Startup Underdogs Ed. 3 - Our Secret Weapon: Creating a Viral SaaS Community

“The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.” - Peter Thiel

How to get started building a SaaS community

When we tell SaaS Startup Founders about our experience at Cybrary, the number one question we get is about the community we built; and, how they can build a community of their own.

Every SaaS business can benefit from having community around their product(s) or service(s). Why? Because, done well, your community members become loyal advocates. They help promote your business, shorten learning cycles, provide a focused test-bed for messaging and functionality, and enable you to unlock new value propositions you may not have ever considered on your own.

If you're building a public SaaS community, and want it to grow — take a hard look at your brand, and look for ways to tie yourselves to someone's professional ego. It's a powerful tool which can motivate engagement, advocacy, and ultimately growth. People are constantly looking to signal their professional competencies and ideologies. Looking for a quick tip? Here it is: Consider how your community can enable positive signaling of someone's professional competency.

The first 3 steps people take when building a community

1. Determine which type of community makes the most sense: Are you creating a Community of Product, Community of Practice, or Community of Interest (communityled.com)- if you're in SaaS, you'll most likely be merging a Community of Product with either Practice or Interest. This means your community will be about your product as much as it is about talking about and promoting conversation about your specific industry, trade, or passion.
2. Find your tribe. You need to seed your community with ideal community members, people passionate about the type of community you want to grow. As you will be discussing your industry as much as, if not more, than your product, I HIGHLY recommend seeding your community with people who are capable and love to "talk shop" with other professionals. If you are a new SaaS startup, you're initial customers or users might be good people to consider here.
3. Create a home for your community. At Cybrary, we built the home of our community into the core functionality of our product. Today, you'll want to consider where your tribe spends their time. Slack, Discord, Reddit, Circle, Discourse - there are many different platforms to consider, each with their own Pros/Cons. But, understand, your community exists beyond that place. Creating a great community is about building something people are proud to be part of; they wear it, like a badge of honor.

Now, the real work that goes into community building...

Easy right? Not so fast...here's where the real work starts. If a community isn't engaged and growing, then it's dying (or dead).

1. Why do you want this community to exist? It's ok if the answer is to grow your product, but if you want it to be successful, you need a bigger "why" behind why people should join.
2. Who do you want your community to serve? There are communities for everything, from the highly generic to the weirdest, most niche things you can think of. Building a community is VERY similar to building product, you'll need to establish an ICP, and progressively solve for acquisition, onboarding, engagement, and retention. Setting your ICP will the basis for all your future decisions (free v. paid, how members engage, the type of content to create, rules to govern by, growing the community, etc.), so it's worth spending the time to get this right.
3. How do you want community members to engage? Communities face cold start problems, and growing a community with low engagement, will lead to low retention. While you'll want members talking about your product, they don't wake up everyday thinking about YOU and your product. Foster opportunities for your members to talk about what they love, what they hate, what they are challenged by, what associated interests they have, what they think about, what they wished they had, etc. (This is not only great for your community members, but you are getting VALUABLE data to use around your product, your messaging, and the type of content you can create to attract customers).
4. What are you going to provide community members? Your community will most likely not be the first to serve your target audience. This means you need to be compounding VALUE beyond simply existing. Physical goods are fun, but shallow. Connections can be meaningful, but fleeting (and many people prefer to lurk). The best value is EDUCATION. People want to learn; and, they want to learn from others in their field. Enable them to learn what's new, what's working, and what's not working. Help them become better versions of themselves. Note: If you can help them do all this and show off your product solving big problems they are facing, you will begin building a groundswell of interest you can tap into for advocacy.
5. What are the rules you want the community to be governed by? I cannot state enough the importance of establishing rules to govern by. Much like establishing startup values, you need to create clear, enforceable standards for how people interact and live by within the community. The fastest path to killing off your community is people being mean or hateful to one another. There should be zero tolerance for this type of behavior. Full stop. Now, beyond that, you will also want rules around solicitation and self-promotion - professionals get sold to ALL day, don't bog down your community in even more of that. Note: What I've seen work well is a dedicated space to allow people to post if they are looking for something, and let community members toggle notification controls.
6. Where on the FREE, PUBLIC, PAID, PRIVATE quadrant will your community exist? There is no right answer to where to spot your community. It's entirely based on why you are building a community and the goals you have for it. Generally, free/public communities are great for widespread adoption, but the quality can often degrade quickly. Paid/private communities can offer a high quality experience, but your growth expectations should be tempered. Each decision comes with pros/cons - if you're uncertain, I always recommend going PRIVATE to start (invite only). Focus on quality interactions and bringing in the right people before scaling it out. Note: Dev communities might be the one exception, and require a very different approach due to the nature of them.
7. How can community members help grow the community? This seems obvious, but you want to be EXPLICIT in explaining to members how they can help grow your community. User growth, engagement, retention can all be positively impacted when you enable your community to do so.
8. Show up every day. Seriously, if you want your community to thrive, to grow, to become an asset for your business, you need to show up every day for it. Much like your product, and go-to-market, you need to invest everyday in growing and nurturing your community. It requires discipline and consistency, and it's the number one reason communities fail.

How we built community at Cybrary (0 to 2m members in 2 years)

To understand why the Cybrary community grew the way it did, you first need to understand why we started the company by giving away free training.

When we launched Cybrary in 2015, we sought to create a solution 10x better than what was available to the market. The concept of MOOCs (massive open online courses) had been around for a few years, with notable companies like Coursera, Udacity, and EdX starting in 2015 - putting training online wasn't novel by any means.

In 2015, Cybersecurity training was dominated by the major certification bodies (CompTIA, ISC2, EC-Council), and new providers were beginning to pop up offering online cybersecurity training subscriptions for $29.99-$59.99/mo.

Launch another “me-too” cybersecurity subscription wasn't going to make anyone stand up and take notice because the industry didn't need that (no one would care).

What was the narrative in the industry? The growing cybersecurity skills gap and need for more qualified cybersecurity professionals.

What did the cybersecurity industry value? Freedom of information & giving back to the community.

What was unattractive to the established leaders in the industry? Established leaders were "fat and happy" with charging thousands of dollars for certifications that didn't actually prepare people for anything. Most were even focused on the enterprise space and cared little about supporting the consumer market.

What could we provide that would stand out and make people take notice? Training was expensive, and that made it inaccessible. If we made all of our training free, the established leaders were NOT going to like that - so we had to go big with it. The best way to instigate change is widespread adoption.

Every great brand knows storytelling is the most powerful tool at its disposal.

So we created a Mission that would resonate, and told a great story.

3 key tenets to Cybrary's community

The No. 1 reason we were able to build such a large community was because we had a radical mission that resonated with our target audience. People wanted to be a part of and help promote the community because of what it stood for.

The No. 2 reason we were able to build such a large community was because we built it WITH our community, we gave people a way to contribute to it and be part of the solution.

The No. 3 reason we were able to build such a large community was because we cared about GIVING more value than we EXTRACTED.

Community tactics that worked for us

Free & Public: Part of our company's go-to-market strategy was to build Cybrary into the biggest brand in the space. This meant we needed it to be public and free to join. Anyone, anywhere with an internet connection could become a Cybrary learner. It didn't matter your background or your level of experience - everyone had a place. If you were new in your career, you didn't have to spend a dime to learn new skills and figure out if cybersecurity was for you. If you were a seasoned professional, you could teach, mentor, or contribute to growing knowledge base for the next generation of professionals to take advantage of.

Education First: Education is the best value community can provide. People join communities to engage with like-minded people. As the facilitator of that community, our product provided that education to the cybersecurity industry. We used our size and our reach to provide the fastest growing, most up-to-date training in the market. If someone wanted to learn about cybersecurity, then you came to Cybrary (and if you asked online where to learn about cybersecurity, people would recommend Cybrary).

