Community-Led Growth: How In-App Communities Drive Retention and Revenue

Figma, GitHub, Notion, Lego, Airbnb, and Duolingo are highly popular examples of companies that turned community into a business growth engine. Discover how you can complement performance marketing by leveraging the power of community, with almost any audience (including the silent ones), and even in your own app. Join our exploration of what community-led growth involves in 2026. From core components to actual strategies, and how to effectively measure CLG’s impact on customer acquisition, retention, and other business outcomes.

What Is Community-Led Growth

The answer to what is community-led growth is simple: it is a business strategy that relies on community-building to drive acquisition and customer retention.

Unlike product-led growth (PLG), which focuses on the solution, CLG focuses on the user and their community experience. Community is the growth engine, and developing it involves much more than just embedding a chat/forum or running a Discord server. It involves fostering active participation at every stage of the funnel: awareness → activation → retention → expansion → advocacy.

This go-to-market strategy gives people a dedicated space to discover the product and the organisation behind it, while cultivating product enthusiasts and raving fans. Business growth is a byproduct of sustained community engagement.

Olivia Nottebohm, CRO of Notion, explains why growth is so important (markets value growth more than profit) and why community-led growth, in particular, is the “100-foot wave for SaaS entrepreneurs”:

“Growth is paramount [...] companies that are growing at over 60% as they hit $100 million in ARR are valued five times more than companies that are growing just a little less than that, say, at 20-60% as they hit $100 million in ARR.”

“We found that growth predicts success. So companies that are growing over 60% as they hit $100 million ARR are eight times more likely to ever make it to $1 billion in ARR [...], and growth is super hard to maintain. So those companies that were pacing at 60% growth as they hit $100 million in ARR, only 15% of them were able to maintain that growth as they grew to $1 billion. And finally, growth matters way more than margin.”
If product features are easy to replicate, your community’s support and advocacy create a more powerful, durable moat that naturally supports growth.

You’ll find community-led growth examples across various niches:

• Figma: A powerful community of designers who learn from each other and share their work and knowledge
• Peloton: Users who value shared workouts, rituals, and accountability
• Twitch: Communities around creators, with monetisation driven by social engagement
• Sports clubs like FC Barcelona: Engage fans to create value year-round and participate in events beyond just matches
• Robinhood: Social narratives and engagement through community sentiment

Audience vs Community

From media and sociology to psychology and marketing, it’s fascinating to see how the concept of “audience” is studied and defined from multiple perspectives. 

James Webster at Northwestern University examined these perspectives in his paper on audience segmentation. Audience as mass is a “large collection of people scattered across time and space who act autonomously and have little or no immediate knowledge of one another. They are defined as an entity by their common exposure to media.”

Simply put, in marketing, an audience is a large group of people you can market or sell to, who don’t interact much with each other. These prospective customers consume information targeted to them but contribute little through channels the organisation doesn't control (reviews, social media posts, comments, and mentions).
The reason why audience and community are often confused is that a community is, in fact, a part of the audience. But not just any part! A community is a group of people who have already been primed to express themselves and communicate with each other. They have a dedicated place to contribute, share their expertise, give feedback, and add value to other users. Unlike the general audience, the community is active and mutually beneficial – members grow their knowledge and connect with peers, and the organisation increases brand awareness, acquisition, and customer retention.

The pay-per-view live-streaming platform Livey can easily illustrate these notions. On Facebook and Instagram, its followers are general audiences. The actual community consists of the viewers who watch the live events on the platform and use the embedded chats. Conversations take place alongside the content, in a shared space specifically designed for participation.

From Performance Marketing to Community-Led Growth

Paid search, paid social, affiliate marketing, email and SMS are pillars of pure performance marketing. But they’re being complemented by community-led growth initiatives, largely due to traditional marketing burnout: too many channels, too much content pressure, increasing CAC, and fleeting user attention.
CLG is increasingly popular because it requires fewer resources and replaces some of the paid effort with advocacy and peer interaction:

Members are more likely to respond to each other than to marketing messages (a study shows that only 19% of young people trust large tech companies, and 74% trust peers and neighbours)

Communities build trust by being useful and educating (CMX found 67% of teams use public recognition to foster community engagement, and 46% reward community contributors with access to experts). 

