In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin interviews Christina Garnett, Senior Marketing Manager for Offline Community and Advocacy at HubSpot, to explore the concept of community‑market fit and how it differs from traditional product‑market fit. Christina explains that while product‑market fit focuses on a functional value proposition—features, price, and solving a clear need—community‑market fit centers on emotional value, belonging, and network opportunities. She outlines how to assess community fit at ideation, maintenance, and scaling stages, emphasizing the importance of understanding community members' needs, measuring ROI through metrics such as NPS, retention rates, and trigger events that drive repeat engagement, and applying a “rule of 40” mindset to gauge loyalty during economic downturns. The conversation also covers practical steps for building and sustaining a community, the role of community as a strategic moat (especially in Web3/NFT contexts), and the necessity of continuous feedback loops to ensure the community delivers the promised emotional and tangible benefits. Sponsor mentions for Rev Genius and Demandbase are included, and listeners are invited to join the Rev Genius community.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
Incredible talk by Mark Roberge. Thank you, Mark, so much for that. We have right now with us someone really incredible, Christina Garnett, Senior Marketing Manager, Offline Community and Advocacy at HubSpot. So Christina, we're so glad to have you here. Christina is a community builder and advocacy strategist. Christina Garnett uses audience intelligence and social listening to learn more about audiences to determine needs, behaviors, and more. Her work serves to help brands better connect with their current customers, potential customers, and fans. So Christina, we are so glad to have you here today. Christina, I give the mic to you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat and be a part of the Rev Genius GTM series. Specifically want to talk about how community market fit is incredibly crucial.
Community is such a big buzzword nowadays. And it's more important now than ever for you to have a good understanding of your community, what their needs are, what values they're looking for, and how to get started. So I am excited to really kind of give you this overall lens of what are the differences between product market fit, community market fit, and how you can start asking yourself key questions in either the ideation stage or the maintenance or scale phase of your community to make sure that not only do you have community market fit in the beginning, but you continue to strive to ensure that you are still having that fit. So some of the things we're gonna talk about today, we're gonna talk about what exactly community fit market fit is. Obviously, if you've been with us throughout the rest of the day and the other sessions, you have a really strong foundational knowledge of what product market fit is. How you can start using that for your current work, for future work, or for anything that you're thinking about. But we want to think about how community is different, how you can determine if it even exists. And then when we're looking at that, what does that role and ROI look like for community? If you want to start a community, why do you want to start a community? What kind of ROI can you be thinking about? What kind of metrics and KPIs do we need to be considering when we're thinking about this kind of work. And if you're thinking about, if you're on this call and you're thinking about building a community and you don't know where to get started, we're gonna have that conversation. So let's go ahead and get the elephant in the room. I know that this is specifically for a product market fit, but it's never more important to think about what community looks like, whether community is your product or whether community is that strategic advantage if you're using community as a moat. For, for your specific product. It's really important to think and consider what that looks like and how those things differ. So when we're thinking about this, we're obviously, we know the ground rules of product market fit. We understand that that value prop, it needs to answer a clear need in the market. Obviously, your solution is, is really the answer to someone's question, something that they're currently challenged with. There's a lot of really great ideas and there's a lot of buzz where they talk about businesses that are a solution in search of a need. They think they have a great solution because— and because they think it's a great idea, they haven't really done that due diligence to make sure that there's actually people who need that, who would actually be able to utilize that to give them what they need. And so when we're thinking about this work, it's really incredibly important to look beyond the the shininess of the idea itself. Is there actually a reason why this needs to exist? Is there someone who wants this? And is there someone who's willing to pay based off of that? And so when we're thinking about the product, we have to make sure that, yeah, the features may be great, but if it's not in line with the price that the market's willing to pay, then you're also not going to be successful. You really need to have that sweet spot as it is. To make sure that the features that you're providing and the price that you're that you're setting that product to aligns with what that that market demand is, so that when they see your product, they know that's what it is, and they can't wait to give you money. And then that rule of forty: if you were able to survey the majority of the people that are your customers, if not all of them, how many of them are in a I absolutely have to have this? How many of your products would survive if there is an economic downturn and price becomes an obstacle? How much value, how much need is there for your product that when there are variables, and there are always variables, that someone doesn't think, if I have to start cutting things, this is one of the products I'm going to cut? So that rule of 40 and figuring out like, are 40% happy or 40% willing to cut? your product if they, if something were to happen or they weren't happy. And then NPS, obviously that voice of the customer is incredibly important, making sure that you are doing regular checkpoints to determine how happy people are. You might think you're doing a great job, but you don't determine that, your customers do. So making sure that you have a very strong feedback loop, you have an NPS schedule to ensure that you are essentially keeping yourself honest. That you understand what they're looking for and are you meeting those goals. So how's that different than community? Well, it's just slightly tweaked. When we're thinking about community, it's not that value prop, it's the community value prop. Is there— if you're building a community, is what your community providing what someone's needing? Now, your community may not have the same ROI or value that say a product does. A product is gonna automate something for you or it might make something easier for you. A community isn't necessarily gonna do that. What community gives is more of an emotional value, belonging, network, tangible opportunities to connect with other humans. And so we really have this difference of emotional connectivity versus tech connectivity. And so when we're thinking about community, you really need to think about How does value differ in this community, especially if you are leveraging community as a product, which we're seeing a lot in Web3 and NFT projects currently? And that value needs to align with the time investment. On the one side, we're thinking about price, we're thinking about features, we're thinking about what we're giving. But when we're thinking about community, community's an investment. I'm gonna go into this space, whether it's online or whether it's in person, and I'm gonna have to determine whether or not I'm able to do the desired behaviors and get the desired value that I want? Am I going to be able to connect with certain people? Am I going to be able to ask my questions? Am I going to be able to feel safe and understood? Am I going to be able to connect with other people? And for community, yes, you have that 40% for product where they might leave if there's a downturn, or they might, might be the first thing to cut if there's an economic crisis. But for community, You have to not only get them to come once, you need to get them to return. So it's incredibly important to figure out what does it look like? What triggers do you need to be able to get someone to join? But then how do you get them to return? It's a lot easier to get someone to join something with all the promises of what they can do there. It's a lot harder to get them to return once they've seen what's under the hood, once they've had that member experience. And then that voice of the customer. NPS is gonna be the same for both. You need to make sure that you're constantly having the voice of the customer, the voice of the community member at the heart of everything that you're doing. It doesn't matter how good a job you think you're doing. If they are not happy, if they are not getting the value that was intended for them, if they're not able to do things easily and conveniently and quickly or thoughtfully, that's gonna be an indicator that you're really just not hitting the mark.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free, and it only takes like two seconds. And you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
