The Community-as-a-Second-Product Test
Price the full operating burden before using community as an acquisition engine
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 98%
The Community-as-a-Second-Product Test evaluates community-first acquisition by modeling the community as a product with its own funnel. The company must acquire members, onboard them, induce interaction, retain them, and fund ongoing operations before it can attempt product conversion. It then faces an additional relevance problem: people may have joined for the topic or peer group rather than for the commercial product. This creates two simultaneous growth systems with less automation and weaker scale economies than conventional product-led growth. Teams use the test to estimate the full operational and conversion burden, compare it with direct acquisition, and decide whether community is truly a scalable engine or should instead amplify a narrower part of the existing funnel.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain during Kieran Flanagan and Anu Atluru's critique of community-first B2B acquisition.
Core principles
- 01Community members must be acquired from somewhere
- 02A community requires onboarding, engagement, and retention
- 03Community has weaker scale economies than software
- 04Converting members to an unrelated product adds another difficult step
How to run it
- 1
Model Community Acquisition
Identify how prospective members will discover and join the community at scale. Calculate the channels, effort, and cost required.
Pro tip Treat member acquisition as rigorously as customer acquisition.
Watch out Members do not appear simply because a community space has been launched.
- 2
Define Community Activation
Specify the behavior showing that a new member has begun receiving and providing peer value. Design onboarding around reaching that behavior.
Pro tip Use an interaction-based activation event rather than registration.
Watch out Membership totals can grow while the community remains inactive.
- 3
Plan Engagement and Retention
Determine what brings members back weekly and what ongoing programming or relationships sustain participation. Estimate the operational labor involved.
Pro tip Separate host-generated engagement from self-sustaining member activity.
Watch out Operational demands often rise with scale rather than approaching zero.
- 4
Test Product Relevance
Measure whether the reason members joined overlaps with the problem the commercial product solves. Identify a credible path from community value to product value.
Pro tip Interview both converters and non-converters about their original joining intent.
Watch out A large but weakly related community may convert worse than a small targeted audience.
- 5
Compare the Two Funnels
Compare the combined community-acquisition and product-conversion funnel with direct product acquisition and other growth channels. Proceed only if the added system creates compensating strategic value.
Pro tip Include support, moderation, programming, and community-platform costs.
Watch out Do not credit broad influence as revenue without defining how it will be evaluated.
In the wild
A software company creates a broad professional community, acquires thousands of members, and funds events and moderation. It later discovers that many members joined for peer networking rather than the tool's specific workflow.
→ The company narrows the community mandate to education and advocacy instead of treating it as its primary acquisition engine.
Common mistakes
Assuming Free Acquisition
Community members still require channels, content, events, referrals, or paid effort to acquire.
Ignoring Intent Mismatch
Members may value the community while having no need for the associated commercial product.
Underbudgeting Operations
Community-led growth requires recurring human work and does not inherit software's near-infinite scale economies.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for B2B teams considering a topic community as a scalable top-of-funnel acquisition channel.
Not ideal for
It is not intended for products where community participation is already the core product experience.
From the transcript
“You're really growing two products because community is somewhat similar, like a product, right? You have to acquire, you have to engage, you have to…”
“I for sure I would say that community-led growth is more operationally heavy, right? I think you have less scale economies with community-led growth than…”
From the episode
Community-Led Growth vs. Product-Led Growth with Anu Atluru
Anu Atluru