I recently tried a well-known nutrition app, Zoe, which aims to help users better understand their personal health by analysing their microbiome and blood sugar responses. Part of their strategy to enhance adoption and create stickiness was to foster a sense of community. However, their implementation was lumping users into a generic group chat with a health coach, attempting to stimulate conversation out of nothing. There were awkward, irrelevant prompts and crickets in response, and the coach’s inability to give specific advice in this group setting made the experience feel devoid of purpose.
It’s true that, when done well, developing a community amongst your users can be a strong driver for engagement and repeat use. However, many product teams approach ‘community’ in an overly simplistic way. They see adding a group chat or forum as synonymous with building a community.
Building a community isn’t about adding a feature. It’s about creating meaningful connections, belonging, and real value. If you commit to it, it should be reflected throughout everything you do in ways as big as a whole product or feature or as small as the text on a button.
In this article, we’ll examine how some companies have excelled at building community and share a cheat sheet of approaches for you to pick from. For those who decide to build chat groups into your products, we'll explore in more depth how you can set these up to become a genuinely valuable hive of communal activity.
Duolingo has integrated community features seamlessly by using competitive elements like leaderboards and achievement badges. These features make the user feel connected to others who are on the same language-learning journey. They also provide opportunities for celebrating shared progress, which keeps users motivated and invested. Duolingo also connects users with real friends, not just strangers, tapping into existing relationships to foster a sense of shared achievement. Its forums and discussion areas also allow users to ask questions and help each other, fostering peer support and community learning. Additionally, everything around their product is designed to be recognisable - from their owl mascot to the iconic ring that sounds when a lesson is completed. This provides elements for users to bond over, whether they love or hate them, which you can see in the duolingomemes sub-reddit.
Strava taps into a sense of belonging by creating a community of everyday athletes where users can follow each other, give ‘kudos,’ and share workouts. They’ve done great leveraging competitive and collaborative motivations, and users genuinely feel part of a broader movement. Strava also allows users to share photos of their runs or rides, giving something beyond stats to talk about. When you run a segment another user has completed, you’ll see how you compared. You can contact that other athlete via their profile - perhaps to arrange to run together. After all, interactions in real life are the strongest. But even if you never meet up, seeing who else has run or cycled the same route and comparing your performance adds a robust layer of shared experience, giving users a sense of camaraderie and connection even if they’ve never met in person. This, in turn, aids one of the app's primary goals: to keep athletes motivated. Just be careful not to expose secret military facilities as a by-product.
Notion supports specialised communities by promoting user-generated content. Users share templates, workflows, and tips through forums, making the community a vital resource for learning and improving skills. Notion has cultivated a space where users feel comfortable sharing their personal productivity setups, which helps others and builds a sense of collective contribution. The company has also embraced offline community-building by supporting Notion meetups, where users can connect in person, further deepening the sense of belonging. Another example of a company using similar tactics is Miro, which has created “Miroverse” for users to share templates on (check out ours).
You won’t have heard of this one, but communities aren’t just a feature of consumer applications. They can also be fundamental parts of enterprise SaaS products. Back in my McKinsey days, I led the design of Brix, a sort of internal Stackoverflow which allowed Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to share code, modelling approaches, and even entire internal products with each other. In other words, the community was the product. Getting busy consultants to engage on top of their actual jobs was anything but easy. But we ultimately succeeded in motivating contributors in large part by giving them their own content dashboard, showing their work’s impact on other projects and giving them data they could use to make their case for promotions when the time was right. (Find out more about Brix).
As these examples illustrate, there are numerous ways to foster a sense of community around and within your product. Which ones work for you will depend on your specific context. Thoughtful design, prototyping, and user testing will help you determine the right path (we’re here to help with all of this). To get your creative juices flowing, here’s a cheat sheet that breaks down a few approaches you might consider:
Encouraging users to contribute content builds a sense of ownership and pride. When users actively create and share content, they invest emotionally in the community, helping it flourish. By showcasing individual successes and allowing users to share experiences, you can turn your community into a resource built by the users, for the users. Examples include:
Fostering real-time interactions helps build strong member relationships. By allowing users to engage directly with each other and participate in live activities, you create more touchpoints for meaningful connections. Real-time engagement can be the glue that holds your community together, turning passive users into active participants.
Recognising and rewarding community members is a powerful way to encourage ongoing engagement. Highlighting individual achievements and contributions can motivate users to participate more actively. Rewards create a sense of accomplishment and belonging, helping members feel appreciated and valued within the community.
Creating smaller, niche groups within your broader community can significantly deepen engagement. Users tend to feel more connected when they share specific interests or experiences. Specialised communities help foster intimacy, making it easier for users to bond and build meaningful relationships.
