Ultimate Guide to Community-Led Growth with Kyle Poyar, OpenView

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I think a caveat that I'll just share is that folks shouldn't build community on the basis of what KPIs it's going to improve for you. You need to build a community with and for your users or your audience. And so if it's really explicitly about your own objectives, the kind of counterintuitive finding is that you're probably never actually going to meet your objectives because it needs to be actually community.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more.

Hey folks, Lloyd Lobo here, co founder at Traction and Boast AI. Today's Traction webinar is brought to you by Boast AI Launch Academy in partnership with Vanhack. Extend your company's hiring budget with VanHack School of 400,000 remote engineers at a lower cost than local hires companies like Dapper Labs 1Password Brex and Dually. Hire great engineers with Manhack and check out their free virtual hiring fair September 20th to 22nd and get to meet hundreds of remote engineers that could be great for your company. I'm super excited for today's session. Kyle's tweet prompted this. He said, in the past, software companies established their brand bonafide the old fashioned way through marketing. Now users are the brands people respond to. People look to folks they trust for advice. Basically, brands of yesterday were built on what they told the world about themselves and brands of the future will be built on what the community says about them. I've been a big fan of Kyle. The way I describe Kyle is he is a one man SaaS gardener and he was recently a keynote speaker and hosted a couple of great sessions at our in Person Traction conference in Vancouver. Kyle Poyer, partner at OpenView, thank you for joining us again.

Yeah, excited for more collaboration.

That tweet. What prompted that tweet?

There's been a lot of talk lately about community led growth, a buzz where everyone wants to build a community these days. And I tried to step back and think about what's changed, why is this getting to be so popular, what's different about the world and what's different about building companies and reflecting on it. We're in a new era of product led growth. Product led growth was coined about six years ago by my colleague Blake Blake Bartlett. And it's this idea of building products for the end user, really leading with self service experiences, allowing folks to try before they buy and then expand from the bottom up. In this current environment, it's fascinating to see companies really take that ethos of product led and take it to as far as it can go. And so increasingly folks are saying, hey, a PLG strategy actually means a lot more than we thought it meant. It means that now users are going out, they're discovering products. A lot of times the products fit within their existing workflow or embedded in their existing tools. Rather than forcing them to go and seek out a new destination. These products are making it easy for citizen developers or individual users to customize or create their own apps, create their own experiences, to create the tech stack that they want to see, even if they're not a software developer. And then because folks have really built exactly what they want, they really feel attached to these products like they had a hand in developing them. And so they go to bat for the products that they love, they talk them up, they share their notion set up on Twitter, they tell their friends. And so they not only spread the products that they love within their organizations, but they really build a community around the products that they love. And then that becomes the foundation for ongoing, really healthy growth, is that users talk to other users and all of a sudden that the users are essentially the face of the brand, more so than the company's marketing or PR team. And so it's been fascinating to just see this. It's really like the story of PLG playing out to its natural conclusion.

And community is not a new thing, right? So if you look at it this last two years, so many VCs have reached out to me and friends like, hey, talk to us about community, give us your playbook. We effectively boast was bootstrapped to eight figures in revenue with building this traction community. And I'm like, hey, if you're asking for community in 2022, you're already too late because you're looking at, hey, how do I turn this to drive more leads, right? And if you look at some of the greatest companies or iconic brands out there, even non tech, you look at Harley Davidson, they almost went bankrupt in the 80s, then they came back and rebuilt the company around the culture of an ethos of community, starting with Harley, writing clubs and in person. And then if you take that to HubSpot and Gainsight, they create categories with community. Like before they even had a product, they had the inbound community, they had the customer success community. And that drove product in a big way because they were enabling their audience to become successful without a product or service. And then if you also look at it, yesterday's innovation in a way always becomes today's option and tomorrow's commodity, right? Like you look at the gps, it was a new thing, you couldn't get your hands on it and then it became an option and Today you got CarPlay and you don't really need it. But my philosophy from studying all these people is if you build a community, you won't become a commodity. You'll constantly get those raving fans who give you the feedback to make your product better and like you said, go to bat for you. So I love that building that audience and that community that goes to bat for you. Let's dive a little bit here. You said community is an incredible multiplier on a PLG strategy and can be applied to nearly every PLG business. What are some areas of business community impact? Marketing, products, cs, finance. Let's dive into some of those.

