Community Lead Growth As A Channel for your SaaS Company

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If you'd like to sponsor the SaaS District podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show, visit horizoncapital.com/saas-podcast today. Thanks again, folks. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about community-led growth as a channel for your SaaS company. If you guys have listened to many of our other episodes and interviews, we typically talk about many other growth channels that we can look at, right? We talk about product-led growth, we talk about paid marketing growth, we talk about growth by acquisition or inorganic growth. We talked about SEO, we talked about paid marketing, we talked about so many different channels. But one channel that I feel is underrated and probably isn't talked about enough is community-led growth. And that's exactly what I want to talk about today. So on top of that, just so you guys know, this is another one of those episodes where it's just me talking here. I don't have an interview format. Seems like a lot of people seem to like this style of podcast. So I decided to do a couple more of these just to get a feeler from you guys and if you wanted me to continue doing it. So I'm going to keep doing this until you guys tell me to stop and I'm going to keep going back to interviews. Otherwise, I'm going to keep going back and forth between doing interviews with our guests where you guys get to learn from the other experts, then also get to hear from me on my background, what I like and what I want to talk about as well. So today we'll talk about, like I said, community community-led growth for you and your SaaS company. So there's a lot of different channels. Let's talk about it. If you guys have been paying attention to the recent news, I think it was just about a month ago where HubSpot actually did an acquisition and they acquired The Hustle, which was a content site. And that was their entire strategy by acquiring The Hustle. If you guys don't know who they are, they're a media company. They produce newsletters, they have a podcast, and then they have that premium research content. What HubSpot was doing was they offer ways for communities of scaling by providing valuable content across different kind of range of topics and media, right? Like HubSpot alone has their HubSpot Academy. It's a source of education for its community. I think they have 100,000 people who take the lesson every single month. They have over 300,000 people who have actually went through their HubSpot certification. So what they decided to do is acquire a community and by using that they're able to leverage what they have, that trust with their community. then upscale and upsell their users. As for Hustle themselves, I mean, they started back in 2016. And they have over, I think, 1.5 million readers, right? That's a huge platform, right? Between their subscription platform Trends, and then they also have their podcast called My First Million. So if— so what you're like, who cares? Wow, they did an acquisition, good for them. What does it matter, have to do with my SaaS company? But If you're in, you know, what you notice in the SaaS industry is getting more and more competitive, right? So in order to really build a moat and make your company a lot more valuable, you have to become obviously a lot more relevant. So when you have that community, you're building a common goal, you're building a common vision among your users, you build that loyalty, that trust, and people will know you for what you've helped them with. So the more you help somebody, the more trust you build with them, the more they're going to come back and want to buy from you, right? So like I said, HubSpot Academy, they have help you with skills around marketing, they help you with sales, you get certification and that's their mission. They want to transform the way that people and companies grow by just offering these free kind of educational pieces of content. And based off that, the research is saying companies who actually use this kind of strategy, they're going to be growing a lot faster because they're going to get better gross margins, they're going to get more engaged users, they're going to get more advocates who are going to talk about them and promote them. And, you know, they're going to give them back more feedback and quicker feedback to the company. You know, they get better customer experience, you know, more loyal, effective loyalty programs, and it helps inspire customers. And obviously, the last thing is it helps leverage even more word of mouth. So there's just so many benefits by building that community. And, you know, another point that I always love to talk about, which is valuations, you know, us at Horizon Capital, we do investments, acquisitions. When we're looking at SaaS companies, It's clear across competition. If you look at the valuation, the valuation is going to be a lot higher when businesses have that community already built and that loyalty of followers behind them. So if you're in this position, you're like, hey, how can I increase my retention? How can I lower my churn, increase LTV, get more commitment from my customers, increase sales, expansion, all the above? Look at building a community. I'm serious, guys. There's so many good benefits to it that the cost is so negligible for the return you'll get. There's nothing— I don't think there's a better strategy out there for the long term that you'll get by building that community. And also, it's a lot harder to get copied. You can't copy a community as you can of a product or a solution of your feature. Let's say you and your competition are on a product roadmap war. You build this feature and then next week you say they copy you. If you have that community, they can't copy that. There's a loyalty to you and what you