#110: Community | What Does B2B Community Building Look Like? With Stories from Exit Five, Zapier and Zendesk

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One, two, three, four. Exit, exit.

Exit.

We're here. It's the top of the hour. Adam's here, Carly is here. I'm Dave. I'm gonna be your host. So before we get in, you know, while everybody's getting settled and getting onto this live session, do me a favor. Go in the chat. We can see all this now. I have a. I have an animal walking around my desk. This is unexpected. Go into the chat. Write who you are and where you're writing in from. This is including you speakers. You gotta practice your keyboard game right now. I'm gonna write Dave. I'm Dave. I'm in Burlington, Vermont. All right, cool. We got April and Boseman. Teresa's in Portland, Oregon. Rachel's in Maine. Jessica's in Jupiter, Florida. This is unbelievable. Dublin, Ireland. Charlotte, North Carolina. Cams in Dallas, bc. See, community is a global phenomenon. This is my favorite part of the show. Everybody's here. Jessica's in D.C. darcy's in San Francisco, Evan's in San Diego. Where are you? I did. Where are you two? You're. You're. Carly's in Squamish.

Yeah. So Squash Bush. Columbia is right between Vancouver and Whistler.

Very nice. Adam, where are you?

San Francisco.

San Francisco. Okay, awesome. So Carly and I have the. Do we have a winter climate? What's the climate in British Columbia right now?

Yeah, yeah, we got a lot more rain than we do Snow here, but 30 minutes north and Whistler is a lot of snow.

All right, that sounds. Oh, Ethan's in Burlington, Vermont. Let's go, Ethan. Shout out to you. All right, so, hey, everybody, this is. I'm super excited for this session. So here's what we're gonna do. We're have a conversation today about community building as it relates to B2B startups, B2B brands. We have two great guests alongside myself. I'll be your host here today. And the goal for this session is to walk away with a deeper knowledge about what community building can be inside of your company. We want to help you grow your audience. We want to help you. We want this to be a session that you go to and you go and you ping your boss or CEO, whoever, like, tomorrow, and you're like, hey, I just was on this session and Carly from Zapier said that they do this and we need to do that, or Adam gave me this idea to think about, and I want this to be a source of inspiration for you. So we're going to talk through a bunch of different things. We're going to hear about what each of these great, smart people have done at their company. I'm happy to talk about what we're doing at exit 5 in building a B2B marketing community there. And the best part of this session is, look, this is going to be recorded. And we have a rule here at exit 5 where if you go into the chat, help us hold us accountable. If you go into the chat and you ask if this is going to be recorded, you have to do 100 burpees and run a mile, and you have to send us a video of that as it happens. So do not ask if this is going to be recorded. This is. We are a professional media company here. It's going to be recorded. We're going to send it to you after. Okay? Otherwise, a little bit. A little bit of fitness baked in. It's good for the brain, good for the Good for the body. So we're going to chat. But look, this is an audience full of marketers. And so if you're here right now, which there are lots of people in the chat right now, talk to each other, help us out as we answer questions, add your point of view in chat. Disagree. Add links to your stuff. Like, let's make this an interactive discussion. I want this to be really useful for the people that are here. There's also going to be a big audience for this in a couple of weeks as we will turn this into an Exit 5 podcast episode. So if that's you listening on a future walk or run. Hello. Great to have you. All right, Carly, let's kick us off. Tell us who you are, what do you do, and what is your role in community?

Yes. So my name is Carly Moulton. I am the head of community marketing at Zapier, and there's a distinction there that I'll get to in a little bit. And my role is to oversee our community marketing team, which really has three pillars. So that's online, offline, and advocacy. So I'll pause there, Adam, and let you go, but I can dive deeper into what each of those means.

Yeah, let's go back to those in a second. Great.

That's awesome. I'm Adam o'. Donnell. I do startup partnerships at Zendesk for startups. So it's our startup initiative, helping founders, at the end of the day, getting the next generation of unicorns to use us. And for me, it's not a standard community role, which is kind of cool. But I run our podcast where we interview unicorn founders, as well as a lot of other cool events that are all targeted to just simply help founders where they are not just with customer support. So I'm excited to talk about this because I used to be a founder myself, and that's why I care about it.

Cool. All right, so Laura's in the chat. Carly said online, offline and advocacy. Let's actually use that as a jumping off point. First of all, this is a new role that Zapier that you took in the middle of the summer. I guess if I look, I think it was like July, I went to do my research here. What led to this role popping up at Zapier?

Yeah, so I think one of the things that led to the role popping up in this capacity was the community team, as it existed at Zapier previously wasn't really well understood. And so this was one of my big learnings coming into the role is that community can take so many different forms. So we do have a community team at Zapier that is focused on providing support for our free users. And so I think community practitioners really understand that form of community. Well, they know that that is one of the many forms community can take on. They have many different goals and metrics associated with it, but the main one being support ticket deflection. But people outside.

It's the best way to put it. Support ticket deflection?

