- A telco company with no call centre, where the customers answer each other's questions faster than staff ever could.
- The comment section under a stranger's YouTube video, where the viewers teach each other.
- The WhatsApp thread that quietly holds your whole industry together.
- The client who stopped paying you two years ago and still shares every event you post.
Every one of those is a community. Not one of them is just a Facebook group.
Say "community" to most people and they picture a Facebook group. A noisy forum, a couple of spam accounts and a moderator slowly losing the will to live. So when I suggest a community product to a client, plenty pull a face. That's not us. We're past that. We're a serious business.
The bit they're missing is that they're already in community, all day, everywhere. The industry you came up in. The people who trained you. The past clients you've already served. The WhatsApp group that keeps you sane. The Slack channel that keeps the inbox tame and meetings about meetings at bay. The neighbours, the school gate, the networking thing you pretend you don't enjoy. Nobody calls any of those "a community", and every one of them is. They shaped who you are, in business and in life. You didn't build most of them. You just belong to them, and you shape them right back.
And the one forming around your own business is closer than you think. Your clients, past and present, already feel part of something with you at the centre of it. You're not "not a community person". You're a community leader who hasn't looked up and noticed the room.
Community isn't just a buzz word or trend for me to write about. It matters more now, than it ever has before.
Ask AI a question and you get a decent answer in four seconds, any hour of the day, no small talk required. Brilliant. Also a little bit soulless. Ask it again tomorrow and you'll get a different answer. The more of that we get, the harder people go looking for the other thing.
The human bit, the blood, sweat and guts experience, the current environment and economy context. The room where someone doesn't just know your name, they have context and commonalities.
It's the 'touch grass' effect, basically. The businesses that hold that room and show up as their human selves are going to be the ones that matter in a year's time.
And while it's often top of mind when I mention a community product, it's never really about the platform. A community is only ever the people in it and the function or outcome it provides. What decides whether it's worth your time is the job it's doing and who it's really for.
Here are the five kinds of community, one of which you'll already have as a business owner, intentionally or not.
1.It's all about you
People join to get closer to you. The paid newsletter, the members-only podcast, the Substack, the high-ticket group where the whole draw is your thinking and your access. There isn't much chatter between members, and that's the point. They didn't come for each other. They came for you. It's recurring revenue for being the person worth sitting near, and yes, it can flatter the ego. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you've built the reputation on real expertise and the demand is there.
Just be clear what this one is and isn't. It's not the warm, buzzy, everyone-piling-in room and collab. That's the next type along. You're not here to build community for the feeling of it, or to keep an algorithm fed with likes and comments. You publish, your people get the goods, you get on with your day. For an expert who'd rather be paid for their thinking than perform for reach, that isn't a lesser kind of community. It's the whole appeal.
2.It's all about them
The opposite animal. An open room where the members answer each other, share what they know and show off their own expertise. You're the host, not the star.
Years ago in the UK, I had a friend who worked for a competitive pay-as-you-go mobile company. Their point of difference at the time to keep costs low, was having no call centres and no shopfronts. Their own customers ran the customer support incentivised by credits and merch (alongside ego boosts), answering each other's questions around the clock, quicker and more accurately than a call centre ever managed affordably. The community wasn't sitting next to the business. The community became the business (in later years the community even developed products quicker than the company could!).
"Community-led" gets said in too many corporate meeting rooms, but if the members aren't actually owning something, baked into the product, the pricing, the delivery, the way the whole thing works, it's just a buzzword on the business plan and everyone can feel its ickiness.
This mobile company didn't just talk about community, they gave them the keys and let them drive.
You might be closer to this than you think. If your audience already answers each other in your comments sections and group messages, you wouldn't be building a community from scratch, you'd be giving one a home. The only real catch is that this type asks you not to be the centre of it, and for a lot of experts that's a surprisingly hard pill to swallow.
