Free field guides
Field guides for community builders
Playbooks, worksheets and templates from running Bettermode’s own community. Every guide is free, one short form each, and new ones land here as we write them.
Free worksheet
The community leader’s toolkit
A working guide to community use cases, the KPIs that prove them and the CRM wiring that turns activity into pipeline evidence. Fillable, so you can type straight into it.
All guides and tools
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Guide
How to grow a successful online community
From a silent room to a community that runs itself. Which of the six types you’re building, where new members really come from and the eight steps in the order they work.
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Guide
The 90-day community visibility playbook
Make your community the answer Google and AI tools reach for. A 90-day plan to find the questions buyers ask, make your answers citable and keep them current in half an hour a month.
Get the playbook -
Worksheet
The community leader’s toolkit
Walk into the budget conversation with proof. Pick the use cases that pay off and the KPIs that show it, then fill in a scorecard your exec can say yes to.
Get the toolkit -
Guide
The member onboarding playbook
Turn new signups into returning members: the first-session checklist, four ready-to-send emails and the scorecard that shows it’s working.
Get the playbook -
Calculator New
Community ROI calculator
Put a number on what your community returns, before the sale and after it, and compare it with your other channels. Every starting value is an assumption you replace with yours.
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Story New
You built a community in Claude. Now what?
It took a weekend and it works. Here’s what the next nine months bring, for the person who built it and the person who has to approve running it, with a three-year cost calculator you can share.
Read the story
A sample from the current guides
What you’ll find inside
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The community flywheel
Attract, onboard, engage, retain, advocate. Each stage feeds the next, and skipping one is exactly why the wheel grinds.
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Where members actually come from
Ranked by what works: your own product first, then email to customers, search, existing members, events. Pick two to start.
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Eight use cases, split by timing
Four that earn discovery and demand before the sale, four that compound retention and advocacy after it.
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A KPI menu
Pick three numbers: a leading indicator you can move this month, a channel KPI you report monthly and the executive metric it ladders to.
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The source-ready edit
Title, opening, proof, trust, discovery, path. Six passes that turn a buried thread into a page search and AI will actually use.
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Why communities fade
No owner, no focus, an empty launch, vanity metrics, a neglected loop. Five causes, every one of them avoidable.
Common questions
Something we missed? Ask in a demo.
Are the guides free?
Yes. Fill in one short form and the download opens on the page, with a copy sent to your inbox.
Do I need to be a Bettermode customer?
No. Most of what’s in them works whatever you run today, Discourse, Circle, Discord or nothing yet. Where a guide leans on something Bettermode-specific, it says so up front.
What does fillable mean?
Some of them, like the community leader’s toolkit, have real form fields you can type into: your chosen use cases, the KPIs, the owner, the review date. Fill it in on screen, or print it and use a pen.
Will this put me in a sales sequence?
No demo sequence fires off these forms. There’s a checkbox if you want new guides emailed to you, and leaving it unticked still gets you the download.
Who writes them?
Our GTM team, from running Bettermode’s own community: the public Wishlist board, the events space and the answer surface at bettermode.com/hub. The examples are things we’ve done or measured.
Are more coming?
Yes. New guides and worksheets get added here as we write them. Tick the box on any form and you’ll hear when the next one lands.
Run the plan on your own community
Every guide comes from how we run Bettermode’s own community. Fill in the scorecard and we’ll walk you through putting it to work on Bettermode.