Original Summary

I've spent close to 20 years building and running online communities. Over that time, I've seen firsthand how valuable a good community can be for a business: customer conversations, peer support, feedback, retention, word of mouth, and a growing body of useful content. That background is what led me to build a SaaS in 2024: a white-label community/forum platform for businesses. I also liked the market for a few reasons: The category is already proven. There are established companies making serious revenue from community/forum software. Businesses already run communities across forums, Slack, Discord, Facebook Groups, etc. I believe useful human conversations will become more valuable as the web fills with AI-generated content. One of our product bets is that public community content should also help businesses get discovered through Google and AI search, rather than community being purely a retention/engagement tool. The business is profitable today, and we have a small number of customers who genuinely like the product. But there's one problem: Finding new customers is much harder than I expected. That has made me question something more fundamental than our marketing. Is community/forum software actually a good business to be in today? Do enough businesses genuinely care about owning a customer community to pay for dedicated software? Or is community one of those things companies like the idea of, but rarely consider important enough to prioritize and budget for? I keep wondering whether I'm dealing with: A. A good market where I haven't figured out distribution and positioning yet or B. A category that's fundamentally a "nice to have" for most businesses I'd especially like to hear from founders, marketers, customer success people, or anyone who has bought/evaluated community software. How do you view this category today? Is there a real, urgent business problem here, or am I overestimating how much businesses care about community? I'm not looking for encouragement. I'm trying to understand the market more clearly.   submitted by   /u/kkatdare [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：服务器与云资源
  • 分类依据：内容涉及服务器、云资源或网络线路
  • 信息来源：Reddit · Entrepreneur
  • 发布时间：2026/9/21 14:07:17