Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Walker, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high-performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself in your company you're in the right place. Let's get started. If you want to build a growth engine your competitors can't copy overnight. Start with community. Hey everyone welcome back to Growth Activated. I'm your host Mandy Walker and today we're talking about one of the most underrated growth modes in B2B right now. Community-led growth. I'm joined by Ritty Singh, founder of 91 NINJA's, a go-to-market partner for B2B SaaS and AI companies. Ritty's spent 15 years in marketing and has worked with businesses globally and she brings a super clear point of view on what community-led growth actually is when you move past the buzzword. In this episode we cover why community-led growth is surging right now, the difference between building an audience and building a community, who this strategy is really built for, and how to get started without overbuilding. If community-led growth has been on your roadmap but you've been unsure how to do it in a way that actually sticks, this one's for you. Let's get into it. Hey Ritty welcome to Growth Activated. We're so excited to have you here today. Hi Mandy, super excited. Thanks for having me here, it's been. Yeah I am so looking forward to this conversation. As you know as I've shared with you directly I led a community for about 10 years at the beginning of my career so really excited to kind of jam out with you today and learn from your expertise as well. Same here. I'm looking forward to share what I know and learn as well on whatever you have done. I'm sure there's a lot that I can learn from you as well. Awesome. So hey before we dive in I'd love to start with a little bit about your background and what you're doing today. Yeah so I'm the founder of 91 Ninjas. 91 Ninjas is a GDM partner for B2B SaaS and AI companies and prior to that I was heading marketing at Payu India which is an asperce company. So we're a marketer for 15 years now. I started 91 Ninjas about five years back and prior to that 10 years I've worked in various companies driving growth for businesses and then I realized two things. Right so the first thing was that GDM is a problem, it's a universal problem. It's a problem across the globe whether you go to US, India, China, South Asia, any place. Right. Second thing that I realized was that you know like it's too short to not have flexible workspace. Right now we have two kids. Yeah I have two kids so I realized that you know they're growing up fast and I want to have a good career, I want to continue working but I also want to see them grow and that's when I started 91 Ninjas. We are completely remote so it has really really helped and so far I think we have worked with 94 businesses globally and I'm liking it so far so good. Yeah. Yeah oh I love that and it really resonates with me. I went fractional probably two years ago. I think I actually just hit my two-year anniversary being fractional and I love the freedom. The freedom is sort of the number one reason why I do it. I'm actually recording this as we speak from the UK and just working and traveling abroad and you know that would be really hard to do with a full-time job so I'm right there with you. That's right. I think it helps see in today's world and I think COVID one good thing that came out of COVID is that people got very comfortable connecting virtually. It opened a lot of opportunities. It gave a different perspective exposure so yeah it worked well. Like I keep saying this to my team but I'm saying it on record also. I generally think that it's tough for me to now go to office and work. Totally which actually sort of ties really nice into the conversation we're having today because so much myomy so much has changed in the last couple years and the dynamics of where our buyers are at are different. We don't want to leave our homes in a lot of instances but what we are seeing and I know what you're seeing as well is the rise of how do we break through how do we break through that and sort of get to our buyers and this idea that community-led growth could be a great way to do that. So talk to us a little bit about why you think why now is the moment for community-led growth. What from your perspective has changed and evolved so much that makes this you know a top strategy that marketers should consider. Yeah I think community-led growth has always been there but earlier other marketing channels were also working fine and people could grow their business with those. Now there are two fundamental changes that are happening which is changing how we market how we plan our JDM strategies and all right. So the first one is AI we know how AI is shaping marketing and other of these as well right and in the world of AI trust is a trust is a mode for businesses right. So when a lot of content is being generated a lot of videos are getting generated a lot of fake profiles are being created right. How do you know whatever you're consuming researching is not seeded and true right. So that's where people will turn to people more to actually take decisions and that is where community-led growth becomes important because trust is a mode and trust will become even more important than ever. So that's one point. Second which I realized some time back is where we have been calling Gen Z is there it's out there it's going to come. We've started seeing Gen Z in the buying decision right. So they form a court park they have significant pay-tage in buying decisions and if you're selling to any business today Gen Z are a part of that panel what it means is and these Gen Z's people they're social