Conversation between Kevin "KD" Dorsey and Leslie Greenwood about building customer communities and brand evangelists. Key points: prioritize meaningful community design over blind scaling; use tools (e.g., Slack bulk DM/tagging) and tiered targeting to engage strategic advocates; evangelists can be amplified into a referral flywheel (Leslie cites referral-driven uplift); community requires ongoing investment—ideally a full-time community manager—and must tie to clear business outcomes (support, success, product feedback, content, or revenue). Practical early-stage advice: start with 10–20 ideal members, interview many (50–60) to identify the core, and activate advisor/ambassador lists when present.
Chapters
You know, I don't always need to worry about scalability. Let's do this right and then let's figure it out on the other side.
I hate that word. I hate how people focus on it, because people focus on scale, not success.
The other thing, and this one is, does have to do with the community, but it's. You wouldn't have to have a community. They do have an advisor program. Well, it's small, you know, is it for support, for success, for product, for content? There's many different types of community you want to build or is it just you want to build revenue through membership fees? There's got to be a business outcome, otherwise your community won't look last because your company will not continue to support it.
First of all, information's easy. Execution is not right. People pay you for the execution, they don't pay you for the information. So don't worry, you'll be fine there. Because the next part that I want to ask, right, it's an ugly question, but you'll get what I mean when I say ugly, which is like, how do you do this at scale, though, right? So, like, okay, like I am a company, right? Like, I've got 10,000 customers. Like, how. How do I build evangelists? Like, how do I engage at scale? How do I amplify at scale? How do I empower at scale?
Well, I'd say the first thing, if you have a community, it's going to be much easier for you because you can do that in mass. You know, there are tools that you can. I didn't know there were these tools. You. I can send a private DM to 300 people with a tag on it within Slack and tell them something special. I had no idea you could do that. There's technology for that. And so I can be very prescriptive. So that's one way to scale. Two is going back to your, let's see, what do you call it? Like, tiering? So who are your most important customers or who is your most verbal activist right now? So it's really thinking, we don't have to do that to everyone. There are strategic ones. Because my experience and my opinion is I make one evangelist, you're going to make 10 more. Those 10 are going to make 10 more, and then we're going to go from there. So if you do that right from the beginning, you're creating a flywheel of evangelists. And what happens is that is actually there's studies and statistics that if you are referred in. So I refer you somewhere, Katie, you join or buy, you're actually four times more likely to refer others. So just by coming in as a referral, you're more likely to refer. And so that's where we start looking at the compounding effect of doing that. Now there will always be maintenance. You know, you'll always be have. Someone will still have to be in there giving love to the community, giving love to your customers, ongoing. That could be your CSMs. They could do it. Just take maybe a slightly more personal approach. Another thing is, I mean, there's a time when scalability, it doesn't matter. I mean, I'm talking to a lot of earlier stage founders. I don't, you know, I don't always need to worry about scalability. Let's do this right and then let's figure it out on the other side.
Yeah, that's why, like I didn't want to ask the question, but I wanted to ask the question because, like, I hate scalability. I hate that word. I hate how people focus on it. Because people focus on scale, not success. They'd rather scale a bad community that have a successful smaller community. And so maybe I actually had this backwards. So it's kind of coming up in your answers. So it sounds like it should be community first, then evangelists, not evangelists first and then community. It's kind of been layered in your answers a little bit through it. So is that the right way to approach, to start with a community and then focus on evangelism, or is it the like, can you start with evangelists and go to a community?
I think you can go both ways. So one of the founders I'm talking about talking with, he has 10 early customers. He also has 200 people on the waiting list to get the product. Guess what we have, we have evangelists. We have evangelists waiting in action. So we're not going to build a community first. We're going to amplify and identify and get his evangelists going. Who Then we will build a community around it and then we can talk about the products, we can talk about the new releases and get everybody fired up. The other thing, and this one does have to do with the community, but you wouldn't have to have a community is they do have an advisor program. Well, it's small. There are a hundred people on the wait list to be part of the advocate or ambassador program. Guess what? Let's go activate those people. Let's tell them they're special, let's get them going and then let's use them to as references to close deals for the rest of the year because they're excited and they want to do it. We're just not tapping into their power. So there's. I think there's multiple ways to do it. I don't think it has to be through. Through a community. A community may come from it. If you do it right, people are going to want to be part of your community. But you don't have to start with that. Got it.
Okay, so then let's make that shift then, to community.
Okay, Right.
Of like. Because that's another word.
Right.
Build a community. It's like, what does that mean? Right. And I love the way you define it as community is helping each other. I made a mistake. I built a community against my even best wishes. Right. I didn't want to do it, but I got advice from some people like, oh, you got to build a community. So I built a community. Right. I built a Slack channel, and it was the absolute bane of my existence because it was not a community. It was open access to kd. It wasn't a community. Right. And so it was not the community helping each other. It was just me talking to people and people hitting me up. Right?
Yep.
So talk about how to actually build a community. Right. Where the community is helping each other. You mentioned in one of your earlier answers are like, customers helping customers. Right. Back to kind of how I talked about it in the intro, that how.
Right.
A salesperson is never going to talk about the how as well as a customer because the customer actually uses it. They actually do that. So let's now go through. Okay, well, how do you build a community? That one is engaging. Right. Because, like, you and I talked about this on the road. I'm like, I literally go into pavilion and that's it. Like, I don't go into any other ones. And even that one, I probably won't even go into that much if it weren't for the roadshow and the courses I'm teaching and whatever else. So let's talk about how to do this in a way that engages, that gets people involved, and, like, starts to become self sustaining.
Yep. Well, it's never going to be fully self sustaining. I think that's a myth to begin with.
Okay.
I had the pleasure of talking to Erica Kuhl, who, you know, launched the trailblazer community community at Salesforce. And I asked her when I was first looking at this, like, what's the one thing, like, if you looked at through all your community launches and you saw a thread through any of them, she's like there's probably a lot of things, but one thing is a full time community manager. It'll never, you'll never do enough that it's just gonna like go on its own. So I guess that's one first myth that this is an investment and it's a long term investment. So, you know, some of the things, like I talked earlier, it's like, what are the values of the company, values of the community? You know, what will be your competitive advantage over other communities? So how are you going to differentiate yourself then? What challenges do your community members have that you're going to be able to solve? So you have to continually give value. You don't give value once, you have to continually to give value over time. I love this, I think I heard it from somebody else on LinkedIn. But there's a difference between giving value and received value. So I can give you all the value, but if you're not receiving it, you're not attaching it to the community, it doesn't matter. So it's like, what is the received value and how are we going to make sure they receive the value? And then we got to start with 10 to 20 people. If we're starting from scratch. I want you to list 10 to 20 ideal community members and then tell me what about them makes them ideal. I want you to talk to all of them and maybe you talk to more like I have another one. They're going to probably try to talk to at least 50 or 60, but then of those 50 or 60, if I were going to take, take those 50 and like, if I could just clone all of them, who are the 10 to 20 people that I want in my community? I mean, I could tell you from Pavilion, I could name 10 to 20 people right now that if I could clone every single one of them, I'd make the best community ever. And maybe I wouldn't have to do a lot of work because I know they already understand, they understand the values, they understand what they're getting and what they're giving. And then the other thing to think about is the business outcomes. So people say I want to do a community, but they don't think about what are the business outcomes. If you're a product community, is it for support, for success, for product, for content? So there's many different types of community you want to build or is it just you want to build revenue through membership fees? So you really have to, there's got to be a business outcome, otherwise your community won't last because your company will not continue to support it, Sam.
