Community x GTM Playbook: What Every Founder & CEO Needs to Know - Part 2

A deeper look at how to build and scale a strategic community that drives business outcomes.

This post is part of the "Community x GTM Playbook" series, designed to help CXOs understand how community drives business outcomes across marketing, sales, product, and beyond.

 You’ve seen the headlines: community drives efficient growth, reduces CAC, and boosts retention. In Part 1, I unpacked why CEOs and founders can’t afford to ignore community as a strategic lever. Now let’s talk about what it actually takes to operationalize community inside a growing business—and what that looks like beyond theory.

This post is for leaders ready to get tactical. You’ll learn how to build the right foundation, avoid common traps, and design a community program that evolves alongside your GTM strategy. Whether you're starting from scratch or scaling an existing initiative, consider this your practical roadmap.

What Happens When You Ignore Community (Continued)

In Part 1, I covered what’s at stake when you overlook community. Part 2 is about the downstream consequences of not resourcing it correctly. Even companies that say they “value community” often:

• Underfund or understaff the function

• Bury community under support, where it becomes reactive

• Expect metrics without investing in measurement infrastructure

The result? Burnout, confusion, and a program that never reaches its potential.

If you want community to influence revenue, retention, or product velocity, you have to treat it with the same seriousness as any other GTM motion. That means clear goals, cross-functional collaboration, and access to the right data.

What You’ll Gain by Operationalizing Community

When you move beyond lip service and build a real strategy, community becomes:

• A retention moat: Members who feel seen and heard are more likely to renew—and grow.

• An insights engine: You’ll get ongoing feedback loops that cut research costs and surface messaging and roadmap intel.

• A launch accelerator: Communities can de-risk GTM efforts by validating messaging and creating built-in amplification.

• A cost-efficient onboarding engine: When customers help each other, your CS team can focus on strategic value.

One critical shift? Thinking of community not as a department, but as connective tissue across GTM.

What Community (Still) Isn’t

Let’s expand on the traps founders and CEOs fall into, even when they mean well:

• Chasing competitor ideas without context: Founders and CEOs often ask their teams to “do what [Competitor X’s] community is doing” without understanding what made it successful. This kind of inspiration often leads to disconnected efforts and tailspins for the community team.

• Confusing audience with community: A mailing list is not a community. A LinkedIn following is not a community. These are audiences and followers on platforms, but they aren’t in-depth relationships between a company and its customers.

• Not aligning teams: CEOs who don’t start by deciding what community should do and who should own it internally often create fragmented efforts with unclear customer and business value.

• Over-platforming: Investing in community software before defining purpose or goals.

These mistakes are fixable—but only if you frame community as a strategic function, not a side hustle.

What Community Is (When You Do It Right)

Community is infrastructure. It’s an always-on system that:

• Delivers value before the sale (via learning, connection, and discovery)

• Supports during onboarding and adoption (through peers, resources, and real-world examples)

• Deepens post-sale engagement (via belonging, advocacy, and co-creation)

At Glide, the team didn’t just build a forum—they built a culture of contribution. The community became a searchable, scalable resource that amplified their content strategy, reduced support costs, and gave early signals about what features users needed most.

Case Study: Zapier

Zapier, the automation platform, built its community around peer-to-peer support and shared problem-solving. Their team invested in community-led support early, integrating it into their help documentation and user experience.

The result? A self-sustaining ecosystem of superusers who troubleshoot, educate, and contribute new use cases—all without relying solely on Zapier’s internal team.

This investment reduced support volume, improved onboarding, and created a steady stream of customer-generated solutions. Zapier didn’t just create a help forum. They built an engine of distributed expertise that reinforced their value prop at every stage of the funnel.

Questions You Should Be Asking

If you’re serious about using community to drive real results, ask yourself:

• What is our “community moment”? Where in the customer journey could we use peer connection to accelerate time-to-value?

• Are we resourcing this like a real GTM motion—or expecting one person to do it all on a shoestring?

• Who owns community? And do they have access to strategy and cross-functional teams?

• Are we surfacing and acting on insights from our most engaged users?

• What would change if we treated community as infrastructure instead of an initiative?

• How are our competitors engaging their communities—and are we behind?

• Are we listening to the qualitative signals our users are giving us every day—and acting on them fast enough?

• Do we have a feedback loop that connects community insights to our roadmap or GTM priorities?

Ideas for Tapping Into Community’s Potential

You don’t need a massive team or budget to get started—just intentionality and focus. For example, you could start with just one of these initiatives:

• Launch a product council: Invite 5–10 power users to provide feedback on product direction. You’ll get sharper insights and build stronger champions.

• Map the first 90 days: Collaborate with community members to create onboarding experiences that reduce time-to-value and boost retention.

• Test campaigns in community first: Float messaging, creative, or offers to your community before launching externally. Their feedback will improve your odds.

• Open up a real-time product feedback loop: Create space for community members to share objections, feature requests, or competitive comparisons. Funnel that insight into GTM.

• Host lightweight roundtables: Don’t overengineer it. Invite 5–8 customers to a virtual discussion and let them teach you how they use your product. You’ll walk away with language, ideas, and patterns.

Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes

Some of the most common pitfalls come from trying to move too fast—or expecting results without the foundation:

• Lack of long-term commitment: Community takes time. CEOs expecting overnight ROI often miss the compounding returns of doing it right.

• No clear ownership: When community is everyone’s job, it becomes no one’s priority. Assign and resource a strategic owner with cross-functional reach.

• Tool-first thinking: Don’t let the platform decision drive the strategy. Start with the business outcome, then choose tools that support it.

• One-size-fits-all programming: Your customers aren’t monolithic—neither should your community be. Segment based on maturity, use case, or region.

• Focusing on the wrong metrics: Follower count, forum traffic, and swag requests aren’t bad—but they’re not business KPIs. Focus on pipeline influence, usage and retention deltas, and support deflection.

• No analytics support: Treat community like any other growth function. Partner the team with data, revops, or analytics to prove value and find new opportunities.

No More Hand-Waving. Here’s What to Actually Do.

If you’re ready to stop talking about community and start operationalizing it:

• Step 1: Choose a business problem. Focus on a goal like reducing churn, improving onboarding, or amplifying launches.

• Step 2: Assign ownership. Appoint a community lead who has cross-functional access—and give them executive sponsorship.

• Step 3: Align with GTM. Invite the community team into your GTM planning cycles. Their insights will surface friction, reveal hidden advocates, and guide messaging.

• Step 4: Build shared metrics. Partner with RevOps or analytics to create a shared view of how community contributes to key business outcomes.

• Step 5: Pilot and iterate. Launch a small, focused initiative tied to one KPI. Measure, refine, and expand.

• Step 6: Budget for the long haul. Community programs don’t thrive on leftover dollars. Fund them with intention.

Community impact doesn’t start with scale—it starts with clarity and commitment.

Community, Reframed (Again)

In Part 1, we made the case for why community is essential to any modern GTM strategy. If you missed it, it’s worth going back for the full strategic context—especially if you’re still selling community internally.

But this post? This is for CEOs ready to stop admiring the idea and start operationalizing the motion.

Because community isn’t just about belonging—it’s about better business. And if you’re looking for efficient growth, compounding returns, and customers who stick around, it’s time to stop treating community like a side project—and start building with it like the strategic lever it is.

I’ll continue this series with more CXO-specific playbooks in the coming weeks—covering how CMOs, CROs, CCOs, and CPOs can leverage community to drive real business outcomes.