first they're community first so they're way more informed is compared to you know the previous generations and they've done their research. So if you're not there when they're talking to people if you're not there when they're asking questions on socials and communities then you're not even a part of consideration set right. So you're not even a part of consideration set how are you going to sell to these people and that's where community becomes even more important. I think these are the two fundamental changes that we are seeing and it will only increase from here. So in my opinion community-led growth has no longer option it's basically mandatory and it's better to start investing early than later. Interesting okay and you know just sort of dawned on me maybe we even take a step back and let's define what community-led marketing and community-led growth is because I think you know there might be some questions out there is it just building an audience you know if I'm nurturing an audience is that my community. So I'd love to hear from your perspective like what is it and what is it not. Yeah that's a very good question right so when we say community-led growth we often confuse it with community building. It's a community building is I'm building your audience audiences when it's it's a conversation where I'm having a conversation with my audience right it's basically the brand or a person is talking to an audience that you've created. Violent community-led growth it's basically community members talking to each other. So there's a fundamental difference and it is not building a community or having a set of audience that you're talking to it's basically a GDM strategy where audience talk to each other and amplify and they are they play a very important role in the entire customer lifecycle right from discovery to amplification and I think that's the huge difference so we first need to get that right that we're not talking about building an audience we're not talking about a Slack community that you build and ensure the how many active people you have we are talking about your right segments of power users are they talking about yet multiple places and how do you put a strategy in place that they keep talking about you. Interesting okay and I love the idea of allowing your your audience to talk to each other as opposed to just sort of this one way or two-way communication between you and you and your buyer so when you said it's not just a Slack community that that struck a chord for me because I also agree with that but just to play devil's advocate here a Slack community does allow audience your audience and community to talk directly to each other so why would that not necessarily be why would having a Slack channel for your audience not necessarily be a community-led marketing approach. Yeah so I think when I said a Slack channel is mostly when business is start thinking about community right they think hey should I have a watch set should I have Slack how many active members are there how many people I'm teaching out to and we start working very online and very specific to that channel which is not the right approach to community that growth right so what I meant to say was when you think a community-led growth it could be an offline activity that you're doing it could be the goodies that you're sending to a community it could be sending birdie cards to your TGS well right it could be organizing those meetups so don't I mean a Slack channel or a watch set group is one of the channels to interact with the community but it's not the entire community-led growth so when we are thinking in principle it's more about how do you bring the entire community together and there are two parts to it right creating value and having fun right because that's what we all want to assume right to creating value and having fun can you have that in any platform and you can't
continuously keep doing that. Obviously you'd want them on one platform and Slack works beautifully but when you're looking at community efforts to just look at how many people are there on Slack. I love the idea of making sure that there's fun because I think so often it's easy to forget about that when we're constantly thinking about how we're delivering value, how do we make sure people are engaging with each other and frankly so one of the communities that I spent gosh over a decade building was this community called Tech AdMotion and it ended up being about 350,000 tech professionals as a part of this community and we would host events all over North America monthly and it always made me smile because people loved the networking mixers like more than these really great panels and fireside chats and demo events they just really people would show up in troves for the networking mixer and I think that to your point speaks to this idea of people just want to have fun and connect too. They want to connect and think about this right so sometimes I say even businesses think about community we think about how do we push out try to how many people is it ICP you know I mean of course we need to have ICP but it's mostly what do I get out of this community kind of mindset from day one which probably is not the right mindset to start a community right so when you're starting a community the mindset has to be very different these are people who are my right ICP how do I make a difference in their lives how do I ensure that they are able to do well professionally and even personally as well right so in my opinion apart from professional success ensuring that they're set up for success and you know they understand thing we should also think about are these people also getting 3 a.m kind of friends who they can call in the night