Public Community Forums: As marketers, we knew the power creating a large presence of high-quality indexed pages could have on growth. We took that opportunity to stand up public community forums allowing anyone to ask and get answers to any question they had. This not only provided immense value to learners, it also built a growth engine through which we could attract and acquire hundreds of thousands of prospective new learners.

User Points (Cybytes), Invites Levels, Badges, and Profiles: These worked incredibly well for us because our personas had affinities for these types of things. People engaged, shared, and came back to us day after day, week after week, and month after month to share (to earn points), collect badges, level up, and build out their profiles. We were giving an immense amount of value away for free, all we asked in return was for to engage and tell your friends/colleagues.

Social: In 2024, this is the norm for people and brands. But in 2015, there were big advantages to adopting social as part of your [early] go-to-market. The cybersecurity community lived on these channels, especially Reddit and Twitter (X), so showing up there, building a following, and engaging at large created a ton of momentum for us.

Open Blog: We stole this idea from Moz Blog (a marketing blog we were fond of at the time). The Moz Blog allowed anyone to submit a post and offer their advice, research, how-tos, and insights - all in the name of helping people level up their SEO and online marketing skills. So we created the Cybrary Open (we used Leetspeak, 0P3N) to allow practitioners and experts submit their advice, research, how-tos, and insights - all in the name of helping people level their cybersecurity skills. We received dozens of posts per month, high-quality stuff, which we published and promoted (with emphasis on those who submitted). All of these posts were publicly available for the community to consume (with the added benefit of being indexed by Google for user acquisition purposes). I wish I still had access to our data, but anecdotally user retention skyrocketed if someone read one of these posts, and acquisition from these pages was bananas.

Note: We read through each post to edit for grammatical errors and ensure there was no plagiarism...I wish we had today's tech to automate this process for us :)

Community-Sourced Instructors: I mentioned we prioritized building Cybrary WITH our users. The course content we developed was no different. We wanted instructors from our community to take center stage. We wanted to make them stars (the cool kids call them influencers). Of course, it's great (and powerful) to work with influencers. But, we wanted to incubate our own micro-influencers. Many of these people were well-known within cybersecurity circles, but we worked with them to bring their visibility to millions.

The Power of Community

Even now, I think I underestimated how big and powerful of a community we built at Cybrary. When you are able to pull together a large number of like-minded people who all believe and care about something

Unbanning our Mobile App

The first time I witnessed how powerful a community can be, 10 months into the company's life (250,000 users), many of our learners began asking us for a mobile app so they could take Cybrary on-the-go. We got it built, launched it (some poor engineering work caused everything to crash at launch, but that's a story for another day), and out of the gate we had tens of thousands of people downloading and using it. A couple weeks in, we got a notice from Google Play, they had removed our app from the app store due to policy violations: “provides/links to specific instructions used to circumvent software/hardware mechanics.”

WHAT?!

We reached out to Google, but no one would respond to us. We were a small, inconsequential fish.

With hundreds of people messaging us a day about the app, we had no idea what to do. I remember Ryan saying, "I wonder what Google would say if they got everything we were getting". Then the idea struck. Let's see if we can mobilize the community around this, and help get Google's attention.

So that's what we did.

Thousands and thousands of activist community members and others from within the cybersecurity community came to our aid, tweeting and retweeting at Google to reinstate the app.

A couple days later, we were back up and live in the App Store.

Had we been exclusively a mobile app with no community behind us, Cybrary would have been dead in the water, not 12 months since launch.

"We're broke...like dead broke...we need to find a way to make some money"

I heard that statement more times than I care to admit during my time at Cybrary. Offering free cybersecurity training was a powerful mission, one that was clearly building an incredible amount of momentum, but we were faced with needing to figure out our monetization strategy if we wanted to survive.

One of the benefits of a large community is the near unlimited ways you can monetize.

