Building a Community Around Your SaaS Product on a Marketplace

When founders launch a SaaS product, their dreams often fixate on growth curves, activation rates, and churn percentages. Rarely, at first, do they focus on the intangible but powerful asset that many of the most successful software businesses eventually come to cherish: a thriving user community. In the age of marketplace-driven SaaS, where platforms like Salesforce AppExchange, Atlassian Marketplace, Shopify, and AWS Marketplace shape the destinies of thousands of software products, building community becomes both more challenging and more indispensable.

Most SaaS founders are well aware of what a good community looks like. They imagine lively forums, volunteer moderators, avid supporters evangelizing their product, and a sense of shared excitement whenever an update drops. But what is less obvious is how such a culture can sprout organically, particularly within the architectural limits and unique cultures of a third-party marketplace. Marketplaces have their own rules, restrictions, and user flows, and a vendor’s ability to nurture connections with their users can be at once enabled and constrained by these platforms. The real question is not whether you should try to build a community, but how you do so when someone else controls the environment.

Why Community Matters in a Marketplace Setting

For SaaS products that live exclusively or primarily inside digital marketplaces, community becomes a survival skill. Marketplaces offer exposure, of course, but they also commoditize software by pitting you against dozens or hundreds of similar offerings. It is all too easy for users to try your product today and jump ship tomorrow. What resists this gravitational pull are ties that go deeper than mere feature lists or marginally better pricing. Customers who feel sense of belonging invest more, remain longer, advocate louder, and even forgive the occasional stumble.

In this context, community is more than a fluffy afterthought. It is a retention machine, a discovery engine, and even a customer support buffer. The top-grossing SaaS vendors on app marketplaces often share not just product excellence but robust communities that orbit their brands. This is no accident. As feature differentiation narrows in maturing categories, it is the warmth of peer support, exclusive content, and shared culture that makes one app’s review page brim with glowing endorsements where others languish in obscurity.

The Challenges Unique to Marketplace SaaS

But the obstacles to community-building inside a marketplace environment are manifold. First, the nature of user ownership changes. Marketplace rules can restrict the type and amount of data you receive about each signup. Some platforms tightly gatekeep direct communication, making it harder to move users into your email lists or community sites. Attempts to circumvent these structures can violate terms of service and risk your entire business.

Second, in a marketplace, your users’ initial loyalty may lie more with the parent platform than with your product. If your SaaS offers add-ons for Jira, for example, many users still primarily identify as Jira users. This “borrowed audience” dynamic can make it harder to spark a distinct culture around your offering alone. You must give customers a reason to step outside the parent ecosystem and form new rituals with you.

Marketplace algorithms themselves shape how and what people see. Instead of seeing new user signups as invitations to a dinner party you host, imagine opening your door to a crowd motivated more by convenience than kinship. Winning them over requires delicacy and creativity.

Foundations for Community Growth

Despite these hurdles, the most successful SaaS marketplace vendors become masters of cultivating grassroots user involvement. Their approaches differ, but a few common principles emerge.

Transparency fosters trust from the outset. When prospective users evaluate your product via marketplace listings and reviews, they must find not just polished marketing copy, but tangible signs of a real user base. Highlight user stories, showcase real conversations from your forums or Slack group, and share the history of your company in a way that feels more personal than performative.

On marketplaces that limit direct email, creative use of built-in communication features becomes crucial. For example, some vendors leverage release notes, customizable onboarding tours, or product-driven notification banners to invite users to external channels, such as a discussion group, Discord server, or customer meetup.

Co-creating value signals that the community exists for users as much as for the vendor. The best SaaS vendors routinely invite users to co-author documentation, suggest feature ideas, and vote on improvements. Some even formalize user advisory panels or run periodic “Ask Me Anything” sessions with developers. This sense of shared ownership works wonders for both advocacy and product velocity.

Marketplace reviews are foundational to standing out in crowded shelves. At first glance, soliciting reviews may seem like a transactional marketing task. But forward-thinking founders treat reviews as windows into the evolving mood of their community, responding authentically to both criticism and applause, and then sharing learnings transparently.

Case Studies and Lessons

Consider some familiar examples. Trello, once a startup but now a veteran of the Atlassian Marketplace, cultivated dozens of user-driven boards and template libraries, many developed by users, not staff. This open-ended approach invited users to become authorities in their own right, increasing loyalty both to product and to one another.

Or think of the world of Shopify. Apps that thrive in its marketplace often maintain their own external discussion forums or private Facebook groups, where power users share tutorials and campaigns. This seeding of knowledge produces a flywheel: advanced users become unofficial support agents, the burden of onboarding drops, and product virality spreads naturally.

The Risks and Responsible Community Management

Every advantage comes with challenges, and community building is no exception. As a SaaS vendor, you are responsible for the tone and safety of the spaces you seed. Inadequate moderation or indifferent engagement can turn promising user forums into echo chambers or worse. Setting clear codes of conduct, being accessible when issues arise, and celebrating users’ success stories are tactics that pay dividends over time.

Another risk lies in promising a sense of intimacy or influence that will not withstand scale. If users are told their votes determine roadmap priorities, but no follow-up occurs, trust decays quickly. The only viable community is one rooted in consistent, visible, and honest engagement by the product team.

The Opportunity: Lessons for SaaS Builders

Building community around a SaaS product in a third-party marketplace is not for the faint of heart. The platforms’ constraints are real and significant. Yet this environment also presents a rare opportunity. Every crowded marketplace is a stage set for those willing to move beyond transactional thinking to relational, community-centric practice.

The payoff, for those who succeed, is not merely higher retention or lower support costs. It is the gradual formation of a true network effect, where your users’ affinity for your product multiplies as new members arrive, not because you bought their loyalty, but because you earned their trust and belonging.

As SaaS continues to globalize and marketplaces become even more vital, the vendors who master the art of community-building will find themselves not just with more loyal customers, but with a living, breathing ecosystem that propels their brand even when the algorithms change. What might begin as a tactical challenge for lead generation becomes, in time, a strategic moat that, much like software itself, is built iteratively but compounds exponentially.