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  • Why is Community Building Important for Startups in 2025?

    Kaustubh Katdare

    Community Administrator

    Updated: Mar 25, 2025
    Views: 491

    Howdy Jatra Community Members! 👋 Thought I’d get your views on Why community building is important for startups. Having a thriving community for your business is no longer a ‘nice to have’, but an essential in 2025.

    I’ve worked at a startup and I noticed that we spent a lot of money on ads, influencers and PR. As the Head of Growth, I was responsible for finding out the quickest way to grow the business, grow profits and most importantly - retain our existing users.

    We started with a Slack group; but quickly ran into challenges. For example, Slack didn’t give us any organic growth. We then moved to Circle; but that didn’t work for us because of its poor SEO focus. We eventually switched to Discourse - but it was a nightmare to manage.

    A couple of points to kick-off this discussion -

    • According to CMX, 86% of the companies say community is critical to their mission. Yet very few invest in it early.

    • Word-of-mouth is the gold! How do you get word of mouth? Well, through communities

    • Feedback? Hello Community!

    But building a community takes time. For most founders, it’s about creating a Discord server and then waiting for users to join.

    Let me know your thoughts.

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  • Paula Derrenger

    Member • 1w

    I agree with your take, Kaustubh. I think we discussed this during our call.

    I used to focus only on product and sales. We thought we'd focus on community AFTER we had several customers. I was wrong! I now realize that communities need to invest in startups as soon as they begin working on the MVP.

    The idea of building a community around our SaaS tool came from one of our customers. I participated in a support chat, and the user had a lot of feedback to share. I asked them to write an email and they said - why don't you have a forum for us to share feedback?

    We started with a small Slack group and have moved our community to the Jatra Community Platform. Our community is growing - thanks to Kaustubh's advice on SEO and content.

    An important aspect of communities is trust building. When you see other customers actively engaging with the company execs, you are tempted to share and contribute your own thoughts, ideas and feedback.

    We noticed that ever since we launched our community, our churn has dropped by 18%;and it's just been about 5 months. We are also noticing a steady rise in the referrals.

    I know community building is a slow process. But from my experience, every startup should invest in building their own community.

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  • Sia Kate

    Member • 1w

    We actually A/B tested community onboarding approach. TL;DR - 27% higher activation.

    Here's how we did it: Tested two onboarding paths

    • Group A: Got email + product tour
    • Group B: Was onboarded to our community

    The community group (B) showed 27% higher day-30 activation. We talked to the customers and asked several questions. Everyone mentioned about the usefulness of the community and the confidence it built in them.

    We are now experimenting with writing SEO optimized content on our community to get free traffic.

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