community-marketing

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• build a community
• community strategy
• Discord community
• community-led growth
• ambassador program

What it does

community-marketing is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. 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. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the community-marketing SKILL.md 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. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the community-marketing folder of his marketing-skills repository.

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.