I’m going to tell you something that might be unpopular. Most of the advice you read about community-led growth is garbage. It’s written by people who have never built a real business, or at least not one that’s scaled to a 7-figure exit. They talk about "engagement" and "vanity metrics" like they mean something. They don't.
I learned this the hard way. We wasted thousands of dollars and countless hours on things that didn’t move the needle. But we also learned what does work. The lessons that follow are the ones that made us millions. They are the exact, behind-the-scenes playbook we used to scale RemoteTeam and get acquired by Gusto.
1. Your first 100 users are everything.
Forget about viral loops and growth hacking for a minute. Your only job at the beginning is to get 100 people to love your product. Not like it. Love it. You need to know them by name. You need to have their phone numbers. You need to be on a first-name basis with their dog.
I’m only slightly exaggerating. With RemoteTeam, I personally onboarded our first 50 customers. I did live demos, I answered their support questions, I listened to their feature requests. It was a grind. But it was also the most important thing I did in the early days. Those first 100 users became our evangelists. They were the ones who spread the word for us. They were the ones who gave us the feedback we needed to build a product that people actually wanted to use.
2. Build in public, but not too public.
There’s a fine line between transparency and oversharing. You want to bring your users along for the journey. You want them to feel like they’re a part of what you’re building. But you also don’t want to give away your secret sauce. Or worse, bore them with the minutiae of your day-to-day operations.
We found a good balance by sharing our high-level roadmap, celebrating our wins, and being honest about our failures. We didn’t share our revenue numbers, but we did share our user growth. We didn’t live-tweet our board meetings, but we did write blog posts about the lessons we were learning. It was enough to make our users feel included, without giving our competitors a roadmap to our strategy.
3. Your community is not a support channel.
This is a big one. So many companies treat their community as a cost center. A place to deflect support tickets and reduce headcount. That’s a huge mistake. Your community is a profit center. It’s a source of new ideas, a-ha moments, and, yes, new customers.
We made this mistake at MovieLaLa in the early days. We had a forum, but it was mostly just people complaining about bugs. It wasn’t until we started actively cultivating the community that things started to change. We started asking for feedback, we started featuring our power users, we started treating them like the VIPs they were. And it paid off. Our community became our most valuable asset, helping us reach 360 million people.
4. Content is king, but distribution is queen.
You can write the best blog post in the world, but if nobody reads it, it doesn’t matter. You need to be just as obsessed with distribution as you are with creation. For us, that meant a few things.
- Email list: We built an email list from day one. We had a simple newsletter sign-up on our blog, and we promoted it everywhere.
- Social media: We were active on social media. Not just broadcasting our own content, but engaging in conversations and sharing other people’s stuff.
- Relationships: We built relationships with other creators in our space. We’d guest post on their blogs, they’d guest post on ours. It was a classic win-win.
5. Viral loops are not a myth.
But they’re also not magic. A viral loop is simply a system where your users do the marketing for you. The classic example is Dropbox. You sign up, you invite your friends, you both get more storage. It’s a simple, elegant loop that helped them grow to millions of users with very little marketing spend.
We built a similar loop into RemoteTeam. When you created a new team, you could invite your colleagues. For every colleague that signed up, you’d get a credit towards your next month’s subscription. It wasn’t as direct as the Dropbox loop, but it worked. It was a key driver of our growth in the early days.
6. Don’t be afraid to charge money.
This is another one that seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many founders are terrified to ask for money. They think their product isn’t good enough, or that people won’t pay for it. If you’re solving a real problem, people will pay for it. And the sooner you start charging, the sooner you’ll know if you have a real business on your hands.
We started charging for RemoteTeam from day one. It was only $10 a month, but it was something. And it was the best decision we ever made. It forced us to focus on building a product that was worth paying for. And it gave us the revenue we needed to reinvest in the business.
7. Your pricing is probably wrong.
We changed our pricing at least a dozen times. We tried freemium, we tried tiered pricing, we tried per-user pricing. We even tried a "pay what you want" model at one point. It was a mess. But it was also a valuable learning experience.
What we eventually landed on was a simple, value-based pricing model. We had three tiers, each with a clear set of features and a corresponding price point. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot better than what we had before. And it was a direct result of listening to our customers and understanding what they were willing to pay for.
8. The data will set you free.
I’m a big believer in gut feelings. But I’m an even bigger believer in data. You can’t make good decisions without good data. It’s that simple. At RemoteTeam, we tracked everything. User sign-ups, conversion rates, churn, customer lifetime value. You name it, we tracked it.
But we didn’t just track it. We analyzed it. We looked for patterns. We tried to understand what the data was telling us. And it was often surprising. For example, we found that users who invited at least three colleagues in their first week were 10 times more likely to become paying customers. That one insight changed our entire onboarding flow.
9. Hire slow, fire fast.
This is another classic startup cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. The people you hire will make or break your company. You need to be incredibly selective about who you bring on board. And you need to be just as quick to let go of people who aren’t a good fit.
I’ve made my fair share of hiring mistakes. I’ve hired people who were brilliant on paper, but toxic in person. I’ve hired people who were great individual contributors, but terrible team players. And every time, it’s cost the company. So now, I’m ruthless about hiring. I’d rather have an open role for six months than hire the wrong person.
10. Culture is what you do, not what you say.
You can have all the ping pong tables and free snacks in the world, but if your culture is toxic, none of it matters. Culture is about how you treat people. It’s about the values you live by. It’s about the decisions you make when nobody is watching.
At RemoteTeam, we had a few simple values. Be transparent. Be customer-obsessed. And be a good human. That was it. We didn’t have a 50-page culture deck. We just tried to live by those values every day. And it made all the difference.
11. Don’t forget to have fun.
Building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a long, hard slog. And if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to make it. You need to find ways to celebrate the wins, to laugh at the failures, and to enjoy the journey.
We did a lot of dumb stuff at RemoteTeam. We had a "gong" that we’d ring every time we got a new customer. We had a weekly "demo day" where we’d show off what we were working on. We even had a company-wide "hack day" where we all built a giant Rube Goldberg machine. It was silly, but it was also a lot of fun. And it’s what kept us going when things got tough.
12. The exit is not the end.
When we sold RemoteTeam to Gusto, it was a dream come true. It was the culmination of years of hard work. But it was also just the beginning of a new chapter. I’m still an entrepreneur at heart. I’m still obsessed with building things. And I’m still learning new things every day.
I’ve been fortunate to have a couple of successful exits. I’ve also been fortunate to invest in over 200 companies, including some of the biggest names in AI like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. And what I’ve learned is that the journey is the reward. The process of building something from nothing, of solving a real problem, of making a difference in the world—that’s what it’s all about. The exit is just a nice bonus.
So, if you’re a founder, or an aspiring founder, I hope you’ll take these lessons to heart. They’re not a magic formula for success. But they are a good starting point. And they’re a lot more real than most of the stuff you’ll read on the internet.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know which items apply to my situation?
Start by honestly assessing where your biggest bottleneck is right now. The items that address that specific constraint will give you the highest return on your time and energy.
Which item on this list has the highest impact?
It depends on your stage and context, but in my experience, the items near the top of the list tend to have the broadest applicability. That said, sometimes the less obvious items create the biggest breakthroughs for specific situations.
Are these recommendations still relevant in 2026?
Absolutely. While specific tools and tactics change, the underlying principles remain consistent. I update my thinking regularly based on what I'm seeing in the market and across my portfolio companies.
How were these items selected?
Each item on this list comes from direct experience, either from building my own companies or from patterns I've observed across the 200+ startups I've invested in. I prioritize practical, actionable items over theoretical concepts.