The business impact of CLG, while harder to quantify compared to performance marketing, is still on a positive trend. In 2024, only 16% of respondents said they could confidently quantify the financial value of their community building, but that number rose to 24% in 2025. And of those who can quantify, nearly half report over $1M in impact.

When Community-Led Growth Works (and When It Doesn’t)

Some products solve problems that people simply don’t want to discuss publicly. In sensitive niches such as debt collection, addiction recovery, legal disputes, or personal medical conditions, discretion makes more sense than community connection.

Also, when you’re still figuring out your product-market fit, it may be too early to build a community if you haven’t clarified your target audience, market size, or the problems you’ll solve.
So, a community-led growth strategy makes sense when:

• You’re selling continuous-use products
• Your audience is motivated by identity, learning, fandom or lifestyle
• Your ICP benefits from other people’s presence (vs. solitude)
• The market shows low trust or comes with high customer acquisition costs

Reconsider it when your solution/service involves:

• One-time purchases (insurance claims, utilities, filing taxes, etc.)
• Very sensitive use cases, where people need discretion by default
• Participation requires thorough governance to avoid compliance, safety, or trust risks (platforms for minors, domestic abuse support tools, legal workflows, crisis systems, etc.)

Benefits of Community-Led Growth

People are searching for tools to solve their problems, but, over time, the value shifts from the actual tool to who else is using it and how users interact. Chris Dixon said it best: users come for the tool and stay for the network. 

But the shift has deeper reasons: “The deadliest form of human deprivation is loneliness,” wrote Psychology Today, citing, among other studies, one that shows humans have a powerful, unconscious need to be part of a broader community (aside from their family and close friends). This desire is satisfied by attending larger events and connecting with community leaders they identify with.

That said, community-led growth is what naturally happens when people stay for the network.

Higher retention is one of the biggest benefits of community-led growth. The community is a place where users want to be and stay. As they develop a sense of belonging, they adopt the product and encourage others to do the same. Therefore, greater adoption is another major benefit of CLG: 72% of community-led deals close within 90 days, compared to 42% for sales- and marketing-led deals (Common Room).

Increased loyalty is a natural consequence of people who stick with a brand for longer and keep using the product – they’ll trust it and be more likely to upgrade or respond to upsells over time. Statista found that 7 out of 10 consumers worldwide consider themselves loyal to a brand, citing trust and emotional attachment as the main reasons. And within communities, loyalty translates into repeat usage, grassroots engagement, and more UGC.

All these go full circle into higher LTV (through retention and loyalty) and lower CAC (through advocacy, word of mouth, and user-generated value). Community members who feel they belong will be loyal, active supporters who spend more with the organisation and encourage others to do the same.

Community-Led Growth for Platforms with «Silent» Audiences (Streaming, Sports, Fintech)

The 2025 CMX Community Industry report found that some audiences use apps purely for consumption and then head to WhatsApp (21%), Discord (16%), and “Other” social media channels (21%) to discuss it. Those are silent audiences, typically in the niches of football clubs, streaming platforms, trading/fintech, etc.
For organisations, this is a problem because:

• They can no longer control the experience and the relationships between users
• Learning what users discuss on other channels is infinitely harder (vs collecting first-party data)
• There are significantly fewer opportunities to sell, upsell, or cross-sell

That’s why in-app CLG is all the more important for platforms with silent audiences. Chats, co-watching, real-time text and voice, public and private rooms, second-screen experiences, all with built-in moderation, can facilitate a powerful community engagement layer.
Match TV, the largest sports broadcaster in the CIS region, faced this problem during the World Cup. After they embedded in-app chats and real-time community features, up to 95,000 unique users started to join the chats daily, and the average session length grew by 376%.

