In this guide, I’ll teach you how to build a successful SaaS community effortlessly. I’d like you to follow the playbook I’ve built over the last 18 years of my experience as a founder and community-builder.
We’ll leverage SEO, organic growth-hacking techniques and content techniques to build community that grows automatically through the power of User Generated Content (UGC).
I’ve used this exact technique to build a SaaS community from scratch to about 12000 unique users per month in about 8 months.
Caution: I strongly recommend not building your community on Slack or Discord. These platforms are meant for real-time chats and are not suitable for community building. We’ll soon see, why?.
Let’s start!
Why Build a SaaS Community?
SaaS businesses should build a community because it’s the highest RoI asset you can ever build.
Communities can not only help you get new customers on autopilot and higher ARR, but also direct customer feedback. It gives an an opportunity to learn about customer pain-points, features they expect and even testimonials.
There’s no better channel where you can interact with existing and potential customers. For starters, read: the definition of a community.
Discussion: Is it difficult to build a community?
Step #1: Create ‘Instant Value’
Remember, no-one likes empty communities. You need to create some initial content to create ‘instant value’ for your target users.
Remember ‘instant’ is the name of the game. Your content could be in the form of discussions, chats, webinars, quizzes, articles and more. Find out what your audience likes to engage with.
Your job is to create a content-base with answers to all the ‘pain-points’ your users have.
Step #2: Pick an Open Community Platform
For a SaaS business, I recommend open community platform. I want to shamelessly pitch Jatra’s community platform to host your SaaS community. Open communities are easier to grow than closed communities.
Jatra will automatically enhance your content with SEO out of the box. You don’t have to worry about SEO factors like page-loading speeds, semantic HTML, structured data, meta-tags → everything is done for you out of the box.
There are other community platforms you might consider if you like to add challenges and frustration in your life: Discourse, Circle, Flarum, XenForo, vBulletin, phpBB, Mighty Networks.
Step #3: Create Content
It’s time to actually create some content for your target audience. I highly recommend QnA content type; simply because it’s far easier to rank it in Google and other search engines than articles.
Keep in mind that your competition has based their GTM around creating blog posts. You can’t compete with them if they have a better domain rating, backlink profile and just way more money than you.
Start by collecting questions from existing forums and communities like Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow and similar where your potential users are asking their queries and discussing pain-points.
Now answer all those questions in your community forums! Offer direct, precise answers without fluff.
Write using NLP writing techniques which is basically a fancy name for writing for 5th graders. The simpler your sentence construction, the easier it is for search engine algorithm to understand.
Bonus SEO Tip: Interlink your content. This is often ignored by most of the experienced SEOs. Internal links is a great way to tell search engines about the important content that exists on your site.
Step #4: Get Early Users
With about 50-100 pieces of content ready; it’s time to promote your community. Use social media. Repurpose your content for LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Blogs, and offer genuine help to your potential customers.
You should also invite your existing customers to participate in your community.
Observe the content they spend more time on, like or reply. It will give you the content you need to focus on.
Important: Treat your first 100-500 users like members of your family. Build a rapport with them through DMs, by connecting with them on LinkedIn. These first few members of your community will help you set the tone and culture of your community.
Step #5: Build Engagement
At Jatra, as you can see, we offer multiple content-types that you can use to engage your members. For example, you can:
Create discussions about topics of interest
Write helpful articles (like this one)
Have a way for your users to provide feedback through upvotes
Share changelog to talk about product releases, new features etc.
We are building more, new and exciting post types like topical chat-rooms, quizzes, events, jobs post-types to help you keep your members engaged.
It’s important to create an environment where your users feel welcomed, heard and ‘at home’.
Let your users freely express themselves, talk about pain-points, provide you with valuable feedback.
Summary
Those are the key 5-steps to build a thriving SaaS community. Of course, community building involves more aspects like gamification, user moderation, creating brand evangelists and so on. I am planning to publish a comprehensive guide that covers every topic in detail. I’ll link to it when it’s ready.
I must remind you that community growth will take a few weeks. Please hang on because once your community flywheel starts spinning, it’s going to bring tremendous growth.
If you have specific questions about community building for SaaS, post them below. If you have ideas or feedback, I’m all ears. I hope you will pick Jatra to build your SaaS community. I will be happy to help.