Ideally, it could impact just about every metric and function in a business. Although I think a caveat that I'll just share is that folks shouldn't build community on the basis of what KPIs it's going to improve for you. You need to build a community with and for your users or your audience. And so if it's really explicitly about your own objectives, the kind of counterintuitive finding is that you're probably never actually going to meet your objectives because it needs to be actually community driven. That said, when we see successful communities, they first and foremost help with tapa, funnel your users, go help recruit new users, they share your product with other people, bring folks in to hear about your brand and all the great things they can do with your product. I find it's really helpful for activation and time to value because your Users provide support for other folks. They build templates, they share how they see value in their products, which really helps inspire other people. And it helps them both have peace of mind that the products need to use, but then also helps them understand if there's an infinite number of ways to use a product. For instance, like Airtable or like Notion or like webflow, if you have someone that you trust, has a setup or has a kind of template, or has a playbook that really motivates you, all of a sudden you've been able to copy that playbook as opposed to starting it all from scratch. So you get to value a lot faster. I also tend to find it's great for customer support because your users are able to help other users by sharing best practices, sharing how they got unstuck when they ran into certain issues. And then I think the last thing is that because there's so much conversation that happens around community, you're actually creating a lot of user generated content that helps your product get found by folks outside of the community through SEO, through organic search, that kind of thing. And all of that produces lower customer acquisition costs, better conversion funnel metrics, and then hopefully better retention dynamics as well. So an overall much more kind of efficient go to market motion or unit economics for a company that's really doubling down on community.

Yeah. And if founders and companies are jumping on it and looking at for a 2, 3, 4 month ROI, I almost tell them like, don't do it. You can't build and scale a community in two, three months. It's not like running ads or putting SDRs on it. You got to look at your community. I feel like a product led motion in its own right. Maybe picking one activity to get people to rally or engage around. Maybe it's an event, maybe it's a webinar series, maybe the podcast, maybe it is a forum, whatever it is. But people should come in and be onboarded so they get an aha moment and they want to come back. Like what brings them in? What gets them to keep coming back? What gets them to bring their friends? And then the money follows because you get that brand love and you keep hearing about it everywhere. So I like that it ultimately impacts finance, but it's likely not a first three, six months thing.

Absolutely. Yeah. I think a lot of folks jump straight to all right, we need a slack forum, or like we need X. And they jump to what the answer is when the best way to start is to understand, hey, what actually is needed by the folks that you're trying to serve, what are their pain points? Like how can you add value to their lives? And it might be actually that there's existing communities where these folks already live, but these existing communities are not fully serving their needs. And so you could actually be a truly trusted voice within communities where folks already live rather than starting your own. That is normally a more efficient or like faster way to see results from community. But then when you start unpacking, all right, if users don't have this community, maybe we're starting a new category. So like we're HubSpot. We want to create this term inbound marketing. We want to help people understand how to do this. You need to really provide a way to help connect users with their peers. So people that are trying to do it in other organizations share best practices, amplify the voices of those thought leaders that everyone really looks up to and you essentially play the role of connector, connecting people to the essentially skills, the resources and the people that they need to be successful. And the whole thing is it's not necessarily connecting them to your product, it's about thinking about the broader way that you can add value to these folks working lives. And it's usually really hard to bite off all of that at once. And so start with a wedge that you can deliver, you can get people to really trust you and then ideally build with your community. So what are people raising their hand for? What are they asking for help with? Do they want to get involved and contribute? And how can you enable them to really own the community and build it out on your with you rather than thinking of it as something that you're building top down, for example. And just one small example, I have been noticing that a lot of software companies are struggling with usage based pricing. It's been a hot topic lately. It's not something that's super well understood and requires changes to how you run the business, how you manage rev ops, how you do billing, how you forecast or predict your business. There's so many changes and a lot of folks kept reaching out to me asking for help or answers for certain questions. But then the questions really became, it became clear people wanted to talk to other people that have been in the same situation and they didn't necessarily need answers. They wanted to commiserate, they wanted to talk through, hey, I'm considering A versus B. What do you think about it? And so instead of yeah, thinking about it as something that hey, we've got to write a bunch of content or got to have a bunch of answers for people, I just Decided to collaborate with some of these people that were raising their hand and start a community for executives and at company scaling with a usage based model. And we're now up to hundreds of folks. It's super active group, we meet once a month. The engagement level is extremely high. But it's not because I had an idea that I wanted to start this community. It was because people were really craving it and I really listened to what people were asking for and the community was a solution to that real need that existed.

