Make: Building a Community-Powered Knowledge Hub with Discourse

When the automation platform Integromat became Make, they had a thriving Facebook group for peer-to-peer support, but they knew they were leaving value on the table.

"The Facebook group didn't serve us well in the long run," explains Michaela Štaffová, Community Builder at Make. "The content was not SEO-optimized and was therefore 'locked' in the Facebook realm. If Meta decided to make changes, we would lose control over how our data is served."

The problems ran deeper than platform risk. Conversations were lively, but only accessible to people who had already discovered the group. Users searching for solutions via browsers had no way to find those threads. And not everyone has, or wants, a Facebook account.

Make needed a community platform that would turn user knowledge into something discoverable and durable. Leadership agreed. "The main selling point was the fact that we wanted the community to serve as a knowledge base," Štaffová says. "One we create in collaboration with our users, for our users."

Why Discourse

Make evaluated their options with specific needs in mind: flexibility, customization, a robust API, and OAuth SSO for frictionless access. Discourse checked every box.

"We knew we wanted to go with Discourse because it provides the best balance of flexibility and ROI, which allows us to invest more in our community programs rather than just the infrastructure," Štaffová explains. "The plan was always to use Make plus our community platform to enhance it as much as possible for the benefit of the Community Team, and therefore the community."

The OAuth SSO capability mattered most. With single sign-on, every Make user can register with a single click. That alone made the community far more accessible than a closed social group.

The Shift That Changed Everything

Two years after launch, Make moved the community team from Marketing to Customer Experience. Štaffová describes this as "where the magic started happening."

The logic was straightforward. Within Customer Experience, the community sits alongside Make Academy, the Help Center, and Customer Care. All four teams now work as a single unit focused on user success.

"Because both teams sit within the Customer Experience organization, we actively exchange insights and surface helpful information that directly benefits our customers," Štaffová explains. "We also regularly bring learnings from Customer Care back into the community, making them publicly accessible and easy to find."

The community team has grown to match its role. There's a Head of Community focused on strategy and cross-functional planning, two Community Managers handling engagement and content creation, and a Community Program Manager for initiatives that extend beyond the forum. Soon, the team will add community events managers focused on local, onsite community building.

Redefining Success Metrics

Four years in, Make has learned to ignore the metrics that don't matter. "We don't let ourselves get distracted by vanity metrics like total user count or the raw number of new topics," Štaffová says. "It's natural for the community to grow as the company grows, but size doesn't always equal value."

She's come to see certain growth signals as warning signs. "After four years, a sharp increase in new topics isn't automatically a success signal. It can point to discoverability gaps in our knowledge base or to friction in the product itself."

Instead, Make focuses on topic resolution rate: are people actually getting the help they came for? They have a massive number of unregistered users who browse for answers without ever signing up, so the real measure of success is whether existing solutions are high-quality and easy to find.

Leadership tracks total users and monthly signups for general reach, but Štaffová is working to expand that view. She's now analyzing how many active product users engage in the forum and the average point in their product journey when they decide to register.

"It's difficult to estimate what it would cost to recreate this body of knowledge," she says. "Over the four years since the Make Community was launched, an enormous amount of expertise and context has been shared. Rebuilding that from scratch would be both time-consuming and costly."

An Async Advantage

Many of the resources shared in the Make Community get referenced repeatedly by community members and the Customer Care team alike. This durability is what asynchronous forums offer that real-time chat cannot.

"We're still exploring better ways to understand the value created for users who browse the forum, often anonymously, and learn from existing conversations," Štaffová says. "We strongly believe this value is significant, but we need a more robust system to validate that assumption."

The Make team sees this as the difference between forums and social platforms: "Forums aren't outdated. They solve a different problem. Social platforms are great for conversation in the moment, while Discourse helps us create durable knowledge that people can rely on long after a discussion ends. A solution shared today can still help someone years from now."

Building a Make-Powered Community

As an automation platform, Make can use its own product to run its community. They've leaned into this.

To stay ahead of the spam and low-value traffic that comes with operating a global platform, the team built their own AI-powered "moderation pre-filter" using Make. The system analyzes every new topic in real-time through a two-tier logic: high-certainty spam gets automatically deleted and the accounts suspended, while suspicious-but-uncertain content triggers immediate alerts for human review.

"This 'Make-powered' approach keeps the community clean and safe around the clock, allowing us to stay proactive without needing to manually monitor the forum every minute of the day," Štaffová explains.

They're applying the same philosophy to their recognition program. While they use Discourse's native Gamification plugin, they've connected it to Make to power the logic behind the scenes. Starting in January, they're introducing "scorables" tied to specific high-value behaviors. Users earn points for these actions and can redeem them for rewards.

Programs That Drive Engagement

Beyond organic peer support, Make's biggest wins have come from treating the forum as the home base for all community initiatives. They've turned the community into a destination through a few programs.

They use the forum to publish product updates, news, and bite-sized user success stories. The recurring nature creates a sense of habit for users who check in specifically for these updates.

Every other month, they run Community Challenges where users compete for rewards and the title "Master of Make." These live beyond the forum but need a Make Community account to participate, creating a reason to join.

They host product-focused live building sessions and store recordings across multiple platforms to maximize discoverability, including in the community and on their video channel. This brings in people who might have only intended to watch a video, but once they see the forum's value, they stay.

Most recently, they launched a Champions Program, handpicking the first cohort based on years of history. "These are veteran Make power users who have proven time and time again that they care deeply about the health of our community space," Štaffová says. They plan to review new applications every six months to grow this group of advocates.

What's Working

Štaffová points to two Discourse features as essential: the Data Explorer and the API. "Since we are a team of automators, having a deep, flexible API is absolutely crucial for us so that we can work on our processes and workflows," she explains. "On the data side, the reporting and Data Explorer tools have been vital for our shift toward more sophisticated analytics. They allow us to pull the granular insights we need to prove the community's business value to our leadership."

Štaffová praises the new Horizon theme as a much cleaner starting point. "The dream would still be a true drag-and-drop editor for the front end," she admits, "but we wouldn't want to be boxed in by those constraints and only able to do what the platform allows through that kind of interface. It's more important that we can build exactly what we want."

Evolution: From Support Forum to Knowledge Hub

The community's purpose has evolved since launch. "Our community definitely started as a support-focused space, and while it still absolutely serves that purpose, it has evolved into what I call a Community-Built Knowledge Hub," Štaffová explains.

The most unexpected development has been watching the community become a living supplement to official documentation. "It's where the real-world edge cases and creative hacks live. It's where people go to see what's actually possible with the product, not only when they have a problem."

This evolution hasn't followed a straight line. "We've realized that the 'perfect' community structure is a moving target. What worked two years ago doesn't necessarily work today as our user base becomes more diverse." They make changes frequently, sending out annual feedback surveys and acting on the results. "If the data shows a category isn't working or a flow is confusing, we iterate and change it."

What's Next

The upcoming months are focused on three areas: localization, co-creation, and expansion.

Localization means building locally rooted communities to support Makers in their own languages and regions. Co-creation involves building infrastructure for a "community-led content machine" that lets experts share their knowledge more formally. Expansion means growing their presence beyond the official forum to meet users where they are.

"We've realized there is a massive appetite from our users to share their expertise," Štaffová says, "and we want to empower them to be co-creators of our ecosystem."

Her advice for peers considering the platform: "Integrate it, automate it, and make it part of your product ecosystem."

"Discourse lets us build the community we want, not the one a platform allows."