Why Your Community Isn’t Growing

Everyone wants to build a community right now. Founders, creators, investors, and operators are all launching Slack groups, events, newsletters, and founder-led content. But communities do not grow just because they exist. People join, but the right connections do not always happen. Great conversations get buried. Follow-ups fall through. Member needs stay scattered across forms, DMs, spreadsheets, event tools, and Slack threads. Selina Li , Cofounder of Bubble Lab (YC W’26) , will break down where most communities lose momentum, why community has become such an important part of startup distribution, and how AI can help turn messy member data into real community infrastructure. We’ll go deep on: Why communities are a key part of startup growth Why product alone is not enough to earn trust and attention How content, events, and community all connect to distribution Why starting a community is easy, but making it useful is hard How AI can make communities more searchable, personalized, and valuable This is not a panel. It’s a founder-led workshop in a bar, designed to go deep on one…