yeah and if that happens your community is going to live right and then they're never going to forget so they will stay in the community and now you're a part of their lives and not just a part of the transaction that they have to do yeah I think even I've been a part of so many communities that they die out so quick like there's this you know this is really exciting um bump of adoption and a bunch of people joining and having this bigger expectation and then within a few months it's dead and no one is engaging the channels are quiet um and it feels like that happened you know if the dime it doesn't so talk to us a little bit about who is doing this really well that we could look to and say ah that's how you run a really great community I mean I know just being being in the marketing world I really admire exit five and everything they're doing but would love your perspective um what other which other communities are you seeing that are being built right now and what are they doing differently I think I love exit five right very very well curated sort of community if I think from the business perspective one brand that's the gold standard for me when it comes to CLG is clay okay if you look at clay right they have they have beautiful example of how CLG as a GDM strategy be applied across right so think about it they helped people make their professional careers out of the product that they had right so they talked about GDM and she created a profession out of it so many people are learning this and getting better opportunities so that has a direct impact on the lives of people they could have also gone ahead and you know just told people they use my product tell us these are the new product features they could have like but they they realized who my power users are what is the use case that I have that helps them to better and create a business impact in their lives in their professions right they also collaborated with agencies so they are being great we all know K agency's right and they've been beautiful stories of how people started their own two three people agency two three people agency and they're earning you know more than a million a year right now that's a really important when they're doing it they're having those conversations they gave uh when they opened their own for investment they also let the community participate in that right they have 60 plus eight clubs that are and when I look at these clubs people actually are driven to host those from their busy lives right which means that the kind of impact the kind of uh you know feeling that you have created or the bonding that you've created among people now the community is driving itself right and they also have fun while they're doing it so they like they recently did clay cups right beautiful concept where they had two different teams you know people from all over competing and you know global and then there was somebody who won the clay cup that's very innovative and the weights all set up is they're not restricting themselves to a specific activity they know how to have fun they're also creating an impact and they definitely know how to market it better so there's an entire amplification engine that's in place uh that's amplifying and it didn't happen in a day or in a year right it's taken them significant time and I'm sure resources but the kind of growth that they are now seeing uh is because of the effort that's been put in so in today's world when we do businesses are looking for community led growth I think clay should be the cold standard on how they crack it and how people are vouching for them and how you can think uh from those principles and see if you can succeed yeah absolutely they they're they're the gold standard for a lot in marketing in my opinion and I and I don't know if you'd consider this community but I remember seeing a couple months ago they had a customer who I think in they learned in the community that was gonna have their own sort of innovation day around how to better use clay and clay was like whoa come to our offices and we'll be a part of it and though it's to make a fun hackathon out of this and then they I think they recorded it they shared it um and shared out a lot of the learnings and even I think I think some product improvements came out of it as well um which is just such a cool such a cool way to um involve your involve your customers and your community in what you're doing well they always they're right so the customers their partners would know recently you are somebody in our demand team was saying they wanted to do some course in GDM engineering and do some good course and uh they were talking about how like it's it's a panel of six seven eight people and obviously like clay's team is also there who come and who open their playbooks and like explain everything and they're certain cohorts that they take right and I was just thinking as a as a marketer I don't know how many times in a day do I hear about them wherever I go I go on LinkedIn I see the founder talking about it the uh teams talking about it if I go on any community it will come in if I'm using the product if I'm solving some marketing challenge I'll still and when I'm looking at hey what school that other people are doing I still bump on it right so that's what a good marketing is they're just everywhere and if you are a persona they will be talking to you in some form or it though they've reached you oh totally I've never actually even used the product but I know a lot about them and I see it just like you I see them and hear them everywhere so so really I think one of the things that uh you know I'd be asking myself if I was listening to this conversation right now is yes it sounds great but it