Community
A user community, ambassadors, templates, or user-run events that bring in and keep users.
Counts as evidence: The company describes its community or ambassador program as a growth source.
Who ran it
Cursor · Enterprise push and consumption pricing · 2025 to now
Community SupportingA funded ambassador program runs meetups, workshops, and hackathons. Cursor reports more than 800 events and 300 ambassadors in over 80 countries.
Salesforce · Many clouds, Dreamforce, Trailblazers and acquisitions · 2009 to 2024
Community SupportingTrailhead, launched in 2014, gives customers and partners free online courses on using, administering and developing on Salesforce, and the Trailblazers community grew around it.
Atlassian · Starter licenses, Marketplace and Experts · 2009 to 2019
Community SupportingAtlassian sponsored community-led user group meetups, and the Atlassian Answers forum had over 400,000 users at the IPO.
Atlassian · Free cloud editions and the server sunset · 2019 to 2022
Community SupportingThe Community site drew over 19 million visitors in FY2021, and 80% of attendees at community-led events started a cloud trial within 30 days.
Figma · Browser multiplayer and the shared link · 2012 to 2016
Community SupportingThe founders worked the early user base directly, including house calls to customers' offices and a trip to visit users in Nigeria, and went deep on anyone with strongly positive or negative sentiment.
Figma · Paid plans, first sales rep, Community and education · 2017 to 2020
Community PrimaryFigma Community launched in beta in October 2019 as a public space to publish live design files anyone can inspect and remix, after plugins. More than 200 Friends of Figma chapters organized over 650 events in 2024.
Figma · Platform seats, IPO and AI credits · 2024 to now
Community SupportingUsers have published over 250,000 Community resources, including more than 10,000 plugins and widgets built on public APIs.
Twilio · Developer-first self-service and pay as you go · 2008 to 2015
Community SupportingDeveloper evangelism is a named sales and marketing cost, and international growth leaned on international developer evangelism programs and a London roadshow event.
Datadog · Self-serve monitoring for DevOps teams · 2010 to 2015
Community SupportingThe agent, integration plugins, SDKs, and documentation are open source, with developers from over 650 organizations contributing. This is community around the client software, not an open-source product funnel.
Replit · Community platform and paid power · 2021 to 2023
Community PrimaryBounties opened a marketplace for work with top Replit creators, the community could create and manage templates, and in 2022 community members bought about $5 million of shares.
Wiz · Platform, marketplaces and partners · 2023 to 2024
Community SupportingThe Zero Critical Club recognises customers with zero critical issues in their clouds, and the CMO calls membership the metric the company cares about. Wizdom, a community for customers and partners, launched in December 2024.
Notion · Community, templates and a free personal plan · 2019 to 2021
Community PrimaryA 20-person ambassador programme started in 2019 with the most vocal users on social media, alongside in-person user events and the original template gallery. Communities abroad led localization: Korean users had written four textbooks before the 2020 Korean launch, and the 2021 Japanese launch came with local support and translated templates.
Canva · Free editor, search pages and word of mouth · 2013 to 2015
Community PrimaryUsers tweeted, blogged and ran their own Canva tutorials and workshops, and a one-person community team worked with bloggers and social media managers. Guy Kawasaki joined as Chief Evangelist and Peg Fitzpatrick as Head of Social Strategy, and by October 2015 users had written 14,560 blog posts and made 19,500 YouTube videos about Canva.
Canva · Canva for Work and 100 languages · 2015 to 2019
Community SupportingFrom October 2015 nonprofits could use the full Canva for Work free of charge, for teams of up to ten people.
MongoDB · Atlas, usage pricing, and the licence change · 2016 to 2019
Community SupportingMongoDB sponsored user groups and ran MongoDB University courses: 116 meetup groups with over 55,000 members and over 730,000 University course registrations by July 2017.
MongoDB · Atlas becomes the business, sold with the clouds · 2019 to now
Community SupportingMongoDB University registrations passed 3.0 million at January 31, 2026, up from over one million in January 2021.
GitLab · Open source project and monetization experiments · 2011 to 2015
Community PrimaryContributors shaped the product itself: in 2015 a community member built a better CI runner that became the default, and he later joined the company.
GitLab · Enterprise sales, partners, and the IPO · 2019 to 2021
Community SupportingContributors grew from more than 1,600 in January 2020 to more than 2,600 in July 2021, and the roadmap is public so the community can give feedback.
GitLab · Pruning the cheap tier and the free ceiling · 2021 to 2024
Community SupportingOpen source projects, education, and startups were exempted from the Free limits through community programs, which give qualifying projects Ultimate features.
Asana · Self-serve first, sales to expand · 2017 to 2023
Community SupportingAsana Together ran a forum, in-person events, Asana Ambassadors who promote adoption in their own networks, and Certified Pros, independent consultants who charge for help.
Lovable · Launch, ship daily, and post it · 2024 to 2025
Community SupportingHackathons, user project showcases on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and a Builder Hall of Fame for the most impressive builds ran from the first months.
Lovable · Credits, giveaways, and a community at scale · 2025 to 2026
Community PrimaryLovable sponsors any user-run hackathon with free credits and books them as marketing cost. Community managers and an ambassador program support it, fans host 10 to 30 meetups and hackathons a week, and the Discord has 160K+ members.
Vercel · Vercel for frontend teams: free tier, Git integration, Next.js Conf · 2020 to 2022
Community SupportingVercel sponsored other frameworks and libraries, donated free accounts to hundreds of communities, and hired Svelte's creator to work on it full time with its governance unchanged.
Vercel · v0: an AI product-led front door · 2023 to 2025
Community SupportingAmbassadors get $100 in v0 credits a month and commit to creating and sharing content about v0 at least once a week.