The Community Form-Factor Matrix
A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Most teams hear 'community' and picture a big Slack forum. Ricketts' two-by-two replaces that single mental image with four: the right community initiative depends on whether you have hit product market fit and whether you sit closer to enterprise or consumer. Each quadrant has a distinct form factor, from tiny customer advisory boards to a wildfire ambassador and influencer program.
Origin
Created by Camille Ricketts during her time as head of marketing at Notion, as a way to counsel founders who assumed community meant one thing (a chat forum) and therefore wrote it off.
Core principles
- 01Community is a category of initiatives, not a single artifact.
- 02Pre-PMF communities exist to extract feedback from ideal-fit users; post-PMF communities exist to spread ubiquity.
- 03Enterprise communities work through people inside your customers (champions) and people who make a living implementing you (consultants).
- 04A small circle of ten advisors is as legitimately a community as a 200,000-person subreddit.
How to run it
- 1
Place yourself on both axes
Axis one: have you hit product market fit, or are you still exploring it? Axis two: are you strongly enterprise or strongly consumer? Be honest about the current state, not the aspiration.
Pro tip If you run the full gamut like Notion does, place yourself where your early traction actually took root, not where your ARR eventually comes from.
- 2
Pre-PMF + enterprise → customer advisory board
Convene a small circle of ideal-fit users, connect them to each other as well as to you, and incentivise structured feedback by making clear they are on the ground floor and will have influence over the roadmap.
Pro tip These advisors reliably grow into your biggest evangelists and become the seed of the community you eventually build at scale.
Watch out Don't let it become a one-way feedback extraction call — the member-to-member connection is what converts advisors into evangelists.
- 3
Post-PMF + enterprise → champions and consultants
Run two programs. Champions: a gathering place for the most avid users inside your customer companies, giving them special access to your team and a channel for customer success to spot obstacles early. Consultants: remove friction and actively promote the outside layer of people making a living implementing your product.
Pro tip The consultant layer is the Salesforce playbook — a whole economy of people who don't work for you but succeed only if their clients succeed with you.
- 4
Post-PMF + consumer → ambassadors and influencers
This is Notion's quadrant. Fuel the individuals who are already extremely vocal and excited, and pay creators to produce content that drives measurable traffic. Expect wildfire spread of trial and usage.
Pro tip Sponsored creator content is one of the few community-adjacent motions with tight attribution — you can trace traffic from a creator's content straight to your site.
In the wild
Early at Salesforce, a layer of people who did not work at Salesforce saw the opportunity to help other companies implement and grow with the product. Salesforce nurtured rather than fenced off that layer.
→ The consultant ecosystem became a massive part of Salesforce's model — the archetype of the post-PMF enterprise quadrant.
Notion had PMF and sat close to the consumer end of the spectrum early on, so it went hard on ambassadors and influencers rather than on advisory boards. It later added champions inside customer companies as it moved up-market.
→ In-person events run by community members are now back to about 30 per month worldwide, plus member-run Facebook groups and a ~210,000-person subreddit that Notion does not own or moderate.
Common mistakes
Assuming community means a Slack forum
Many founders reject community outright because the only picture they have is a chat instance where people talk all day. That is one form factor among four, and the wrong one for most pre-PMF enterprise companies.
Running the wrong quadrant's playbook
Chasing a mass ambassador program before PMF, or an advisory board when you already have thousands of vocal fans, wastes the motion you actually have available.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and growth leads who suspect community could help but cannot tell which form of it fits their current stage and buyer
Not ideal for
Teams that already have a thriving community motion and need scaling tactics rather than a form-factor decision
From the transcript
“And on the axes, you have whether you have hit product market fit or if you're still exploring product market fit and then whether you're…”
“I think that you have the opportunity to do customer advisory boards, which is really convening like even smaller circles of ideal fit users and…”
“I think when you hear the word community, you think of a big forum of some type, whether it's a Slack instance or something else…”
“And so if you're in that quadrant, figuring out how to start moving people in your customer base into those categories.”
From the episode
How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business
Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital)