{"id":17509,"date":"2021-02-25T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chartmogul.com\/blog\/?p=17509"},"modified":"2023-08-11T11:16:05","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T09:16:05","slug":"community-building-saas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chartmogul.com\/blog\/community-building-saas\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Build a Community to Grow Your SaaS Company"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lots of SaaS companies talk about their communities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to the [company] community,<\/em> they say on Twitter, when a new customer comes on board. Thanks to our community of early adopters,<\/em> they write in a blog post. But what most of these companies really have is a mailing list \u2014 people they\u2019ve largely never met who are happy enough to receive emails passively, without ever really doing much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with that, of course \u2014 the right mailing list can be the foundation of inbound growth. But an actual <\/em>community of active and engaged people, in conversation not just with the company but with each other, is hard to create, harder to build and just as difficult to keep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But creating a genuine community can be orders of magnitude more valuable than other growth channels: people getting value from each other, and coming back every day because they want to, rather than being retargeted, creates a priceless brand association. You don\u2019t have to look hard to find growth success stories driven by community \u2014 Notion and Figma being two of the most prominent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marketing to haystack needles <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At Juro<\/a>, we\u2019re building the all-in-one contract automation platform for visionary General Counsels to create, agree and manage contracts in one unified workspace. Our challenge is the same one that plenty of early-stage B2B SaaS companies confront: our ideal customer persona (ICP) is extraordinarily narrow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Juro is loved by lean legal teams at venture-backed tech companies between series A and D \u2014 typically marketplaces or fellow SaaS companies. Ideally, they\u2019re looking to automate non-disclosure agreements<\/a> or MSAs<\/a> for commercial teams around the business. That\u2019s a pretty specific bunch of people, and one of their defining characteristics is that they\u2019re incredibly busy. Finding them, capturing their details, nurturing, and ultimately selling to them at scale requires incredible precision for a small team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Juro<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So instead of scouring the internet to find these needles in haystacks, we decided to just build the perfect home for them and make them hang out there. If we provided an exclusive experience, crucially imitating the peer networking they\u2019d been missing during the pandemic, we knew we could put ourselves at the center of their lives and increase our stickiness as a brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We set ourselves an aggressive deadline to launch a formalized community and got to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting with why<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our founders are huge believers in starting with why, and I had zero chance of getting buy-in without a clear articulation of why we were doing this, a short and medium-term strategy, and some clearly defined success metrics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first things I tackled were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n