Community-as-a-Service: A Business Model for the 21st Century

Community-as-a-service is the phenomenon where access to a group of people is valuable enough that it can be considered a marketable product.

Every community-as-a-service comprises two elements: 

1. A founder (or founders) who creates original content that a community can gather around 
2. The community members who come for the original content, but stay for several reasons we’re about to explore  

The value that community members derive from community-as-a-service type business can be broken down into:

1. Learning from the content creator: the direct transfer of knowledge and skills from the creator of the community to the audience.
2. Learning from the community: the opportunity to interact with like-minded people and exchange ideas in a peer-to-peer network.
3. Building your network: providing valuable content to other community members with the goal of building your own community-as-a-service.