#335: Linda Lian of Common Room, on Navigating Foundational Pivots on the Path to Product Market Fit and Building a Pandemic-Age Startup Serving Modern SaaS Companies

Welcome to the Just Go Grind podcast. I'm your host, Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital. On today's episode, we have Linda Lian, CEO and co-founder of Commonroom, the first and only platform that gathers community engagement, product usage, and customer data into one interactive platform. Let's dive in. Linda, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Yes, Commonroom. There's so much to talk about with Commonroom. You kind of came out of stealth in a big way not too long ago. I'm curious, for people who aren't familiar with Commonroom, what are you doing with this company?

That's a good question. So Commonroom is an intelligent community growth platform. You probably don't know what that means, and I'll get into it a little bit. So at a high level, we allow modern SaaS companies, community teams, DevRel teams, CXOs, and revenue leaders to instantly connect their community engagement across all the channels where their users, their champions, their partners, their customers, their developers are engaging with them. And then marry that with product usage and revenue data. And this enables our customers to unlock intelligent insights that let them take action to grow happier customers, measure outcomes, and then unlock ultimately kind of growth and business impact, right? So we're currently used by many community-led growth companies across Web3, commercial open source, and PLG SaaS. Those are kind of the verticals that we focus on, including, I'm sure, a lot of names that have had differentiated community-led growth stories that everyone may be familiar with, like Atlassian, Asana, Chainlink, Metaplex, Webflow, Grafana, dbt, Figma, HubSpot, and many others. So yeah, our core users are community teams, DevRel teams, and then ultimately also revenue teams. So to go back a little bit into what community growth means.

For sure.

I think it's a relatively new concept in But you may have heard kind of, you know, that term on the rise. There's a fundamental shift happening over the last 20 years in how enterprise software is being distributed and adopted, in that it's now looking much more consumer-like, right? The practitioners and the users of the software have so much more power to decide what tools they want to use at work. And so these users are also more networked than ever before. They find out about new technologies to adopt from their friends and their friends on the internet. And so these conversations are happening everywhere where people like to convene, right? And I'm talking about chats like Slack and Discord, forums, you know, digital, you know, channels, social media, but also in person via meetups and conferences. So anywhere where your users, your customers, your champions are talking and talking about your product and talking about you, we consider that to be a company or an organization's community. And so the reason why community-led growth is taking such a center stage now is because for the fastest growing companies today, their users, right? Not some budget holder that's completely divorced from the product and doesn't really use it, but it's the day-to-day users that are really the biggest growth turbines for their business. And, you know, I think on the consumer side, and we all can relate to this, there's a huge shift in how people wanna interact and how they wanna evaluate technology, right? Like, if I wanna go look at a productivity tool, I'm going to go do research on the internet. I'm not going to go—

Of course.

And immediately talk to a sales rep, right? If I have a problem with something, I don't wanna send a ticket through Zendesk. I'm more likely to actually tweet at the company about it or go into a forum or go into Reddit and compare notes with my peers. And so all of these disparate engagement channels creates like a massive problem for modern software companies, right? If you're a developer advocate, a community leader, or a CXO, you can't control where these conversations are happening. The analogy I like to use is like, if you're not meeting your users where they wanna engage with you, if you're not having these conversations in these channels, you kind of risk being that person who's being like talked about out at a party where you're not there. And that's like such an existential threat to any modern brand. And so we're an intelligent community growth platform. We aggregate across all of these places where engagement and conversations are happening, and we marry it with a company's internal business data, right? Like product usage and revenue data. And so all of a sudden you have essentially this, we call it a digital relationship manager or a full kind of user 360, right? And then layer on top of that our workflows, our alerting, and you can take action on all of these insights. And you need to do this in order to compete and perform within how this shift in technology and how it's being evaluated and distributed is happening.

There are so many different touchpoints across that, which is what you mentioned, and which is why I say it's so useful to have something like Common Room. I'm always curious about the early days though, because you have this insight, this idea, You're like, okay, obviously there's some problems, some need in the market that you see. How did this get started though for other founders out there who are wondering? They see Common Room now, they're like, oh, they raised like a $32 million Series B. They've got great investors. They've obviously grown a lot. But in the early days, how did this get off the ground in the first place, Linda?

Yeah. I think for a little bit, I purposefully really wanted to be a founder. And so I was always interested in thinking about ideas, right? This is— yeah, I think when I was getting started, I was like, how do I get the idea? Like, what is that? Where?

Yeah, exactly.