Core Components of a Community-Led Growth Strategy

The three stages of community-led growth are 1) Seeding the community, 2) Supporting growth and engagement, and 3) Measuring the business impact.
Throughout these stages, you’ll need:

• An active community: A place (typically online) where members feel they can engage and are not actively sold to (Discord, Reddit, Slack, Twitter, or in-app communities are a few options)
• High-value content: Information of interest that offers direct benefits (step-by-step guides from power users, playbooks, checklists, troubleshooting threads, “How I fixed….” walkthroughs, etc.)
• Structured ways to contribute: Clear and repeatable actions members can take to progress and contribute (onboarding programs, peer support loops, feedback programs, recognition rituals, ambassador tasks, etc.)
• A code of conduct: Dos and don'ts that keep the community a safe and valuable place
• A solid CLG team: Clear roles on who owns the community, execution, and outcomes
• KPIs and success metrics: Community health metrics (participation, response rate, retention) and business impact metrics (adoption, revenue impact, LTV)

Community Vision, ICP, and Value Proposition

Every community starts with a vision of where it’s going, what role it plays in members’ lives, what relationships it establishes, and how it supports growth.  Without a clear vision, ICP, and value proposition, you’ll get a community that engages, but whose activity has little or no business impact.

Start by clarifying your:

Reason why: Why are you building it? Perhaps to help members learn faster and from each other, to support them in decisions, to ease product adoption and usage, etc.

ICP: Who are you building it for? Most likely for existing users but also for enthusiasts who’ll use your product and benefit from sharing knowledge, real-time discussions, validation from peers, etc.

Value proposition: What will your members get from it (advice, visibility, a sense of belonging, lessons from peers’ experiences) AND what will your business get from it (product insights, fewer support requests, advocacy, lower CAC, faster activation, higher retention)? 

Only after you’ve sketched your vision, ICP, and value proposition can you start looking at the programs that will foster consistent participation across the user journey.

Programs and Rituals Along the User Journey

A program is an initiative with a clear goal that occurs at a specific moment in time, designed to activate people at that stage (an onboarding program, for instance). 
A ritual is a recurring behaviour, typically with an event attached to it, and part of a program (a weekly live event where new members are introduced, for example).

These engagement formats shouldn’t put much pressure or obligations. For new members, make participation feel optional (low commitment, not low value) but inviting enough that they’ll happily get involved. 

Then, as first-time users evolve into activated users, engaged users, power users, and advocates, use formats that increase both responsibility and ownership within the community:

• A new user might join a peer support program and attend rituals such as intro threads or weekly welcome rooms.
• An activated user might enrol in a product tour program and attend rituals such as weekly usage check-ins.
• A power user might join an ambassador program and attend recognition-through-participation rituals. These aren’t passive rituals like shoutouts or badges but rather involve hosting weekly office hour sessions, moderating live event rooms, leading monthly feedback circles, mentoring new members, etc.

Governance, Roles, and Ownership

When everyone chimes in but no one is accountable, GLC can easily fail. To ensure success, you need to clearly establish who owns the community within the company, who is accountable for results, and what roles exist.

Aside from internal roles, your CLG program also needs community-side roles such as champions, ambassadors, moderators, and trusted contributors. These people will lead discussions, support peers before your moderators step in, take over rituals, and scale engagement in ways your internal teams can’t.

Data, Tooling, and Workflows

Greeting, getting to know, checking in with or just keeping track of your community members takes a lot of time. As the community expands, doing it all manually is impossible, which is why you’ll need tools that facilitate:

Connection: In-app community layers, Discord/Slack communities, live chats, co-watching tools, event-based chats, etc.

Data collection: Community analytics and social listening tools like Adoreboard, Sprout Social, Pulsar, etc.

Continuity: Workflow automation platforms (Zapier), lifecycle messaging systems (Intercom), in-app prompting and onboarding tools (Pendo), feedback tools (Typeform, Hotjar), etc.

Community-Led Growth Strategies

Every community has users at different stages in the funnel. Below are some of the most common strategies to connect members through the most suitable participation modes and support your goals from different directions.

Strategy 1 – Onboarding and Peer Support Communities

The health of your community initially depends on the quality of onboarding, followed by peer support. When you do this right, new members feel welcome, start contributing sooner, and stay with the community for longer.

The onboarding approach and peer support strategy should create early feelings of success, recognition, and usefulness for every new member:

• Show them how the community works, plain and simple (short “start here” posts, pinned welcome messages with clear instructions, a quick walkthrough of where to post what, etc.)
• Make their first actions and interactions as effortless as possible (give them prompts, simple polls, one-question forms, one-click reactions so they don’t have to obsess about what to write)
• Ensure that when new members post, peers are more likely to respond first, not your team members (nudge the more experienced members to reply, highlight the unanswered questions, etc.)