also sounds like a lot of work and from my own perspective and from my own experience it was I mean truthfully we when we built tech and motion um we were building it across at the time markets like local local markets really mattered because this was before COVID and so we had 14 different markets where we were building these micro communities across the macro tech community and I had a community manager at full-time community manager in every single market in order to make this thing run and so now obviously times have changed and people don't necessarily need to invest that heavily in in community led growth coming out the gates but I would ask you like who do you think this is the right strategy for just knowing the type of investment that it takes in order for it to make it successful and not be something that dies out really quickly that's a very good question and you're absolutely right the kind of investment and the time it needs like very few businesses would have the resources or the patience to continue right so believe there are a probably a couple of or three to four parameters on which you can evaluate right first is the complexity of the product um how complex is your product because if the product is complex or it is new for example clay was something which was newer right so there was a lot of education that was required and that is where you would love your community to take on that education and they learn and they find use cases and each other's also so if the product is complex and a lot of DevOps tool has been right they fall into this category so that's first criteria you can look at whether the product is complex or is it fairly simple so a DevOps tool or a clay versus an email marketing software that exists and people are fairly comfortable using it you probably need it more for complex products right second is when your ICPs are skeptical right so what it means is if you're dealing with developers right they are not going to trust everything and they don't like to be marketed too right they just hate marketers right if you're selling to CFOs that's another community right so when when your people that you're selling to are skeptical you would need a community you'd want to be a part of their network make them comfortable and earn their trust to be able to sell them so they need to trust you and they need to feel that it's not being marketed it's basically real value that they see there right and I think third is when the culture that you have within the come.
is more of a long-term growth perspective. People who really understand what community-led growth can do. If you have a CEO who is asking for MPUs from day one, then this cannot, cannot survive at all. So culture, you can call it product culture of it. The product definitely needs to be good. And the culture of the company that's going to invest in CLG has to be good. It has to be a culture of community building because you will take at least a year of investment to see something coming in from community, minima. So I think these are the three criteria. And one more check that. So I believe, simpler products where the ACV is fairly low, for them, maybe community is not the right channel to invest in any other days. They will probably get better results from ads or SEO, et cetera. Yeah. Wow. I really enjoy that framework. And it just hits me too, because when I was working at a B2B SaaS company a couple of years ago, we weren't category creators, but we were definitely taking a different approach in changing the way that go to market operators were previously using that category of technology. And it was really hard. It was hard to bring them along the journey and get them to change their perspective. And just as you were talking, I was like, dang, a community would have been a great approach for what we were trying to build there. And the other thing I was just thinking and wanted to get your opinion on is the level of skepticism. I smile, because we were building a tech community and cybersecurity professionals are some of the hardest people to get engaged and involved. And that was a big selling cyber services was a big part of what we did. And the community was a great way to overcome that. But one of the things I'd love to get your opinion on is the branding. So when you are going after a market that has this level of skepticism, and we were as well at the time-- and I don't know whether it was the best decision or not-- but at the time, we actually branded our community separately from the company, because we were recruiting and staffing firm, and we knew no one's going to want to come to a recruiting and a staffing event. But they'll want to come to this really cool cutting-edge tech event that we have a table at. And so we treated it as our brand was the sponsor. And the founder, but we branded everything under an entirely different name. And that really, I think, worked well for us in terms of building the trust with these highly skeptic personas. But would love your take. Does that-- we were constantly evaluating, does that negate what we're trying to build here from a brand perspective, or does it help? But what's your perspective if people are doing this to overcome to really build trust and overcome skepticism? Which approach would you take? Yeah, I think my personal opinion is I would create the community separate from the main brand. I don't want to do that. There are another more company communities. Like I figured out certain ways of branding it, power by X5Z, but it would be people's first rights. So it would have a different name. The name would be centered on the ICB that I'm going for, the communication, everything. Whatever is happening will be useful to them. I'll keep