You’ve heard it a hundred times by now. — “Community is the future of distribution.”

Everyone’s saying it. VCs are funding it. Notion built its entire GTM around it. Figma’s former marketing lead literally defined her company’s go-to-market strategy as building a user base that powers product adoption — not as a program, not as a Slack group, but as the whole operating principle.

So everybody nods. And then goes back to posting on LinkedIn and X, and if “they know” then on TikTok. Or ask marketing to launch a Discord, set up a Telegram group, maybe start a newsletter.

Here’s the problem. Most founders hear “community is the future” and translate it as “We need to post more and on more places.” Stay consistent. The algorithm will do the rest. And they double down on building an audience.

It won’t work.

And the founders who figure this out first are going to eat the lunch of everyone still chasing follower counts.

Something structural is changing now, and it’s moving faster than most people realize. I mean, we know it - social media is not really social anymore.

Scary — but during Mark Zuckerberg’s antitrust hearings last year, Meta’s own charts told the story. The share of content from actual human contacts on Facebook dropped from 22% in 2023 to 17% in 2025. On Instagram, it went from 11% to 7%. We kinda feel it, but seeing it in raw numbers makes it very real.
That means over 90% of what you see on Instagram now comes from pages, brands, ads, and creators you never followed.

The platform that was built on sharing photos with friends now shows you almost zero photos from friends.

LTK CEO Amber Venz Box said it plainly: over 94% of people are calling social media no longer social, and more than half of them are already rotating their time into smaller niche communities — spaces they know are real, where the people aren’t trying to sell them anything.

This isn’t sentiment. It’s migration.

The algo took over completely. The following stopped mattering. Your feed looks like TV — endless short videos from people you’ve never heard of, served by a machine that optimized for engagement at the cost of everything else.

Sprout Social’s 2025 data shows roughly half of all global social media users planning to increase their time on community-driven platforms.
Gen Z is moving even faster.

The reason is simple: when AI floods every feed with generated content, human trust becomes a scarce resource. And trust doesn’t live in open algorithmic feeds. It lives in closed spaces where people choose to be — where the room has edges, shared context, and people they actually recognize.

We’re all migrating into private groups, niche communities, WhatsApp groups, interest-based servers on Discord, paid Substacks, and small Telegram channels. Builder first communities like Farcaster. Closed rooms where we know the people — or at least trust the signal.

NOEMA Magazine called it cleanly: intentional, opt-in micro-communities are replacing the feed. Smart startups and creators are chasing depth over scale. Retention over virality. Because your chances of success are dramatically better than virality bet.

Here’s what this means for you as a founder or marketer: posting is becoming branding. Your company’s social presence will matter the way a storefront sign matters — it proves you exist, it’s proof of life. But it won’t get you customers. Not anymore. The algorithmic feed is no longer a distribution channel. It’s a billboard on a highway where nobody’s looking at billboards.

The real distribution is happening inside the rooms.
The era of chasing mass attention on open feeds is ending. Now.

Most founders who say they’re building a community are building an audience. These are not the same thing.

An audience consumes.
A community creates.
An audience shows up when you post.
A community shows up for each other.

Seth Godin named this in Tribes almost twenty years ago. He said the internet had killed mass marketing and revived something much older — groups of people connected not by location but by shared ideas and values, with leaders who serve the movement rather than broadcast at it.

The line that stayed with me: “You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”

Kevin Kelly also gave it a number. You don’t need millions. You need a thousand people who actually care (1000 True Fans) — who spend money, spread the word, and show up without being asked. Not scale. Depth.

The companies that have actually cracked this didn’t crack it by posting more. Neo4j CEO Emil Eifrem put it perfectly when asked why he chose a community-first approach: “We didn’t even think of it as a GTM strategy. We just figured it was the way to do things.”

But here’s the part almost nobody’s talking about yet.

I want to take you back to 2013. I was the founder of a digital publishing company in SF where we started publishing iPhotographer magazine and a handful of other titles under the FastTrack magazine umbrella. Times when the iPad was a novelty.

