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Building Engaged Communities: The Art of Scaling Without Losing Your Users
There's a moment every startup founder dreads. You've built something people actually want, but suddenly growth feels like a liability. The more users you add, the harder it becomes to keep them engaged. The community starts feeling like a transaction instead of a movement.
Tade Oyerinde and Teddy Solomon know this problem intimately. Oyerinde runs Campus, an online school offering associate degrees and specialized certificates to over 3,000 students. Solomon co-founded Fizz, a college social platform operating on more than 200 campuses with over $40 million in funding. Both have faced the same challenge: how do you scale massively while keeping your community alive?
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, they shared strategies that go beyond typical startup playbooks. This isn't about growth hacking or viral loops. It's about building sustainable communities that feel personal, even when they're reaching thousands of people.
The stakes are higher than most people realize. A startup with excellent features but mediocre community engagement dies quietly. A startup with average features but obsessive community focus becomes a movement. The difference comes down to intentional choices about how you involve your users, what you prioritize, and where you're willing to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term loyalty.
In this guide, we'll break down the exact strategies these founders use, the frameworks they follow, and the mistakes they've made along the way. If you're building anything with users who need to stay engaged, this matters.
TL; DR
- Community isn't a feature: It's the foundation. Oyerinde and Solomon both designed their platforms around community first, features second.
- Monetization follows engagement: Both founders focus on retention and user satisfaction before aggressive monetization strategies.
- Membership models work: Oyerinde believes everyone will eventually have subscription services for skill development and learning.
- Users are everything: Solomon explicitly states that keeping users happy and engaged must come before profit optimization.
- Multi-format content drives retention: Fizz's addition of video, marketplace, and peer-to-peer features increased engagement significantly.
Fizz has strategically added features over time, starting with messaging and feed, and expanding to include a marketplace and video, enhancing user engagement. Estimated data.
Understanding Campus: Rethinking Online Education at Scale
Campus operates in a space most people assume is already solved. Online education exists. University infrastructure exists. But Oyerinde identified a gap: there's no online school designed from scratch to be genuinely accessible and flexible.
The platform currently offers associate degrees in information technology, business administration, and other career-focused fields. It also provides specialized certificates in areas like cosmetology and phlebotomy. With over 3,000 enrolled students and more than 100 part-time and full-time professors, Campus has built something that feels like a traditional school but operates entirely online.
The innovation isn't technological. It's structural. Oyerinde uses Pell Grants to keep tuition affordable, allowing students who couldn't afford traditional universities to access quality education. This decision is radical in higher education, where profit margins often come before accessibility.
What's equally important is who's backing him. Sam Altman from OpenAI and Jason Citron from Discord sit on Campus's cap table. Neither needs the money. They're there because they believe Oyerinde is solving an actual problem: the education system is broken, and fixing it requires someone willing to prioritize impact over profit.
This backing matters psychologically. It sends a signal to students, to faculty, and to the market: this isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. This is someone trying to fundamentally reshape education. When your investors don't need your money, you can make decisions based on what's right, not what's most profitable.
The À La Carte Course Model
Oyerinde recently announced that Campus would begin offering à la carte courses. Employers started demanding this. They wanted their employees to learn specific skills without committing to two-year degrees.
This is a classic community expansion move. You're not replacing your core offering, you're creating an on-ramp. Someone who takes a three-week course on a specific skill might eventually enroll in a full degree program. But more importantly, they experience your community first.
The beauty of this approach is that it aligns your interests with theirs. You're not trying to extract value from day one. You're inviting them into an experience and letting them decide how deep they want to go.
The Subscription-First Future
Oyerinde made a bold prediction at Disrupt: everyone will eventually have subscription services for skill development. This isn't about Netflix-style entertainment subscriptions. It's about education becoming ongoing, modular, and personalized.
Think about the math. If someone works for 40 years, and technology changes dramatically every 5-7 years, they're looking at 6-8 major skill refreshes during their career. The old model where you go to college once and coast isn't viable anymore.
Campus is positioning itself as the place where this continuous learning happens. You might start with a certificate course, move into an associate degree, and then maintain an ongoing subscription for micro-credentials and skill updates. Each layer keeps you engaged with the community.
Campus has a significant student body of 3,000, supported by 100 professors, with a mix of full-time and part-time faculty. Estimated data.
Understanding Fizz: Building Community in the College Space
Fizz operates in an equally crowded space: college social networks. But Teddy Solomon has identified something everyone else missed. College students need a platform designed specifically for their context, not a Facebook alternative or a TikTok clone.