Yeah, right. Like it's, you're, you're trying to reduce that load on the support, support team. So, but I think if you talk to folks that are outside of that practice, and particularly senior leadership, they don't quite understand how that's community. So there's that kind of education element. So when I spoke to the team when I first came on into this role, they told me they heard some comments and questions of like, oh, like why don't we have a community team? You should have a community team. It's like, oh, we do. And this is like the purpose that they serve. So anyways, when I was asked to take on the role, I kind of looked at it from the lens of, okay, well why are people asking those questions? And what's kind of missing from Zapier today that we need to fill here? So I did a ton of asking and listening because again, it was a completely new role for me. And where we kind of landed was we need to connect our users to each other and to the company more. So let's give people a direct way to build those connections because we've got a lot of people who are so passionate about the brand and they don't really have a central place to express that passion or to meet other people who share that same passion. So right now what we're building is an online forum for people to learn about how to put AI to work for them. I think a lot of people use AI Right now we're kind of figuring out like, oh, here's the party tricks I can use. I can write a funny birthday poem for Dave. But there's so many actual powerful capacities to use it in your everyday work that are really untapped. So we want to make a home for that for people. Our offline pillar is focused on bringing people together in location based meetups. So let's come together. No agenda, no sales pitch, let's do something fun. We host like happy hour, we've hosted beach volleyball, we've hosted dinner. Fun, cheap, merry. And that's basically the whole thing there. Like, can we create A fun environment for people to connect. And then advocacy is tapping into people like Adam, who are like big users and supporters of the brand. Have an interesting story and then let's have them tell that story for us because it makes for a much more interesting story than one that we might tell ourselves. So those are the three pillars that we're focused on now.

Cool. I love that. Because it's clear that what you've done and which I think is wise at the company is there is no cookie cutter role. It's like these are different pockets of communities that we have here at the company. Let's have someone own this so we can manage this full time. Whereas, like, what I see happen is sometimes you're like, we're hiring a community manager and they're going to manage the LinkedIn page. And this, and this is what they're supposed to do. Where it's like these kind of things already existed and now having somebody that's dedicated and can focus on them is going to help them grow. My question is for you back on some. And I want to, I want to dive in on a couple of these things, but those are all great ideas, right? And they're great. I can understand why they're important. But at some point there needs to be a marketing goal and a business goal. And how is Carly measured and how is her team doing and what are we doing? And this is where a lot of the community stuff drives me nuts and breaks down because like, at some point the head of sales wants to sell into this community or the, you know, demand gen leader wants to like, you know, well, can those be MQLs, like all the people who are in the community? And eventually this kind of like gets hard to do inside of a company. So how are you measured? How do you think about measurement? And where does this fit into the overall kind of broader marketing strategy?

Yeah, so our CEO has a saying, and I think he adopted it from somebody else, but I forget the original quote. Anyways, he likes to say that money follows love. And so what we're building is brand love. And so that can be measured in a couple different ways. Now to caveat this, we are a brand new team. So a lot of these things we are still setting up, like the online community we haven't even launched yet. So we're kind of thinking of it in three different phases. MVP validation and scaling. And each of those phases will be measured in different ways. So from the mvp, it's like, I need the validation that this idea is actually good. And if we don't get that validation. We need to pivot. So for the online community, eventually what we will be measuring is adoption, is us providing a place to help people learn how to use AI at work, increasing their use of zapier as well it should eventually. But it's not the short term goal. The short term goal is will people even show up to this? Are they going to engage in the way that we think that they're going to engage? So it's a lot less very specific marketing metrics driven at the beginning. They're kind of softer metrics. It's like, are they behaving in the way that we are expecting them to behave?

This is what's possible. I think when the direction, when the CEO believes that money follows love and believes in the value of brand building, that's when the marketing team gets permission to go and hey, let's build a community this year. And we don't know the measurement yet because we're going to build it and we're going to learn on the fly. Oftentimes it's like, well, how are we going to measure this? How is this going to work? I don't know if I believe in this. We need direct sales and that's when everything breaks down. Like you're kind of, I guarantee you're going to succeed in one form or fashion. It might. Maybe it is the AI community, maybe it's not. But when you're set up from this, from the top down level, I think that's what it takes for community efforts to be, to be successful. Right. Also you mentioned, I think it's a super smart idea and I wanted to call this out because I think this is where people that work at companies here, whether you work at a software company or an agency or whatever, like this approach, like you're not building the zapier community, right? You're going to build the. Oh, we see this bigger trend which is AI and automation in the workplace. Like let's build the place for those people to hang out online, right? It's no different than exit 5. Let's, let's build a place for B2B marketers to hang out. I think where community doesn't work is when it's too broad and too generic, it's much more or it's tied too close to the product. I think that's going to end up being like the support ticket forum, right? Where like. Which is different. But what you're doing is trying to take advantage of like this broader trend that your company ties into that it's valuable for you to be a resource for this for those types of people. Hey, we see an opportunity for us to build the AI community for people working in business. Let's go do that. And it happens to be powered by Zapier. Wait, real quick. In the chat right now, there's a million questions in the chat. Take your questions and go over to the Q and A, take the same question, put it in the Q and A. And then what we can do is everybody that's listening right now go, you can upvote questions, and then I will go and look through as we keep talking, upvote the questions that you want us to get to next. Go ahead, Carly.

Yeah, I was just going to say the topic that we were just on, where we're building a community around an idea or a trend, it actually has a name, which is another thing that I've learned in this new role, which is community of practice. So it's not necessarily tied to your brand specifically. It is tied to this, like, bigger idea. So people can come into this community whether they use Zapier or not, and they will get value from the community whether they use Zapier or not. So somebody was asking about, like, do you measure lead gen? The answer right now is no. But will this eventually maybe lead to lead gen for us? Maybe. We'll see. That's one of the things that we're going to be looking at in the future. I think it gives us a better chance to do, to be successful in generating leads, because it's like, you don't have to already be a customer of Zapier in the future to participate in the community.

I see this in the chat. Amit said, are there too many communities out there? Is Zapier doing something different? I see this question all the time in marketing. Are there too many YouTube channels, too many podcasts, too many webinar prop? My answer is no. There's, there's not. There's always going to be room for the right one and the most interesting one. And I think if you look at Zapier has a strong brand, a big audience, a lot of SEO power, and a use case that is widely applicable to a lot of people. I think those are the right ingredients. And even if somebody's done this before, it doesn't mean that you can't be successful and, and do it your way. What about you, Adam, on the let's, let's flip over to your world for a little bit. So your focus is this podcast, right? How do you See, before we talk specifically about the podcast, how do you see podcasting as a channel fitting into community?