We weren’t really starting from zero. We were finding communities that already existed — photographers, artists, creative hobbyists, pet food enthusiasts — groups ranging from 50k people to over 2 million, all already doing the thing we wanted to write about in different magazines. The magazine wasn’t the product. The magazine was a tool we built for the community. (and then for some corporates as well)

What did it do for them? It gave them visibility. We’d feature everyone from photographers shooting for Forbes and Playboy to a school teacher in the Midwest doing remarkable iPhone art photography with her students. Different levels of fame. Same community. The magazine was how both of them got seen by more people who cared about what they were doing.

That’s why, in the first six weeks after launch — when iPads were still rare and expensive, and the app market was in its infancy — we got 10,000 paying subscribers.

It wasn’t because we were such good marketers or community builders. It was because we gave the community something they valued. They were already there. We just showed up with the right tool in our hands.

Now fast forward to 2026. What was “nice to have” in 2013 is becoming the only way forward.

The fight for community access is no longer about who publishes the best content. It’s about who builds the best tools for the community. An app that solves a problem the community actually has. A calculator, a tracker, a workflow, a chatbot, a magazine — something they care about, can carry with them and use repeatedly, not because you asked them to, but because it makes their life better.

Think about what Notion did. Think about what Pete Kazanjy did with Modern Sales Pro before he ever launched Atrium.

Technocrats often call this PLG - Product Led Growth. But the game is changing. What I’m trying to tell you is that you don’t need a product to start, and the product is not the main hero. Community tool is.

Here’s where it’s heading, and I want you to think about this carefully because the window is still early.

Every major community is about to become a battleground for access.

Right now, companies spend money on ads, KOLs, influencers, and content to reach people. In the next wave, the smartest companies will spend money building tools for the communities where their buyers already live. And then those tools — embedded in the community’s daily workflow — become the distribution channel.

Not posts. Not newsletters. Not influencer deals.

A chatbot that helps a community of independent architects generate project proposals or find people right now thinking about their next house. An app that helps a community of Etsy sellers track their supply costs. A tool that helps a community of founders score their pitch decks. Each one gives the community something it values. Each one also gives the company behind it a permanent, trusted position inside that community — before the sale conversation ever starts.

When you start, you don’t need millions of downloads. You need the right five hundred people using your tool every day in the community where your next hundred customers already live.

Cloudflare’s CEO recently shared data that should scare every founder still betting on content: AI is repackaging your blog posts, your SEO, your carefully written articles, and serving the answer directly. People are increasingly not clicking through to the source. The organic traffic model that HubSpot and half the internet was built on is vanishing.

But a tool lives inside a community. A tool doesn’t get scraped and summarized by a chatbot. A tool builds habit and trust in a way that content alone can’t, because it does something — it creates value every time someone opens it.

And the company that built the tool? They’re embedded. They’re trusted. They’re not fighting the algorithm. They’re not hoping to go viral.

They own the access. Think about it … 🤔

If you're starting now, here's the three-step playbook. They’re simple to describe and genuinely hard to execute, which is why most people won’t.

Find the community first. Don’t build for an imaginary audience. Find a group of people who already share a problem, a passion, or a professional identity — and go spend real time inside it before you write a single line of code.

Build the tool they need. Not the tool you think is interesting. Not the tool that looks impressive in a demo. The one that makes their specific, actual, daily work better. The one that earns its place in their workflow because it solves something they couldn’t easily solve before you showed up. (if you need framework guiding you → check the Lean Canvas essay)

Own the access before you worry about acquisition. Traditional marketing wants you to find a customer, qualify them, pitch them, and convert them. What I’m describing skips the first four steps. When your tool lives in a community your buyer already trusts, you’re not acquiring customers anymore. They’re already there. You’re just giving them a reason to look up.

Posting still matters. Don’t misread this. But posting is now what it was always supposed to be — branding, presence, proof that your company still exists and cares. It tells people you’re alive. It won’t bring you net new customers at scale anymore. Not in the era of algorithmic overload and AI-generated noise.

The distribution fight of the next decade will be won by founders who find their community, earn their trust, and put something genuinely useful in their hands.

The magazine was the tool. The community was already there.

Find the community. Build the tool. Own the channel.

That’s the whole game now. Hope you agree?

What’s your tool?

Till next time, let’s BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

Publishing every Tue morning UTC and occasionally over the weekends.

ETH Sofia GTM Hackathon is coming in September — if you’re a builder who wants to launch with a splash and group of others and with distribution figured out, this is your room. Details dropping soon.