Fizz launched in 2021 and now operates on over 200 college campuses. It has raised more than $40 million from investors including Owl Ventures and NEA. At its peak, it operated in high schools too, though the company has since focused on the college vertical.
What makes Fizz different isn't the technology. It's the intentional design around what college students actually want to do: connect with peers, buy and sell items, share moments, and discover what's happening on campus right now.
The Evolution of Features: Adding Depth Without Losing Focus
Fizz started with messaging and feed. That's enough to get initial traction. But Solomon quickly realized that retention requires more. People need more ways to interact, more reasons to return daily.
The company added a peer-to-peer marketplace. Over 100,000 items have been listed since launch. This is brilliant community design because it solves an immediate problem: college students constantly need to buy and sell used items. By making this happen inside Fizz instead of on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, you increase engagement and create additional value.
Then came video. Written posts only go so far. Video lets people express themselves more fully. It also increases engagement time on platform, which obviously helps retention.
Each feature wasn't added randomly. Each one answered a question: "What do our users actually need that we're not currently providing?" This is community-driven product development, not feature-led growth.
Global Fizz: Expanding Beyond the US
Solomon is now working on Global Fizz, a product designed to expand Fizz beyond American college campuses. This is a fascinating play because the concept (college students wanting to connect locally) is universal, but the implementation needs to be local.
A college campus in Tokyo operates differently from one in São Paulo, which operates differently from one in London. Cultural norms around social interaction, privacy, and content sharing vary significantly. A thoughtful founder would recognize this and build accordingly.
Global expansion in community products is harder than most people realize because community is inherently cultural. You can't just translate an app and launch it. You need to understand local dynamics, what students care about, and how they want to communicate.
The Monetization Question: When and How to Make Money From Community
Both founders addressed monetization, and their approach reveals something important about sustainable growth.
Solomon said Fizz is focusing on ads. They've already worked with companies like Perplexity, which makes sense. College students are an advertiser's dream demographic: they're young, have disposable income, and are establishing brand loyalty.
But notice the framing. Solomon said the company is "focused on our ads business, and we're focused on building a great product that keeps our users around and makes them happy." The order matters. Product and retention come first. Monetization comes second.
This is the opposite of most startups. Most startups launch, get desperate for revenue, and monetize aggressively. Engagement crashes. Users leave. The company slowly dies.
Solomon explicitly said "the users are everything." This isn't a marketing slogan. It's the actual operating principle. Every decision gets evaluated through that lens: does this make users happier or unhappier?
The Subscription Model Question
Solomon mentioned that subscription models have worked well for apps, but Fizz is focused on ads for now. This is a reasonable choice for a college platform because students are price-sensitive.
But Oyerinde is positioned differently. Campus is in a space where people expect to pay. Education has always involved tuition. Students understand that learning has a cost. Oyerinde can build subscription economics into Campus because the context supports it.
The lesson: your monetization model should match your user's expectations and ability to pay. Forcing the wrong model onto your community is the fastest way to destroy engagement.
Balancing Investor Demands With Community Health
Oyerinde has a unique advantage: his investors don't need the money. This fundamentally changes how you operate. You're not pressured to hit aggressive revenue targets. You can invest in community health, take time to get things right, and prioritize long-term impact.
Most founders don't have this luxury. Most investors expect returns. The pressure is immediate and constant. This creates a fundamental tension: what's good for the community (slower, more thoughtful growth) often conflicts with what's good for investor returns (aggressive growth and monetization).
The founders who navigate this successfully are ruthlessly transparent about trade-offs. They say to investors: if we monetize now, we lose users. If we wait six months and build engagement first, we'll monetize better. Most good investors understand this logic.
Estimated data suggests that 'Removing Barriers' is the most effective strategy for building engagement, followed closely by 'Multiple Interaction Formats'.
Building Engagement: Practical Strategies From the Trenches
So what does engagement actually look like? Both founders revealed specific strategies:
Strategy 1: Live, Interactive Learning
Oyerinde emphasized that Campus offers "live, online classes, taught by amazing people." This is significant. Pre-recorded lectures are cheaper to scale. Live classes require real-time instructors and create coordination complexity.
But live classes create community. Students interact with the instructor. They see each other. They feel like they're part of something. This is worth the operational complexity.
Strategy 2: Multiple Interaction Formats
Fizz didn't stop at messaging. It added marketplace, video, and peer-to-peer features. The insight is that people want to interact in different ways. Some want to chat. Some want to buy and sell. Some want to share video moments.