In 2016, we experimented with our first bit of monetization, sponsored advertising for cybersecurity companies. We had companies like Huntress (when they were just launching), TripWire, Cisco Talos, Cato Networks, Thycotic, and more participating with the community. Overnight, we went from $0 to $100k MRR through these partnerships - in today's environment as businesses look for partnerships like that, we probably could have 10x'd that.

Note: Our thesis at the time is that we could get companies to partner with us and develop training for their products on Cybrary. What better way to drive adoption for your brand and products than hundreds of thousands of people learning how to use it. Funny enough, every single company said the same thing "people are going to reverse engineer our product and steal our IP". So our sponsored advertising became nothing more than some newsletter sponsorships and reposting of their blogs/whitepapers/webinars. ??

In 2017, our community members began asking about Practice Tests to help with certification prep, and virtual labs to give them hands-on practice with the skills they were learning about. This ultimately led us to becoming the first provider online to partner with and integrate all of this together into a single platform and offer it to consumers (none of these providers had the reach to make a consumer offering worthwhile to them).

Then in 2018, one of our PMs came to us and told us about the conversations he was having with learners about the need for a structured career path. Cybersecurity was a maturing industry and no one had formalized how to go from "here to there" in your career. This became our major unlock to the business. We had a fresh idea, backed up by what the community was telling us. And that point, all we had to do was get it built and push it out...and with a mailing list of nearly 2,000,000 and 50,000 new users joining for the first time every day, all we needed was a little spark...

One year later, recurring revenues grew from $516,000 ARR to $6,000,000 ARR!

Over the next few years we started scaling the business, specifically in the B2B segment.

Product-wise, our B2C segment would become our test bed for new features and functionality, and for faster learning cycles. We'd then leverage the data we got from that to improve features and functionality for our B2B learners (while we had a B2B product with functionality for a different buyer, we were ultimately serving learners through our B2B solution).

Sales-wise, we leveraged the data we were getting from the B2C segment to signal which businesses to target. We identified patterns and trends from signups, and took what we knew they were learning and how they were engaging with the platform to inform our approach to the sales call.

Every call we got on, was like having a warm introduction. "Oh you're with Cybrary? Yeah I know Cybrary, my whole team is using you all."

It was incredible.

Final considerations around community building

As Cybrary grew, the community faded away. I spoke to someone just last week that said "I don't know what happened, Cybrary seemed like the biggest thing in the industry, and in the last few years it just completely disappeared". There are many reasons why a community can die off - ultimately, if it loses its sense of purpose, that resonating mission which originally brought people together, then there is no compass, engagement becomes shallow and meaningless, and people go elsewhere.

If you're an early stage SaaS startup founder, there are many reasons not to invest in community:

• It diverts focus from product development (your priority in the early stages).
• It’s resource-intensive with uncertain ROI.
• The product may not need it.
• It risks fragmenting your focus.
• It will just create external pressure and expectations we aren’t ready to meet.
• If you can’t harvest leads from it, then there’s no point.

Now consider the benefits of investing in a community:

• It can help you focus on building the right product (your priority in the early stages)
• Create clarity to your messaging and positioning
• Build an early set of brand advocates
• Develop new content to attract your ICP
• Grow your network and get intros into prospective customers

Community is an investment - it takes time, consistency, and perseverance. And often, the return on the investment may not be seen for years (if you're business even lasts that long). Consider though, when approached as an extension of your early stage go-to-market strategy, it has the potential to contribute far more value than you are giving it credit for.

We are fast approaching a new model for B2B Marketing, and I see ample opportunity for early stage SaaS startup founders to get an edge in their go-to-markets through swift adoption:

The three prongs:

• Content (Education in collaboration with the community)
• Community (Engagement amongst pees)
• Events (IRL - Build Connection)

If you want to jam out on all-things community, feel free to hit up Ryan Corey or I. We help seed to series A startup founders build out their revenue and operational processes so they can make fewer mistakes and lead more effectively through the initial scale up phase of their business. And, community is one key component of a broader go-to-market strategy we help our clients with.