Is a Community Actually a Growth Channel for B2B SaaS?

Is a community actually a growth channel for B2B SaaS?

Rarely, and almost never in the first few years. A community is a retention and support programme that occasionally produces acquisition as a by product. Run it for retention and it often works. Run it as a growth channel and you will be asked for pipeline numbers it was never structured to produce.

That is a minority position in a market where every SaaS company is told to build one, so this piece argues both sides with the evidence that exists. Some of that evidence cuts against community harder than its advocates admit.

We build the sites, content engines and automations that B2B companies run growth through, which means we see what gets funded and what gets quietly shut down eighteen months later. Community shows up in both columns.

What does the industry's own data say?

The most useful source is the CMX Community Industry Trends Report, which surveyed 589 community professionals between May 1 and June 22, 2025. Its editor's own summary opens by describing the industry as in a bit of a crunch: teams are leaner, budgets have taken a hit, and the pressure to prove value is as intense as ever.

Two numbers from that report tell the story. 17% of respondents said nobody at their company works on community full time, which CMX calls the highest number it has ever seen. And ROI is named as the number one challenge, again.

At the same time, 83% said community is core to their company's mission. That combination, near universal belief alongside a persistent inability to prove value, is the actual state of the field.

Should you trust that data?

Partly, and knowing why matters. CMX surveys community professionals, so the sample is people whose job is community. That is the right group to ask about practice and the wrong group to ask whether the function should exist.

The company mix also skews small. Among respondents who answered, 36% work at organisations with under 1 million dollars in annual revenue. That is a very different setting from a Series B software company weighing community against paid search.

We are not dismissing the report. We are saying read it as a picture of how community teams work, not as evidence that community produces growth. It does not claim to be the latter.

What is the strongest argument against community as a growth channel?

It comes from effectiveness research that has nothing to do with community. Binet and Field's five principles of growth in B2B marketing, published with the B2B Institute using IPA Databank data, include a blunt one: expand your customer base, because customer acquisition strategies are much more effective than loyalty strategies.

A community is, structurally, a loyalty strategy. It concentrates attention on people who already chose you. If the research is right that acquisition outperforms loyalty for growth, then community is being asked to do the thing it is least shaped for.

Add John Dawes' 95:5 rule, which holds that up to 95% of firms are not in the market for a given product at any one time. A community is almost entirely populated by the small share who already bought. The 95% are not in it, by definition.

What is the strongest argument for it?

That the alternative uses for the same money are not as good as they look, and that community compounds where campaigns do not. A forum answer written once keeps answering the question for years, and it does so in public, where search engines and answer engines can read it.

That last part is the argument we find most persuasive and the one least often made. A community generates the kind of specific, problem shaped language that no marketing team writes on its own, and it generates it at a volume no content calendar matches.

CMX's data supports the durability claim. More than half of the communities surveyed have existed for five or more years, the highest rate in six years, and 14% reported over 100,000 members in 2025, up from 9% in 2023. Communities that survive do get large.

What does community realistically do well?

Three things. It reduces support load, because members answer each other. It surfaces product feedback earlier and more honestly than any survey. And it creates the conditions for expansion, because a customer who knows three other customers is harder to lose.

Every one of those is a retention or cost outcome, and every one is measurable. Ticket deflection, feature request volume, and net revenue retention among community members versus non members are all real numbers your finance team will accept.

That is the honest pitch. It is a good pitch. It simply is not a pipeline pitch, and the expansion side of it sits closer to building an expansion motion than to demand generation.

When should a B2B SaaS company not build one?

Before product market fit, when you have fewer than a few hundred active customers, and whenever nobody will own it full time. That last condition is the one that kills most attempts, and CMX's 17% figure shows how common it is.

A community with no owner is not a small community. It is an empty room with your logo on it, which is actively worse than no community, because prospects find it and read the silence as a signal about the company.

Also skip it if your customers do not have a shared professional identity. Developers, marketers and finance leaders form communities because they already talk to each other about their work. Buyers of a narrow internal tool usually do not.

What does a realistic starting version look like?

Smaller than the platforms want you to think. A single recurring live session with customers, run by one person who owns it, for six months. No platform purchase, no gamification, no separate brand. If forty people show up repeatedly, you have found something. If eleven do, you have saved yourself a platform contract.

Only then decide whether it should be asynchronous. CMX found that 86% of respondents host online forums, chat spaces or message boards, and that management is shifting to shared models, with in house only management down to 49% in 2025 from 61% in 2023 and hybrid up from 31% to 41%.

That shift is worth noting before you start. A forum that works is one members eventually help run, which takes years, not quarters.

How should you measure it honestly?

Pick outcomes the function can actually cause. Support tickets deflected. Net revenue retention among members against non members. Feature requests that reached the roadmap. Time to first value for customers who joined in their first month.

Do not measure influenced pipeline. It is the metric community teams reach for under pressure, and it is the one that gets the programme cancelled, because every reviewer knows the attribution is generous. Claiming a weak growth number is worse than claiming a strong retention one.

This is the same discipline we argue for with other slow channels, including the honest version of whether a newsletter is worth running.

What about AI in all this?

Adoption among community teams is near total. CMX's 2026 report page states that 93% of community professionals are now using AI tools, up from 81% the previous year, when 92% also said they were excited to learn more. The 2025 report notes the main uses as content, reporting and moderation.

Our read is that this helps the cost side rather than the growth side. AI moderation and summarisation make a small team viable, which addresses the staffing problem CMX keeps measuring. It does not make a community produce demand.

It does create one genuine growth adjacent benefit. A well summarised, publicly indexed community archive is the sort of specific, first hand material answer engines cite, which is a real acquisition effect even if it is a slow one.

So what would we recommend?

Build it if you have customers who already talk to each other, someone who will own it properly, and a retention problem worth solving. Do not build it because a competitor has one, because a platform vendor made a good case, or because you need pipeline this quarter.

And if you do build it, be honest internally about what it is from day one. A programme that promised retention and delivered retention gets renewed. A programme that promised growth and delivered retention gets cancelled, having done exactly the same good work.

We help B2B teams decide where the next unit of effort goes, and often that argument ends up being about which channel is being asked to do the wrong job. If you want a candid second opinion on yours, we are happy to talk. You can find us at phoenix.studio, and the nearest thing we would usually recommend first is founder led content.