A good community platform provides many ways to engage. Users choose the format that fits their needs. More formats mean more opportunities for engagement.
Strategy 3: Solving Immediate Friction
When Oyerinde heard employers wanted specific skill courses, he didn't launch a complex platform for corporate training. He added à la carte courses to what already existed. This is efficient. It addresses a need without massive new infrastructure.
Fizz's marketplace works the same way. College students already buy and sell used items. Fizz just made this happen on their platform instead of elsewhere. You're not creating new behavior, you're channeling existing behavior into your community.
Strategy 4: Removing Barriers to Participation
Oyerinde's use of Pell Grants is a barrier removal strategy. Cost is the biggest barrier to education. By removing it, he dramatically increases who can participate. This expands the community and improves engagement because more people feel like they belong.
Barrier removal isn't always about price. It might be about complexity, time, or social friction. A good founder is constantly asking: what's stopping someone from engaging more deeply?
The Psychology of Community Scaling
There's a psychological transition that happens in communities. At 10 members, everyone feels special. At 100 members, you start feeling crowds. At 1,000 members, you feel like you're part of something big but also anonymous.
Both Oyerinde and Solomon have crossed this threshold multiple times. How do you maintain the sense of belonging when you're scaling from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands?
Maintaining Intimacy at Scale
Campus does this with live classes and active instructors. Even though you're one of 3,000 students, you're sitting in a live class with maybe 20 other people and a real instructor. The community feels intimate at that level.
Fizz maintains intimacy through campus-based organization. Yes, Fizz is on 200 campuses, but each campus feels like its own thing. The platform is global, but the experience is local.
Creating Micro-Communities Within Larger Communities
Both platforms implicitly encourage sub-communities. On Campus, students in IT might form study groups. On Fizz, students in the same dorm might connect more frequently.
Small groups are the antidote to scale. You can't have deep relationships with thousands of people, but you can have them with dozens. A good platform makes it easy to form these smaller groups within the larger whole.
Fizz focuses heavily on ads, aligning with user expectations for free content, while Campus leverages subscriptions, fitting the educational context. Estimated data based on narrative insights.
The Founder's Dilemma: Growth vs. Community Health
Here's the tension both founders face: growth metrics are easy to measure. Daily active users, retention rate, engagement time. Community health is harder to measure but more important long-term.
A platform could grow rapidly by being predatory. Aggressive dark patterns, exploitative monetization, and manipulative features all drive growth. But they destroy community. Users feel used. They leave.
Solomon explicitly chose the other path. Build a product users love. Keep users happy. Then monetize. This is harder because you need more patience and more capital. But it's more sustainable.
Monetization Models for Community Platforms
Let's break down the specific models both founders are using and considering:
Advertising Model
Fizz is pursuing ads. This makes sense for a college platform because the audience is valuable to advertisers. The key to making this work is keeping the ad experience non-disruptive. Too many ads tank engagement.
Ads also need to be relevant. Showing college students ads about adult financial products won't work. Showing them ads about food delivery, clothing, and campus-relevant services will.
Subscription Model
Campus is obviously subscription-based because it's education. But Oyerinde's prediction that everyone will have learning subscriptions is interesting. This suggests he sees a future where Spotify-for-learning is a standard expense category.
Subscription models work best when the value clearly outweighs the cost. With education, this is true. You're paying for career advancement, skill development, and future earnings.
Freemium Model
Fizz likely uses a freemium model, though Solomon didn't emphasize paid features. The free experience is the priority. Premium might come later if it makes sense.
Freemium is tricky because the free tier needs to be valuable enough that most users don't feel limited, yet some will upgrade for premium. Get this balance wrong and you either lose users (free tier too weak) or can't monetize (free tier too good).
Marketplace Commission
Fizz's marketplace generates transactions. Presumably, they take a small commission. This is elegant because they only make money when they create value (by facilitating transactions). It aligns incentives perfectly.
B2B Integration
Oyerinde mentioned employers asking for courses. This opens B2B revenue. Companies might pay for their employees to access Campus. This is recurring revenue from high-value customers.
B2B is higher-friction to sell but higher-revenue and more stable than consumer. A mix of B2C and B2B revenue is ideal.
Solving real problems and proving engagement are crucial for building engaged communities. Estimated data based on typical startup challenges.
Lessons for Your Community
If you're building anything with engaged users, what can you take from Oyerinde and Solomon?
Lesson 1: Solve Real Problems First
Both platforms exist because they solved real problems that weren't being solved well. Campus addresses education access. Fizz addresses college social dynamics. Neither was trying to be clever or viral. They were trying to be useful.