This community bucket, honestly, like, even above a podcast, I like. So I'm in a go to market role at Zendesk, and at the end of the day, I'm judged by how many startups join our free program. It's still like a marketing kind of effort, but we actually sit under sales, which is interesting. So we want the next generation of unicorns to do that. And for me, I'm like, I used to be a founder myself. I moved out of San Francisco. The startup failed. It was really painful. And then I was fortunate to join a VC and got to see that other side of it. So for me, all I care about is helping founders. And I look at the right medium to do that, and I know what founders care about. And so I'm like, that's why the podcast was kind of a. It was just an expression of like, what we really wanted to do, which is just help founders, period. And the three things founders care about is growth. Number one, like, how do we get new customers? Funding. Number two, how do we get VC intros? And, you know, number three and four, five, six is kind of like, give me some deals, maybe help me save money, customer support somewhere down that list. But I spend most of my time on helping founders with the two things that they care about. Getting interest to customers and learning how to fundraise. And one of the ways that we express that basically is through a podcast. And so I just started interviewing founders who had raised over a hundred million. Started with Henry Schuck from Zoom Info. He introduced me to Manny Medina at Outreach. He introduced me to Auth0's co founder, and it just continued on from there. And basically in these podcasts, it's just how, you know, understanding their fundraising journey, understanding their product market fit journey. And that's it. But I haven't, like, put it as a community. We, you know, we ultimately are, but it's just like kind of a reverse way of looking at it.

But what you get from the podcast is you do get community, right? It might not be a particular place where someone's going to go log in and chat with other people, but you're starting to get fans of the show, you're starting to get listeners, you're starting to get people that are reviewing it and sharing it with their friends. They're starting to build some affinity for this company that you happen to work for called Zendesk, right? But the show happens to be put on Verse, if you exclusively put out the Zendesk podcast, that probably would not be as interesting or successful or attract the right type of audience. Audience for this. And so I think when it comes to comm, like the reason that I love community, but it's also very hard to talk about and measure and manage is because it's, it's kind of like that. You know, it's good when just be like you can feel it or you can see it and you got to do these things. And so like I, I worked at a company called Drift and the CEO there, David Cancel, was very much a believer in, I think that line Carly, you used, which is like the love follows money or money follows love, right. And so he pushed the marketing team to invest in those scrappy community building ways. Like we, you know, send 10 handwritten notes to random customers, right? Start a podcast, do a random meet. Like let's go to Miami, Florida and do a meetup with 30 customers that happen to be down there with no measure of the roi. But like, let's set a cap on it, let's see if we can spend, you know, do it in under five grand and see what we get from it. And those things make a huge difference. I think today it's very easy to focus on the highly measurable, highly scalable marketing channels. But there's so much in this community bucket that I think is really valuable, especially now at a time where people are still not sure what to do. Maybe budgets were cut last year and they're not coming back, or they're not growing, or you're looking for creators and new ways to build relationships with customers that don't require like direct response spending. There's a lot in the community bucket that I think is really interesting and relevant for people. I want to get to some of these questions because there's a lot in here related to stuff that we've already talked about. So this question is from Joel. What about tough to reach and engage audiences like the C suite, groups of CFOs, CEOs, etc. The idea of cheap and fun doesn't seem like an effective approach for this audience. Have either of you done or seen examples of community where, where you're trying to reach more of the C Suite?

Yeah, that's tough, cheap and cheerful. You're right. Probably wouldn't be the most effective for this group when you're trying to like break into the boardroom. That's not a target audience for us. So I honestly don't have a ton of strategical Advice for you here, aside from know your audience, where are they hanging out? Like what, where are they already? And try to beat them there and then build your approach from there.

I think on, on this topic, like if you're selling to the C suite, that to me says that you're probably selling something that's going to be a bigger deal, right? You're usually not selling to the CEO, CFO, COO on a, you know, $19 a month SaaS product. And so I think here the way that you're going to build community is you're, you might have to spend more upfront, but you're going to do things that I've seen work really well. HubSpot did a really good job of this back in the day. They, they created this whole kind of content, executive level content where it wasn't necessarily like they had content that was how to more for mid level junior marketers, but they broke off a whole content arm that was like how to present to the board how to hire. Here's what a great COO does, like creating content for those people. But also I remember they used to do these like executive level breakfasts, right? And so you might pick a location and invite 30 to 50 people and you're going to have to spend to run that breakfast and to get people there. But we're talking about selling, you know, 20, 30, 50, $100,000 deals if you're selling into the C suite. So you might have to do more targeted spending meetups. It's a tough to reach them in a scrappy way if you want to do the scrappy version. I think the scrappy version is creating content and doing one to one outreach to those specific people. But I've seen dinners, breakfasts, different types of meetups, CEOs and CFOs and COOs, they're no different than junior level people. They just want to be surrounded by peers. And so can you pull a room of CEOs together? We used to do something when I was at Drift where once a quarter we'd go to San Francisco, we'd say hey, we're going to do CMO dinners. And I would literally just go to LinkedIn. I would make a target list, I would work with the sales team to come up with a list of 30 interesting companies and CMOs and San Francisco and we'd say, hey, I'm Dave from Drift, I'm pulling together this dinner. We're going to have, you know, these five other CMOs there. We'd love to invite you. It's going to be an awesome meal. Here's where it is. There's going to be no hard sell there. Like, we're literally just curating this group of your peers and we're going to have a nice dinner together. That worked really well. We never pitched drift at those events, but people associated us with like, man, I had an awesome dinner and I met Carly and Adam at this dinner that was put on by drifting. It builds like a piece of that in the awareness bucket and helps build a. Build a relationship with you. Adam, I don't know if you had anything to add to that.

