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Aisha Khan
I was a philosophy major at the University of Toronto who accidentally became a community manager. In 2018, I was running a design meetup in Toronto, just a monthly thing where 30-40 designers would get together, show work, and drink too much coffee. Figma's community team found the meetup and asked if I wanted to run Figma's Toronto community chapter. I said yes without fully understanding what I was agreeing to.
Over the next year, I grew the Toronto chapter from 40 to 800 members. More importantly, I figured out something that most community programs miss: a community isn't a marketing channel. A community is a product. It has users, it has value propositions, it has retention curves, and it has its own product-market fit that's separate from the product it's built around. The Figma community wasn't valuable because it helped sell Figma. It was valuable because it gave designers a professional network, learning opportunities, and social connection. Figma benefited, but the community had to work for its members first.
Figma hired me full-time in 2020 to lead community programs across North America. I built the Friends of Figma program from 12 chapters to 150+, created the community-led content pipeline that generated 40% of Figma's educational content, and designed the community attribution model that finally let us show the CFO that community wasn't just a vibes budget; it was a measurable growth channel with a 3.2x ROI.
In 2022, I moved to Webflow as Head of Community. Webflow's community challenge was different: the users were deeply technical, highly opinionated, and had been building with the product since the early days. They didn't want corporate community management; they wanted to be left alone with better tools. So that's what I built: community infrastructure (forums, template marketplace, certification program) rather than community programming. The approach worked. Community-sourced templates became Webflow's fastest-growing acquisition channel.
I left Webflow in 2024 to write and advise. My thesis is simple: community-led growth is the most powerful and most misunderstood growth motion in tech. Most companies that claim to be "community-led" are actually just "community-decorated." They have a Slack group and a swag budget and they call it community. Real community-led growth requires treating community as a product function, not a marketing function.
I live in Toronto's Kensington Market neighborhood. I do improv comedy, which is excellent training for facilitating community events where nothing goes according to plan.
Experience
- Head of Community, Webflow
- Community Programs, Figma (North America)
- BA Philosophy, University of Toronto