SaaS Community Examples: How SaaS Companies Are Using Communities to Scale in 2023

Building a community around your SaaS is one of those holistic solutions that solves multiple problems at once. Struggling to grow without having to spend a fortune on ads? A community can help with this by providing an "intro product" that captures users, with a lower barrier to entry than signing up for your software.

At the same time, it massively helps with user retention. People sign up for your software and immediately have access to a network of other people trying to solve very similar problems to them, often sharing similar values. Because of that, users are able to get help from each other, and make much better use of your SaaS product. They get a lot more value, and don't churn. It's one of those SaaS growth hacks that turns out to also be a long term sustainable user acquisition tool too.

What you then find is that these two benefits work together as a flywheel. Higher retention means that your customer lifetime value goes up, which means that you can afford to spend more to acquire a customer. Which then means there's more users flowing in to your community, which increases the value that all the people in it get from it.

More benefits to community building:

• Communities are a place to host education content, which you can sell access to as part of a Ladder Funnel, which further improves your ability to run ads profitably.
• If you set your community to public visible and host on a platform like Skool which is optimised for SEO, you will get organic traffic to your community, without having to create content yourself.
• You'll get clear feedback from users, and never run out of ideas for new product features.
• An active community provides infinite newsletter content. All you have to do for your email marketing is share how users in your community are finding success using your product. Share screenshots (instant trust building).
• You can also use the common questions, problems, and stories from the community and talk about that on your blog, LinkedIn, YouTube channel, etc.

Let's dive in and look at a couple of specific examples...

SaaS Community Example: ListKit

ListKit is a bootstrapped startup that helps B2B companies get leads and sales using cold email. Specifically they provide a database and smart filtering system to find B2B decision makers.

What's In The ListKit SaaS Community?

One of the first things you'll see when joining is the description of the community purpose:

The focus is on the core problem that their users face: needing to sign more deals from cold outreach. Their SaaS product is a tool that provides part of the solution for that problem, but there's added value in being part of a group of people at different stages along their own journeys of solving that problem.

The other core components of their community are:

• A forum, with pinned posts from admins
• Four courses, based on the expertise of the founders
• A calendar with Zoom office hours
• A member list, with DMs
• A leaderboard with gamified levels to boost engagement

Classroom (Resource Hub / Knowledge Hub)

Inside the 'classroom', there's four courses:

• An intro to the SaaS tool
• A course on client acquisition using cold email
• An older course on cold email
• A course for affiliates of ListKit

Aside from the affiliate course, these all help users achieve their goal of getting clients using cold email.

In this case, the client acquisition course includes one in depth video and written guide, but links out to a sales page to join an additional programme for more content. This obviously works well for ListKit, partly because the founder's background is in info products, but in most cases you'd be better off building a community around your core SaaS offer. A paid course can work really well though as an intro offer so that you can break even on user acquisition much more quickly. This is the Ladder Funnel Strategy.

If you're wondering what course you could put together for your SaaS business, ask yourself: what are the strategies of how to best use the tool I've built to solve the core problem of my users.

If you're selling gold mining pickaxes, then create a course on how to work out which quartz seams are most likely to have gold in.

Forum and Gamified Engagement

The ListKit community uses Skool's leaderboard feature, where members get points for positively contributing to the group. There's 'levels' that members can graduate up through, as well as a 7 day, 30 day and all time leaderboard.

In this case, they've chosen to reward the biggest contributors with free additional credits to use inside the actual SaaS product:

Skool also has a built in feature where community admins can set content to unlock at different levels. This could be a more advanced course, or it could be a coupon code that grants additional usage, or anything you can think of as a reward.

SaaS Community Based Newsletter

ListKit sends out updates via email as well, directly from the community. In most cases these are updates and posts from the community admins, but it can also work well to share posts from community members.

Skool's Own Community

Skool is the SaaS community platform powering ListKit's community, as well as hundreds of other communities. So they should be dogfooding their own product, right?

Skool's founder is Sam Ovens , a veteran of the online info space. But he actually got his start in New Zealand with a SaaS business he started called SnapInspect.

As you'd expect, Skool has a thriving community of community builders, working together to share insider knowledge, growth hacks, and get inspiration.

There's also a classroom, starting with onboarding content, and also including plenty of solid tutorials on how to grow your community as well as optimise it for engagement, conversion, and retention.

Skool's SaaS community also shows how to really use gamification to great effect. As you can see below, there are two resources within the classroom that unlock at different levels.

There's a 'Skool Inner Circle' which unlocks at level 5, where members get greater access to the team and have more of a say in feature requests and direction.

And at level 7, members get to visit Skool HQ and hang out.

On top of that, at the time of writing this, Skool is running a competition within their community, to launch their membership payments feature. As you can see, the founder's community post got a significant amount of engagement within the first 22 hours of posting.

Picking a Platform for Your SaaS Community

The choice of platform can make or break your community. Some platforms don't do a good job at encouraging engagement, and it can end up feeling empty.

Should you build on a social network where you already have an audience? For example a Facebook Group, or use the new communities feature on X?