Data can be a powerful tool to help users understand their place within a larger context. By sharing individual progress compared to others, users feel connected to the broader community, fostering a sense of shared journey. Showing community-wide insights also reinforces that users are part of something bigger, which can be highly motivating.
Providing structured support and mentorship opportunities can be instrumental in creating a supportive community environment. New users benefit from the guidance of experienced members, while mentors feel a deeper connection through their role. This personal support fosters trust and adds value beyond standard community interactions.
Your product’s design plays a significant role in fostering a sense of community. Everything from the imagery you use to the tone of your microcopy can influence how users perceive the space. Thoughtful, community-oriented design can help make users feel welcome, valued, and connected from the moment they join.
Partnering with established communities can add significant value to your product without building everything from scratch. By tapping into networks that users already trust and engage with, you create an instant connection that enhances their experience. Clever partnerships can help you save on development resources while providing a rich, engaging community element for your users.
Chat-based communities can be a powerful way to foster a sense of belonging—if done correctly. Instead of forcing unrelated people into a generic group, here are some key strategies to make chat-based communities more effective:
Ensure group chats are organised around shared interests or goals. For instance, instead of a single catch-all chat for all Zoe users, create smaller groups for people with specific dietary challenges or goals and be transparent about these themes that led to the grouping.
Empower health coaches (or equivalent roles) to act as active facilitators who know how to generate relevant, engaging discussions—not just provide generic prompts. Facilitators should be trained to ask insightful questions, share helpful information, keep the conversation flowing, and have the expertise to tackle tricky questions users may encounter. They should also proactively identify common challenges and introduce relevant topics to help members overcome them.
Use group chats to share exclusive resources, insights, and data that can’t be found elsewhere. Members should feel they gain something tangible by being part of the group—whether it’s early access to new features, expert advice, or curated content. This will also stimulate conversation about the content.
Keep group sizes small enough to foster real conversation but large enough to allow for diversity of experience and input. A good range is between 10 and 20 members, which allows for multiple perspectives while still feeling intimate. Smaller groups make users feel heard, while diversity adds richness to the discussion.
Building an effective chat-based community means continually nurturing conversations, ensuring they stay relevant, and giving members a reason to stay engaged. Facilitators must play an active role, ensuring discussions remain on track and in line with community guidelines and introducing new topics to keep the conversation lively.
Defining your community’s purpose is essential before deciding which features to include. The purpose should dictate the structure, tone, and type of interactions within your community. For example, if the goal is to create a support network, features like mentorship programmes or buddy systems would be far more effective than leaderboards. Purpose shapes how users perceive the community and choose to engage with it.
Communities built without a clear purpose often struggle to retain users. The purpose acts as a guiding principle for the community’s design and the content shared within it. For example, a community built around learning will have different needs—such as expert Q&A sessions and resource sharing—compared to one built around social connection, which might focus more on personal stories and group chats.
Don’t build communities for their own sake or to ‘drive adoption’. Ask yourself, what purpose do they serve for your users?
To truly understand your community’s success, you must go beyond vanity metrics like the number of registered users or total posts. Instead, focus on metrics that indicate depth of engagement, such as active participation rates, average time spent interacting, or the number of meaningful contributions. Metrics like these help you understand if your community is providing real value to users.
Consider also tracking user retention within community features—how often do users return to participate in discussions or events? Retention strongly indicates that your community meets user needs and provides lasting value.
Qualitative feedback is another valuable metric. Regularly gather feedback from community members about their experience, what they find helpful, and what they think could be improved. This can help you identify pain points and opportunities for growth that quantitative metrics might miss.
Inclusivity is a cornerstone of any thriving community. From the language used in copywriting to the diversity represented in imagery, every design decision either welcomes users in or leaves them feeling excluded. Inclusive design ensures that all users feel valued and that they belong, which ultimately encourages broader participation and richer interactions.
Inclusivity also means considering accessibility—ensuring that your community features are usable by people with disabilities. This could include providing text alternatives for images, guaranteeing compatibility with screen readers, or designing navigable interfaces via keyboard.
An inclusive community is one where all users, regardless of their background or abilities, feel they have a voice. This fosters a more extensive user base and richer and more diverse discussions.
When I was added to that group chat in Zoe, it was a stark reminder that a community isn’t something you can create simply by putting people together in a digital room. It needs a purpose, structure, and value that makes users want to engage. Whether you’re using a leaderboard like Duolingo, ‘kudos’ like Strava, or user-generated templates like Notion, the key is to make users feel they belong to something greater in a way that genuinely adds value to their experience.
Building a community takes time, attention, and intention. It’s not just about a feature; it’s about the feeling you create. Let’s make sure the feeling we create is one that users want to return to.