Yeah, I mean, we, you know, we're selling to the founder technically, and the. These companies are under a hundred employees, so I don't know where. What size company they're targeting, but for me, it was all those things that you just said. We've done those. One thing that worked really well was just taking a step back and saying, what do the founders care about? They care about getting intros to customers. And so we tried this thing called the buyer teardown where we basically, we had to go by vertical, but we got partners. So we, we did one called the dev tool Buyer teardown. We got VPs of engineering from GitHub, Twilio, Zendesk and a couple other companies. And then we asked a bunch of startups or companies to submit what they were working on to be reviewed by this panel. We had hundreds of submissions. And when I looked at like the applications after the. The average funding of a company that was there, you know, it was like six to eight million dollars. And the majority of the people who applied were the founder. So, you know, these aren't maybe the size companies that they were specifically talking about. But it was really interesting how people just jump out of their seats and do whatever it takes to be there when their customer or ideal customer is on the panel. Like you were saying, Dave, I love.

This comment from Lindsey in the chat too. She said our CMO interviewed other CMOs to open those relationships. I think that's so smart. And that's like kind of a combination of everything that you guys just said.

Yeah. Think about where you fit. Right. If you sell to CFOs, even if your CFO is not. Has never been on a podcast before. Could you go to her and be like, hey, you are like the people that we're trying to sell to. Can we make you a star of our content and let's have you host? I think, I think there's a lot of people that would be interested in. In in that approach, I, I like some mixers are the new round tables. I like stuff like CMO diaries. And then Miranda said, no matter the level, people want to connect with other people like them. And for me this was always the value of going to events like let's take Saster or Inbound as an example. The events themselves are great. As a VP of marketing at the time, the huge value for me was like people would put on lunches and they do a lunch like in tandem with the event. Like, hey, we know lots of people are going to be here. Hey Dave, we're doing a lunch, you know, Thursday 12 to 1 outside of Saster over here at this restaurant. Like I got to eat lunch anyway if someone wants to pay for my lunch. Fantastic. Oh, and by the way, there's going to be six other VPs of marketing at similar stage companies at the launch. Those things. That's where I got the most value. Like I think there's something about gathering people and doing these kind of like off the record types of conversations where I'm learning about like, you know, how do they think about their budget or what's their team size or they hired this person connecting like your company. There was a question in here about like I think product specific communities versus kind of movement specific. I think you can, in B2B, how can you be the connector for your ideal customers and they will associate you with them and so if you're trying to sell to CFOs, how can you help them meet their peers? I think that's an awesome, awesome community strategy. It's something that I'm thinking a lot about now with like Exit 5, there is one community strategy which is more content, more content, more content, but with thousands of members. There's all these unique little groups in here. There's like a pod of product markets marketers and a pot of demand gen people. And how can we connect them and facilitate those connections and make Exit 5 the place where those people hang out? I think there's a lot of value in being the connection there. There was this question over here and I don't know if you have a specific example, a definition for this Carly, but Patricia asked in the, in the Q and A, what's your definition of community at Zapier?

So I put this kind of into one sentence for my team. We want to make magic for our customers full stop, like that's it. I want to do things that don't scale. I want to try new things. I want people to talk about us with like a Lot of love for the brand and so we're going to try things that emit that feeling from them. And that's really our definition of community. But like I said at the very beginning, it can take so many different forms. So there's also the support community still exists today and it's currently not under my team. So it kind of shows how dispersed community can be within a company even as well. But for the community marketing team, it's to make magic for customers.

And do you have a strategy this. Anita asked this in the chat, but I think this is relevant. Do you have a strategy for or does this fall under you? There is your own community, but then there's also like a. This is almost like a PR and content strategy, like being involved in other people's communities. Does that fall under you? Where do you see that?

It's not a focus for us, but it is something that I explored. And so one reason that it's not a focus for us is because there wasn't a ton of like zapier specific communities that were super strong. There are like communities on kind of the peripheral of what we want to do. So we engage with folks like Exit 5 because Exit 5 reaches our target audience. That doesn't fall specifically under my team, but you know who does a really good job of this is notion. So if you're looking for examples of a company that does this, well, notion empowers other communities to like become bigger, become better using notion. And so instead of having their own central community, they do that. They operate with communities that have been built by passionate users instead. So it's not a focus for us right now for that reason.

Yeah, that's interesting. That's one of the biggest things that we do basically is partner on other startup communities. So it's targeting the same audience. I'll spend a lot of time with like AWS for startups and try to find co marketing things that we can do with them. Brex has a great startup program. Mercury bank has a great startup program. I would say when I looked at last quarter I spent about 31% of my time basically doing co marketing activities with other communities. And I tracked that. I just had it up randomly. But anyways, so it's about how do you do cool things together? And then like we're also openly sharing lists and signups for any co marketing events we do together. So it's like hey, that that partner gets to have all the signups and vice versa if we're going to theirs.