As I studied a whole bunch of communities from Harley Davidson to Nike to HubSpot, the one thing I found is when you don't have product market fit or in the early days, communities are formed around practice, right? Like usage based pricing, you're helping people understand and become better. At usage based pricing or HubSpot, there's no product there. They're helping people become better marketers, helping them go online. Like I'm an engineer and my first job was in product. But because it was a startup, I needed to learn marketing. And everything I learned about online and digital marketing SEO was from HubSpot. They didn't even have a product. And one day then they took that feedback and they said, hey, we have a product now. And so I've seen that pre product market fit when there's no category existing. You're building a community around practice and then eventually you evolve in this product and then you have a sub community in there. But let's unpack this usage based pricing community that you build starting with first. What is a community anyway? Right? A lot of people have a huge audience and they call it community. But there's one thing you said there that I really love is people used to come to me, you're an influencer in the SaaS space and you had this massive audience. You built a lot of thought leadership around usage based pricing and so I guess that was an audience. But then you said people wanted to just commiserate and connect with each other and so then you form this community. So how is that the line then? People connecting with each other versus one to many?

Absolutely. Yeah. It cannot be top down. It's not my voice, it's not me trying to say, hey, from above, here's the best practice or here's what you should do. It's really giving people the chance to partner with one another. Find people that are passionate about this, find their tribe and get better at their job and what they're trying to do as a company. And so for this community specifically, I think key Learnings for me were it needed to be really high quality people. So it's invite only, it's a private group, wanted everyone that was part of it to be passionate about wanting to be part of it first off and to be the kind of person that other people would want to meet, want to learn from. And so everyone actually plays a dual role of both having experience that they can share back with others and trying to learn from others. And so I think this was a key thing. It's not necessarily about the size of a group. In fact like too large of a group can get noisy and can actually get less and less valuable at scale. And so for me the goals were make sure to focus on quality over quantity, prove out that this can be really helpful for people and really start with this MVP of a relatively small group of people that's especially engaged and then have them really bring other people in and really listen to what they're looking for, what they need help with. And I can play the role, helping facilitate, helping bring in experts or helping nominate folks from the community to lead workshops or lead virtual sessions for other people. But it's not my voice. It's trying to listen and take what's happening from the members themselves and then really provide resources or that, that facilitation to make it all happen.

What is the community called?

It's the UBP Mastermind group, but it's not online, there's no website. It's really specifically a private group because also a lot of these companies you're talking about a publicly traded company that has a usage based model, they don't necessarily want their struggles or like what they're going through to be shared with the rest of the world. And so I think a lot of learning for me was if I was thinking about it for my personal objective, right. It would be, hey, let's make this as big as possible. It could have a brand impact for open view. Right. But that's not actually going to be what the community wants and what helps them achieve success like in their companies and in their specific roles. So that hence making it something that is really limited to the people that want to be involved and allowing people to feel like they can have trust with the other members of the group.

