online-community
(12)
Product Marketing Alliance Tried to Sell T-Shirts. The Community Bought a Profession.
A failed merch table exposed the better business hiding in plain sight: build the room product marketers needed, then sell the education, events and tools that make the room more valuable.
Social Strata (Crowdstack)
For more than two decades, a husband-and-wife team in Charleston has quietly powered online communities for brands that outgrew Facebook Groups - and never took a dime of venture money.
Zapnito
A personalized community & knowledge hub for every customer.
XenForo
The forum software built by the people who walked out of vBulletin - and why, in an age of algorithmic feeds, businesses still pay for a place to talk.
vBulletin
The World's Leading Community Software - vBulletin has been powering online forums for more than two decades, and it is still shipping.
Invision Community
For more than twenty years, a small team has quietly built one of the web's most enduring community platforms - the software behind forums you have almost certainly posted in without knowing its name.
Hivebrite
The community platform built for impact - combining a flexible engagement engine, AI agents, and expert support to help organizations turn scattered members into active networks.
Higher Logic
Engagement is changing. Make every connection count.
Forumbee
Build a thriving online community and knowledge base to engage users, deflect tickets, and accelerate product adoption.
Jobcase, Inc.
Jobcase is a Cambridge-based social platform built for the workers most job sites overlook - hourly, frontline and blue-collar Americans. With more than 110 million registered members and roughly 20 million monthly actives, it pairs a community forum and resume tools with machine-learning job matching, earning rankings among the largest U.S. online career destinations. Founded by Fred Goff and Tony Deigh out of the wreckage of an AI hedge fund, Jobcase makes money from employer advertising and recruiting partnerships while keeping the core product free for job seekers.
Twitch
Twitch is the world's largest live-streaming platform, where creators broadcast video games, IRL content, music, and talk shows to a real-time audience that talks back in chat. Founded as a gaming-focused spin-off of Justin.tv in 2011 and acquired by Amazon in 2014, Twitch turned watching someone play a game into a social, participatory medium, building a creator economy powered by subscriptions, Bits, ads, and a culture of emotes and live community.
Linden Lab
Linden Lab is the San Francisco company behind Second Life, the user-built virtual world it launched in 2003. More than two decades on, the platform still runs a multimillion-dollar creator economy where residents design avatars, sell virtual goods, host live events and trade in Linden Dollars - a quiet, persistent metaverse that predates the word itself.