My community building mistakes

I’ve been part of communities for a long time.

The first one being the “OG blogger” community in the early 2000s. This is where I first connected with fellow bloggers online long before “blogging” became widespread.

I’ve also had the pleasure of building and leading communities from Code First Girls, Ladies in DevOps, DevX to Gitpod. And today, Vercel.

As my career led me to the tech industry, joining communities that gave me the chance to learn, connect and collaborate with others is the number one reason why I’m still here.

I’ve been working in tech for 7 years now with the last 3 have been focused on community, and it still honestly feels surreal.

If I did it all again…

After being let go in May, I took to writing because that’s how I usually process big life events (which is why I have 350 blog posts, I suppose 😆)

In the many of my notes, one recurring thought kept coming up: “if I could go back, I would…” Eventually, I realised this way of thinking wasn’t helpful because I can’t go back in time. So, I started to reframe it as: “moving forward, I will…“

And this is the blog post you’re getting today.

These are the mistakes I have made in my community-building journey so far, and what I will “correct” in communities I build now and in the future. I hope it’s insightful!

Note: I’m mostly describing experiences from building communities for products, rather than the “get together” communities.

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1️⃣ Excluding paying customers in the community

There is no reason that your community shouldn’t include your paying customers.

In the early days of my last gig, our focus was building our brand.

A strategy to get there was using open source:

• Open source your product
• Get people to contribute
• Create a community around the project
• Hope that people would share and talk about it everywhere

It worked for us at the time and a lot of other successful community-led companies (side note: the only bitterness I feel is when after a certain point, you go back on your OS roots… but that’s a blog post for another time.)

Naturally, the community foundations we built was on open source. The members I spoke to day-in and day-out during the early days weren’t paying customers, and that’s fine…

Until, of course, it got to a point where when the business needs to cut down. Supporting free users felt more of a burden, and hits harder when you’re an early stage start-up.

Inevitably, there was a huge gap between customers and community. Given that community was labelled as “just free users”, over time the community overtime lost its value. Because who cares, right? 🤷 There are paying customers to support!

But imagine a community that:

• Brings together both free users and paying customers.
• Offers dedicated spaces where customers can connect and learn from each other’s experiences, including mistakes and successful solutions.
• Inspires your most passionate community superfans to support fellow members—whether they’re open-source users or paying customers—creating a mutually beneficial environment.
• Your paying customers evolve into community ambassadors—not only championing your product within their own organisations but also spreading the word beyond.

Picture yourself as a community member witnessing larger companies successfully using your product, prompting them to consider, “Could this work for us too?” Seeing is believing after all. What is more powerful than social proof?

…I could go on.

2️⃣ Failing to define ROI of community

When your company is community-led, it often feels easier to explain what the ROI of community is. But we’re not always that lucky.

As the first community hire, I came in there to add value and support in anything that the company needed. That’s the beauty of early start-ups; you get to be a jack-of-all-trades which is something I know I thrive in!

Back then, I didn’t really have a plan. I didn’t have a playbook. I played it by my gut feeling and following my heart (as cheesy as that sounds!) I like to think my intuition when it comes to relationship building is good and so most of my early work were often shipped with a lot of hard work, passion and trusting myself.

As companies scale and grow it is so important to constantly define what community brings to the table?

• What are the key metrics that you report to leadership at the end of the quarter?
• Why are we running this community initiative? What does this show to leadership and our investors?
• How does community help with the bottom line?
• How does community help with customer retention and adoption?

Community feel-good posts are a great start to build out your brand. When developers love your product, it spreads. But after a point, how does community help keep your business afloat?

These are questions I wished I answered sooner.

3️⃣ Failing to maintain community initiatives over time

As communities evolve over time, it’s important that community initiatives evolve too. That includes answering the questions above, but at the very least, initiatives should be maintained regularly.

I remember there was a point where I was not just leading community and managing two engineers in my team. I was also the social media manager, DevRel, field marketer, conference organiser… all in one quarter.

I naturally had to let go of some responsibilities and one of those was the beloved community programmes. I had planned to re-visit them and overhaul them, but never had the time to.

Eventually, they ended up feeling like those side projects you could never finish… collecting digital dust.

Outdated community programmes? Less attractive. Less activity and engagement. Downfall of community. 🔁

4️⃣ Neglecting community members

This one hurt to publicly write. 🥹

I watched how I couldn’t do anything more to say thanks to community members because it was no longer a priority and I had to shift gears. Slowly, efforts were not being appreciated and they left.

It still sucks because I know how much community had helped the company get to where they are now, and seeing it fade and slowly die out was truly heartbreaking.

5️⃣ Misplacing Community under Marketing

I’ll get all sorts of opinions for this point, I know it. 😆

It’s the same if I go and say, “DevRel shouldn’t be under Marketing, it should be in Engineering” but that is a can of worms for another day.

Community belongs in Customer functions. Why?

• The closer the community is to your customer, the better. See my first point.
• Most of a community manager/engineers day-to-day is all about supporting customers to be as successful as it can be with the product

Obviously, there will be a bit more overlap with Community and Marketing teams when it comes to event planning for example.

But Community should not report to Marketing, especially given most Marketing OKRs are related to lead generation which makes no sense for Community.

Community can support with lead generation. I mean, it does naturally seeing as it is a front-facing channel. But it should not be directly tied to Marketing OKRs.

It is destined to fail — as I learned the hard way.

6️⃣ Automating a community’s soul away

Possibly another hot take… Let’s see. 🤣

After spending some time learning more about AI during my break, I actually see the inherit value of AI across companies. As a former AI-skeptic, I’ve somewhat converted and actually use AI daily. My only red line is writing blog posts, which is why my posts are still ranty 😝

In my old team, we had the idea of building an AI bot that helped community members get answers sourced from our various knowledge bases to every single question received in the community.

This was good because it helped our small community team answer the flood of questions we had coming in. The bot helped users solve their issues immediately. Sounds like a dream, right?

Eh, kind of.

After a while, I observed that previously active community fans would engage less in the conversations. My theory is that people felt like the bot would take care of it, so why should they go and spend time helping another person out?

Slowly, the community reverted back to its initial form: a public helpdesk. We killed the soul.

When I was thinking about this, I came back to the question of “why do people join communities anyway?”

You may be surprised to hear this but they do not come for the automated bot responses. They come for the people.

7️⃣ Losing the internal community

When the community started to be deprioritised, my colleagues also turned away from it. For me, that was when we lost every meaning of the sense of community.

Before being let go, an engineer said to me:

You know what I miss? I miss the community. It feels like when it slowly died off, so did we.

To re-iterate, community is always about the people.

From a more business perspective: the key to building community is about the people. Not just your external users and customers. But the people internally–your colleagues are your allies in your community building journey.

Don’t lose sight of them.

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What’s the impact of your community?

Community will always mean a lot to me in both my personal and professional life. When people ask me, “why do you care that much?” or “is it really that deep?”

My answer always goes back to this feeling I get when I make even a small impact on someone in a community I served:

Thank you, Thierry 💜

If you got this far, thank you for reading. 🫶

P.S. Check out the Vercel Community, I’m hanging out there a lot these days.