Fantastic. Yeah, I like it because you had nail it, then scale it right in the beginning. Do small make a small group of people very happy. So your maniacal focus on an icp, that's very specific and there's some overlap that and perhaps as this scales and there are more UBP professionals in the world, then you can have a sub community that's a funnel for everyone and then you still have this very small focus group. But how did you seed it in the beginning? And when you say mastermind group, what activity did you use to bring it in the beginning? So like how did you like nail who these people are going to be and how do you get them interested? And what was that key sort of event or activity that you brought people together and then sustained it?

Well, it was really a no, maybe yes kind of approach. Like my default was don't do it, don't waste your time. Plenty of other things on my plate, like it's something that I wasn't trying to to push on anyone. In fact, if it didn't work out I was going to be that I didn't have to do anything. But it's something that I was asked by multiple people about this. Kept coming up on calls with folks. And so then I pinged about 20, 25 folks in my network who had maybe reached out to me about usage based pricing or who had been talking about it externally. And I just sent them all an email that said, hey, can I hear questions about starting a group for folks that are really passionate about this topic? A, are you interested in being part of it? And no is a totally acceptable answer. B, like what specific topics would you want covered and like what would you be trying to get out of it? And then C, are there any other people in your network that you would want to nominate to be part of it? I sent that out to about 25 people within a matter of hours, if not days. 80% of them responded. And these are executives and sometimes founders at successful companies. 80% of them responded yes, absolutely, when can we start this? And so it was really clear that there was a lot of pull from folks that wanted to be part of it. And then even when you're thinking about scaling it, I was pretty adamant about not wanting a Slack room because Slack in my experience is not built for some of these communities that are relatively large with we can get into this, but I don't think Slack was actually built to be super community driven. So my mindset was we're not going to have this Slack group. It's really just going to be we're going to meet up for zoom based sessions or in person sessions in local areas and not have an online component. But then folks kept asking, hey, actually like we want to meet outside of sessions and want to send a quick note that gets faster answers or Something that we can collaborate on. And we also want some of these questions and answers saved for future reference. And so folks pulled me into giving up on that idea of not having a slack group and we now have it. But I think that was an important learning for me was start with no, start with thinking that it's a bad idea and really listen to feedback and hear the pull from what folks are actually looking for and have that drive your decision making on where to go and how to scale it.

That is perfect because a lot of people think building a community is something completely different and it needs a whole set of new tactics. Building a community is not different than building a company or building a product. You start with an ideal customer profile, you nail down how to wow them, you start small, you make them happy and you get their feedback. You pull basically you get them to beg for something and you give them more and then you scale from there. But people expect community be something completely different and then ask, hey, should I.

Start a slack group or a Facebook group?

The world doesn't need the millionth Facebook or Slack group, right? You said it at the beginning. You can hop into maybe a subreddit or you can hop into an existing group and see what the underserved need there and create a community within there as a start. But I love this. You, you already had an audience and you polled your friends and they said it's a great idea, they invited more friends, you created this zoom based meetup and they had a great experience. You pulled even the topics from the audience. And so for the next one, you probably already had it scheduled and had more topics and now that turns into in person events. And then you got the community to beg you to create a slack group, which they could likely pull as a channel in their company slacks to collaborate and commiserate and message each other off between two events. And one of the things I also liked is the cadence, right? A lot of people, they say community, they do one webinar or the day one event and they stop. And I think the cadence is really important to keep that going. Touch on that a little bit on you guys. Cadence?

