Zach Hotoff, CEO of TightKnit, explains how the company monetizes a Slack-based community platform for B2B SaaS companies like Clay, Gamma, and Stripe. TightKnit uses feature flags to toggle capabilities on and off, enabling usage-based pricing and plan changes in minutes instead of days. The platform connects community activity to CRM data to show customers the business impact of their communities.
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I'm Zach Hotoff. I'm CEO, co-founder, and community manager of a company called TightKnit. We build a community platform for your leading B2B SaaS and membership communities. And the way that we do it is we go very deep on helping you build a Slack community. So we are a platform that helps you build events, gamification, onboarding, SEO, GEO, all the things you would need on top of your Slack community. And then we connect that to your CRM so you can get attribution data. That actually shows that your community is driving real business. And so we're lucky enough to work with some of the greats. So like Clay, Gamma, Stripe, Salesforce, Vanta all run their communities or parts of their community on our product. When we first started TightKnit, we had a really, we knew we were going to be a very broad product and we're going to have a lot of different features. a lot of different levers that we would need to grow on. And what we realized is we did not want to have to spend our energy building a billing system when we really needed to focus on the customer deliverables. Everything has a schematic feature flag. We upgrade those into features when the time calls for them to be part of like the different plans. And it also allows us to like learn about the feature and how different customers are using them so that we can select which is the right plan for this as well. And so that's been really big for us. It's also really nice to know that like when we, and we are already talking about it, inevitably need to shake up these plans, we have the ability to reconfigure them without reconfiguring the product itself. Most of our plans start standard. And then what starts to happen very quickly is we find customers that need just this one thing and they need, you know, just this amount. And so we're able to do 2 things. We're able to charge based on, you know, like additional entitlement usage or additional entitlement features that we know are like great add-ons of the product. You know, one of my favorites is like just being able to come in and if a customer needs something, just be able to Provide like, like you know I said this: You let me be Oprah. You let me walk in the room and say, "You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car." That's a great feeling to be able to do it on the spot while with the customer in real time. We're able to do what some companies when they say like, "Oh, we're going to turn you on in a few days," we can do that in a matter of minutes rather than a matter of days. So when I actually want to get customers up and running, we're able to deliver that experience so much faster. And that's important to me, right? Getting a customer up and running when they want to be up and running, super important. Yeah. I mean, we're big fans of y'all. I mean, I think you can see it even on our Slack Connect channel that we are just like, we give a lot of feedback and we find these little, even little tiny UX bugs just because we want to make the product better, and we know that your team is able to deliver on it. And I think your team operates very similarly to how we operate, which I appreciate. It's that you listen, you solve the problem, you get it solved, and you keep going. Having your team as essentially like our billing engineer has been a really big win for us. Yeah. I mean, I think I'd say pretty much anyone who wants to build like a B2B platform or a B2B product at all really should be looking at this. We only bought 10 feeds, but we really need 12. And having the ability to quickly solve those problems for them, I think, I think that's like the way B2B sales should be done.