bring versus in your voice and what you offer versus everybody else. So think about that as well in terms of how you can stand out from your competition. So obviously Sam Parr from The Hustle did a fantastic job by building that and obviously created that interest by HubSpot to acquire them. And this is just a quick note from what Kieran said. So Kieran is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at HubSpot. If you guys haven't checked out his podcast, I actually had him on the podcast where I interviewed him and chatted with him a bit. check that out. But, you know, he talks about this acquisition. He says, you know, for many customers, their first introduction to HubSpot is through their education blog, their academy, and their YouTube content. It's not their software. They don't come to them directly to their software. They're looking all around them until they finally find them. So, and now they're saying, you know, more recently our customers have started to seek out news and trends-based content across new forms like media, like podcasts, newsletters, and research. So that just tells you, right, your SaaS is not going to be found by people looking for your SaaS solution. They're going to find you through your YouTube channel, your podcast, your newsletter, your academy, your membership site, whatever it is. That's the best way they're going to find you. All right. So cool. I mean, you guys get it, you understand the benefits, you see that even the big guys are super interested in using that as a lever of growth. So I think we all kind of understand the value of having that community. So next point is like, okay, how do I actually build that community that I want? Maybe that's something I want to implement today. What are some options that I could look at? So maybe look at a platform to help, you know, something like a Slack channel. I think Slack is getting more and more popular for especially users among SaaS communities. But depending on what your type of users or customers want to use, maybe they're on Facebook. So maybe you can create a Facebook group. If you're, you know, in the software space, maybe like Discord or Telegram, any type of group where your customers like to be and they like to interact. You can do webinars, organize like monthly or weekly webinars, Q&A sessions, or product features, releases, and updates to get more members. You can also keep track of engagement with some of the most asked questions or topics that you can use to build content around that. So if your customers are always asking you for the same thing over and over, there are certain topics or questions that always come up, create content around that. Just write about it and throw it on your blog. Blog. Another place that I love, obviously, I've mentioned it several times, and you can see me doing today is launching a podcast. If you're in B2B SaaS, actually doesn't matter, you know, B2B, B2C, there's just, there's so many ways you can take it. But for B2B SaaS, I think you should absolutely launch a podcast. And with podcasting, as you guys can see, we build this relationship, you know who I am, you know who Akeel Jabbar is. Hopefully I can, you know, build you guys' trust. Hopefully we can, you know, build the relationship and I can keep adding value, guys. To you guys, whoever you guys want, right? You guys ask for these topics, you guys ask these questions, and I go and get for you. You guys want the best, uh, you know, guests, you want the best startups, I'll find it for you. Whatever you guys want, I'm here to give it to you. And, you know, I'm hoping in the long term, um, that one day maybe you need me, maybe you, you know, I'm the right person that you like and you feel that is the right fit, that we can maybe work together in one way or another. Um, so if you're looking to build a podcast, you know, there's so many reasons. You know, you can build a community, Like I said, use the topics from your audience to help you build that podcast, that channel that you want to build. Also use the content, like I said, from your customers that they ask you on a continuous basis. So you could do it on the format of one-on-one interviews just like I do with relevant faces in the industry or people who you want to work with, who you want to connect with, people who you want to partner with, or just you want to learn from. There's so many benefits from interviewing people. And then the other side is if you want that more personal connection as well, You can just build those content that your consumers are asking for. So you could just, if your customers are asking for this, just go and record it by yourself, teach them kind of things that you know that they're asking for and build that authority and helps with PR as well. If you're looking to raise money, if you're looking to raise investments, investors like seeing that personality behind the mic. So podcast is one. The next one that you can also do is launch a YouTube channel. And I think the strategy is very similar except you're now expanding into video format. But you can use it the same as podcasting. You generate content relevant to your community, use it as a format to show relevant information, product reviews, interviews, company videos, updates, trends, anything you could kind of figure out that's relevant to your community. And also with video, it helps with— if you guys don't know, YouTube is obviously part of the search algorithm that Google owns, so it helps you get exposure to a bigger audience. And that's just a different stage of the whole entire content funnel. And interesting fact is that with videos typically have a much higher conversion rate when people are looking to make and take action, which makes sense, right? Now you see the person, you hear them, you're almost talking to them. So if they're going to talk to you after they see a video of you, the