Yeah, the cadence. Still fine tuning it, but found that a monthly cadence works relatively well. It's enough frequency that it stays top of mind for people, but it's not overwhelming. It's not like weekly or bi weekly that it just becomes a chore for folks. I want people to be really looking forward to the next one. We also found hour long sessions work well because people want to dive into the details and we want to provide space for folks to not just ask questions of experts or what other companies are doing, but to actually share their experience as well. And so every session shouldn't be one speaker talking. It should be a really collaborative session at any time in order to facilitate that. And then we found that there's just an endless number of topics. And so I also went in being like, all right, there's maybe six or seven topics that are going to be top of mind that seem to be most popular. But what's funny is every time we have one of these sessions, about three or four new ideas get added to the list because there are things that folks start talking about that we have to shut down discussion on. And it's like, all right, we've got to schedule another session to keep going. And so we're constantly pulled in to make sure that we keep scheduling these sessions. And that to me is also a sign that this is something that people actually are finding value in and wanting to contribute to. And again, I'm constantly looking for reasons not to do it.

That that's amazing.

Pulled in to actually facilitate it.

Yeah, when people ask for more, I guess that's a sign of product market fit and you gotta say no a lot. I guess success is more what you say no to than what you say yes to because you say yes to everything and spread too thin and you become an sort of inch deep and a mile wide and then you please nobody. So I love that. What did your onboarding experience look like? What was the aha moment that when people, you got this invite, they signed up, you hosted that first meetup or mastermind and they were like, wow, I want to keep coming back to this, I want to bring my friends.

Well, it's non scalable right now to be totally transparent. I think we started with, yeah, we started with about 40 or 50 people and attendance at the first session. We got like 30 of the almost 50 to join an hour long zoom call, which is just really challenging to do. But then those members have invited other members. I've actually started getting like founders of unicorn companies reaching out, saying, hey, can I join this group? I've heard about it from one of the members. So when that happens, when we add new members, it's a manual process right now. So everyone has to be nominated by another member and they send me the nomination and then I personally onboard actually every new person share that calendar invite for the next session. We've got a kind of master planning document that has all of the members. It's searchable so that people can reach out to other people. And it has all of the backlog of past topics that we've gone through along with the learnings from them. And so the onboarding is kind of person to person right now. If we do try to aim to make it significantly larger, I'll need to rethink it. But for now, I think that personal touch, that personal connection, knowing folks, knowing me and really feeling like they're part of something, it goes a long way in terms of making sure people feel like they can contribute. This is something that isn't just going to be a community that they're part of in name only, but they actually feel like an engaged member of it. And then the other thing, whenever we have a new session, we try to make time for new folks to say hi, introduce themselves. We used to have time for people to do that at the beginning of the call. Now there's enough new people joining that people just introduce themselves over the zoom chat, but it's at least getting their name out there, getting them seen. And then the other thing is whenever we have community sessions, we ask everyone within reason to be on video. And that's something where it's hard to have 60, 70 people on Zoom on video. But people being able to see everyone else's faces, being able to ask questions live, it just creates more of that connection and it facilitates, I think, a lot of dialogue outside of the kind of formal sessions that we do. And so to me that's also important is that don't want this to feel like a webinar or that it's coming from top down. Really need everyone to be an active participant or they shouldn't be part of the group definitely.

So it's almost like maybe a clubhouse or a Twitter spaces chat where everyone gets to contribute, raise their hands, talk to each other kind of thing. Or you go like round robin, like how do you what is the format of that mastermind?

The format is we nominate someone to facilitate each session. So normally pick a topic and then someone that we think is particularly well suited to speak to that topic. And then I'll generally see the discussion with a few questions. But I'll email everyone in the group to add questions to a Google Doc going in and then there's still plenty of time for folks to add additional questions live or additional topics live. But that way we break the ice pretty well like people. It's helpful for people to hear some of the stories or hear the background of that facilitator and that additional Context helps people really consider what to ask about. But then at a certain point it really goes off the rails and so needs reining in. But initially it's going through those initial questions from the Google Doc and then all of a sudden it's oh hey, so and so actually has a really great experience with that. Could you speak to this question? Or hey, I know you asked the question, but maybe why don't you share additional context on how you're handling this today and what's working about it, what's not working about it. And so we're constantly trying to think about ways to make every session two sided. Even though there has been one person nominated to both facilitate and play the role of the expert, each time there's.