And I was like reading all these things. Um, but looking back now, it was kind of a natural progression into realizing that I wanted to build for this problem. Um, so in 2016, I was a junior investor at an early-stage VC fund in Seattle called Madrona Venture Group. And, uh, I know everybody's excited about VC, but I wasn't a great investor to be clear. But one of the best things about the opportunity to be a venture investor is you get to dive super deep into industries and business models that are on the cutting edge, right? They're fundamentally reinventing the way that software is being built and distributed and adopted. And if you have kind of that learner mindset, it can be a really fun job. And so I got to see firsthand the rise of user-led and developer-led adoption within what we call product-led growth, right? It's developer services, it's commercial open source, it's blockchain. And so these early impressions that there was this seismic shift happening was really validated by my next experience leading product marketing for serverless computing at AWS. So at AWS, I was a part of a business unit that was very developer-led, right? We weren't selling into, like, some CTO or CIO tops-down. It was really about developers finding the tooling. It was improving their daily lives. They loved it. They were getting hands-on with it. And they were the ones that, you know, would discover it in a weekend hackathon and then bring it to their job at Nike.

Yeah.

And so, at AWS, because we realized that some of our most innovative services, we're kind of experiencing this game buster's growth, not through this traditional sales-led model, but rather through developer-led. We realized that we needed to go and support and have conversations with our developers where they wanted to engage with us.

Yep.

And so we spun up a Slack that grew to tens of thousands of developers. We, yeah, we were doing AMAs on Reddit and we started an entire kind of Reddit support program and we were really kind of going out into these new channels, if you will. And like I always say, like building a community starts with having a conversation, right? It's these authentic human connections where your community feels heard and supported and really that as a brand or as a company or as a product, you're there for them. And so even though it felt like it should be a win-win for our developers and our business, we had no tooling, right? Right. So there was nothing to tie anything we were doing in Slack or Reddit to any measurable outcomes.

That's tricky.

There was, yeah, we were building a champion program, which is now, you know, the global AWS Heroes program. And there was no tooling to go and find who our biggest advocates were, right? I had to go through Twitter and like manually try to find people who look like a good fit. And so, Nothing to enable this new engagement model was there. And a lack of that tooling really meant that our community members were often kind of screaming out into the void, right? They're in your Slack, you open the Slack, but nobody's responding to them. Like, that's not a good experience.

Yeah.

And then the lack of measurement, you know, like AWS is a very data-driven place. When I'm in exec reviews about the programs I'm building and I can't really tell them how this is accruing to the business or any measurable metrics or KPIs, that's a problem.

Yeah.

And so I think all these things came together where I realized that this was something I experienced, which is like idea advice 101, but also something I was really deeply passionate about and a future and a vision that I knew with certainty was going to happen and I wanted to build for it.

Okay. With that, there's so much to unpack, but with that too, this idea you have obviously perfect fit with what you wanted, your passion and like kind of the need that you saw from this. Take me through those first initial customers when you decide, okay, we wanted to make this into an actual company to solve this problem. Getting your first customers, getting your product out there initially, because I mentioned earlier that I kind of came out of stealth with a big announcement of the raise. But take me through the early days of then just getting your first customers even for this, because you had this idea, obviously it's useful and it's going to— on a grand scale, especially for people who have these massive communities already or massive amounts of customers. Take me through like initial kind of launch and then early customers. I'm curious about that too.

Yeah. Um, so because I had been in the ecosystem, right, I was building for myself, I was building for companies that I knew or I knew people at those companies. That's where you start, right? And so I think what we did is we built our community of what I called design partners before we ever wrote a line of code. And getting seed funding helps here because your investors are also very well connected and they can also start to connect you with an early set of interested parties.

Yeah.

But obviously getting a door to open doesn't mean you can keep the conversation going. And so what we did is we got a group of top community leaders together, beg, borrow, steal, ask everybody, right? I love it. Ask for intros, laying out on the sidewalk being like, do you have 15 minutes to talk to me? That was very much that early stage. But what I did, or what we did, is we showed Figma Design Mocks. We talked about our vision. We found people who were excited about it, right? They had a problem. They were experiencing the same problems that I was facing at AWS. And we showed them Figma design after Figma design, and they were kind enough to keep giving us feedback. And it wasn't until almost a year later that we ever wrote a single line of, you know, code that eventually became our product today.

Yeah.

So we were in, yeah, we were in this discovery phase for, you know, 6 months to 12 months. And I think during that phase, you can expect your idea to actually evolve and change. And my story, so little known fact, I think every founder on that journey to product market fit has moments where what they thought they wanted to build fundamentally was not what customers needed. And so we actually started, I started Commonroom to build a better community forum. Like, I was like, oh my gosh, Slack sucks. Like Reddit, you know, we don't get any metrics there. Can we build something that's like a Slack forum baby, right?

