💃 No audience, no problem: Stand up a community that actually moves people

For early-stage teams tired of noise, hype, and empty Discords.

May 17, 2025

Xin chào, I’m Hien, a serial entrepreneur + community-led growth advisor based in HCMC, Vietnam 🇻🇳

You’re reading a ✨ free edition ✨ of Screate, a global community-led growth hub where we decode how billion-dollar startups weaponized community for unstoppable growth so you can gain clarity and build confidence in your own. Join founders and early teams in 20 countries as we level up, one story at a time.

“How do I build a community if I have no audience yet?”

A founder asked me this recently. It’s a fair and common question.

But beneath it is often a deeper fear:

"I’m not known. I have nothing to offer."

And behind that fear? The wrong mental model.

Let’s flip the script.

🤯 Myth: “I need a big audience to build a community.”

✅ Truth: Communities aren’t built. They’re stood up—and shaped slowly.

Audience vs Community: 7 Key Differences Explained | Bettermode Guide — Relationship between audience and community. Source: Bettermode

Standing one up is not about structure.

It’s about energy, momentum, and commitment.

Some of the best communities I’ve seen didn’t start with a content calendar.

They started with a founder in a small room saying:

“Hey, are you also trying to figure this out?”
And enough people replied: “Yes.”

They didn’t start with numbers.

They started with intent.

What you don’t need:

❌ A huge following
❌ High status
❌ Perfect content

What you do need:

✅ Someone to care about
✅ A shared journey
✅ Tiny, repeatable moments of connection

Most “zero audience” communities fail not because they lack followers—but because they try to act like brands, not build like friends.

My Zero Audience Story

When I started Screate, I had:

A cold list of 40 names from an old webinar
No real platform
No growth machine

But I knew who I wanted to support: Startup founders and early teams with globally ambitious dreams—but no clear path.

So I started reaching out.

10 direct messages led to real conversations.

I asked:

“What’s slowing you down right now? Could anything I know about community-led growth help?”

After talking to dozens of founders and early team builders, I noticed some common threads—quiet frustrations that rarely get said out loud:

“I’ve been burned by hype. We tried building a Discord and it died in 2 weeks.”
“Most events feel like social climbing. Nobody actually talks about how things really work.”
“We’ve read the Twitter threads. We need real, tactical stuff that helps us ship this week.”
“The startup media keeps celebrating the loudest. But what about people like us—quietly building, figuring it out?”

It hit me: Community isn’t broken. But the way we talk about it is.

They think: “Community = a brand play. A place for followers to hang out. A content machine.”

But in an early-stage startup, what you need isn’t a brand community. It’s a user community.

Not people who like your product, but people who use it.
Not content for everyone, but conversations for the few who matter.
Not a following, but a feedback loop.

Brand community can come later. But user community? That’s how early products stay alive. That’s how you learn what matters.

And it doesn’t have to live on Discord or a Facebook Group. It just has to live somewhere real, where users talk, share, and help shape what comes next.

🔍 Key Differences: Brand Community vs User Community

Brand Community vs User Community. Edited by Screate.

Once we got on the same page, the conversations changed.

What I heard:

They want depth over noise. Not another 500-person Slack. Just 5 people who get it.
They crave tactical clarity. Not theory. But playbooks, decisions, tradeoffs—especially from people like them.
They value cultural proximity. Advice from someone in Silicon Valley is useful—but guidance from someone in Vietnam or Southeast Asia? That hits different.
They need emotional momentum. Something to believe in when the metrics aren’t moving. Community as motivation—not just retention.
They want to be seen and supported. Not just as users, but as builders. That’s a very different energy.

These insights became the blueprint for everything we now offer through Screate.

☝️ From the Ground: Real, honest, and straightforward answers to Screate "friends" questions. Delivered on-demand, weekly.
🫀 Weekly Roundup: What mattered this week in community, GTM, and product-led growth. Delivered weekly.
🧪 (Friends only) The Lab: Inside experiments and bets we're making at Screate like project tests, GTM trials, results. Delivered every other week.
📝 (Friends only) Deep Dives: Our premium breakdowns of how the top startups turned community into a growth engine. Delivered monthly.
📡 The Stack: Tools, signals, benchmarks, workflows, and systems behind modern community-led teams. Delivered every two weeks.

Not massive. But meaningful. Because community doesn’t scale first—it compounds.