A few golden nuggets right there because you're facilitating two way interaction. But then a big part of sometimes why people do things in a community is you're like rewarding your champions or you're recognizing them and you're giving them leadership roles. So now it creates this whole, this person is facilitating and sharing. It creates that vibe that this person is given the soapbox or the stage and creates that recognition. Next time it's going to be me and that person gets to nominate the next person or whatever. So people are looking forward to that. That sort of maybe in a way gets people hooked, right? Like you look at Neriel's hooked model is what is the internal, external trigger, what's the minimum investment they make, what's the variable reward and then what gets them to keep completing that cycle? I try to look at it from that framework. That's amazing. So like if it was me, I'm part of a group and I see somebody nominated, then the next time I'm like, oh maybe hopefully someday I'll get to nominate and facilitate. But then this can go so many ways because as this grows, maybe there's a minimum viable size of mastermind group that when you go beyond that size it exceeds, it loses meaning, it diminishes the value. And so maybe you can nominate members from your group to create different submastermind groups and all of a sudden maybe at scale you have hundreds of Mastermind groups with 20, 30 people meeting on a regular basis and then eventually it turns into a big UBP conference with swag and retreats and next thing you know it's a few years down the road. Like exactly what Gainsight did, right? With customer success.

If we wanted to scale and get bigger, I think that's the only way, right? Because these need to be sessions need to be small enough and focused enough that people really feel like they're with their peers and these people get them. And so to me, chapters end up being natural. It's either by location or I think in a lot of cases it's by stage of company. Like the series A, Series B companies are really thinking about different things from the later stage companies or it's by type of company. So the company selling to a developer in the DevOps space in those businesses. Think about your AWS's. Usage based pricing is fairly commonplace. It's been around for a while, but there's other markets where it's new and they're educating procurement teams about how to buy in a totally different way from what they're used to. And so you can start thinking about interesting ways to segment these audiences into subchapters. And then all of a sudden these chapters are going to feel even more relevant, even more personalized to the members because they're talking to folks that get really viscerally the exact thing that they're going through.

I love it. You're involving your community and that drives more engagement and eventually keeps the door open for building or scaling it to something massive and potentially maybe a product idea or two comes out of it. And then we see you starting a company, a product led, community led, maybe product led, community led and maybe in the web 3.

I'm not that. Yeah, I feel like that is like the VC dream, right? All the, you got all the buzzwords in there. I think the other thing I would share, this is something that is a side project for me and it's just been driven by the need. But before this I think I saw personally the power of community through the work with product led growth. And so the PLG is a term that Open View coined and my colleague Blake coined in 2016. And initially we were like just super proud that we had the top page of Google. Everything about product led growth was something we wrote. We were like, we're killing it. We own Google. We are the thought leader in this topic. And it was, we thought that it was sort of this owned branded term and it was a really great way of showing that we were experts as a firm. It turns out like the reason why we had the whole first page of Google was because no one was talking about it, no one was searching for it, no one was writing about it. And that mindset only took us so far. Right. It was actually very limiting and we started to see other people wanting to get involved, wanting to talk about being a platform to enable product led growth, for wanting to be a consulting firm or a training firm that helped teach people how to do plg. And initially it was like, oh, they're going to take our spot, our number one position on Google. And so we were a little fearful, but eventually we really embraced that proliferation of voices and really tried to showcase the perspectives and amplify the perspectives of some of these other people and really try to foster a lot more community. Because the only way to make something really meaningful that changes people and gets people excited about something is to not really treat it as something that's closed or that it's limited, but to really be open about it. And I think for us that was a key aha moment of getting product led growth. To go from something that like was a term that we liked to now it's just something that's become like a household term in software. And that would not have been possible without so much work from so many community members that are really playing an active role.