the brand's secondary. I'll let it thrive and slowly things will start out. People will eventually know where it is coming from. But they want to feel that it's basically for the community and not for things. Yeah. Oh, good. Well, I'm glad we did it. I'm glad we did it the right way. All those years ago, we didn't even-- community-led growth wasn't even a term back then. But one of the really cool-- and I wish I had the CMO's name and the company at hand so that I could give her credit. But I had even noticed she was talking about on LinkedIn a couple months ago, this idea of having a separate community brand and what they were building and all of the actual downstream implications to LLM optimization. She had her team had noticed because the LLM's weren't necessarily correlating the two brands together. But the community brand was giving a lot of power and trust and credibility to their core brand. So talk to us about-- I know you're also your agency focuses a lot on LLM optimization. What are some of the downstream impacts that we may not be thinking about or realizing of doing this approach? Yeah. I think when we think about community, there's a couple of things that are proven and we know. In successful communities, you'll see revenue. You'll see good-- if you're looking at in-fence pipeline, those numbers are better. Your conversion rates will improve. Your pipeline velocity will increase and all right. So those impacts are there. But one thing which is new and is now being seen is you will dominate the AI space. So your AI visibility will increase significantly. And the reason for that is when the LLM's are pulling in data, they're pulling in data from sources, forums. They are pulling in data from human conversations. If you're on forums, if you're on communities, if people are vouching for you, that's where they are treating you as an authority and they are giving those kinds of results. So a lot, you'll get a lot more traffic and conversions from LLM's. And that's going to reflect. So AI visibility, which is hard topic, and everyone wants to be there everywhere. Ventions are going to go up. Your conversions are going to go up. You will be there. You will be seen as a trusted resource. And even the kind of playbooks, so seeing most communities, you will have a GGM engineer who'll be making the plays, et cetera, for the community when they need it. And all kinds of data that these people are creating-- playbooks that they are creating, et cetera-- will be fished in from the community. So it can amplify the kind of work that your product can do without actually pulling in directly from the product itself, but from users who are talking about it. And another thing that I've seen is a lot of semantic searches that are happening. So what it means is there will be hundreds of different conversation topics that community are going to talk about. And imagine that your community is somewhere or other your product will automatically come in. How your product does it, or how you solve it, or somebody from your company talking about it or something, right? So all this semantic coverage becomes pretty, pretty significant over time. When you're looking for it, you'll find it everywhere. Right? And those are some of the impact that we've seen now, which didn't exist earlier. And it's only going to grow. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm just reflecting back. We-- our community-- we could attribute, at least 10% of our revenue, which at the time was a lot because we ended up scaling to 750 million during this time. But just in terms of direct revenue impact, and then there was countless ways that it was impacting retention and conversion rates and speed and acceleration within the sales process. But one of the other really cool outcomes that we didn't necessarily set out to do was having it be a core differentiator against us and our competitors. It ended up being such a differentiator, which also was great for-- we were PE backed. And so as we were selling to new PE firms, that was one of the big reasons why they chose our company as opposed to through adding other companies in their portfolio. And it was great for talent, internal employee pride and retention as well. So I love-- but I love learning about the LLM optimization as well. There's just-- the impact can be compounded in so many ways of building a community, I think. Absolutely, right? And I absolutely love the point that you spoke about getting access to talent and the differentiator part. So today, what's happening is if I'm running an ad, my competitor can just run it anytime. If I'm doing some content pieces, they can also replicate the same. It's really difficult to hold your differentiation for a longer time. And community is not easy to replicate. If you invest in that, right? And if it becomes a self-sustaining thing and if it's right, because a good community will drive on its own. A lot of it will drive on its own with time, right? And it's not easy to replicate. So investment, but the kind of results that becomes a mode for you, right? And multiple leases. Absolutely. I just even remember when Tech and Motion had really started to take off, a lot of our competitors, we started seeing popped up to try and do something similar. And within a couple of months, they would disappear. And I think they realized how much work and investment it really took. And it's not an overnight success, which sort of-- oh, go ahead. And you're absolutely right. So just saying that once we have made some progress in your visible, it's really tough for your competitors to make the ICB switch to another community. Very difficult. Right? So it should work for you if you're moving fast enough. It's difficult to catch up. If you're the second one, it's tough to catch up. OK, so what you're telling me is it's going to be very hard to build a community like exit five. No, it's very-- [LAUGHTER] So really, I'd love to dive in a little bit to the logistics of this. For those that are listening, and they really resonate with one of those key areas you were saying of, yes, this would be great for me and my company and the category that I'm in and the ICP I'm going after. Where do they start? Because I imagine it probably feels a little daunting. And I just looking back, I know, again, how much effort went into it. So where would you encourage?
