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  • Should we hire a community manager for a small community?

    Megan Miller

    Megan Miller

    @meganm
    Updated: Jul 24, 2025
    Views: 70

    We’re launching a niche customer community for our early-stage SaaS product and need help deciding: should we hire a full-time community manager at this stage?

    Our team is small, and we’ve had multiple discussions about whether it makes sense to bring in a dedicated community professional to build and grow the community from day one.

    We’ve moved away from platforms like Discord due to poor SEO and limited structure, and are now exploring options that support organic growth and content discoverability.

    Our goal is to build an engaged, value-driven space where customers can ask questions, share experiences, and learn from each other. But we’re unsure if managing that internally is enough - or if hiring someone with community-building experience is critical early on.

    If you've built a small community from scratch, especially for SaaS or B2B, how did you approach this? At what point did you hire a community manager, and what impact did it have? Are there signs that indicate when it’s the right time?

    Any advice, experiences, or resources would be greatly appreciated!

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  • Kaustubh Katdare

    @kaustubh-katdare • 3w

    Hi Megan! The decision to hire a community manager depends on several factors like your budget, business goals and the available bandwidth of existing team members.

    Short answer: You should hire a dedicated community manager for your small community. When hiring, make sure that they have a playbook to implement and can build content fast.

    I faced a similar challenge in my last role. We had tight budget and we were looking to kickstart our niche SaaS community for video developers. I did interview a few candidates for the role; but couldn't make offer to them because of salary expectations.

    So what did I do?

    I simply bought Ahrefs subscription for a month ($99/mo back then) and did a thorough keyword research. I made a list of about 400 top questions in the niche. I also looked at Google's suggestions, "People also ask" section and niche forums.

    I then built a community content calendar and followed it for the next 5 months. I dedicated about 30 - 45 minutes every day to building the initial content.

    We started getting traffic and organic member sign-ups in about 4 months. We knew that the process worked and then made our first hire for the community.

    The new hire already knew what they had to do and we followed it religiously for the next 12 months. Results? - From 0 visitors/month -> 18,000 visitors/month and a healthy 2% sign-up rate.

    A dedicated community manager for your community will become an asset. If the budgets don't permit, you can do it yourself by dedicating 30 minutes daily.

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