Why did Apple and Figma build communities before products?
Date
Apr 20, 2026
Classification
- Marketing/Branding/Planning/Design
#
- Brand Strategy
Hanbit Biz / Marketer
Sharing insights on AI and organizational culture
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How to Build a 'Home' Where Customers Don't Leave: Why a Community Is Essential for Business
#CommunityBusiness #FandomMarketing #CustomerEngagement #BrandPositioning #GrowthStrategy
🫑 3-Line Summary
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Apple pioneered customer communities in 1985 by introducing the first in-house bulletin board system to handle user feedback.
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Figma grew into a unicorn by first forming a designer community and then adding a product, while Duolingo expanded the translation of language course content and the operation of offline meetings based on a community foundation.
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Community businesses, in which customers who feel a sense of belonging voluntarily contribute, are not a cost to the company but the most powerful weapon for positioning a brand as the most trusted entity in the market.
🥦 Insight
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Paradigm shift from product-centric to community-centric
In the past, the natural order was to create a good product and attract customers through marketing. However, in today's world filled with uncertainty, we need the flexibility to first gather people who resonate with the topic our business aims to solve, as seen in the Figma example, and refine the product while listening to their voices.
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The Key to Scalability That Overcomes Resource Limitations
Early-stage startups or small teams are bound to face shortages of manpower and budget. However, if you design a system that allows customers to create and operate their own playgrounds—like Duolingo, which runs over 2,600 events a month with just three team members—explosive business scaling becomes possible.
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The Ultimate Destination of Business: Capturing People's Hearts
Simple features or price competitiveness are bound to be replaced by competitors eventually. However, if you make users feel a strong sense of community, like a home they do not want to leave, you will gain powerful allies willing to pay to protect and grow your brand.
🥄 A spoonful of execution
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Where is the small channel where customers can share opinions or participate voluntarily in the service or project you are currently preparing? Before building a grandiose community platform, try starting by suggesting a "Coffee Chat" where you first approach the five most enthusiastic users and ask for their feedback.
—— View Original ——
Today, it is difficult to find a company that does not consider its community. However, despite this heightened interest, it remains uncertain how to actually invest in it. From a business perspective, where priorities must be determined ruthlessly, it is a factor that is easily relegated to a lower priority.
Apple, the first company to connect communities to business
Do you know which company was the first to create a community team and build a customer community program? It is Apple.
In 1985, Apple was struggling to handle user complaints. As the company shifted its focus to the Macintosh, feedback letters from previous users flooded the offices. At the time, Apple had a communications expert named Lince, who argued that the company should build its own BBS (bulletin board system) and operate a user community.
Customer communities were not considered important by companies at the time. Even Apple, famous for its innovative endeavors, hesitated, viewing them as a 'cost' rather than a 'benefit'.
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