Why Almost Every Brand Community Fails

Opening

Dear reader, have you ever heard someone say, “Shouldn’t our company build a community too?”

Talking with startup founders and marketers, this question comes up constantly. The expectation is that you spin up a Discord channel, open a Slack workspace, and customers will gather to talk about your product, help each other out, and even contribute to your development roadmap. Honestly, that picture is seductive.

But look at reality: even the hottest companies right now—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft—have launched AI and cloud communities that never really took off. The last post is often days old, and even questions go unanswered. Meanwhile, user-run communities like Reddit function far better.

So the reality is different. Actually, “very different” is more accurate. Most corporate communities go quiet within months of launching, and the moment that silence becomes visible, it’s effectively over. Today I want to talk about the trap of “community solves everything” thinking, and what the small number of communities that actually work have in common.

The Fantasy of “Community Cures All”

Many companies imagine a scenario when building a community: post a product update, customers react; someone posts a question, another customer answers; open-source contributions start flowing in; feedback on product direction arrives naturally. In short, a “virtuous cycle.”

The problem is that this virtuous cycle almost never happens.

There’s a long-known rule in online communities: the 90-9-1 rule¹. It states that 90% of community members only read, 9% engage occasionally, and only 1% actually create content. Jakob Nielsen, an authority in UX research, first formalized this in 2006. For Wikipedia, data shows that only about 0.2% of all visitors actually participate in editing.

Of course, some recent research suggests this ratio is improving. Data on small brand communities shows engagement rates climbing as high as 33%. But that’s the story of well-managed communities. Most corporate communities collapse long before reaching that level.

The Mechanism That Turns Communities Into “Graveyards”

Why do they collapse? Because communities run on purpose. People who join a fishing community want to get better at fishing; people who join a travel forum want to find cheap travel passes or a companion to take their photos. There’s a clear purpose.

But what about a community a company creates? Customers aren’t stupid. They instinctively sense, “Ah, in the end, they’re just trying to sell me something.” The moment that click happens, motivation to participate plummets.

On top of this, there’s the problem of platform transparency. On real-time chat platforms like Slack or Discord, the health of a community is laid bare for every member to see. If the last message was posted a month ago, it’s almost impossible for a newcomer to be the one to break that silence.

There’s a restaurant in Sokcho, a coastal city in Korea, famous for its dried-pollack dishes, with similar restaurants right next door and diagonally across. Yet people wait 30 minutes just for that one place, even when the neighboring restaurant has empty seats. People instinctively want to go where it’s crowded, and avoid what looks empty. Communities are the same. Once silence sets in, that silence itself becomes a force pushing people away.

A Discord channel where only the community manager posts. A Slack workspace stacked with messages from the same single person. This isn’t a community—it’s a community’s corpse. And the fact that every member can see that corpse is what makes it fatal.

The Common Pattern Behind Communities That Actually Work

So what’s different about the ones that do work? I’ve observed three main patterns.

First, repeated presence. Take Twelve Labs, a Korean AI company. It builds video-understanding AI and has raised over $100 million cumulatively. Since its earliest days, it has hosted a weekly online meetup called Multimodal Weekly every Friday. It’s passed 40 sessions now, without ever skipping a week. They don’t just talk about their own product—they invite researchers from competitors, host founders of newly launched startups, and hold conversations spanning the entire multimodal AI ecosystem. This is the key: they demonstrate through action the message “We’re always here. Come anytime.”

Second, reward design for participation. Think about why popular livestreamers run their own fan cafés—the answer becomes clear. Fans post memes, personal stories, and jokes there because their favorite streamer might read it and react. That “reaction” is itself the reward. Chimchakman, a popular Korean livestreamer, originally ran a community on Naver Cafe, Korea’s blog-and-forum platform, before moving to his own site’s board—but the core structure is identical. The expectation that participation will be rewarded is what keeps a community alive.

Third, choosing a format where collapse isn’t visible. This matters more than you’d expect. It’s exactly why companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google don’t bother building separate Slack or Discord channels, opting instead for forum-style or thread-based communities like Reddit. A forum feels less “dead” even if the last post was a week ago. A chat room, on the other hand, feels dead if there’s no conversation within 24 hours. Newsletters work on a similar principle—since readers can’t see who else has read an issue, even loose operation doesn’t create the impression of a “dead community.” It’s a kind of “half-community” that can survive on much less.

Oz’s Lens

Honestly, I’ve seen too many victims of “community solves everything” thinking.

Working on go-to-market strategy with countless startups, the phrase “let’s build a community” comes up almost without exception. And almost without exception, it fails in the same pattern: open a Discord, create 10 channels, hand out gift cards to attract people, watch it become a graveyard three months later, and blame the community manager. This cycle repeats endlessly.

What I find especially unfortunate is the position community managers are put in. If the community succeeds, that’s just expected—it was their job. If it fails—and most do—it becomes their fault. It’s structurally a position where it’s hard to build a good career.

Here’s what I think is the core of it: a community isn’t something you build, it’s something you cultivate. It’s not about buying a several-thousand-dollar community platform plan from day one, spending on marketing, and gathering hundreds of people. It’s about meeting 10 people offline, turning those 10 into genuinely active users, and slowly growing that to 20, then 100, then 1,000.

Handing out gift cards to collect leads isn’t hard—anyone can do that. But whether that person actually becomes an active community member? That’s an entirely different question. And leaders need to understand this distinction first, so that the marketers and community managers on the ground can execute a real strategy.

Closing

To sum up: first, failure is the default outcome for most corporate communities—you need to accept that up front. Second, the secret to a community that survives isn’t the platform or the scale, it’s repeated presence and reward design for participation. Third, choosing a format where collapse isn’t visible is itself a strategy.

Before you build a community, ask yourself just one question: “Is there a reason our members would feel good simply by being here together?” If you can’t answer that question, it might not be time to build a community yet.

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📎 References & Further Reading

• Jakob Nielsen, “Participation Inequality: The 90-9-1 Rule for Social Features”, Nielsen Norman Group, 2006. : A classic analysis of participation inequality in online communities. Well worth reading before you plan a community.
• Higher Logic, “Is the 90-9-1 Rule for Online Community Engagement Dead?”, 2024. : An analysis, backed by real data, of how the 90-9-1 rule plays out differently in brand communities.
• Stateshift, “Best Practices for Community-Led Growth”, 2025. : A systematic framework for community-led growth (CLG) strategy. The 90-day launch plan is practically useful.
• Postdigitalist, “Community-Led Growth: Complete Framework for Tech Founders”, 2025. : A community strategy guide for tech founders, with a concrete breakdown of common failure patterns.
• Twelve Labs official site and Multimodal Weekly meetup. : See for yourself the Twelve Labs case of repeated community presence mentioned in this issue.

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

1. The 90-9-1 rule: a principle describing participation inequality in online communities. It holds that 90% of all members only read (lurkers), 9% react occasionally, and only 1% actually create content. Jakob Nielsen systematized this in 2006. ↩