How to build a community-led academy to boost product adoption

“If you want adoption, start with belonging.”

That was the argument from Alexander Aidun, Director of Education & Documentation at Dremio, in conversation with Brett Hamilton, Customer Success Lead at LearnWorlds, during the Worlds of Learning 2025 Summit.

Alexander made a compelling case for a shift in mindset: from teaching about your product to educating your ecosystem. In open-source software and beyond, the learning journey starts long before someone becomes a customer, and the companies who nurture that curiosity early win trust that money can’t buy.

And who’s Dremio? It’s a lakehouse company built to simplify and accelerate data access for modern enterprises. The platform rests on open-source standards like Apache Iceberg and Apache Arrow, giving organizations flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in. For Dremio, community-led learning isn’t a side project, but a core business strategy.

Read on to get the gist or watch the talk on demand:

Why “community-first” isn’t a buzzword

The open-source landscape has fundamentally changed how developers discover and adopt technologies. They aren’t waiting for vendor training, but are experimenting and educating themselves.

Alexander explains how community education becomes product adoption:

• Curiosity is the entry point. It all starts by the people’s eagerness to learn and discover more about a product on their own.
• Free learning removes friction. Offering free access to education through a community removes the friction that paywalls create.
• Understanding drives adoption. The more people understand your tech, the more they will want to explore.
• Learners become advocates. Those who succeed with your tech will share, teach, and evangelize. They might implement the technology in their organization or in their own projects. They might talk about it at meetups.
• Education builds trust. Teach first, sell later. And the market will follow. When people have already learned from you and they trust you as an educator.

Community-first isn’t about managing a fan base. It’s about building an ecosystem that learns its way into loyalty.

The four pillars of a community-led academy

Dremio’s customer education strategy rests on four simple but powerful principles, aiming to drive curious individuals in and offer them the knowledge they seek.

1. Free and comprehensive

Although “free” sounds counterintuitive, a paywall is essentially a barrier to entry and slows adoption. Remove the price tag, and you remove friction.

2. Practical and hands-on

Every course tackles a real use case, mirroring the problems developers face daily. Learning sticks when it solves something tangible.

This is why you need to use evangelists to talk about these use cases. A practical approach is going to make sure that the knowledge and the concepts are retained in a way that’s relatable, digestible, and easy to reference.

3. Unified audience strategy

Everyone benefits when everyone is speaking the same language, whether it be the community, prospecting, sales, or support. Shared foundations create consistency.

4. Credential strategy

Badges and certificates aren’t vanity metrics or labels, but proof of progress. Recognition builds commitment, turning casual learners into advocates. When people invest their time and effort, recognition gives them something meaningful in return.

How Dremio adopted a community-first educational strategy

Alexander shared some tips to develop a successful community-led academy:

1. Map the overlap

Community-led education works best when you realize your learners, customers, and partners aren’t separate groups. They’re the same people at different stages. Everyone benefits when everyone has a foundational understanding of the technology and can communicate effectively.

Dremio mapped that overlap and built courses that spoke to all: data engineers, analysts, architects, decision-makers. Remember:

• Shared skills, shared language. A common foundation keeps everyone aligned.
• Multiple paths, one journey. The content scales across roles and needs.
• Overlap reveals opportunity. Where audiences intersect, adoption grows.

2. Partner with evangelists

Dremio’s community grew faster when it stopped speaking at its users and started speaking through them. The smartest advocates weren’t hired influencers. They were practitioners already teaching, writing, and solving real problems.

• Credibility can’t be bought. Evangelists teach from experience, not scripts. They’re sharing real stories and real challenges, real solutions. They’ve implemented these technologies at scale. When they say, “here’s what works,” people believe them because they’ve done it.
• Reach multiplies impact. They already have multichannel presence, followers, YouTube channels, or Medium blogs. This amplifies the impact.
• Learning stays fresh. Evangelists have to keep learning to stay abreast of technology. They know what’s cutting edge, what’s coming out, and that means your content can stay fresh.

Your evangelists are among your community, they could even be your employees, and are already creating traction for this tech to become adopted.

💡 Some ways to partner with evangelists:

• Full-time evangelist roles
• Guest instructor programs
• Revenue sharing agreements
• Co-marketing opportunities
• Community recognition programs

3. Lead with credentials

Badges are important not just because they ensure people have something nice to show on LinkedIn. They give structure to learning, checkpoints, and create tangible signals of progress across the community.
How credentials work:

• Prescriptive, not reactive. Clear checkpoints guide learners toward mastery.
• Shared framework. A common standard keeps the whole community aligned.
• Reward for effort. Recognition sustains engagement over time.
• Real-world utility. Credentials help enterprises identify skilled contributors and partners map expertise.

When learners earn visible proof of their progress, motivation compounds. Every badge or certificate becomes both a personal milestone and a public signal of credibility fueling pride, advocacy, and continued participation.

4. Take advantage of LearnWorlds features

Behind every strong community academy is a flexible platform.

For Dremio, LearnWorlds wasn’t just a course builder, it was a creative lab. The team used its flexibility to experiment, automate, and evolve their programs without friction.

• Easy to build. Courses, landing pages, and learning paths can be created and adapted fast even by guest instructors. This means you can easily bring more people into the system who can go ahead and develop their own courses.
• Custom landing pages. People can develop custom landing pages for their programs and badges.
• Course insights. Course analytics help identify what resonates, so the team stays proactive, not reactive. Looking at course insights allows us to get ahead of the trends and understand what’s happening so that we are truly being prescriptive.
• Automations. Integrations and tagging help you set automations. For example, you can autoenroll certain people based on their job title to certain courses, or lead them to a different landing page based on their actions.

As Alexander put it, “We don’t fully know the power we’ve been given.” LearnWorlds lets educators discover that power and keep building on it.

5. Maintain velocity

You need to keep putting content out there to keep people coming back for more. Because popular OSS technologies change weekly. Again, evangelists are important because they are the ones monitoring developments. They will help you know what type of velocity you have to maintain, what you have to build, which new audiences to accommodate.

6. Engage, recognize, and reward

There is not enough time for an educator to do everything on their own. They have to work with a team to build their learning community, and it’s important that you take the time to thank them. Badges are one way to engage and reward them, but think of more creative ways to say thank you,, and they’re going to want to keep working with you.

The future of adoption is education

Dremio’s academy proves that learning isn’t a support function, it’s a strategy. When education is open, practical, and community-led, adoption happens naturally.

A versatile learning platform like LearnWorlds offers a range of features, including a built-in community, to support your efforts and growth removing the complexity.

Watch the full talk to find out more.

Androniki Koumadoraki

Content Marketing Manager

Androniki is a Content Writer at LearnWorlds sharing Instructional Design and marketing tips. With solid experience in B2B writing and technical translation, she is passionate about learning and spreading knowledge. She is also an aspiring yogi, a book nerd, and a talented transponster.