Kyle Poyar on Why Community Isn't a Growth Strategy (And What It Is)

Stop Building Community for Your KPIs

Most founders approach community backwards. They start with metrics: CAC, activation rate, retention. They want a Slack group that drives pipeline in Q3.

Kyle Poyar says that's exactly how you fail.

Folks shouldn't build community on the basis of what KPIs it's going to improve for you. You need to build a community with and for your users or your audience. If it's really explicitly about your own objectives, the counterintuitive finding is that you're probably never actually going to meet your objectives because it needs to be actually community-driven.

— Kyle Poyar

The companies nailing community-led growth aren't measuring ROI in the first 90 days. They're building something people actually want to be part of. HubSpot created the inbound marketing community before they had a product. Gainsight built the customer success movement the same way. They focused on practice, not product.

When Poyar noticed executives kept asking him about usage-based pricing, he didn't launch a content series or a webinar funnel. He sent 25 people an email with three questions: Are you interested? What topics matter? Who else should join? Within hours, 80% said yes and when can we start.

The UBP Mastermind: How to Seed a Community Executives Beg to Join

Poyar's default was no. Don't waste time. Plenty of other priorities. But the pull was undeniable.

He started the UBP Mastermind with 40 people. Invite-only. Private. No website. The first Zoom call pulled 30 executives for a full hour. Now it's hundreds of members, monthly sessions, and unicorn founders asking for invites.

The structure is simple but deliberate. One facilitator per session, nominated from the group. Pre-seeded questions in a Google Doc. Everyone on video. No webinar vibe, no top-down lectures. The goal is commiseration and collaboration, not content.

It cannot be top-down. It's not my voice. It's really giving people the chance to partner with one another, find people that are passionate about this, find their tribe, and get better at their job.

— Kyle Poyar

Onboarding is entirely manual. Every new member is nominated by an existing member. Poyar personally sends the calendar invite, shares the master planning doc, and connects them to the group. Non-scalable, yes. But that personal touch makes people feel like active participants, not passive subscribers.

Monthly cadence works because it's frequent enough to stay top of mind but not overwhelming. Hour-long sessions give space for real dialogue. And every session spawns three or four new topic ideas, forcing Poyar to keep scheduling more.

Quality Over Quantity, Always

The group is intentionally small. Too large and it gets noisy. The magic happens when everyone plays a dual role: sharing experience and learning from others. That only works when the group is high-quality and tightly focused.

If it scales, Poyar sees chapters by company stage, by vertical, or by geography. Series A companies face different problems than public companies. DevOps teams think about usage-based pricing differently than procurement teams. Segmentation keeps relevance high.

Community as a PLG Multiplier (Not a Replacement)

Poyar sees community as the natural evolution of product-led growth. PLG means building for end users, enabling self-service, and expanding bottom-up. Community takes that ethos to its logical conclusion: users become the brand.

When done right, community impacts every part of the funnel. Top of funnel: users recruit new users. Activation: they build templates and share playbooks that help others get to value faster. Support: they answer questions and unstuck each other. SEO: user-generated content makes the product discoverable.

Users are going out, they're discovering products. A lot of times the products fit within their existing workflow or embedded in their existing tools. These products are making it easy for citizen developers to customize or create their own apps. And because folks have really built exactly what they want, they go to bat for the products they love.

— Kyle Poyar

The result is lower CAC, better conversion, stronger retention, and healthier unit economics. But that only happens when the community is built with users, not for your pipeline.

Start where your audience already lives. Maybe that's a subreddit, a Slack workspace, or a LinkedIn group. Serve an underserved need there before you spin up your own infrastructure. Listen for what people are asking for, not what you want to give them.

How OpenView Turned PLG Into a Movement

In 2016, OpenView coined the term product-led growth. At first, they owned the entire first page of Google. They thought that made them the winners.

Then they realized: the only reason they owned Google was because no one else was talking about it. No one was searching for it. Owning a term doesn't make it meaningful.

So they opened it up. They amplified other voices. Consultants, platforms, training firms. People who wanted to contribute, not compete. That openness turned PLG from a branded term into a household name in SaaS.

The same principle applies to any community. If you treat it as closed or proprietary, you cap its potential. Movements happen when you let go, when you empower others to build alongside you.

Poyar's advice: start with no. Assume it's a bad idea. Listen for pull. If people beg you to build it, if they keep asking when the next session is, if they nominate their peers without prompting, then you have something real. Scale from there, slowly, with the community leading the way.