What Is Community Discovery? A Practical Guide for B2B Community Strategy

Community discovery is the stage where the foundations of a community are set – before a community manager is hired, platforms are chosen, content is planned, or members are invited.

After building more than 20 communities across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise environments, time and time again this phase is often underestimated, or rushed. Yet it’s where many of the decisions that determine long-term success are made.

Below is an overview of what a community discovery involves, alongside the key areas and questions worth working through before moving forward.

What is community discovery?

A community discovery is the strategic phase where you work through a number of key questions and put pen to paper on what your community will do. It helps you articulate why it is needed, how it will work, and what success looks like. Crucially, this phase helps you decide whether a community is the right path forward – before you start building.

Discovery is an internal document. It helps you think through your community, acts as a reference point for future decisions, and creates a strong base to build from if you do go ahead. It ensures that you and your team are aligned on the vision.

It’s easy to assume that when you’re talking about “community”, you’re all talking about the same thing. In reality, community can mean very different things to different people. Clarifying what you mean at this stage is key to surfacing differences, assumptions, or potential sticking points early.

Below is a breakdown of the main areas you should be thinking about, and the key questions to ask during discovery.

Defining your community

The first stage is to clearly articulate what your community is. Start with what it will do, who it’s for, and the value proposition for your members.

This becomes the foundation for your positioning and internal alignment – a reference point when talking to your team or others about the community.

Break this section down by covering:

Market and context
Why a community is needed
What the community will do to meet that need
Who it’s for

At this stage, you should also lay out your objectives and organisational intent. The value your members get and the value your organisation gets should be harmonious.

Organisational intent might include things like product adoption, improved retention, building trust in a new marketplace, or creating a moat in a competitive landscape. The key question to ask is: how will a successful community support my organisational goals?

Community landscape

Understanding what, and who, you are competing with will help narrow down your community strategy.

Start with desk research to identify whether there are already communities in your space. These might be dedicated community platforms, LinkedIn groups, newsletters, or even events programmes. They may not look like your community, but they are still competing for your audience’s time and attention.

Once you identify similar or adjacent communities, consider:

Is it active?
How big is it?
What kinds of conversations are happening?
What topics are resonating, and what’s getting crickets?

It’s also important to understand how these communities are run and funded. Are they free or paid? Who produces the content? What is their underlying motivation?

This analysis will help you position your community more effectively and identify gaps in the market.

Community audience

Understanding your community audience is key. Your audience may match your customer base exactly, or your customers may form just one part of a wider community.

How you think about this depends on how similar your audience segments are. Do they share the same challenges? Are those challenges being approached from the same angle? Or are there meaningful differences that need to be addressed?

Your customers may form the core of the community, or they may benefit from other members being present – people who add value through insight, experience, or engagement.

If you are building a community to support a marketplace-style product (for example, where some members provide a service and others buy it), you’ll need to consider which side is more valuable and which you need to attract first. Sellers are often easier to onboard because they have a vested interest, while buyers tend to be harder to attract – in that case, your strategy should prioritise buyers.

Finally, note whether you already have relationships and contacts in place, or whether you’re starting from scratch and will need to actively build your audience.

Engagement

This is a big one.

Defining the type of engagement you want, how you’ll drive it, and what “good” looks like is critical. Desired engagement should shape your content and marketing strategy and form the basis of your reporting.

At this stage, decide what type of engagement you want (and why), then work backwards to define how you’ll achieve it.

What engagement metrics should I focus on?

Member numbers

Member numbers are often the first thing teams focus on. Reach and membership do matter – but only if you’re attracting the right members and retaining them through repeat visits.

Having hundreds or thousands of irrelevant members won’t help. They won’t engage, and they won’t gain or add value. Numbers can be a useful indicator of interest and awareness, but they are far from the most important metric, especially early on.

To sense-check scale, consider the size of your total market and work from there.

Now, with numbers out of the way, let’s look at engagement metrics.

These can include:

Views
Actions
Time spent on the community
Logins
Connections made
Resource downloads
Questions asked
Event attendance
Member-generated content
Survey responses
Conversions to customer
And many others

While it’s useful to understand all of these, it’s better to define one or two north star metrics and build your engagement strategy around them. Positive movement in these usually drives improvement across other metrics too.

If you’re looking for comments, consider what will motivate members to respond – and what you’ll actually do with those responses. What supporting content or prompts are needed to make engagement meaningful?

If repeat visits and views are important, ask yourself what timely, valuable updates you can share that members can’t easily get elsewhere – and whether you have the capacity to sustain this.

A deeper dive into engagement will follow in a future piece.

Roles and responsibilities

Clear roles and responsibilities are essential. Each aspect of the community should sit clearly within someone’s role.

For example:

Does the community manager also handle marketing, or do they work with a marketing team
Who responds to technical questions – the community manager or internal experts?
Who signs off on major decisions?
Who creates content, and who uploads it?
How is technical or specialist content handled?

A key part of this is governance and decision-making. Who drives the community strategy forward? Who decides on major changes? Who is responsible for prioritising actions based on community feedback?

Risks

As part of discovery, you should identify potential risks and define mitigations. These will be specific to how your community is structured and the environment it operates in.

Common risks include:

Limited capacity or resources to produce timely content
Low engagement
Delays caused by external factors (for example, a product launch slipping)
Member behaviour not matching expectations
Competitive pressure

The aim here is not to eliminate risk, but to understand it and plan accordingly.

Exit strategy

Even with strong discovery and good intent, things don’t always go to plan. It’s important to define what would indicate that a community needs to pivot – or stop altogether.

How long are you willing to test before making that call? What signals would trigger a rethink? And if you do decide to close a community, what would that involve.

The decision point

After completing discovery, the final question is simple: “does this still make sense?”

Based on your goals, risks, and available resources, is a community the best option? Or could you achieve the same outcome through other means – a mailing list, an FAQ hub, or an events series?

A good discovery gives you a clear, honest view of what a community would require, how engagement would be driven, and what’s at stake. If the answers stack up – proceed.

If not, that’s still a successful discovery.

A closing note

Community discovery isn’t about producing a perfect document. It’s about creating clarity before committing time, resources, and expectations to building a community.

When done well, it forces the right questions early, and ensures that if a community is launched, it has a clear purpose and a realistic path to success.

Based on the above, I have created a checklist outlining the key questions you want to ask at this stage.

If you’d like to learn more and get community strategy insights to your inbox, feel free to join the newsletter.