Community-led growth
Midjourney, n8n, DeepSeek, Base44 and Nothing built in the open and let users carry the message. Humane skipped that step and sold for half of what it raised. Here's the playbook, and how a Malaysian business can run it.
Midjourney
Humane
Midjourney has never raised venture capital, and most of its web traffic arrives directly or through organic search rather than paid ads. Yet by May 2025 its Discord server had passed 21 million members, the largest on the platform, and analysts estimated its annual recurring revenue at around US$500 million, with a team reported at roughly 40 people.
At the other end of the spectrum, Humane raised more than US$230 million to build the AI Pin. It launched at US$699 with a promise to replace your smartphone. Less than a year later, HP bought its assets for US$116 million and switched the Pin off.
One company built in public, with its users watching and creating alongside it. The other spent years building before customers could try it, and asked the world to trust the launch.
I run iPrima Media, an AI-powered growth agency in Johor Bahru, and this is the third piece in my series on unconventional growth. The first was about stunts versus flywheels. The second was about borrowing distribution from partners. This one is about the cheapest and most durable marketing channel there is: a community that sells for you.
Why it matters now
AI made content free. It didn't make trust free.
AI has made content almost free to produce. That's great for your output and terrible for your reach, because everyone else's output went up too. Feeds are fuller, ads are pricier, and people trust brand messages less.
What AI can't mass-produce is a real person vouching for you. A user showing off what they made. A developer sharing a workflow. A customer who owns a piece of your company. Those signals cut through because they're hard to fake.
The six brands below each found a different way to turn users into their marketing team, and one shows what happens when you skip that step.
Make creation public
Midjourney
The product launched inside a chat room, so every user became a live demo.
Midjourney launched in 2022 as a bot inside Discord rather than as a standalone app. Users generated images in shared channels, where everyone else could see the prompt and the result. Using the product was the marketing. New users learned by watching, copied prompts, posted their own, and invited friends to see.
- Revenue reportedly around US$200 million in 2023 and an estimated US$500 million ARR by May 2025 (Contrary Research).
- Founder David Holz describes the company as “a self-funded research lab.”
If your product produces something people are proud of, put that output where other people can see it. The moment of creation is your best ad.
A renovation brand can share every project as it progresses: site visits, carcass installation, the final reveal, with the homeowner's permission. A café can repost every customer photo. Our write-up on what a viral growth case study taught us about marketing kitchen cabinets covers how transparent workflow content builds trust before the first sales conversation. Our AI video production team turns that raw footage into content at speed.
Let the community build the content
n8n
Every tutorial and shared template is marketing the company never had to make.
n8n is a workflow automation tool from Berlin. Its code is source-available, so anyone can self-host and modify it. That invited a huge community of builders who create integrations, workflow templates and how-to guides. Every YouTube tutorial and shared template is a piece of n8n marketing.
- Raised US$180M at US$2.5B in October 2025, saying revenue had grown tenfold in a year.
- Its 2025 GitHub growth was the biggest single-year total in the JavaScript Rising Stars ranking's history.
- By May 2026 it reported 1.7 million monthly active builders, and SAP invested at a US$5.2B valuation.
When customers can build on top of what you sell, and get credit for it, they become your content team.
Give your best customers a stage. Feature their recipes, setups, designs or results on your channels with their name on it, and run a monthly “customer build” spotlight. Our AI-assisted social media management team runs these programmes. We've also written about how AI is transforming social media marketing, including where humans still need to lead.
Give the core away
DeepSeek
An open model handed to every developer at once, and the internet did the launch.
In January 2025, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model with open weights under the MIT licence, alongside a free chatbot app. Developers everywhere could download, test and build on the model immediately. Within days they were publishing benchmarks, demos and hot takes, and that wave of community coverage did what no ad budget could.
- App Store ranking and licence: Wikipedia. Nvidia's loss: Yahoo Finance.
- The training-cost figure leaves out research and experiment costs, so treat it as a headline, not a total.
Giving away something valuable can generate more attention than selling it. The community does the testing, the reviewing and the spreading.
You don't need to open-source a model. Give away your best knowledge instead: a free cost calculator, a pricing guide, a checklist, a template. Package it so people want to share it. Our guide to why blogging still matters for business websites explains how free content compounds, and our AI copywriting team builds lead magnets that earn the share.
Build in public as a team of one
Base44
A side project, a founder who posted the journey, and an exit six months later.
Maor Shlomo built Base44, a tool that turns text prompts into working apps, as a side project. No big team, no marketing department. What he did have was a habit: he shared the build process openly on LinkedIn and X, including wins, numbers and lessons. People followed the story, tried the product and told others.