encourage people to start if they thought that the community-led growth was a great strategy and moat for them. I think initially first you think like you so you don't need to think scale from day one, right? What I've realized is the first, once you figure out CLG is for you, it makes sense for your business. The first thing that people should do is figure out high, high intensity users I would call power users, so people who will, the segment that's going to really, really try this community. So, figure out, if not more, figure out 20, 25 people who are power users of the product, how you will identify them, you'll see that they are using product extensively and they are using product in different ways. So identify these people, also identify people who have good social media presence, right? So if you could shortlist these 25, 30 people that becomes the step one. The second step is if you're a founder or if you're a marketing leader, so you need whoever is selling this initiative needs to be there. You can't delegate it to anyone. You need to be there for the community, right? And I think that's where the biggest challenges, so a founder cannot really invest that kind of time because they have multiple things to take care of. That's where you need the leader to lead this, not like somebody that you just hire and outsource it to, right? So, second is having a leader and that leader should be spending significant time on the community doing it themselves in initial days, right? Because that's where the soul of the community gets built. If you understand a lot more about your ICP and all those learnings also translate into your business decisions, your product decisions, sales, etc. Right? So that's second one. Third is then start thinking about unscatable ways to scale this community. So, you don't need to, it's perfectly fine if you're doing it on what's perfectly fine if there's a small Slack group, but just restrict it to 40, 50 people that should be the goal and then slowly build on learn, interact, figure out, make them the advocates, right? And then slowly it will start amplifying. So, the first step is reaching this. The second step is now that you have for free people who you can, because it's tough for you also to manage more than this, right? So, if you have these free people who are really connected, you guys meet, you can meet, you can have conversations, we're getting feedback, you're getting in general, you're trying to help them and all right. Then start thinking about how do you ensure that you're always bringing something new or something useful for them regularly at a frequency that doesn't break? Because if you're too active this week and you're not doing anything for second week your community is not going to survive, right? So, good criteria that we have is every month, what is it that you're trying? And all the activities, think of them as activities because it's easier to put that and make it work with that framework. So, list them as activities and think whether these activities are falling into value creation or fun, right? So, anything that doesn't fall into these two should not be a part of your community efforts, right? And I say value creation, so the way to look at value creation is, are these people going to use this information to do better in their professional lives? What is it that they are getting from it, right? Are they going to, why would they care? If I'm sharing something that exists in the market, then like they're not going to be paying attention to it, right? So, it has to be something that they can use in their professional lives or they can use in their personal lives, right? So, that was the first thing, usually it's the professional life thing, right? So, I should be able to upskill, I should be able to use that. So, if whatever my workflow is, if you give me something that I can embed into my workflow, become something very useful for me. That's why I keep coming because this is the place where I learn and then grow and I outperform others. And I do better in my profession. Second is fun. It's really likes to have fun, right? If you find you go on Instagram and tick-tock or YouTube shots, we release it. Education is fine, right? We want to be educated, but another thing which is very, very cold to human existence is having fun, right? Can I have some chance? Can I have some means, right? Can I relate? So, relatable jokes on ICPs, etc. You know, like really being open about it rather than having a lot of corporate, if your ICP is okay with that, right? So, those are the two things and then you can have meetups, you can have value drops, you can have later point, you can have training sessions of the problem. I wouldn't say product of the problem that you're solving. The difference is you're not saying, hey, this is the product demo, you take this and this is the use case. Say, this is the problem that you might be facing. You're not able to generate leads. Okay, here is my framework. Come over. I'm creating this workflow. I'll show you how I'm doing it, right? You take their problems and take those