Not to get all academic on you all. But the definition of a community, a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. That's great. That's super relevant. Right? We. If you work at a company, that company is trying to sell something to someone. Those people are often the same. Who are those people? They're living in the same place. They have a particular characteristic in common. That could be single mothers, it could be dads who want to work out. It could be B2B SaaS, marketers, right? The opportunity is like, how can you be involved and facilitate connections between them? Because that's the brand opportunity. It's not to just. You could just get in front of them and instantly sell. But we all know that it's probably not going to work. And so if you want to build a relationship here over time and reap the benefits of that, you have to do it in a way that is not very self serving. Right? Like HubSpot. Creating inbound marketing and building this inbound marketing community and this movement around inbound rallied all of these marketers who are like, yeah, you know what? I'm, I am a. Like, I, I believe in content. I believe in creating content that's so good, it attracts customers in as opposed to just doing outbound. Like, I do that. I do marketing. I want to hang out with those fellow people. That's the opportunity. And then the other definition is a feeling of fellowship with others as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests and goals. And that's kind of what we touched on earlier, right? Common attitudes, interests and goals. Hey, we have this shared interest. I work in B2B marketing. Like I want to be around other people and learn from them. And the opportunity as a business is could you be the place where those conversations happen? And it can take place in multiple different forms. Forms. It could be a Slack group. It could be a Facebook group. It could be, you do four times a year, you do an in person event. It can, it can take all, all sorts of forms. Then there's also community that comes out of doing certain things. I think like Adam hosting a podcast. I've seen this multiple times with podcasts now. A community builds. People are like, I listen to this podcast. Like, there's this podcast, my first million. And they gave Exit 5 a shout out last week. So it's top of mind. But people love that podcast. They do meetup. Like people are doing meetups around the country, like on their own. That tells me that that podcast has a community. And the reason why is because they've Put out interesting content. They don't try to sell anything to you. That's the opportunity that you can facilitate as a, as a brand.

Dave, I have a question. How big is too big in terms of the breadth of the community? Because I think focus is also a challenge because if we just did any kind of founder versus maybe we could tighten our community and get better if we did a specific kind of founder. I'm curious how, how you think about that.

I don't know if I have a particular like metric or, or number. I think generally a niche is going to perform better than a broad targeted group like you have working out. But then you have like CrossFit people are raving. Fans, runners are their own breed, yogis are their own breed. Right. You, you can kind of break these off. And so I would look for something like that. And so it's, you know, using like Exit 5 as an example. It's why could you make the case that Exit 5 could be a marketing community for anybody that works in marketing? Absolutely. Right. But is there a big enough audience where if we focus on B2B and is there some shared story where like it makes Sense to be B2B? Because I spent B, I spent 10 years in B2B marketing. That's kind of where I've built a network. That's how I got to this idea. Usually there's some story that's going to like unwind back from that. And so like in, in your case, right. It's like not just any startup under the sun. There's kind of a specific, we're kind of focusing on like you said earlier, I'm focusing on venture backed startups. I want to talk to founders who've raised a hundred million dollars. There's a reason for that because it, that's going to attract the right audience for you. So there isn't a particular metric but I do think that you're going to have much more success if you can niche down and then add. Right. Because now Exit 5 is focusing on this niche of B2B marketing. I don't plan to do this, but we could. Right, we could build a sales community now within B2B marketing because I could take all the lessons that we've learned from focusing on marketing and now do it for sales and you can marry sales and marketing together. There's lots of connections. I think the mistake happens when you go too broad and then you're really for no one. It's much easier to get those first 100 or a thousand members or advocates or listeners or whatever they are by focusing on a niche as opposed to trying to do. Do this too broad. You all can help me out too, if there's anything that speaks to you in the, in the Q and A here. Otherwise, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna just hog this and, and, and read some of these. This one is from Julia in the Q and A here. How do you get community members to post on their own without me having to post prompts for them to answer all the time? I have an opinion on this, but Adam or Carly, curious to hear if you. You have any insight on this first.

I think so. Full disclosure, we have not launched our online community yet. So that's coming. It might be a challenge for us. I know it's a common challenge for community, but I think what we just talked about, where it's like finding the right niche and getting those people in the room is a big part of that because they're going to have natural questions and answers that come up that they can learn from each other. So you might have to start with like a content calendar of, hey, here's what we're going to post in order to start this engagement and get the ball rolling. And then people will begin to engage beyond that because of their natural interest in this specific topic that you've created for them.

I mean, one thing we've done in our Slack community is we have these, like we were doing at one point, these weekly founder Q and A's or just executive Q&As, and it would just be like pasted live. So, like, you'd ask a question, we'd do a little prep ahead of time with a Google Doc, and then we'd slowly paste those questions and add to it live to just kind of continue to spark that. But the, the other thing I've done, like off of that community platform itself, but like in LinkedIn, is when I do a podcast post, I was using actually a tool zapier to do this, but I basically got a list of all the people who recently were added to our community or our network at Zendesk, and then I would tag them in the post that I did when promoting the next podcast. So just a way to try to like, bring in a little more overlap to hopefully encourage them to, like, comment. But yeah, I haven't figured it out perfectly.