chances of them doing business with you are just so much higher. Right? It just makes sense. So that's another way, launch that YouTube channel, podcast, Slack, Facebook group, and then you can obviously repurpose all that content, right? Use that content you generate within the community to repurpose for use on other platforms such as social media so that the community has more options to consume the content, share it, interact with it. And obviously that opens up a lot more opportunities to scale up feedback and reach. So when you build any content, maybe you're creating a 1-hour video on podcasts and and YouTube. You know, maybe your users like 5-minute clips. So take a bunch of those 5-minute clips, throw them on social media. Maybe they're Instagram users, throw them on Instagram, you know, little 1-minute videos. And that's where they're going to learn and appreciate the content you put out. And finally, other ways you can write a book, you can give an ebook, you can do an online course, interviews, newsletters, we talked about blogs, guest posting. All these are just, you know, pieces of content to help you create a community. But make sure with any of these you're capturing the user's subscription. So with this, obviously I ask people to subscribe to the podcast channel, right? If you go to our website, you can subscribe via email. If you're creating a blog, a newsletter, you probably want people to subscribe with their email, right? So once people give you their email, that value is a lot bigger than versus just coming and checking out your website. Traffic is important, but if you listen to the podcast I actually had, the interview I had with Rand Fishkin, from SparkToro or formerly it was at Moz as well. He says he would rather have 20 people listen to his voice and his interview on a podcast over 10,000 people or 10,000 visitors to one single blog. Because the trust of those 20 people is just so much more valuable than those 10,000 clicks that you don't know where they're coming from, who they are. They don't know who you are. They're just going to read this article. So think about that. It's not about just about volume. The quality. And, you know, people think if I start a podcast, I need to have millions of downloads, and if I don't, I'm a failure. You don't need that many. You need the right few who are going to stick with you for the long term. You know, we've been doing this for over a year now. We're seeing growth every single month thanks to you guys. And, you know, obviously super appreciative. Um, I always appreciate you guys sharing it, tagging people, um, and, you know, sharing this with your friends. But that's what we look for, is that over time people are gonna find us about it, find out about us because they like what we do. And that's exactly what we're doing here. And we know it's not growing exponentially, but it's growing month over month consistently. People are coming back, they're liking the content. And that's what's important to us. As long as you guys keep engaging, you guys keep coming back, I'm a happy person. And I'm going to keep doing more of what I do here for you guys. So if you're a business, you know, your SaaS company and your vision is all about product-led growth, that's awesome. Don't think about this as, you know, one or the other. Think about it as community-led growth being as a multiplier on top of product-led growth, right? And how people look at that, I think it was, it was coined by Chris Dixon. He said people come for the tool, but then they stay for the network. So that's, you know, if you're a software company and you want to acquire users, you can provide them that useful product. And then obviously you can help with retention by providing that community. So super cool, right? Like Instagram, they came from the retro filters, But then they stayed for the social interactions. So that's one way you can look at it as well. If you're even considering, you know, it was in the back of your mind, hey, I was actually thinking of starting a YouTube channel, I was thinking of starting a podcast, I want to start a Facebook group for my community, just start it today. You don't have to overthink it. You don't have a plan, have a marketing plan just like anything else, but launch that channel, start creating. And over time, like when we started this podcast, we thought you know, our members would want this type of content. And when we look into our analytics, and we look at the data and what people are actually listening to, that helps us give us feedback to what we actually need. And then just like your product, when you're creating product, and you know, building that product-led growth flywheel, it's the same with content, your members, your people, your audience, and your community will tell you what they want. So start building, write anything and everything that you think they want. And then just refine it from there. But the main thing is I want you guys to start today and let me know, uh, send me an email actually. You know what, send me an email at akil@horizoncapital.com if you've been thinking about starting a community. What have you been thinking about? And let me know, what are you guys hoping to launch in the next couple days? So I'll actually give you guys feedback and maybe even help you out in promoting your new community. All right guys, so hope you guys enjoyed this episode and I'll see you guys on the next one. Thank you all for listening in Thank you so much for listening to this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to leave a review and subscribe for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at horizoncapital.com, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, Please DM us on Instagram or LinkedIn @HorizonCapital and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again and hope to see you on the next one.