HubSpot, for instance, created this dedicated space where new users can search for previous answers, ask new questions themselves, and see how other people’s onboarding issues were solved.

Strategy 2 – Product Feedback Loops and Beta Programs

These formats help you gain valuable insights for a better product experience, which will impact your business outcomes (adoption, retention, loyalty, etc.).

Implementing this strategy consists of a few simple but essential steps:

• Create spaces where you invite members to give you feedback: Open feature-specific threads or beta channels and embed structured feedback forms throughout the community.
• Invite members into your beta programs as early as possible: The sooner you can get feedback, the better.
• Clearly explain what type of feedback you’re looking for and how you’re going to use it.
• Show members that you’re using their feedback: Close the loop clearly, explaining exactly what you have decided to ship and why.
• Leverage the data: Consistently track who’s participating and how valuable their feedback is. Gradually build a pool of members who give you high-quality insights.

Business strategist Laís de Oliveira recommends using Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) for community design. She argues that communities must contribute to delivering your company’s core value proposition. If you have a product that fosters collaboration, the community should collaborate by sharing files, giving each other feedback, meeting up online or even offline, at local meetups, etc. Figma does this well through its template libraries and the Friends of Figma hub.

Strategy 3 – Advocacy and Community-Led Content

Advocacy means that your members actively recommend you outside the community and attract new members, take your side in conversations with peers, and frequently share proof of your product and service quality. And as we know, word-of-mouth is one of the strongest drivers for brand discovery (Statista), and influences 20-50% of purchase decisions (McKinsey).

The obvious way to facilitate community activities that lead to advocacy is by offering attractive content. But just sharing is not enough: encourage users to contribute and create a flywheel of community content (UGC). Members will naturally sustain engagement by posting and responding to others.

Afterwards, you can identify local influencers and brand ambassadors.

• Give them earlier access: early previews, featured spots, and before-premiere content.
• Highlight their contribution: assign them badges and expand participation opportunities.
• Share higher roles in events: give them speaker or moderator rights.

In return, they’ll regularly advocate for your organisation, give your community greater credibility, and naturally foster engagement at scale.

Strategy 4 – Event-Led and Live Community Programs

Event-led and live community programs (anything from themed webinars to watch parties for matches and premieres) complement asynchronous content. They give members a reason to come back.

• All events need a clear purpose.
• Be considerate about lifecycles, so events will meet users right where they are in the funnel.
• Make events interactive with Q&As, live chats/feedback, breakout discussions or co-watching.
• If your community is mature, assign to your most enthusiastic members a co-host or host role.

Community-Led Growth Examples (SaaS, Sports, Streaming)

Driven by engagement and advocacy, CLG is more dependent on behaviours than platforms. The platforms where you foster it are less important (and you can think of them as tools), as long as you leverage the right user behaviours. That’s why you’ll see examples of successful CLG in the most diverse industries, as we show below.

In SaaS companies, CLG appears when users share how they use the software and the templates they created, and generally offer their peers support. The more experienced members turn into a sort of extension of the product, advocate for it, and reduce the friction and time-to-value for the newer members. Examples of community-led growth for SaaS companies include Webflow, Asana, and Ahrefs. The latter is so strongly advocating for the community that they’ve put the CTA to join right on their homepage.

In sports, CLG comes from transforming passive fans into active participants who join conversations and spread the word about sports events. Joining official platforms, watch parties, shared rituals and live events, members stay connected with the clubs they support. Not just during match days, but year-round, which can only increase their lifetime value. This applies to both global clubs with huge fanbases (FC Barcelona, Arsenal, etc.) but also the smaller sports organisations who simply want to keep members engaged on a regular basis (Sport England).

In streaming, communities thrive as users co-create the experience during live events. Chats, reactions, shared moments all drive longer sessions and consistent, repeat visits, and we’ve already shown it in the case study of Match TV. But that one is a bit of a hybrid, since it involves streaming sports, so here’s another example from Wink. This video-on-demand platform embedded moderated public chats into everything it streamed, making 25% of its users convert into active communicators right on the platform.

