Entrepreneurs Are Ditching LinkedIn Groups in 2025 — Here's Where They're Going
If you ask most founders where they spend their online time in 2025, LinkedIn Groups rarely make the list anymore. The best online community for entrepreneurs to join has shifted decisively away from legacy platforms toward tighter, more intentional spaces — Discord servers, private Slack workspaces, and curated forums where real conversations happen and lurkers are the exception, not the rule. This piece breaks down why that shift is happening, what separates a genuinely useful founder community from a glorified feed, and exactly where to go depending on your stage.
Why Entrepreneurs Are Leaving LinkedIn Groups (And Where They're Going Instead)
LinkedIn has 1 billion+ members, and that scale is precisely what makes its Groups nearly useless for meaningful founder dialogue. When you post in a LinkedIn Group today, you're competing with promotional noise, auto-scheduled content blasts, and connection requests from people who haven't read a word you wrote. The platform's algorithm has never prioritised Group discussions the way it prioritises personal posts, which means even the best-intentioned Group collapses into a broadcast channel within months.
The migration isn't just anecdotal. Community platform Circle reported a 3x increase in new professional community creation between 2022 and 2024. Discord crossed 500M+ registered users and has become the default infrastructure for niche interest groups, including founder cohorts. Founders are voting with their attention, and they're voting for platforms that weren't originally designed for them but have been bent into shape by operators who know what they need.
The Signal-to-Noise Problem With Legacy Platforms
Facebook Groups still host enormous founder communities — the Entrepreneurs and Business Owners Community on our directory is one example, bringing together ambitious entrepreneurs committed to growth — but even the best-managed Facebook Groups suffer from the same structural problem: the platform surfaces content based on engagement signals, not quality signals. A mediocre post that triggers outrage gets more reach than a detailed breakdown of how someone navigated a Series A term sheet.
Legacy platforms optimise for time-on-site, not insight-per-minute. Founders, who are structurally short on time, have noticed. The signal-to-noise ratio on LinkedIn Groups and broad Facebook communities has degraded to the point where most active members have quietly stopped posting and shifted their real conversations elsewhere.
Discord, Slack, and Private Forums Are Winning Founder Attention in 2025
Discord and Slack win because they feel like a room, not a feed. Channels are persistent, searchable, and organised by topic rather than by recency. When a founder posts a question about cold email deliverability in a dedicated #growth channel, the responses stay attached to that question indefinitely. Compare that to the same question vanishing from a LinkedIn Group feed within 48 hours.
Private forums and cohort-based communities (Mighty Networks, Circle, Geneva) are gaining ground for a different reason: exclusivity creates accountability. When you've paid to join or been vetted by a human, you have skin in the game. You show up. You contribute. The communities seeing the highest engagement in 2025 across the business communities we track are almost universally ones with some form of entry friction — an application, a fee, or a referral requirement.
What Actually Makes an Entrepreneur Community Worth Your Time?
Not all entrepreneur communities online are created equal, and the difference between one that accelerates your business and one that wastes six months of your Tuesday evenings comes down to a few specific structural factors. Size is the metric most people look at first. It's almost always the wrong one.
Member Quality Over Raw Size: Why 500 Vetted Founders Beat 50,000 Lurkers
In our directory of 700+ communities, we've consistently found that member activity rate and peer relevance matter more than raw headcount. A community of 50,000 where 2% post regularly gives you an effective audience of 1,000 — and those 1,000 may or may not be at your stage, in your industry, or facing your problems. A community of 500 where 60% engage weekly, and where every member has been screened for revenue stage or industry, gives you 300 people who actually understand your context.
The ProductHunt Learning Board is an instructive counterexample — a platform with 10,000,000+ members where builders share, discover, and discuss products daily. At that scale, the community functions more like a public marketplace of ideas than a peer support network. It's genuinely valuable for distribution and feedback, but it's not where you go to ask whether you should take on a strategic investor or restructure your founding team. Scale and intimacy serve different needs.
The Three Things High-Value Entrepreneur Communities Have in Common
Across the professional networking communities we've reviewed, three structural features reliably predict whether a founder community is worth your time.
Moderation with a point of view. The best communities have operators who actively shape what belongs and what doesn't. That means removing purely promotional posts, flagging low-effort questions, and occasionally telling a member their behavior isn't a fit. It feels harsh, but it's what keeps quality high.
Stage or vertical specificity. Communities that try to serve every founder — from solo freelancers to Series C operators — end up serving none of them well. The highest-value rooms are specific: B2B SaaS founders between $500K and $5M ARR, or DTC founders managing their first warehouse relationship, or technical founders hiring their first non-technical executive.
Asynchronous value. A great founder community should be useful even on the days you don't log in. That means a searchable archive of past discussions, pinned resources, and a culture of thorough answers rather than quick reactions. If the entire value of a community disappears when you close the app, it's not a community — it's a group chat.
How to Find and Join the Right Entrepreneurship Community for Your Stage
The phrase "founder communities 2025" returns thousands of results, and most of them will be a waste of your time if you haven't narrowed by stage. The conversations that matter to a pre-revenue founder building their first MVP are genuinely different from the ones that matter to a founder managing a $2M payroll and a team of 40.
Pre-Revenue Founders vs. Scaling Founders: Different Needs, Different Rooms
Pre-revenue founders need validation, accountability, and tactical advice on building something from nothing. The right communities for this stage tend to be cohort-based — think peer groups running on 12-week cycles, where everyone is at the same inflection point simultaneously. They also benefit from access to communities built around freelancing and consulting communities, since many early-stage founders are navigating the line between client work and product development.
