How to Think About Community: A Practical Guide for Founders

By René Menozzi

Communities already exist around your product. The question is whether you are actively shaping them or letting them shape themselves. This article is everything I believe about community, built from years of scaling communities from zero to hundreds of thousands of members. It is a practical framework for founders who want to understand what community actually is, how it works, and how to build systems that make it compound over time.

Communities Form Whether You Build Them or Not

A community already exists around your product the moment people start using it. It is people commenting on your TikTok. It is a Reddit thread about your launch. It is two users in a Telegram group helping each other figure out your onboarding. It is customers talking about you at a conference.

A community is a group of people who are aware of your brand and engaged with it at some level. That engagement can be as passive as reading your tweets or as active as beta-testing your next feature. The community exists in any case.

Two paths follow from here. You can shape the community by providing the tools, the structure, and the systems that help it thrive. You can build the bridges between people, create moments of connection, and give contributors a reason to invest their time. Or you can leave it unattended, in which case the community will still form, often in a messy way, in scattered places, with no shared context. In certain cases, an unattended community can affect the company negatively because the narrative is outside your influence.

The role of a community architect, a community lead, or a founder who cares about this work is to help the community develop. Help it thrive. Help people understand what you are building. Make them feel human, feel connected, feel like they are part of something that matters.

The 90/9/1 Rule: Every Community Has Layers

I use a model I call the 90/9/1 rule. It is an approximation, and the exact numbers shift by product and stage. The principle holds across every community I have built or studied.

The 90% are observers. They are passive. They read your announcements, browse your Discord, scan your tweets. They rarely post. This is the majority of every community, and that is completely fine. These people are aware of your product and paying attention. They will act when the moment is right for them.

The 9% are participants. They are more engaged. If there is a contest, they will enter. If there is an AMA, they might show up. If there is a fun initiative, they will participate. They enjoy the community and are willing to invest some time when the opportunity is clear and easy to join.

The 1% are builders. These are the people who are deeply invested in your product. They beta-test features. They write tutorials. They answer other users' questions. They evangelise your product to their own networks. They are your most valuable asset, and they often go unrecognised and unsupported.

The mistake I see most often is treating all three layers the same way. Each layer has different motivations, different needs, and different levels of commitment. The systems you build must account for all three. Give observers easy ways to stay informed. Give participants clear, low-friction opportunities to engage. Give builders direction, recognition, and real impact.

The Science of Social Networks: Nodes and Connections

To understand communities at a deeper level, I study them as social networks. This is literal. It is the actual science of how groups of people connect, communicate, and influence each other.

A community is a graph. Every member is a node. Every interaction between two members is an edge, a connection. The health of a community depends on the density and quality of those connections.

In a healthy community, connections are distributed. Multiple nodes connect to multiple other nodes. Information flows through many paths. If one person leaves, the network stays intact.

In an unhealthy community, connections are centralised. Most nodes connect to one hub, often the founder, a community manager, or a single moderator. If that hub disappears, the network fragments.

This is the core of "systems over heroics." A community that depends on one person being present 24/7 is a fragile network with a single point of failure. A community built on systems has distributed connections, multiple pathways for information, and infrastructure that operates independently of any single node.

My job is to build those distributed connections. I do this through onboarding systems that connect new members to existing ones, contribution programmes that give people reasons to interact with each other, and clear communication structures that let information flow through the network efficiently.

Metcalfe's Law and Why Community Compounds

There is a mathematical principle that explains why community is such a powerful growth tool. Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users.

The key word is connected. A Discord with 10,000 members who never interact has a network value close to zero. A Discord with 500 members who actively help each other, share content, and build relationships has enormous network value.

The implication for founders: optimising for connected members (retention, depth of engagement, quality of interactions) produces exponentially more value than optimising for total member count (growth, vanity metrics, top-of-funnel numbers).

Belong, Grow, Succeed: Why People Stay

I use a three-part framework to understand why people join and stay in communities. Every lasting community satisfies these needs in some form.

Belonging comes first. People join communities to find others like them. They want to feel part of something. They want to be recognised, welcomed, and heard. This is the most fundamental human need a community serves, and it is the one most founders underestimate. If people feel like they belong, they will tolerate a lot of product imperfection. If they feel like outsiders, they will leave no matter how good the product is.

Growth builds on belonging. People stay in communities where they learn and develop. A community that helps its members grow creates genuine loyalty because the value compounds over time. The longer you stay, the more you learn, the more you have invested.

Success builds on growth. People ultimately want to achieve their goals. In a business community, that often means making money, building status, getting early access to opportunities, or advancing their career. The community that helps its members succeed earns their deepest commitment.

These three layers operate in sequence. A community that jumps straight to "succeed" (cash incentives, prizes, financial rewards) without building belonging and growth first will attract mercenaries who leave the moment the incentives stop.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: A Real Story

People come to communities for two types of reasons: intrinsic motivation (they genuinely care about the product, the people, or the mission) and extrinsic motivation (they want a reward, a prize, or a financial return). Both are valid. Both are useful. The danger is building a community entirely on extrinsic motivation.

I experienced this firsthand. At Talus Network, we ran programmes with cash incentives. People participated in AMAs, games, activities, ambassador programmes. Engagement was high. 300 users would attend a single event. The numbers looked incredible.

Then we decided to test something. We cut the cash incentives to see who was actually interested in the product and the community itself.

The result was immediate. Attendance at AMAs dropped from 300 to roughly 10. Most of those 10 were moderators.

The majority of the engaged community had been there for the extrinsic rewards. When the rewards stopped, they left. The intrinsic community, the people who actually cared, was a fraction of what the numbers had suggested.

This experience shaped my entire approach. I now design incentive systems with a clear principle: extrinsic motivation gets people in the door, intrinsic motivation keeps them in the room. The system must create a bridge between the two. People might arrive because of a reward, and that is fine. The system then needs to give them reasons to stay that go beyond the reward: belonging, learning, status, genuine connection to the product and the people around it.

Always know the ratio. How many of your engaged users are there for extrinsic reasons, and how many are intrinsically motivated? If you remove all incentives tomorrow, how many people stay? That number is your real community size. Everything above it is rented attention.

Empathy Is Infrastructure

The most underrated skill in community work is empathy. I mean this in a structural sense. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of your users and understand exactly what they experience when they interact with your product and your community.

This means listening. Actively, consistently, seriously. When users give feedback, that feedback is data. When they complain, the complaint is a signal. When they celebrate something, that celebration tells you what is working.

The principle is simple: people like to be listened to. Even when they are wrong about the solution, they are usually right about the problem. It is your job to listen, interpret, and then act on what you hear. The act of listening itself builds trust. The act of implementing what you heard builds loyalty.

Empathy becomes infrastructure when you build it into your systems. A feedback loop is a clear, easy, visible way for community members to share their thoughts. The key is that the feedback is acknowledged and visibly acted upon. Transparent communication means explaining the reasoning behind decisions, saying so honestly when something goes wrong, and crediting the community when their input shapes the product. Transparency compounds trust the same way engagement compounds network value. And at the moderation level, training moderators to listen with empathy, respond with clarity, and escalate with context is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make.

Word of Mouth Is Still the Best Marketing

The most effective marketing is word of mouth. This has always been true, and social media has amplified it. A single user sharing a positive experience with your product reaches their entire network instantly.

Community is the infrastructure that enables positive word of mouth at scale. When people belong, grow, and succeed within your community, they naturally talk about it. They bring friends. They share content. They defend your brand in public conversations.

This is community as a growth engine. It is organic, sustainable, and compounds over time. It is also the hardest kind of growth to build because it requires genuine investment in people, systems, and long-term thinking.

The community you invest in stays.

Practical Takeaways for Founders

Community is already happening around your product. The choice is whether to invest in shaping it.

René Menozzi is a community architect who builds retention infrastructure for startups and crypto projects. He has scaled communities from zero to 200k+ members. You can reach him on Telegram or X.