These are very popular choices, but the Facebook Group experience has been in slow decline for years, and while it's often easy to get people into your Facebook Group, they tend to get lost in a sea of notifications and other content on Facebook.

There are two main ingredients that any successful community has: discussion and content. Let's take a look at the main options for both of those.

Slack

Slack needs no introduction. For a lot of us, it's where work gets done. So it's an easy step to add in another workspace and starting chatting to people trying to achieve similar goals to you, outside of your team.

In the example above, SEO software Ranktracker uses Slack for product updates, and general chat about SEO.

Even though their community has over 22k members, I found it to be not hugely helpful for improving my SEO skills. The main activity seems to be link exchanges. While there's nothing wrong with that, I can't help feeling that if they created a bit more structure and added educational content, then it could be more valuable to members.

Discord

Discord is gaining popularity, and a number of SaaS products host their community there. It's Slack's cooler friend.

It does a good job as a chat app, and it has a lot of features for real time interaction that make sense given its roots in gaming.

It's organised into channels, much like Slack. Unlike Slack it gives admins more flexibility to customise the look and feel of the platform, as you can see in the screenshot below of Voiceflow's community that they've built to drive adoption:

Where Discord struggles is on the educational content side of things. While you can add videos and links, it becomes quite cluttered and difficult to navigate. There's also no sense of progress or tracking completion of different courses.

Which is why a lot of businesses using Discord for their community end up hosting their educational content somewhere else, like Teachable.

Teachable

Teachable is one of the giants of online learning. They are popular among info product creators, coaches, universities, and are home to a number of SaaS communities too.

One of the examples Teachable proudly talks about is the large bundle of courses created by GNS3, a network design software company.

They sell low ticket courses on a range of in depth networking topics, presented by experts in each area.

The Teachable platform really lends itself to structured courses, with modules and individual pieces of content inside them, with a clear progression through.

Where Teachable is lacking is in community features. In fact, Teachable recommend that you use their integration with Circle if you want to have a community as well as educational content.

Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are used heavily across the SaaS industry, for good reason: there's a lot of people already using Facebook.

Many SaaS brands have built free communities to drive user acquisition, product adoption, and customer retention.

For example, cold email software lemlist, where they've been able to build one of the most active niche communities for sales people.

The founder Guillaume Moubèche still contributes regularly to the community, which really helps keep everyone engaged.

One of the potential downsides of Facebook is that you're at the mercy of their algorithm. Facebook may decide to de-prioritise Facebook groups in terms of how much they appear in your members' newsfeeds and notifications.

Also, while Facebook groups can host courses, it isn't ideal for that. In fact, lemlist have chosen to host their cold email course outside of their Facebook group.

Telegram

Telegram is used to host a handful of SaaS communities, particularly in the crypto space. It's similar to Slack and Discord, but even more geared towards chats rather than forum style discussions with content.

In my opinion, Telegram is not a good choice unless your SaaS business is in a niche that heavily uses Telegram already. And even then, you will likely struggle to provide easily accessible educational content on the platform.

Skool

As you can probably already tell, Skool is my favorite community and course platform. It's the only platform that does a great job at combining educational content with true community features.

How to Build a Community to Help Scale Your SaaS Business

Start with 10 'True Regulars'

1. Begin by acknowledging that a successful community is not built with hundreds or thousands of members, but with just ten "true regulars".
2. Understand that these true regulars are the ones who actively participate and help keep conversations flowing.
3. Initially, focus on getting three loyal members who will engage often by posting and commenting. You don't need to even have a community platform set up at first, just talk to these people one on one.
4. These initial three may possibly be your friends or people you frequently communicate with regarding the topic of your community.
5. Have conversations among this core group, discuss interesting articles and share learnings.

Define Your Community Goals

Share your vision with these initial members, it's crucial they understand what the community seeks to achieve for them to contribute effectively.

Create Education Content

As part of discussions and interactions among members, educate each other about relevant subjects tied to the theme of your community by sharing educational content.

Build this in a structured way with a clear progression towards the shared goals of your community.

You may be able to draw on existing webinar content or blogs to some degree.

Pick a Platform

After talking to the initial group of people one on one, pick a platform to host the content and community. As I've mentioned, I recommend Skool, which I think has the best combination of features for the SaaS industry.

Promote Your Community

Gradually invite more people into this small but steadily growing community while being selective in adding new people.

Also maintain a balanced number while inviting new members so as not to interfere with the smooth running interaction among existing members.

To appreciate loyalty and active engagement from these early bird members reward them uniquely in ways such as one-on-one hangouts on zoom or even meetups; this encourages others too! You can use 'levels' to automate some of this.

You've successfully built a the start of thriving community once you have these few dedicated regulars - they form its beating heart! Their enthusiasm energizes the entire group keeping it vibrant!

Next Steps for Your Own SaaS Community

By now you should have a better understanding of how educational content plus community equals better retention, more sustainable growth, and a whole bunch of other benefits for your SaaS business.

If you're looking for help creating educational content, structure it into a mini course to build a community around, and get members, that's something I can help with. Send me a message and we can have a quick chat.