# community-marketing > A Claude Code skill that designs and grows online communities — Discord, Slack, Circle, Reddit, forums — around shared identity rather than product, with a flywheel and health metrics. **Use case**: Build a community that compounds **Canonical URL**: https://agentcookbooks.com/skills/community-marketing/ **Topics**: claude-code, skills, marketing, growth **Trigger phrases**: "build a community", "community strategy", "Discord community", "community-led growth", "ambassador program" **Source**: [Corey Haines](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/tree/main/skills/community-marketing) **License**: MIT --- ## What it does `community-marketing` is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines's [marketing-skills repo](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills). It turns Claude into a community strategist whose first move is asking what *identity* the community reinforces for its members — not what product it's promoting. The skill activates when you mention "build a community", "Discord community", "community-led growth", or "ambassador program", and walks through platform selection, founding-member playbooks, rituals, and health metrics. The output of a session is a community plan: identity definition, platform recommendation with tradeoffs, channel architecture, a 90-day launch plan with founding-member outreach, weekly/monthly rituals, an ambassador program brief, and a health-metrics dashboard (DAU/MAU, new-member post rate, thread reply rate, non-staff content share). ## When to use it Reach for it when: - You're about to launch a community and want to avoid the "ghost server" failure mode - You have a community at 100–1k members that's stagnating and need a diagnosis - You want to formalize an ambassador program around the power users you already have When *not* to reach for it: - Your product doesn't have a natural shared identity — community is the wrong wedge - You can't dedicate hours per week to community management; it'll wither ## Install The skill is distributed via Corey Haines's [marketing-skills repo](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills). Install via the repo's recommended path — copy the [`community-marketing` SKILL.md](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/tree/main/skills/community-marketing) into your project's `.claude/skills/community-marketing/` directory, or use the repo's plugin install if you've set it up. Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for `.agents/product-marketing-context.md` (or `.claude/product-marketing-context.md`) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines's marketing skills. ## What a session looks like A typical session has three phases: 1. **Identity + platform.** What identity do members reinforce by joining? Which platform fits — Discord (developer/creator), Slack (B2B), Reddit (public + SEO), Circle (course-based)? 2. **Launch playbook.** Recruit 20–50 founding members manually, seed 5–10 conversations before opening, write culture-not-rules guidelines, define the weekly action loop. 3. **Health + scale.** Recurring rituals (weekly threads, AMAs, challenges), recognition for power users (1% generate 90% of value), a member-journey from welcome DM to first post, health metrics with warning signs. The discipline that makes it work: every decision has to accelerate the flywheel — members join, get value, engage, create, attract more members. If a feature doesn't, cut it. ## Receipts Honest reporting on what `community-marketing` produces and where it has limits: **Where it works well:** - The identity-first framing kills the "let's build a Slack for our customers" failure mode early - Founding-member playbooks turn the cold-start problem into a recruiting checklist - Health-metrics with explicit warning signs make stagnation visible before it's fatal **Where it backfires:** - Communities are slow — the skill can't generate engagement, only structure - Recommendations assume you have a product with users; pre-product communities need different rules **Pattern that works:** trigger on the specific stage you're in (pre-launch / 0–100 / 100–1k / scaling). The advice diverges sharply by stage and a stage-mismatched plan reads generic. ## Source and attribution Originally written by [Corey Haines](https://corey.co). The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the [`community-marketing` folder](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/tree/main/skills/community-marketing) of his [marketing-skills repository](https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills). License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved. This page documents the skill from a practitioner's perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.