Unlocking the Power of Your Long Tail: Building Advocacy and Community

Name: Unlocking the Power of Your Long Tail: Building Advocacy and Community
Uploaded: 2024-03-04T14:03:39+00:00
Duration: 31 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this conversational excerpt, the speakers discuss the strategic importance of the "free" or long‑tail segment of a product’s audience. They argue that…

4 Mar 2024 · 1 min

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In this conversational excerpt, the speakers discuss the strategic importance of the "free" or long‑tail segment of a product’s audience. They argue that responsibility for nurturing free users falls to founders and product teams, as sales and marketing teams are typically motivated only by direct monetization opportunities. The dialogue highlights the substantial size of a newsletter community—approximately 500‑600 k readers—and emphasizes that even non‑converting members serve as vital advocates. Over‑monetizing this long tail, however, could erode the community’s goodwill and undermine the broader ecosystem, a point illustrated with references to thought leaders like Lenny and Brian Balfour.

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And this VP of free thing, like it's gotta be founders working with product because no one else cares about the free. You can't expect the sales team to care about free, can you? You can't expect the marketing team to care about free, not unless they can immediately monetize them, right? Unless they can ram them into conversion. People, uh, ignore, abuse their long tail in the last 18 months, but your long tail is your, is it, these, these are your, even if they don't convert that much, they're your advocates. I mean, how many people read your newsletter? 500,000 people, right? Almost 600,000. Okay. 600,000. Now, not all of them convert, do they?
No, no. That's exactly how I look at it. It's kind of the same. Okay. Brian Balfour is—
what about the 590,000 of them that love Lenny that don't convert, right? If you over-monetize them, then your whole, then, then Lenny's empire, Lenny's community doesn't exist if you over-monetize them.