Why Almost Every Brand Community Fails

Opening

Dear reader, have you ever heard someone say, “Shouldn’t our company build a community too?”

Talking with startup founders and marketers, this question comes up constantly. The expectation is that you spin up a Discord channel, open a Slack workspace, and customers will gather to talk about your product, help each other out, and even contribute to your development roadmap. Honestly, that picture is seductive.

But look at reality: even the hottest companies right now—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft—have launched AI and cloud communities that never really took off. The last post is often days old, and even questions go unanswered. Meanwhile, user-run communities like Reddit function far better.

So the reality is different. Actually, “very different” is more accurate. Most corporate communities go quiet within months of launching, and the moment that silence becomes visible, it’s effectively over. Today I want to talk about the trap of “community solves everything” thinking, and what the small number of communities that actually work have in common.

The Fantasy of “Community Cures All”

Many companies imagine a scenario when building a community: post a product update, customers react; someone posts a question, another customer answers; open-source contributions start flowing in; feedback on product direction arrives naturally. In short, a “virtuous cycle.”

The problem is that this virtuous cycle almost never happens.

There’s a long-known rule in online communities: the 90-9-1 rule¹. It states that 90% of community members only read, 9% engage occasionally, and only 1% actually create content. Jakob Nielsen, an authority in UX research, first formalized this in 2006. For Wikipedia, data shows that only about 0.2% of all visitors actually participate in editing.

Of course, some recent research suggests this ratio is improving. Data on small brand communities shows engagement rates climbing as high as 33%. But that’s the story of well-managed communities. Most corporate communities collapse long before reaching that level.