How to Choose Your Community's Business Objective Before You Build It

The most crucial step in building a product community is defining its primary business objective before any other decision is made. David Spinks' SPACES model offers a structured framework to select one objective, guiding subsequent design, content, and measurement choices.

Maya Rios

March 31, 2026 · Updated October 23, 2026 · 3 min read

The most important decision you'll make about a product community happens before you pick a platform, write a welcome post, or recruit a single member: deciding what business objective the community exists to serve. Community builder David Spinks, writing in Lenny's Newsletter, argues that community is an investment like any other, and that you must understand your business goals before committing time and resources. His SPACES model — Support, Product, Acquisition, Content, Engagement, and Success — gives founders and marketers a structured way to pick one primary objective, which then shapes every downstream choice about design, content, and measurement. This guide walks through that framework and the foundational steps that follow.

SPACES Model: Defining Your Community's Primary Business Objective

The SPACES model exists because a community built without a clear "why" tends to become a generic gathering place with no way to prove its worth. As Spinks frames it, the question "Why should we build community?" must come first, and there are six distinct objectives a community can drive. Your task is to map your most pressing business need to one of these functions and treat it as your community's primary job — not a wish list of everything a community might someday do.

Mapping business needs to the six SPACES community objectives
Objective	What the community does	Key benefit
Support	Creates spaces for customers to answer questions and solve problems for each other. Spinks cites Autodesk's support community as an example.	Customers get help from peers rather than relying solely on your team.
Product	Creates spaces for customers to share product feedback and ideas with each other and with your team.	Insights directly inform product roadmap decisions.
Acquisition	Attracts new customers through advocacy and referrals.	Supports growth and marketing efforts.
Content	Generates user-created content that enhances brand value and search visibility.	Turns community contributions into marketing assets.
Engagement	Builds deeper connections between customers and the brand.	Increases loyalty and retention through a sense of belonging.
Success	Helps customers achieve their goals with the product.	Drives adoption and expansion while aligning community efforts with customer outcomes.

Use this matrix by starting from your current business pressure, not from what sounds appealing. If support tickets are overwhelming your team, the Support objective — creating spaces where customers answer questions and solve problems for each other, as Autodesk does — is your candidate. If your roadmap decisions feel disconnected from users, Product is likely the fit. If growth is the bottleneck, Acquisition points you toward advocacy and referrals. Pick the single objective that answers your most urgent need, because that choice determines who you invite, what conversations you seed, and how you'll eventually measure success.

Notice the discipline here: the model defines six separate objectives precisely so you don't collapse them into a vague ambition to "build engagement." A Support community succeeds when members help each other solve problems; a Product community succeeds when feedback shapes roadmap decisions. Spinks notes that communities begin at a baseline — members simply participating — but exponential growth happens when members start taking an active role, and the role you want them to take depends entirely on the objective you've chosen.

The Foundational Steps That Follow Your Objective Choice

Once your objective is fixed, the launch sequence becomes clearer. The initial steps for starting a community run from strategic to practical: define your goals in concrete terms, identify the target audience whose needs align with that objective, and choose a platform type suited to how that audience wants to interact. Your SPACES choice simplifies each step.

Define your goals. Translate the objective into a plain statement of what the community will accomplish for the business, so that later decisions can be tested against it.
Identify your target audience. A Product-focused community needs feedback-rich, invested users; a Success community needs customers still learning to get value from the product. The objective tells you who to recruit first.
Choose a platform type. Decide on the form of interaction — question-and-answer threads, idea boards, discussion forums — that matches the objective, before evaluating any specific tool. This article's scope ends at strategy; it is not a comparison of software platforms.
Plan initial content and engagement. Seed the first conversations around the objective, so early members experience the community's purpose immediately rather than an empty room with no direction.