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This is a great question and I think that this tells you a lot about the community and the fit and I think that, so to Julia's question, How do you get community members to post on their own without having to having me to post prompts for them to answer all the time? I think that is part of the answer and that in the beginning it has to be you super involved. And ideally, this community is started by someone who is an expert or has deep passion or expertise in this niche. And I'm going to not use an Exit 5 example, but let's say that you love the Office, you think the Office is the greatest TV show of all time, and you want to start a little mini community or group for people, right? You're the one who started this, right? You have passion or energy or, or lots of thoughts and content about this. It should come from you to start. You should be the one prompting people in there. I think you have to start it. And that might be for years or months. I mean, we're going on. This is going to be the third year that I've had the Exit 5 community. If you did the stats, I. I looked at them before I moved off of Facebook into. Into circle. I have written over 3,000 posts in there. And so there is no other way. You have to be the facilitator and you have to be the facilit. Somebody has to be the facilitator. Where I see companies make the mistake, especially in B2B SaaS, as they're like, we're going to launch a community and the community is going to be about AI and the AI community is going to be managed by our intern. And every day the intern is just going to post like a prompt, like, what are you working on today? What did you do this week? What's your favorite tools? That stuff eventually just dies out and after six months they shut it down because there's no engagement. You have to post, but you also have to be like a facilitator. And so I'd be in there, I'm answering people's questions. I'm saying, wow, you have to reinforce what good looks like. And so if I'm posting and all of a sudden it's only been me posting, but one day I log in and Carly posts. I'm like, wow, hey, Carly, this is awesome. I'm so glad to see people posting. I want more people to post like me. You can even write like, hey, everybody, it's been fun. Like, I'm enjoying facilitating discussions, but I want this to be a real community and I want you to help me drive this thing. Ideally, you have a group of people who are all doing something similar. We all are into yoga. Right. I'm not just going to post every day. Why don't you start, Tell me what you're interested in. Tell me what your hangups are. You have to, like, give them permission to post and then in the comments reinforce what good looks like, and eventually you kind of start having conversations. It's honestly like how I have two guests on this webinar right now, but I'm trying to bring you each into the conversation. Right. You have to do the same thing, but it's going to be in a. In a dedicated space online. I would also say that this is where you have to really think about. If you're doing this for a while, something's not working, and it could be the wrong audience fit and it could be the wrong content fit. And so can you whittle down the audience even more? Maybe the targeting and what you're posting about is wrong. Like, I think a lot of the times this is a silly thing to say out loud, but a lot of times with content, it comes down to the content. And so if you're posting all the time and no one's responding and you can't get people to post on your own, you either have the wrong people in there or you're posting the wrong stuff and you just got to keep trying. And I said, this is why I love the idea of, like, I think community starts before you go and build a dedicated online community. Like, I'd rather see you be active on Twitter or LinkedIn and have a sense for this. This is how we got to exit 5. I was posting almost every day on LinkedIn about B2B marketing. I grew a following there. I started to get a feel for what people were interested in. When I launched the community, I already had a good idea that people would be interested in it. And now it just became a smaller subgroup in a dedicated space. I see you both kind of nodding along. I'm just curious to hear your reaction to that.

Yeah. One tactic that we're taking, and I see Rachel in the chat here, and she's actually leading this, she's on my team, is we have the benefit of building this community net new. So we're starting from nothing. And so one thing that we're doing with the MVP phase is we're hand selecting people to be part of the community. Our goal is to kind of grow a whole bunch of these facilities.

That's a great idea.

Yeah. And that was Rachel's idea. So it's like, let's make them feel like owners of this community. Hey, like, you own what this is going to be. You're going to help build this with us. And so with that ownership, they feel a sense of like, hey, I need to come in and like, help make this the best that it can be. Because, like, I've got a stake in this. So that's like the very first phase of the community rollout for us and I think we'll learn a ton from that too. It's like, well, what type of content do they want? Because we've got a good guess, we've got a good hypothesis of what they're looking for just based on our conversations with customers. But I think that'll evolve too as we bring them all together in this one group and we can continue to learn from each other.

I love the idea of, of seeding the community with people that you think are going to be active. I think if you just open this up to the world and you're like, our community here is here and it exists. Like, I'm thinking about doing something later in this year where we add on something into exit 5 that's a little bit more focused on like future marketing leaders because there's kind of general B2B marketing knowledge, but there's this track of people who want to be VP or cmo. I don't want to just announce that to the world. I think we're going to go and hand, we're going to go through and find out who are, who might already be in there. That would be a good fit for that. Tell them about it, start it with 10 or 20 people for two or three months, get the thing going, get feedback and then open up, open it up to the world. I think that's a, the hardest thing is the cold start problem. And you don't with a community you want new members to join and the community, it's like, it's only as valuable as what's already in there. And so if you launch a community and you get hundreds of people to sign up, but nobody's posted content yet, then it's not going to be effective. Versus start with a smaller group, have 10 to 20 people in there that are active, adding value. Then I join and I'm like, whoa, this stuff is already in here. This is really valuable.

That's so good. I feel like that's similar to the podcast. When we first started, I was just like, I just want to do the right thing and just get the content that I know that founders want. I almost like ignored the views and listens because I just didn't want to get discouraged because every time I started a podcast, it takes so long for the momentum to happen. And despite interviewing some of those really big people, the views were not really significant for the first year. It took, you know, a year and a half and other promotion that, you know, has now grown it. But it was just really painful. But I just said, I'm not going to let that be my definition of success. I want to. Like, it's those one anecdotes. And I started screenshotting every time I heard a founder saying, like, that was really helpful. And this is why. And I'm just like, that's my north star. I got 10 this, this quarter. You know, like data boys that help me.

That's huge. I mean, back to, like, Carly launching a new community. I think there's so much value in, yes, it's important to measure this and have metrics, but, like, you will know as you go. And I think, especially with efforts like this, where it's not going to happen overnight, part of the success means we're going to go hard on this for a year or six months, right? And we're going to do it no matter what. Like, if Adam set out to launch his podcast and he did three episodes and the response was not great, like, I'll give you another example. This. On this. I. I started this. A friend of mine, we started this golf podcast. I love golf. And I've. You know, they say dress for the job you want, not the one you have. I'm trying to plant this future seeds, right? And it's very humbling because I've been working on Exit 5 for a while, and I've been in B2B marketing for a while. And so, like, a lot of things that I can do in this niche are easy because there's already an audience. There's. It's very humbling to go over that podcast and be like, Today's episode had 27 listeners. When I do an episode of the Exit podcast, Exit 5 podcasts like 3000, but I don't care. It's fun. And I've committed that we're gonna do an episode every week and I'm just gonna shut up and show up and not think about it. And now it's starting to build. We've had a couple of, like, clips on Instagram that have taken off. We've had an interesting guest reach out. Like, that's how this starts to happen and you get momentum. And so I think whether it's a podcast or starting a blog, or community. You have to commit some time to doing this versus just like, well, I've posted in here twice a week for two months now and nothing's happening. Well, you got to be constantly tweaking and evolving and you're going to have to throw a lot of stuff in there and see what works. And you need to give yourself the freedom to be able to do that without instantly having to present to the board meeting about the ROI on this new thing that you launch. Right.

