Poyar of OpenView highlighted that high-value content can be a powerful way to kickstart a community, creating conversations and discussions that attract target users. His own newsletter, “Growth Unhinged,” grew to over 20,000 readers in two years with zero ad spend, purely through community referrals.
• John Doherty, founder of Credo, published an industry pricing guide that became a cornerstone piece of content. This data-rich guide generated a massive number of backlinks and established Credo as an authority, driving leads worth over $250 million.
• Nikhil from UseTopic created free tools and posted valuable content on SEO forums to attract their initial customers, a strategy that grew their business from $0 to $21k MRR in just over a year.

4. Co-Create With Your Founding Members

• The GrowMotely team built a pre-launch waitlist of 5,300 people by launching a community campaign centered around a “Future of Work” survey. This co-creation effort converted 793 professionals and 50 companies into registered users in the first month.
• Andrei Zinkevich of FullFunnel.io used his 4,000-member Facebook community to find beta testers for his SaaS tool, ROI Plan. The feedback from these 50 beta tests was critical in defining the MVP and securing his first paying customers.
• Nathan Doctor from Qualified.io explained how they built CodeWars, a community of over a million developers, by gamifying the experience of learning to code. This community became the perfect validation ground and initial customer base for their main hiring assessment platform, which now serves over 350 customers.
• Sal from Lightster co-builds his product by creating dedicated communities of qualified users and rewarding them for their input. This approach has attracted over 6,000 users and helped the company reach $7k MRR while being bootstrapped.
• The founder of Conveno, a corporate spin-off, built a community called “ahead X” for internal communications professionals. This closed community became their primary channel for gathering feedback and generating trusted referrals that led to their shortest deal cycles.

5. Host Exclusive Events & Experiences

• Charlie Ward’s Weekend Club evolved from a local in-person meetup for indie hackers into a paid virtual co-working community. The exclusive weekly sprints provide structure and accountability, fostering a loyal member base that has grown to over $2k MRR.
• Alex Theuma of SaaStock transformed his media brand into a global conference series by first hosting local meetups. Today, SaaStock is a major event with over 5,000 attendees, generating millions in revenue and fostering a massive ecosystem of side events.
• Prentus CEO Rod Danan hosts live YouTube events with tech leaders and VPs of engineering. These events provide invaluable advice to his community of boot camp grads, helping him grow his intern waitlist from 8 to over 110 in just a few months.
• Anthony Kennada, former CMO of Gainsight, shared how they grew their Pulse conference from 300 attendees to 6,000 by creating an event that became the “home” for the customer success industry, ultimately sourcing 85% of every deal they closed.
• Jason Lemkin of SaaStr turned his popular blog into one of the world’s largest SaaS conferences, which now attracts over 10,000 attendees and generates an estimated $27 million in annual revenue, with a significant portion coming from high-value sponsorships.

6. Bridge Community, Product, and Revenue

• Sachin Gupta of HackerEarth built a massive community of 4.5 million developers on their free skills assessment platform. This community acts as a powerful top-of-funnel for their enterprise product, helping the company scale to a $6 million run rate with over 500 customers.
• GTMfund’s Sophie Buonassisi described their growth flywheel where their community of GTM experts provides built-in support for portfolio companies and serves as a source of expert content for their media arm, creating a self-reinforcing growth loop.
• Max Rofagha of Finimize revealed that community-engaged subscribers have half the churn rate of non-engaged users. This insight proved that fostering community directly impacts retention and lifetime value, helping them build an API business that now accounts for 30% of their total revenue.
• Funnelytics founder Mikael Dia launched his business through a Facebook group, growing it to 3,000 members in two months. This community-first launch generated $28,000 in 48 hours and powered the company to $1.5 million in its first year.
• Mark Abbott of Ninety.io leveraged the existing Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) coaching community to acquire his first customers. This community-based GTM helped him bootstrap the company to a $2.8 million run rate with over 1,900 paying customers.
• Guy Rubin, CEO of ebsta, emphasized that understanding the relationships and engagement within your customer community is vital. By analyzing this data, his sales teams can 3x their win rates, contributing to their impressive growth.
• Bryn Jones from GrowSumo built a marketplace for influencer programs, which acts as a community for both B2B SaaS companies and the influencers who promote them. This model helped them grow 50% month-over-month and serve over 70 paying customers.
• Crystal CEO Drew D’Agostino used a freemium product to build a large organic funnel of over 1,000 signups per day. This massive community, built through SEO and multiplayer features, provided the foundation to pivot into a more sustainable B2B sales model.
• Florian Leibert, co-founder of D2iQ, explained that building on and contributing to a pre-existing open-source community was crucial. This community-centric approach gave them credibility and an initial user base that helped them raise over $252 million in funding.

Conclusion

You just learned the 6-part playbook for building a powerful community-led growth engine, supported by over 40 real-world examples from top SaaS founders. By finding where your people are, building a valuable space for them, and consistently delivering exclusive value, you can turn your user base from passive consumers into active advocates. This strategy not only drives user acquisition but also enhances retention, provides invaluable product feedback, and creates a competitive moat that is nearly impossible to replicate. To get started funding these initiatives, you can get instant, non-dilutive capital from Founderpath.

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