- About US$189,000 in profit in May 2025, according to Shlomo's posts (TechCrunch).
A founder sharing real progress is a community engine in itself. People root for a story they can watch unfold.
Founders here are often uncomfortable posting about their own business. Start small: one honest post a week about what you built, what went wrong, and what a customer said. That's the model we coach founders on: AI handles the production, and the founder stays the face. Read more about how we work on the iPrima Media founder page.
Turn customers into co-owners
Nothing
Fans who own a slice of the company don't need to be asked to recommend it.
Nothing, the London consumer-tech brand founded by Carl Pei, invited its fans to invest through equity crowdfunding. Instead of only buying a phone, a fan can own a small piece of the business. Co-owners defend the brand, explain it to friends and show up for every launch.
- £1M in 54 seconds on Crowdcube, March 2021.
- US$200M Series C at US$1.3B in September 2025 to build AI-native devices.
- Its December 2025 community round raised US$8M+ from 5,000+ new backers in 80+ countries.
The deepest form of community is ownership. People with a stake in your success market you without being asked.
Equity crowdfunding is regulated here, so speak to a licensed platform and your advisers before going that route. Ownership can be lighter, too: founding-member pricing for life, a customer advisory group that votes on new products, or a referral programme that treats loyal customers like partners. Our creator commerce and KOC team designs these loyalty and advocacy programmes.
Cautionary tale
Humane
No community testing along the way, so the market's verdict arrived after the money was spent.
Humane's founders were former Apple employees, and the company raised more than US$230 million. Customers didn't get their hands on the AI Pin until it launched in April 2024, positioned as a smartphone replacement at US$699. Early reviewers and customers were widely disappointed.
- Humane cut the price to US$499 in October 2024 and reportedly sought a buyer at US$750 million to US$1 billion (TechCrunch).
Without a community testing your product along the way, you find out what customers think only after you've spent the money.
Before a big launch, run a small public beta. Invite 50 real customers, let them post honestly, and fix what they find. A soft launch with feedback beats a grand opening with silence.
Close to home
What community-led growth looks like in Johor Bahru
We practise this on our own ecosystem before we sell it to clients.
AmpQuartz Badminton Club members who play, film, post and invite friends. That community feeds our creator network, and our creators feed the brands we work with. See working with badminton talents as KOLs in Johor Bahru.
AmpQuartz shares its renovation process, from quotation education to production videos: the same “make creation public” play Midjourney uses. See how a kitchen cabinet brand went viral in Johor and video marketing in Johor.
The framework
The build-in-the-open flywheel
Drawn from the five brands that got it right. Each stage feeds the next, and every new member who creates something in public attracts the next one.
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Open the door
Give something valuable away, or make your product easy to try in public. Free tools, guides, samples, trials. (DeepSeek, n8n)
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Create in public
Show the work as it happens, and let customers show theirs. Behind-the-scenes, progress updates, founder posts. (Midjourney, Base44)
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Spotlight contributors
Feature the people who create with you, and reward them. Customer spotlights, creator partnerships, KOC programmes. (n8n)
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Give people a stake
Turn your best fans into co-owners, founding members or partners. Stakeholders defend and recommend you. (Nothing)
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Own the relationship
Platforms and trends change overnight. Land the community's attention on assets you control: your website, search rankings, AI-assistant citations and a WhatsApp list.
Then loop. Every new member who creates something in public attracts the next member. That's why Midjourney's traffic is mostly direct and organic.
Your turn
Five questions to start your community engine
- What do my customers make, achieve or show off because of my product, and where can others see it?
- What can I give away that's valuable enough to share?
- Who are my 20 most enthusiastic customers, and how can I put them in the spotlight?
- What am I building right now that I could share honestly this week?
- What would make a customer feel like an owner rather than a buyer?
Work with iPrima Media
Ads rent attention. Communities compound it.
iPrima Media combines AI technology, media production, creator networks, community, e-commerce and automation into one growth system. We launch fast, test cheap, scale only what's proven, and measure ourselves on sales, not vanity metrics.
- Midjourney revenue, funding, Discord and traffic: Contrary Research · Wikipedia
- n8n Series C and community: Tech.eu, 9 Oct 2025 · GitHub stars: Wikipedia · SAP: Tech Funding News, 13 May 2026
- DeepSeek: Wikipedia · Nvidia: Yahoo Finance, 27 Jan 2025
- Base44: TechCrunch, 18 Jun 2025
- Nothing: UKTN, 10 Mar 2021 · Reuters via Yahoo Finance, 16 Sep 2025 · Entrepreneur India, 18 Dec 2025
- Humane: TechCrunch, 18 Feb 2025