There's a lot of questions or like chatter in the chat about tooling, which was another thing that kind of threw me for a loop in this April. Yeah. So some folks are asking, where does the Exit 5 community live? And Dave, I have been an Exit 5 community member for a long time, so I know you.

I know that.

Fairly recently though. But I'd be curious.

You want me to give my rant about tooling?

I do, because I have a feeling I've got a very similar one.

What's your rant? Tell me your rant first.

Okay. It's not a nice one. All the community tooling kind of sucks. So it's like you're choosing the lesser of all evil when you choose the tooling. And every single.

I think it's a crutch. I think it's a mistake. I think it's. I think that. I think that what we like to do is we like to spend a lot of time picking the perfect platform and think that the success is going to. You can pick the best platform in the world. Like, let's say. I'm just going to say this because this is where it is now. Let's say that I use Circle. Let's say that Circle is the best community platform in the world. Right. You can have a bad idea for a community and be not good at it. Just because you hosted on Circle, it is not going to make it work. The flip side of that is exactly what I got myself into with Exit 5, which is I accidentally built a very successful community on Facebook and I really wanted to move off of that, but it got to skit like, I wouldn't have been able to build this business if I didn't build there because it just happened to work. I also get a lot of message from people who are like, why did you pick Circle? Why not this and this tool and this tool and this tool? Because who has the time to evaluate 15 different tools and lay out the feature check. You need to just get started and you will learn the huge value in Community is the Feedback loop and learning from the community as you grow. And so sure, are there certain, maybe you work inside of a company and the community tool you need, you know, has to have some security feature or it needs to have some integration with Salesforce. Does stuff like that matter? It does, right? But I think from a macro standpoint, like you need to pick one and go. And it's so easy to look at the landscape and see 20 different platforms that you could choose from and be like, ah, we're going to take this quarter to evaluate which community platform we should be on. Where it's like, I'd much rather see you be like, we're going to do this on Slack and It's free and 60 days. We're going to move and see how it goes. I think it becomes a unnecessary roadblock where like don't let you know you're training for a marathon. At some point you need to just get out there and run the first mile and run the second mile and I think you just got to pick something and go and know that you can change. We've all changed website platforms, we've changed CRM, we've changed, you know, hosting, whatever. You're going to be able to make a change. Please, please, please, if you're listening to this, do not let like picking the actual platform, especially when you don't have one. If you've built a successful community and you want to move it because you want to level up and go to V2, then you can spend, you've earned the right to sweat like where you're going to host this thing. If you have not started yet, like, please don't let that be the hang up on this. How's that, Carly?

It's good. I think that there's like another complicating factor to it that I encountered which is everybody has a strong opinion about which platform you should use.

Yes, for sure.

So it's trying to like navigate. Okay, what is a platform that's actually going to get us closest to what we are trying to solve. And like you said, Dave, like allow us just get started and test our hypothesis before investing a whole ton of time and money into something. So yes, for folks asking about the tooling slash platforms, that's our rants.

All right, we'll do one more question and we'll let people get out of here a couple minutes early. Experiment. This is from experimenting with community as a channel. Makes sense. But how do you get buy in from other stakeholders? Isn't there a constant push for ROI and results from the community.

Yeah, I would say for us we did start with understanding revenue and nailing that and then we built trust to be able to keep growing. It's almost like we, we use non traditional community channels to build trust and then got buy in to be able to go from there. And I think the reason our program grew in a couple years from like 1 or 2 people to 20 people for like the whole startups program was because of our ability to show the roi. But we proved it in a small scale and then it was like cool, here's the resources. So it's like you were saying David, it's like hacking where you are using the free Slack community and just get going. It's like what we say to good founders. You know what I mean? Don't overthink it, just try to help people.

I think you mentioned this earlier but I love the idea of showing people the, the qualitative feedback and screenshots of like someone in the community who met somebody. You know, I would put this in board decks and some people didn't like this because I, you know, sometimes didn't use all the data or use the data but also use a screenshot. But I think this is important. People, people are emotional and as much as we want to make, make it like businesses 100% run on you know, logic and you do this and you do this like you need to show people that the reaction. And so we actually used to have this joke inside of Drift where we started this podcast called Seeking Wisdom and it became pretty popular in the early days of the company. And we would just out of nowhere sales rep would get off a call and be like hey, I talked to Carly from Zapier day. She said she's a huge fan of the pod of Seeking Wisdom screenshot that put it in Slack general channel and be like check this out. People are like wow, people seem to really like this podcast. A week later CEO gets a DM on his LinkedIn about someone. Something he said in the podcast screenshot that like this is how you make the case for Community. It's not going to be some perfect like ROI number. It's going to be these types of moments. You know, this thing happened, this moment happened. You need to show them that. And then once they feel that we got to a point where our VP of sales was like you need to be doing more episodes of this podcast. And I'm like wow, there's diminishing returns, there's a whole story there. But like don't discount that, show them the community is going to be about people discovering connections or peers or new content or getting unstuck on problems at work. Like, don't discount screenshotting those things and showing people and building more of an emotional story. And so it's like, hey, I want to present to you like the lessons from Q1 of launching our community. We got 200 members in, blah, blah, blah. But then you show some screenshots of the discussions and the types of things. There's also a whole other thing that we haven't talked about with community, which is the ROI goes beyond direct sales and people who are going to buy Zendesk or Zapier or get an Exit 5 subscription. I get an insane amount of value by the conversations that people are having inside of the community that could fuel our content for years. Right. Like, I know what we should be writing about in our email. I know which types of webinar topics are really relevant. This can even just be on LinkedIn, like you're posting on LinkedIn. I know what things people are interested in. So having a engaged community, it gives you a finger on the pulse of the content you should be creating. Right. If you have an engaged group of a hundred of your ideal customers talking about their jobs, their lives in an online forum, the ROI there is not just going to be direct sales. It's going to be, hey, these are insights that we can use for the rest of our business and to power all of our marketing.