Yeah.

Like that was kind of my original idea. And I remember like the early design partners we had were excited. Like they also had the same problem that I had, but I'll never forget the day when the director of community at a fast-growing design tool company said to me, she was like, Hey, this whole Slack forum thing to rule them all sounds great conceptually, but I don't actually need another place for my community. I have too many places. I have Slacks, I have Discords, I have forums. I'm doing training and certification. I'm engaging with people on social media.

Yeah.

I'm doing in-person meetups, digital events. What I need is something that ties all of this together so that I have a place and my team has a place to get actionable insights and report on outcomes. And the day she said that, it was like, oh my gosh, realization. Right? And that's not even the original idea moment. That's like a year after the original idea moment. And we've been on that path ever since. And so it's okay for things to change and evolve. I think what's most important is that you're reacting and responding to what your community is telling you that they need and that you're finding partners who you know, you can build a relationship with and will be honest with you.

Okay, with that, Linda, you're a year in, you get this feedback that, okay, this is actually the direction we should head. Making that decision to actually do it, and what did that mean in terms of the company shifting then? Like, did you already have things built prior to that? I'm just kind of curious about that transition, because I know founders are going to hear this and be like, yeah, like, we hear about these light bulb, like, pivots or changes in strategy. Just take me through a Like what that looks like for you and Commonroom?

Yeah, so I think that we decided to do this kind of directional shift the day after, like pretty much the day after my 2 engineering co-founders joined the company. So I had kind of been building my team over the course of a year, bringing on all of my co-founders. And so they had joined to build something else. Um, but I think at that point, you know, what I did is I presented all the data. Uh, although this conversation was the linchpin, there had been many signals over the course of discovery that was kind of pointing us to this being the sort of problem that we really wanted to go solve.

Yeah.

And, um, at the time, I think our team was like my 3 co-founders and our founding engineer. It was like not very— the N was small, right? The number of people I had to convince was small. So I had individual conversations with all of them. I find that in more sort of larger strategic decisions that you wanna discuss, kind of going one by one is really helpful. And I just told them about everything that we were hearing from our design partners in our community. And I said, hey, and some of this is gut, right?

Yeah.

That all founders have or should listen to their gut on a lot of things. I was like, I think this is the direction we need to head in. And to everyone's credit, they were like, yes, let's do it. And again, at that point, we had still not written a line of code that ultimately became our product. We were kind of experimenting and futzing around, but there hadn't been deep investments made. And I can imagine that those pivots Where you may have a product and you're like, Slack, they were building a game, then they were building a chat. I imagine those are potentially more dire and difficult.

I agree. That seems like a much different situation from yours. Luckily that you found this out early enough. You had that kind of moment, which is incredible. Take me through from that then. So where you are today, like I said, I mentioned the raise and everything, and you've come a long way. What's fueled the growth? of Common Room to this point? Why has this kind of grown so fast over the last bit of time?

Yeah. So obviously there's growth from the things you can control, right? Building an incredible product, working with amazing visionary customers and kind of building the company brick by brick. But I also think of this analogy that I've heard before, which is like, building a startup is kind of like being a surfer. You're kind of like paddling and building, and you're like stacking those bricks, like brick by brick, and you're paddling and building. And at some point, like, this wave appears on the horizon, and you're like, okay, I better be ready to catch that. And then the wave passes, and you kind of get this, you know, whatever it is, um, fundraise, like PR.

Yeah.

And then you kind of go back to like the paddle build phase, and then hopefully another wave comes. And that's That's kind of the cadence of building early stage. I'd say that there's been 2 interesting waves that have happened to us, and you can't control for these, right? And one of them is just getting started, but the first one was COVID. Oh, that one too. Yes, we closed our seed round the day the markets tanked and shut down. And so, yeah. So we've been building, like, we're very much a pandemic-age startup in that most of us had never met in person. Like, a year into working together, none of us had met in person, right?

Yeah.

So while at the time it felt very dire, the pandemic showed organizations how digital relationships can be just as strong as real-world ones. and can even give birth to new organizational paradigms like DAOs, right?

Yeah.

And everything we're seeing with crypto. And so companies who could no longer engage their community, their users, or their customers in person shifted to digital engagements on chats, forums, and much more. And so you had this kind of Cambrian explosion of like digital omnichannel conversational engagement, right?

Yeah.

Between community and companies and organizations. I think the second wave is actually this current market correction that we're experiencing. So when you're a company that's been valued at X dollars based on the size of your community, right?

Yeah.