Scaling founders — post-revenue, post-first-hire, often post-first-funding — need a completely different kind of conversation. They're dealing with hiring mistakes, channel saturation, board dynamics, and the psychological weight of being accountable to a team. The right communities for this stage are smaller, more confidential, often membership-gated, and dominated by people who've already solved the problems the founder is currently stuck on. The peer-learning value compounds when everyone in the room has made at least one expensive mistake.
Red Flags to Avoid When Evaluating Any Founder Community
When you're evaluating any founder community, watch for these warning signs.
A high post volume with low response depth is a sign that members are broadcasting, not engaging. If every post has three fire emoji reactions and zero substantive replies, the community has an audience problem, not a community.
Guru dynamics — where one or two figures dominate the conversation and everyone else performs agreement — indicate a platform built for a personal brand rather than peer exchange. Real founder communities have distributed expertise. Nobody should be the smartest person in every room.
No visible moderation or community guidelines is a structural red flag. Communities without rules default to the loudest, most promotional voices. Check whether there's a clear code of conduct before you invest time posting.
The Best Online Communities for Entrepreneurs to Join Right Now
The following communities represent the best networking communities for startups and individual founders based on what we've seen across our directory. Platform, focus, and entry model all vary — match based on your stage.
Best Communities for Early-Stage and Solo Founders
Indie Hackers (online forum, 50,000+ active members) — Structured around revenue transparency, with founders sharing actual MRR, growth experiments, and failure post-mortems. One of the most honest communities for early-stage product builders on the internet.
On Deck Founders (cohort-based, gated) — Intensive cohort model with screened applicants. High-effort to join, high-return if you're in a serious build phase. The network effect from alumni is significant.
r/Entrepreneur (Reddit, 2M+ members) — High noise, but the search function is genuinely valuable. Treat it as a reference archive rather than a live community, and it becomes more useful.
For founders who are also building personal practices or consulting alongside their product work, the freelancing and consulting communities and marketing and growth communities in our directory surface several strong options organised by platform and focus.
Best Communities for Growth-Stage and Funded Founders
YC Alumni Network (private, invitation-only) — If you've been through Y Combinator, this remains the single highest-signal founder network available. The density of solved problems and operating experience is unmatched.
Pavilion (paid membership, $1,500–$5,000/year) — Focused on go-to-market executives and founders scaling revenue functions. Particularly strong for B2B SaaS operators navigating sales leadership and RevOps decisions.
Founders Network (membership-gated, peer mentorship model) — 600+ tech startup founders at growth stage, with a chapter-based local structure that makes in-person connection realistic even in a digital-first community.
Growth-stage founders managing teams will also find value in the leadership and management communities we've listed, particularly for navigating the transition from founder-led everything to distributed management.
Niche Founder Communities Worth Knowing About
The generic "entrepreneur community" category is increasingly giving way to vertical-specific rooms that produce much higher quality conversations.
Black Founders Network — Focused on supporting underrepresented founders at every stage, with strong programming around funding access and enterprise sales.
Women in Tech Founders (Slack, 8,000+ members) — Active discussion around fundraising, product, and operator challenges with a consistent events calendar.
For founders in the creator economy, education technology, or content-driven businesses, the r/IAmA Educators & Course Creators subreddit — with 9.5M members — offers something unusual: direct access to operators who've built real audiences and course businesses, sharing candid insight in AMA format. The scale means you're mining for signal, but the signal is there.
FAQ
What is the best online community for entrepreneurs to join in 2025? The best online community for entrepreneurs depends on your stage. Pre-revenue founders benefit most from cohort-based communities like On Deck or Indie Hackers. Growth-stage founders with funding get the most value from gated, high-trust networks like YC Alumni or Pavilion, where peer experience density is highest.
How do I find entrepreneur communities that are actually active? Look for communities where the average post has multiple substantive replies, not just reactions. Check whether the most recent activity is within 48 hours. Ask for the community's member activity rate before joining paid options — strong communities will tell you. Avoid any community where the founders or admins are the only frequent posters.
Why does joining a paid founder community make sense over a free one? Payment creates selection — members who've invested money tend to invest attention. Free communities with no barrier to entry attract a much higher proportion of lurkers and promotional accounts. The best networking communities for startups often carry a fee precisely because the operators understand that friction and quality are directly linked.
What is the difference between a founder community and a networking group? A founder community is built around shared experience and peer learning. A networking group is built around connection and referral exchange. Both have value, but they serve different purposes. The confusion between them is why many founders join professional networking communities expecting peer support and leave disappointed.
How many entrepreneur communities should I join at once? One to two, actively. Three or more means you'll underinvest in all of them and extract value from none. Choose communities that match your current stage and commit to contributing before extracting. The return on a community correlates almost directly with your contribution rate in the first 90 days.
At OpenCommunity, we've curated 700+ Discord, Slack, and Telegram communities so you can find the right one without the guesswork. Browse communities by topic.
Communities to Explore
These communities are listed on OpenCommunity and have been reviewed for activity and quality:
- Entrepreneurs and Business Owners Community — Facebook group. Connect with ambitious entrepreneurs and business owners committed to excellence and growth beyond mediocrity.
- ProductHunt Learning Board — online community · 10,000,000 members. 10M+ builders learning product development through daily discoveries and discussions.
- r/IAmA Educators & Course Creators — subreddit · 9,500,000 members. AMAs with course creators and edtech entrepreneurs sharing insider knowledge.
Browse more in Business communities or explore all online communities.