Lesson 2: Users Are The Product, And The Customer
You make money from users (through subscriptions, ads, or commissions). But users are also your product. Your reputation, your network effects, your value all comes from having engaged users. Treat them accordingly.
Lesson 3: Community Compounds
Network effects don't work immediately. They work over time. Oyerinde and Solomon have both been operating for years. Year one is always harder than year five because network effects take time to build.
If you're not willing to wait for compounding, don't build a community product. Find something more transactional.
Lesson 4: Monetization Follows Engagement
The standard startup path is "grow fast, monetize later." But most startups don't have investors like Sam Altman and Khosla. If you do have traditional investors, they'll push for monetization earlier.
The solution: prove engagement first. Show retention metrics. Show that users come back. Show that they bring others. Then monetize. Investors will wait if the fundamentals are strong.
Lesson 5: Multiple Formats Increase Engagement
Fizz adding video, marketplace, and messaging expanded engagement because people engage in different ways. Your community probably needs multiple formats too. Don't lock people into one interaction mode.
The Future of Community-Driven Growth
Both founders see a future where community isn't optional. It's the foundation.
Oyerinde's vision is education becoming continuous and modular. You're always updating skills. You're always part of a learning community. This makes Campus not a one-time purchase but an ongoing membership in something bigger.
Solomon's vision is local community becoming more digital. College students will meet more of their community needs through Fizz. But they'll also graduate and move to new cities. Global Fizz suggests he's thinking about how community follows people through life transitions.
Both visions require extreme patience. You can't force community. You can't fake it. You can only create conditions where it grows naturally.
Building Your Own Engaged Community: A Practical Framework
If you're starting from scratch, here's how to think about building engaged communities:
Phase 1: Solve a Specific Problem for a Specific Group
Don't try to build a general community. Start narrow. Campus started with online degrees. Fizz started with college social. Pick something specific that a defined group desperately wants.
Phase 2: Make It Dead Simple to Get Started
Remove every barrier. Campus uses Pell Grants. Fizz works on campus, not requiring users to find it. Make it stupid easy to try.
Phase 3: Listen to How Users Interact
Watch what they're trying to do. Where are they frustrated? What needs aren't being met? What are they doing outside your platform that they'd rather do inside?
Phase 4: Add Features That Enable Their Behavior
Don't add features because they're trendy. Add them because users clearly want them. Fizz added marketplace because students clearly wanted it. Campus is adding à la carte courses because employers are asking for them.
Phase 5: Create Multiple Paths to Deeper Engagement
Some users want to be casual. Some want to be obsessive. Create paths for both. Campus has full degrees, associate degrees, certificates, and now individual courses. Users can engage at whatever level suits them.
Phase 6: Build Small Community Structures Within the Larger Whole
Help users form study groups, friend circles, and focus areas. Small communities are more resilient than large ones. They're where relationships actually form.
Phase 7: Monetize From a Position of Strength
Once you have strong retention and clear engagement metrics, then think about monetization. You'll know what your users value because they're already using it.
Common Mistakes in Community Building
Most community products fail not because the idea is bad, but because of execution mistakes:
Mistake 1: Building Features Instead of Community
You add a new feature every week. But you never invest in the relationships between users. Community isn't features. It's people. Build the relationships first.
Mistake 2: Monetizing Too Aggressively Too Soon
You launch and immediately try to make money. Users feel bled. They leave. Now you have no community to monetize. Wait until retention is strong.
Mistake 3: Treating All Users the Same
Some users are core community members. Some are casual. Design for both. Core members are your anchor. Casual users are your growth. You need both.
Mistake 4: Ignoring Local Context
You build globally but ignore local norms. College culture in the US is different from Japan. Young professional culture in San Francisco is different from Austin. Smart platforms adapt to local context.
Mistake 5: Growing Too Fast
You can scale too quickly and destroy culture. Every time you 10x size, you need to intentionally rebuild culture. Most products don't do this and they break.
The Long Game
What struck you about the Disrupt conversation with Oyerinde and Solomon? Probably not the features. Probably not the growth metrics. It was the patience.
Oyerinde has been building Campus for years. He's not in a rush. He has investors who don't need the money. He can do this right.
Solomon launched Fizz in 2021. It's 2025 now. Four years in, he's still thinking about retention and engagement, not just growth.
This patience is the advantage. In a startup ecosystem obsessed with speed and growth, patience becomes a competitive advantage. Communities take time. Engagement takes time. Network effects take time.