The size of your Slack, the number of GitHub stars, whatever, it's suddenly become the number of like organic users on your free tier, like whatever it is, it suddenly becomes way more urgent in today's environment as multiples have corrected that you understand and can better serve the needs of that community so that you can transform your community over time and potentially much faster than you wanted to into a way to grow happier customers. and grow your business. And so what happens is CXOs are realizing that all of their amazing community members that have been engaging with them and getting adoption, getting engagement, like using their free tier, using their open source project, all of that, it suddenly turns into a nice— from a nice to have to a need to have. to ultimately transform your community into a thriving customer base, right? And to keep growing that community because it becomes one of your biggest levers for growth. And to also understand that community because again, like if you can't understand it and you don't have visibility into it and you don't have the data intelligence, you can't affect it. And so these 2 things have happened to us in the last 2 years, which, you know, I think are little waves in the larger macro tide of, you know, every single modern organization really moving towards more of a community-led Growth model.

You know, to your point of what you mentioned, I think it's like having this community, all these people is an asset, but in terms of getting the value out of it, you need something like Common Room or something to actually bring it all together. And we, we run a community at Vitalize for angel investors. I'm opening a community for founders and it's like thinking of the exact thing too. We were like, okay, how do you bring it all together? All the different tools we're using, how do you make it all streamlined and everything? How's it tie back? It's like, there's so much that goes into it. And also I must say from 400 podcast interviews, I don't think anyone's ever mentioned riding the wave and like That analogy. So props to a new one, Linda. I appreciate that as well. And I know we're getting close to time. So last thing I'm just curious about with Commonroom, you mentioned some things, right, in terms of customers early on. Who are the kind of ideal customers, use cases? I just wanna hear a little bit more about that before we kind of close things.

Yeah, we work with some incredible customers, right? Like Figma, Grafana, Cribble, HubSpot, Atlassian, Asana. I would say they fall into 3 main buckets today. One is Web3. We work with some incredible folks there like Chainlink and Metaplex and others. Another is commercial open source. So that's your dbt Labs, your Grafana Labs. And then there's also, and I would say developer tooling broadly falls in that. And then the third bucket is what I would consider to be like PLG SaaS. So Figma, right? Asana, HubSpot, really the SaaS businesses that are very community-centric and user-led. And so we're servicing these 3 buckets because our platform does 2 main things, right? The first is we enable a community manager, a dev rel practitioner to actively engage and nurture the community through human conversational automations and workflows. So you're almost like offloading a lot of that manual work. So for example, we have an amazing way to greet every single member that comes into your community where you set the message, it's from you, it's in Slack and it's a DM. And that has increased engagement, that has increased a feeling of belongingness. And I think it's really cool how with AI and advancements in technology, we can have more human and conversational relationships that are not bot-driven or transactional, right? And then so there's an aspect of how do we help people grow, nurture, and engage their community? Because that is ultimately the heart of it, right? And then secondarily, we tie all of this community engagement back to the business and we will interface with adjacent customer-facing teams like sales or customer success or other parts of marketing to bring the entire organization closer to what their users and community members need. So if there's a community member who's raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm really having trouble with adopting this thing because I'm running a POC and I'm doing an evaluation. Well, we would want to make sure that the sales team or the sales engineering team can help that person within the context of what they need help on, right? So it's all about meeting your users where they are and having the intelligence to essentially like triage their needs across your organization. And again, like bring everyone kind of closer to the user. If you think about what sales folks look at in Salesforce, it tells you very, very, I mean, it's more so like a log of productivity. It tells you literally nothing about what your users actually need or who they are, right?

Yeah, obviously there's a need for this. It's very clear. Even my research beforehand, I'm like, oh, I get it. It makes total sense what they're doing, especially with how you could say how hot community is now. But people are thinking about community way more. I hear it all the time now, even in venture side of things. How do we leverage our community? How do we build our community? It's become buzzwords in many ways, but obviously it's a value from that if you can extract that and do it in a good way. So I love what you guys are doing in there as well. Where's the best place for people to learn more about Commonroom and connect with you, Linda, if they'd like to?

Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter. I think it's Linda M. Leanne. Definitely try out our product. You can try it out for— we have a perpetually free tier, especially for small communities and small teams. So Nice. Immediately click, click, click, hook it all up and you'll be getting insights and all the goodness of our platform right away. And then of course, please join our Uncommon community. It's full of amazing DevRel leaders, community managers, community leaders, and we're all sharing knowledge and building this playbook and this space together.

Thank you so much, Linda. I appreciate the time.

Thank you. It was great.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Just Go Grind. If you want to follow along on the socials for all things Just Go Grind and with me as well, You can find Just Go Grind on Instagram and Twitter @JustGoGrind. You can find me on Twitter @JustinGordon212. Find me on Instagram @JustinGordon8. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye.