When I advise companies about building community programs, there’s a conversation that comes up again and again. They tell me they started a community about a year ago, so I ask to talk to whoever’s running it. More often than I’d like, the answer is some version of “well, no one’s running it, we just started a Discord.”
I understand how it happens. A founder or someone in marketing says let’s just start a community, and a Discord server or a Slack group is the fastest way to have one. It feels like progress, and for the first few weeks it can even look like it’s working. The gap is that nobody’s job includes running it, and that doesn’t show up until later.
When a company asks me whether it’s ready to build a community, the conversation usually starts with the parts that look good. Customers are already asking each other for help somewhere. Leadership has a reason to care, maybe retention, maybe product feedback. There’s even a rough idea of what members would get out of showing up.
Then I ask who’s going to run it.
Four things need to be in place
The way I think about readiness comes down to four conditions. All of them need to be true, at least well enough to start:
Member need. People already want to learn from each other or connect around this problem, and you can see it in how they behave, beyond what the company hopes.
Business need. Community would support something the company cares about right now, and the leaders involved understand why.
Value exchange. Members get something real from participating, and the company gets something back without extracting it from them.
Ownership. A specific person is responsible for it, with enough protected time to do the work and a line into the teams who need to hear what the community is saying.
The teams I talk to usually have a decent story for the first three. Ownership is the one that gets waved through, because it feels like a staffing detail you can sort out after launch.
Why you can’t average them
It’s tempting to treat readiness like a score, where strength in three places makes up for a gap in the fourth. Plenty of member demand, a clear business case, a sensible value exchange and a plan to figure out the owner later sounds like three out of four, and three out of four sounds pretty good.
I don’t think it works that way. The weakest condition decides what happens, because the others depend on it. Strong member demand with no owner can turn into a frustrated group of customers the company can’t support. A great business case with no real member need gives you a space people stop coming back to, however good the programming is.
Seen that way, the question worth asking before launch shifts. It stops being whether there’s enough excitement and becomes which of the four is weakest, and whether that one can be fixed first.
What a missing owner looks like a few months in
Back to the Discord. If it’s at all popular, posts start coming in faster than anyone can read them. The person keeping an eye on it in their spare time has neither the experience nor the bandwidth to keep it under control, let alone make it a useful, valuable place for the people in it and for the business.
From there, I’ve usually seen one of these happen:
The company shuts it down, which is terrible for the people who showed up and cared.
It gets left to drift, which is also bad, just slower.
Someone gets brought in to clean it up, which usually means a lot of time dealing with some significantly bad content before anything of quality can be rebuilt, often from scratch.
That last one is extremely time consuming, and it’s work that a real owner from the start would mostly have avoided. My advice here is about as plain as I get: don’t start a place where you’re encouraging customers to have conversations without someone on your team whose job it is to manage it.
When the owner is a junior hire expected to do everything
Sometimes the company does hire someone. The version I see most often goes something like: we need a community, who’s the cheapest person we can get to do this? I don’t know of any other part of the business where you’d hire the least experienced, least knowledgeable, but maybe very eager person you can find and put them in front of your customers all the time.
The job postings tell the same story. I’ve seen them ask for two or three years of experience to single-handedly lead, strategize, execute and report on a community program that doesn’t exist yet. That’s the whole job, handed to someone with very little experience to lean on and nobody more senior to learn from, often for very little pay. The people in those roles are often talented and eager, and I don’t hold it against them. What it tells me is that the company doesn’t yet value community, and hasn’t understood what goes into making it work.
The owner doesn’t always have to be a dedicated hire. Typically it’s one full-time person, and sometimes it’s half of another person’s time. Either way, the time needs to be carved out and protected, and there needs to be a person.
Value exchange, and who fixes it
At HeyGen, I inherited a community that was essentially a bunch of activities that had been happening before I arrived. It needed to be righted before it could really work.
Recentering it started with talking to community members about what they actually wanted or needed, especially the ones in the audience we were trying to build for. From there we restructured the program and rethought the strategy around it, so that it met what the business was trying to achieve along with what members wanted to have happen.
I bring it up because of the order things happened in. The value exchange got repaired because someone owned the community and had the job of going and asking. Without an owner, the other three conditions don’t have anyone looking after them either.
What I’d do with the weakest one
A few questions I’d put to any team before a launch:
Who owns this, by name, and how many hours a week do they actually have for it?
What will community do for this business that isn’t already served by something else in your go-to-market?
Are customers already helping each other somewhere, even informally?
What would make participating worth it for members, given everything else competing for their time?
Sometimes the answers point to waiting, and that’s a legitimate outcome. If ownership is the weak spot and the rest looks strong, if it were me, I’d run a pilot, with a real owner and a set date to look at what happened and decide whether to keep going, before anyone commits to a platform or a headcount plan.
I’d be patient with that date, too. In my experience community typically takes several months or more before it shows results for the business, so the first decision point should look at whether the pilot is doing what you set it up to test.
What a readiness check won’t tell you
Working through the four conditions tells you where the risk sits. It won’t tell you how big to go, which platform to pick, or what the programming should be, and a team can look strong on all four and still have a hard first year. What it does tell you is which condition to work on before you launch, and in the companies I’ve advised, that’s most often the owner.
Try this
Before your next planning conversation about community, write down who would own it, by name, and how many hours a week they’d have for it. If either answer is fuzzy, that’s the condition to work on before anything launches. For more on what ownership involves once a community is up and running, read Who Runs Your Community After You’ve Designed It?
Decoded Takeaways
Readiness for a community comes down to four conditions: whether members need it, whether the business needs it, whether the value exchange works for both sides, and whether someone owns it. They don’t add up like a score. The weakest one decides what happens, because the others depend on it.
Ownership is the condition teams most often wave through, treating it as a detail for after launch. The results are familiar: a Discord or Slack group that grows faster than anyone can manage and ends up shut down, left to drift, or cleaned up at great effort. Hiring the cheapest, least experienced person available and expecting them to do everything leads to the same place more slowly.
A real owner is also what makes the other conditions repairable, because someone has the job of asking members what they need and reshaping the program around it. Before launching, it’s worth naming the weakest condition and deciding whether to fix it first, run a pilot with a real owner and a set decision date, or wait.