The founders who understand this will build lasting companies. The founders who don't will burn out users and pivot constantly.
If you're building a community product, decide right now: are you willing to be patient? Are you willing to prioritize retention over growth? Are you willing to wait three years to see network effects? If yes, you have a shot. If not, you're probably building a feature, not a community.
FAQ
What makes Campus different from other online schools?
Campus is designed from scratch as an online-first institution, not as a traditional school moving online. It offers flexibility through à la carte courses, specializes in career-focused degrees and certifications, and uses Pell Grants to improve accessibility. The platform emphasizes live instruction from experienced professors rather than pre-recorded content, creating genuine interaction and community among students.
How does Fizz maintain engagement across 200+ college campuses?
Fizz maintains engagement by staying campus-specific rather than global. While the platform operates on over 200 campuses, each campus experiences it as a local community. The addition of features like peer-to-peer marketplace, video sharing, and peer interaction creates multiple reasons to return daily. Rather than trying to connect all college students globally, Fizz facilitates local connections within each campus community.
Why do Oyerinde and Solomon prioritize engagement over aggressive monetization?
Both founders understand that community is fragile. Aggressive monetization—through excessive ads, paywalls, or exploitative features—destroys trust and causes users to leave. Strong engagement and retention create value that can be monetized sustainably. They're following the logic that users are everything. Happy, engaged users either pay more willingly or tolerate non-intrusive monetization like well-placed advertising.
What does Oyerinde mean by everyone needing learning subscriptions?
Oyerinde predicts that continuous skill development will become a standard expense, similar to how people now subscribe to entertainment or productivity tools. As technology changes rapidly, professionals need ongoing training to stay relevant. Rather than one-time education, people will maintain subscriptions to platforms that help them learn new skills throughout their careers. Campus is positioning itself as the platform where this continuous learning happens.
How can startups balance growth with community health?
The key is sequencing. First, solve a real problem for a specific group and remove barriers to entry. Second, listen to how users actually interact and add features they request, not trendy features you think they want. Third, prove engagement metrics and retention before pursuing aggressive growth or monetization. Growth should follow strong engagement metrics, not precede them. This requires patience but creates more sustainable companies.
What's the best monetization model for community products?
There's no single best model. Fizz uses advertising because college students expect free platforms. Campus uses subscriptions because education has always involved tuition. The best model matches user expectations and ability to pay. The timing also matters—monetize from a position of strength (high engagement and retention) rather than desperation. Multiple revenue streams (like Campus's B2C degrees plus B2B employer training) provide stability.
How should community products handle rapid scaling?
Scaling challenges community because what made a platform special at 100 users feels impersonal at 100,000 users. Address this by creating micro-communities within the larger platform (study groups, local chapters, interest areas), maintaining multiple engagement formats so users can interact in their preferred way, and being intentional about preserving culture as you grow. Every 10x in size requires deliberate cultural rebuilding or the original community feeling disappears.
Why did Fizz add a marketplace when it could have focused on messaging?
Fizz observed that college students already buy and sell items, and they were using other platforms to do this. Rather than ignore this behavior or force all interaction into messaging, Fizz channeled existing behavior into their platform. This is efficient community building—you're not creating new user behavior, you're making existing behavior more convenient within your ecosystem. Every feature addition should answer the question: "What are users already trying to do that we could make easier?"
Key Takeaways for Building Sustainable Communities
The insights from Oyerinde and Solomon reveal something important about building products that actually stick around. Communities aren't built through viral loops or growth hacks. They're built through patient, intentional design that puts users first and monetization second.
Start with a specific problem for a specific group. Make it easy to participate. Listen to how people actually use your product. Add features that enable their behavior, not features you think are trendy. Create multiple paths for engagement. Build smaller communities within the larger whole. Then, from a position of strength with engaged users, figure out how to monetize.
This approach is slower than the typical startup playbook. It requires more patience. It requires investors who understand that community compounds over time rather than generating immediate returns. But the companies that build this way—like Campus and Fizz—create something lasting. They create communities that users don't leave because they feel part of something meaningful.
If you're building anything that needs user engagement to survive, these principles apply. Whether you're building an education platform, a social network, a marketplace, or a professional community, the fundamentals are the same. Put users first. Listen to what they need. Design the community before designing the monetization. Wait for engagement to compound. Then build something valuable on top of that foundation.
The founders who understand this will build the next generation of enduring companies. The ones who don't will keep chasing growth until they burn out their users and have to start over.