3.For a specific purpose
Small, and usually for a set stretch of time. A cohort moving through a programme together. An exclusive group for one project, one campaign, one beta test, one round of mentorship. Everyone in one place for one job, then it's done. It might live in Kajabi, it might be nothing more than a WhatsApp group or a Slack channel. Aside from the functional bits, the tool matters far less than everyone finally being in the same room, away from the noise of busy inboxes and clashing schedules.
What makes this one work is the shared timeline and exclusivity, which helps keep people accountable. There's no hiding in a giant community of hundreds or thousands, everyone in this style of community knows you by name and probably by face too. Everyone's at a similar stage, hitting the same walls and celebrating the same wins together.
I worked with a growing company that put its entire leadership team through a programme together as one cohort, rather than sending one or two managers off to do it alone or leaving everyone to go at their own pace. Everyone hit the same learnings and live sessions at the same time, picked up the same language and could hold each other to it long after the programme ended, because they'd all been in the room together. As one of them put it, it would have been a completely different result if it had just been a couple of them doing it on their own. The content was the same. The cohort is what changed the business.
That's the real ROI, accountability and momentum you can't manufacture on your own, which is what makes the change actually stick. And the end date is the fuel. The finish line is what creates the urgency, so don't be tempted to keep it running forever. Let it do its job, then let it close.
4.Top of funnel
The free group, tightly moderated so you stay the expert in the room. I've recently partnered on a large Facebook business group that was previously a wasteland, full of spam and tumbleweed engagement, and it's coming back to life purely because, with the right guidance and a bit of engaged action-taking, people started showing up for each other again.
This is the one spot where I'll walk back what I said earlier about the platform not mattering, because here it does, and it comes down to what you're after. Facebook is the move if you want volume and the topic is broad enough to pull a crowd. It's busy and noisy, which is fine when the job is reach. But if you want depth over numbers, put it behind a login, somewhere like Kajabi, where people have to make a bit of effort to get in. That effort is a filter. There are no pings from forty other groups fighting for attention, it's a quieter, more contained room, and a lot of people find that far less overwhelming. It's also where they tend to open up and get more honest, because they're not performing for an audience of strangers, they're in a room they chose to be in.
Handled well, a free group drip-feeds toward your paid offers, gives your referral partners and affiliates somewhere to be and hands you the best market research going, for free. You get to watch your ideal clients say out loud exactly what they're stuck on. That's not a 'check the box filler' for your non-buyers, it's a lead engine with a live preview to your future clients built in.
5.It's all about the org
A company running its own academy or internal community for its own people. The beating heart of the people side of the organisation. The unwritten "how we do things around here", finally with a home, for onboarding and every reference point after. And it's just as much about clarity and efficiency as it is about training your people. No more lost email trains, "which thread was that in", wrangling people for meetings, everyone and everything in one place. Usually it's wired straight to the work, tied to the actual training, tracking accountability, business, team and personal KPIs and CPD obligations.
I work with an organisation that trains and supports people across a huge number of sites, and their internal community quietly became one of the highest-rated support resources they offer, second only to picking up the phone to a real person. Not because of anything clever in the software, but because people trust an answer from a peer who's actually done the job more than they trust a policy document. That's the quiet power of this type. It keeps the knowledge in the building instead of walking out the door when someone leaves. It grows your own people instead of paying to buy them in. Plenty of corporates tend to think they're above community building while running exactly this and calling it something more respectable. A portal. An academy. A resource centre. Anything that keeps it off the same shelf as a Facebook group.
Not one of those is just another Facebook group. All of them are community, with intention.
So the question was never whether community is a bit beneath you, or too fluffy, or already done to death by someone else. The question is which of the five fits your people and your own purpose, and whether you're going to keep pretending you're not already standing in the middle of one.
The room is already there, and it's a valuable blind spot in your business. Past clients still vouching for you. Present clients spilling their beans to you and bringing their mates along.
At a time when a machine will answer almost anything, a room full of humans who know your style and story is the one thing a competitor can't clone and AI can't fake. That's not a soft skill. That's your edge.
Your offer, your pricing, your content can all be copied. Your people can't. That's your point of difference.