hands on informal sort of sessions and the session quality have to be good and actionable and you'll see that more and more people will show up. Because people in every profession have a lot of problems that they want somebody to solve and collective learning will shorten their learning period as well, right? So, that's how you think and then like then you can have fun games. As I said, like, click ups, it's a very good idea, right? There could be many such contests that you can do, you can start some awards, you can celebrate their wins. You really have to know what's going on with their lives, right? Yeah. And so once you have those list of activities, we'll have enough, if they're falling into these two, you'll have enough material to run it. Yeah, and I think then like it will slowly start picking up, but that could be a good start point. I totally agree. And if you don't mind, I'd also even just add some of my own learnings. One of the things just took back to your earlier point about having either us as the marketing leaders or founders being heavily involved. One of the things I we even learned is because we were building a tech community and really you could apply this to any persona you were going after, in our instance, our CEO and myself were not tech people. And so one of the things that we figured out really early on was having our CTO heavily involved and making them the face of the community because they are the persona and there's so much more relatable in that instance than than myself was. And it was even a challenge that we had to overcome pretty early on because we had a team of 25 marketing leaders trying to build these communities, these developer communities. And so we had to pull in developers, both from our own team and then find influencers and other people in the community that we could lift up and help guide a lot of the content and make sure that it was creating value or creating fun for that particular persona. So that's something I would encourage people. And I think of the same thing, like that's a great marketing learning in general, even when you think about if you're going to launch a podcast, like if you're going to launch a podcast targeting HR professionals, consider having your CHRO be the one that leads the podcast, right? So that really could be applied to anything. And then the other thing I think we saw a lot of success on, and I would encourage people as they're building communities is don't be the only one in terms of your brand that's doing the talking and doing the engaging, like lift up and feature other people in your community that can add a lot of credibility to your community just through sort of the halo effect of marketing. But we would again, we would feature, we were constantly in the background and we would feature CTOs and CIOs and VPs of engineering from really awesome tech companies and they were more so the face of the community than we were. And I think that ended up voting really well for us. That's a beautiful lesson in there. So like if your community has to work, it has to be driven by people, by groups of people, right? You can run the face of it. People talk to people when they take initiative to take those training sessions or come, that's where community truly survives or tries or not survives, right? It needs to be there. And how do I think that I've seen is the kind of team that you need to make it happen. Like once you know that, you know, this is going to work for me, I'm going to invest. And etc. You need a facilitator, not a dictator, right? So your facilitator should be somebody who is facilitating the community to have a conversation. You need somebody with the right kind of expertise. There it's not a social media person. The community person is very different from a social media person, right? And a good community person, you won't probably notice them too much on the committee. You'll see they are facilitating a lot of stuff. They're having conversation, but slowly other, the community will take over and they'll just be there, like any other community member, right? Second, you do need a domain specialist. And as you were talking about how you're pulling the CTO and you know, different team members from the tech team, it's a very important point. You do need a domain expert within the community to work with you because whether that's a developer or a GDM engineer, depending on what you are setting to, right? Because they need to have the kind of depth to answer questions that are relevant to the domain, right? So, you will need to establish the skill that they're, I did cannot be just fun. So very, very important. And then you rightly said that, right? I also believe you also need a content and ops person to amplify this everywhere. It's important. And that's what marketing does, right? So it takes it and ensures that everyone's seeing it everywhere. So these three are, I believe, core people that you need and one more person that you're living the entire thing. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And at what point in your experience do people start really seeing this working? Because it does seem like a longer term play and so you don't want people to give up too quickly. But where, what would you advise in terms of, hey, if you're going to lock into this strategy, give it six months, give it a year, give it, what would that timeframe be that you would really encourage people to lock down on? I think it's Minne Momoui.