Measuring Community-Led Growth: Metrics That Matter

Analysing community-led growth typically involves looking at community health and business outcomes. There are multiple layers involved, but it all starts with a couple of relevant signals:

Community Health Metrics

These metrics show your community is active, the members are responsive, and engagement is sustainable:

• Percentage of active members from the total members
• Participation rate (how many posts, replies, reactions, etc.)
• Peer-to-peer reply ratio (vs. team reply ratio)
• Time to first response
• Repeat visits at 7/30/90 day intervals

Here’s how community health can predict business growth: higher responsiveness rates from peers (vs. teams) can be correlated with fewer support inquiries. So community engagement is not just high in terms of volume, but also in terms of quality, and this quality saves you money.

Product and Revenue Metrics

These are the clearest connections between community activity and business outcomes. The two most important indicators here include:

• Product qualified leads (PQLs): users who have actively engaged with the product. They show high intent and are likely to receive value from a sales conversation. They’re the most qualified to convert or upsell.
• Community-attributed revenue (CAR): Revenue that can be tied to an organisation whose members engaged in the community before they appeared in a CRM. This metric proves that the community impacts the bottom line.

Additionally, you can:

• Look at the expansion or upsell rate among community members
• Compare retention and churn between community members and non-members
• Compare the sales cycle length for community-engaged accounts

First-Party Community Data as a Growth Asset

Every marketer and product developer would love to hear directly from the ideal customers, and growing your community in your own “virtual yard” allows you to do that. You see what interests your members and what challenges them, and you can add data from AI and ML to foster intelligent community growth.

Watchers supports the creation of in-app communities by embedding chats, shared rooms, and real-time interaction features which give you your users’ first-party data directly. Due to this, you can

• Analyse what users discuss in the chats
• Look at relevant engagement metrics such as DAU, MAU, and message volume
• Run an automatic semantic analysis that uses AI to detect what themes and sentiments occur in the chats
• Collect structured user feedback that involves the product experience
• Understand user pain and desires
• Adapt user insights into real changes of your product 

Leading vs Lagging Indicators

At the most basic level, the community growth indicators can either predict why growth will occur (leading indicators) or confirm that business growth has happened as a result of community growth (lagging indicators)

How to Pitch Community-Led Growth to the C-Suite

The C-Suite may think it takes too long to build a community that boosts business results. And also correlation and influence of community to business metrics growth can look too vague. When you pitch CLG, you have to make it clear that a community can amplify other GTM initiatives and deliver results both in the short and the long term.

Tell them you’ll use the community to:

1. Discover net-new leads who are more likely to pay
2. Spot expansion opportunities through upsells or cross-sells
3. Learn directly from your real customers and speed up the sales cycle
4. Stay ahead of churn by identifying churn indicators within the community
5. Foster word-of-mouth marketing by simply facilitating member-to-member communication

Also, include some relevant numbers:

Buyers use 10+ channels to interact with a company throughout the buying-decision cycle, and one-third of them prefer digital self-serve at every stage (McKinsey). The community can connect sales, product, and marketing communications in one channel.

The buying decision is built through individual research before the actual sale conversation. About 80% of buyers prefer getting their information from articles rather than ads, 62% start by researching online, and about 67% of the buyer journey is now digital. By the time they contact sales, B2B buyers are 57-70% through their research (WB Research). CLG can sit at the core of this pre-sales, research-heavy phase and educate leads while quietly winning the sale.

If your executives are wondering why now (and they usually are), tell them that waiting will cost you trust, momentum, and leverage. The earlier you start building trust through community, the more leverage you’ll gain over time.