Yeah, I did the exact same thing. So I actually saw one of our customers in the chat, Francisco Franco, if you're still here, made a comment, but I met Francisco at the Vancouver meetup that we ran. Again, it was cheap and cheerful. I brought a cooler of Costco snacks to the beach and I emailed everybody in Vancouver that that is a zapier customer. And I said, who wants to come play beach volleyball? It was kind of an overcast day, wasn't very nice, but people came out like quite a few people came out and it was had some really interesting conversations that sparked some great relationships from there. Like, since then, we've worked with Francisco on a webinar for his company. It allows us to create almost this kind of like flywheel effect of, hey, we go out, we meet these people, they see these really great things that we then of course share directly in Slack. We've got a kind of a customer love weekly roundup that we'll do where when people send us a nice email or they post about us on social, that gets captured and that gets documented and that gets shared repeatedly because it's like, this is the value. This is the roi. It's this customer love and retention. We've had people say to us, like, I was thinking of switching office Zapier because of XYZ reasons. And I came to this meetup and I'm actually going to stick with you because I see a lot of value from it. Like, I feel really connected to you now, so on and so forth. So that's just one example. But if we're going to start to do that at scale, right. So I'm not always going to be able to perfectly measure that. Like, I can't perfectly measure that. Somebody was going to switch off of us but then decided to stay with us. We retained them at the meetup, but, like, I can show you the comment where they said they were going to do that, right?

There's going to be no Salesforce report that says, like, you know, yeah, beach volleyball referral.

Yeah, it sounds ridiculous, right? But I think people, like, they enjoy the connection. And then another thing, like, I talked about that third pillar for us is advocacy. So it allows us to identify more advocates for the brand. And then we work with them to do, like, media interviews. They go. They speak on behalf of Zapier at, like, a conference. Like, they will do a customer story for us and talk about how they use the product. Like, there's a whole bunch of different ways that the community feeds into different parts of the company. That's not always measurable. Perfectly biometric.

It's beautiful. Very well said. I've done a bunch of things, like spent maybe $2,000 and rented out a. A class at Barry's Boot Camp, like, on the morning of saster and had 30 people there. And it was unbelievable, the connections that we made with those people. Like, not all of them bought Drift, but they all worked out with us. We posted pictures. They told their friends, like, those small moments. If you can work at a company where people are willing to do stuff like that, that's. That's when you can really do the great marketing stuff. Go ahead, Adam.

Yeah, no, I was saying I was actually at that. And I promise you, it was like 2017, 2018. Yeah, sure was in San Francisco. I remember on like, Bush Street. Anyways. That's amazing.

Did you do. You went. You were at that workout?

I went and ran at that workout, and I met some really cool people. One of the guys who sold his company to G2 Crowd Patrick. I can't remember his last name. Oh, yeah.

Anyways, that's Amazing. Patrick Barnes or something like that. Yeah, yeah, Josh. This question's from Josh. We'll wrap up in this one for earlier stage companies with less brand recognition. How do you evaluate directly tying your brand to a new community? Hey, I swear, we're not just trying to sell things. Let's think about this one out loud. The answer is in the question here, which is don't do it. Right? You have to prove it. Right? You have to not sell things. It's. No one's going to believe you until you don't do it. And so you, you can't just say that up front, but it's going to be in the content over time and so show them that you're going to deliver on that. And I think if you're an early stage company, you don't have a big audience, then start with five people, right? Your community could be five. You're going to connect five people. You're never going to sell your product. You're just going to all help each other. Hey, we all work in hr. I'm going to help connect you all. I got five people that work in HR together. I'm never once going to talk about my HR software. I'm going to help connect you because I know some people in industry. I think you just have to, you have to do it by showing them. Right? And I also think, like, I think great marketing happens when you lean into the objections and beliefs that people might have. And so if you're like, hey, look, I know you might be skeptical. We promise that we're not going to sell you stuff in here. And if you do, like I say this in email sometimes, I'm like, hey, you know, we're going to email you stuff. Like, I promise that our emails will be thoughtful and respectful and we're not going to email you too much. If we ever do, like reply back and yell at me or unsubscribe, it's totally fine. I think just even saying that just sets the, the expectation. So I think this is something you can, you can own in your marketing and in your community building. All right, Carly, Adam, thank you for doing. This was awesome. We had 130 people here for most of this. The chat was buzzing. There's a lot of people in here that are passionate about community and all the various forms. Thanks for giving us some of your time today. I'm excited to see what you each continue to do at Zendesk and Zapier. Good luck the rest this year. Thanks for hanging out with us here in the Exit 5 community and on this webinar. And to everybody in the chat, that was fantastic. Excellent work. Give yourself a round of applause from, from wherever you are. Thanks for hanging out with us here today. All right, we'll see you all later. Exit Foreign.

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