years. That's what we are talking about here. You cannot expect a lot before that, but there are certain early indicators that you should see. For example, there is this brand called Document 360. So, one of the initial sort of, one initiative that we did or activity that we did to like build a community or start having some name within the community or awareness within the community was global writers about. So, when we were doing this, we didn't know what kind of response we were going to that. That was the first activity, but we saw 400 signups coming in 130k votes and there was a wide, virality angle within that, right? And the response was very good. So, you will feel certain things working and you should see some of those successes during that time. It cannot be anything is working, but I'm still investing because I need to cross the vania mark, right? So, you need to figure out within that vania what is working and of all the initiatives that you're trying out, you need to have a few hero initiatives that have seen some success and you amplify it, right? So, one year you need to invest, but you need to be faster with experimentation activities. What is resonating with your target audience and really amplifying few of those things? Yeah, I would definitely agree. I think it took us at least, I want to say it at the two year mark, we hit like 50,000 members and that was that was really a huge milestone for us and then it took another year or two to hit 100,000, but it was, we could tell much earlier than that, that it was starting to work for sure. You would use that in your bones, right? So, what were your numbers like after a year of starting the community? I think after a year we hit about 10,000 members. You know, of course, times are a lot different. This was at the time when Meetup had just started Meetup.com and so we built our communities on Meetup originally and our main sort of channel of interaction was events and so, and then it evolved from there, but I think within the first year we hit about 10,000 members and then very quickly, I think maybe the second or the third, I think it was the second year we hit 50,000 and then a couple of years later we hit 100,000 and really grew from there. I think it is a compound effect that sets it. So, you would have even no confidence suddenly people would be everywhere. It was really cool. We went from like, you know, having maybe 10, 15 people in a in a conference room having pizza and beard to a 500 person room at NYU having a big fireside chat and panel with some of the biggest tech leaders in New York. It was, it was really cool. And that happened pretty quickly. I think once, you know, again, once people see that their peers are in it and invested in it, they want to be there too. Yes. Yeah. Awesome. This has been so much fun. It's been a walk down memory lane for me. It's been a while since I've built a community, but it was a big part of my career early on. And are there any final tips or learnings or lessons that you would share that maybe we haven't touched on that already? I think they've kind of touched on a lot of stuff. Yep. I can't imagine like more things, but I would definitely say this is the time. So, if you qualify for investing into CLG, you must. Otherwise, it's going to be too late. It's how I'm going to put it. Yeah. So, I think that the time is now is how I put it. I'm the same marketer who would have said otherwise previously saying there's a lot of investment in time. You know how about you? Fix other things. Now, it's pretty clear where we are going, where we're headed, right? But it's needed. And it's needed not just for trust, but a lot of think about our will you be visible in all these AI platforms? Right. You'll need to. There are newer marketing channels that are coming in. We are we're talking about how like from offline marketing when we had the Google and the you know, the meta as of the world, right? We suddenly shifted to digital marketing and we looked at metrics and the wave market changed completely. That's going to happen right now as well. And these newer channels are probably the channels that will drive your business significantly. And it is important that you are present there. And community is going to write that. Yeah. So, I agree. We seriously think about it. Yeah. It's part of why I'm so bullish on events right now. I mean, I always have been, but even more so right now because it's just the human interaction. I think we are all craving human interaction and community have missed all of all of the AI generated content that we're seeing and feeling. So, you can feel it, right? So, when you go to LinkedIn and you see the same kind of pose that are machine-generating, you can actually tell. When you get an email, which is just another email generated by an agent, you can feel that, right? What stands out is where people are generally sharing something which AI can't generate, right? And those are the kind of people who stand out in your daily interaction as well, right? So, I think it's already from AI is the wave to, hey, we should thank human first. We've seen this narrative of being built now and we come into the core of it. Absolutely. I love it. Well, thank you so much for spending the day with us. Today, Rudy, this has been so much fun. And I know if people want to get in touch with you, I imagine LinkedIn is probably the best way. Where can they find your profile on LinkedIn? They can find me if they search for Riti. Yeah, I think Riti found out of 901 inches. They should see my LinkedIn. And I'm here on LinkedIn. Or they can drop me an email at
[email protected]. Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Same here. Thank you for having me. Love the conversation. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or a colleague and be to be marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating Growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
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