Community-Led Growth Checklist for Product and Teams

Here’s a CLG checklist to help you tick all the right boxes:

Foundations

☐Your community purpose can be clearly summed up in one sentence (what members get + what the business gets)

☐The clear ICP shows who your community is for and who it’s not for
☐You have a specific value proposition that shows why users should return weekly to your community
☐Health, product, and revenue success metrics are agreed upon upfront

Architecture

☐You’ve chosen the community home base (in-app, forum, Slack/Discord, hybrid, etc.)
☐You’ve mapped all the community spaces by job/stage (onboarding, peer support, feedback, betas, events, advocacy, etc.).
☐You’ve clarified  navigation paths (where users start, the pinned threads, where to post and what)
☐The code of conduct is written
☐There’s a moderation plan with rules, roles, escalation, and safety coverage

Onboarding
☐You’ve designed the first-week journey, what every new user should do in the first week, each day
☐All first actions are low-friction
☐You’ve engineered peer replies
☐You’re ready to measure time-to-first-value (first reply, first peer interaction, first answer they found useful)

Feedback and beta

☐You’ve structured all the feedback collection mechanisms
☐You have a solid beta program in place with user selection criteria, timeline and expectations
☐You’ve scheduled the rituals that close the feedback/beta loops
☐You’ve planned how to identify the contributors that give you the most valuable information

Content and advocacy engines

☐You’ve planned proof content
☐You can intentionally seed UGC
☐You have a clear image of how brand champions will be formed
☐You’ve defined the advocacy actions and metrics

Events and rituals

☐You’ve set a clear cadence for weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities
☐You can link every event you plan with a job
☐Every activity has some degree of interactivity
☐You have a vision for turning events and rituals from team-led to member-led

Data, tools, and workflows

☐You’re connecting your members’ identity to the product or CRM so you can attribute their influence
☐You have analytics in place for community health and business impact
☐You have the messaging mapped out (and the right tools) for the entire lifecycle, from welcome to reactivation
☐Any automation you use supports humans without replacing the feeling of genuine interaction

Cross-function operations

☐You’ve got your one owner who’s accountable for CLG
☐Outcomes are clear and shared between team members
☐You’ve set a monthly review for health metrics, product insights, and analysing the revenue influence
☐You’ve set explicit roles on what marketing, product, and sales must do daily within the community

How Watchers Enables Community-Led Growth Inside Your Product

From social media and forums to private groups and local meetups, offline and online communities can form anywhere you intentionally design them. However, if your home is your app or website, you’ll reap significantly more benefits as engagement stays in context and you keep all the data (and monetisation opportunities).

We help you embed in-product community features (like public chat rooms and in-app live streaming) to allow users to talk, react to content, help and advise each other, making your initial app or website one of their favourite social media. Book a demo to discuss opportunities and find the most relevant community-led growth strategy for your business.

FAQs About Community-Led Growth

What is community-led growth?

Community-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that helps you grow a business by first building a community of enthusiastic users. Instead of investing heavily in performance marketing, you invest in growing a community of leads, new users, and power users who support each other and convince others to stick to your product.

When is a company ready for community-led growth?

Communities thrive when they serve causes that users want to talk about (some products solve problems users don’t want to discuss online). If you’re in one of those niches, you can think about fostering community-led growth as soon as you have established product-market fit.

Do I still need Discord if I build an in-app community?

It depends on your goals. Technically, you don’t need these extra channels if all you want is engagement in context and access to first-party data. However, you might consider them in the earlier stages, when you’re looking for a fast setup that requires minimal engineering. Also, if you already have an audience that lives and breathes in one of these channels (creators, gamers, web3), it might make sense to continue growing that community. Slack is more suitable for internal or professional communities.

References

• How Community-Led Growth Drives Product-Led Growth with Notion’s CRO | SaaStr
• The Audience | ResearchGate
• Youth Trust Peers, Local Government, and Institutions They See Taking Action | Tufts
• The 2025 CMX Community Industry Trends Report | CMXhub
• People Need People: We Are Communal Beings | Psychology Today
• The Need for Social Embeddedness: Human Belonging Goes Beyond Dyadic Bonds | Sage Journal
• 360: The Community-Led Growth Report | Common Room
• Brand loyalty - statistics & facts | Statista
• Community-Led Growth: How To Turn Customers Into Your Growth Engine | The B2B Playbook
• Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing and advertising - statistics & facts | Statista
• A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing | McKinsey Quarterly
• B2B Pulse 2024 | McKinsey
• Here's How the Relationship Between B2B Buying, Content, and Sales Reps Has Changed | Worldwide Business Research