Ultimately, openness is the biggest enabler of growth. And if you look at it, when multiple people are attached to the same mission, you go from category creation and community creation to something beyond, you actually become a movement. And you guys must be really proud and should be really proud that PLG is no longer a category, it's no longer a community, it's a movement. There's like thousands of people attached to that mission. And if you see what Nike did was celebrating athletes and athletics, they don't talk about the anti wicking technology in their shoes. They talk, they celebrate that. And now all the other brands are celebrating athletes and athletics and it's become a movement HubSpot similar with digital marketing. Right. And so I think that is a key thing is that openness because then you got multiple communities attaching to it and that mission becomes a movement Here I want to ask you, on your onboarding though, you had this new community, you said you personalize it. I love that personal touch. Because that personal touch also if you build this community of 1 to 20, 30, this mastermind group and then you recruit members, that is actually potentially scalable. That personal touch, 1 to 20, it's not scalable. 1 to 500 or 100. What are some specific actions you did in that onboarding to make people feel like, wow, this is, I don't want to disappoint Kyle, so I'm going to show up.

I have not cracked the code on that for sure, but all of these folks that are joining, they have someone that has nominated them, that's brought them in, that's introduced them to me. They have that connection.

Right.

They're already part of it because they already know people that are in it and who have spoken highly of it. They get that note from me and sometimes it's even hopping on a quick 15 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute call first. Not everyone's interested in that or we don't always have time, but when possible that's a great additional step. And then I think just that, that note from me about, hey, welcome to the group, here's what we have coming up next that you can be a part of. This is happening in two weeks. I'm going to send you the calendar invite. Here are your peers who are coming. I think just it's not that complicated of a thing to do. But even just that simple step goes a long way in getting people to actually commit and be part of it.

Yeah, eventually people build enough of a bond with you that they genuinely are like, I don't want to disappoint Kyle, I'm going to show up. When it's like this mass audience coming, then people drop off and they don't care. But you building that one to one connection is almost like an example of customer success to drive community retention. And building a community is so much like building a product if you take it seriously. So speaking of that, what are some metrics to measure KPIs? Like what should people stay on top of you recommend?

It's a great question. So I'd say first off, don't be overly focused on the volume of people in your community because I think volume itself is a bit of a vanity metric and we've all made that mistake at some point of this is getting really big. This is great. Focus more on engagement and how many members are actually engaged in the community, how many folks are coming up, showing up at events, contributing their voice, speaking in forums and so on. For software companies, once you've really nailed that, the next thing to think about and to look at are signals that you can invest further around community or that community is actually a viable business strategy. Because I think for a lot of folks it's really hard for community managers or community leaders to convince their boss that this is actually a great ROI and adding value to the business. So I start looking at other metrics that you can start to be able to make the case to the team about the business impact without obviously diluting the community. So can you show traffic to the website that started with a community as a referral source, for example, or can you show community qualified leads of folks that come sign up for your product or request a demo that actually they were initiated from the community as that first touch point rather than being touched by, for instance, marketing campaigns. And that to me is the holy grail. Because when you can start to demonstrate that, you'll often find these community qualified leads are they convert at higher rates because they already trust you, they already know you, they have better retention rates, and they end up just being just a really efficient code of market motion. And so if you can demonstrate that to your leadership or to your board, then all of a sudden there's going to be a lot of people that are much more interested in resources to expand the community. If you can't prove that it's something that I think that there's a chance that community becomes something that was a flash in the pan and can die out from neglect. Because a lot of times it's something that is harder to measure or it is something that feels amorphous or fluffy. And so at times like right now, when VC dollars are harder to come by, everyone's tightening their belt. There's a chance the community could be the thing that's on the chopping block. Unless you can tie that community activity to these More important business KPIs, your.

Community flywheel needs to work in parallel with your product motion. Whether it's a sales funnel or whether it's a PLG flywheel, you can map those community activities if you understand the buyer's journey from I don't know anything about this product to I'm a raving fan, I'm a retained referring user and you can map it. The issue becomes a lot of companies don't do multi touch attribution. The technology for multi touch attribution doesn't exist. So they then they say, oh, this person came to my website and they bought, so it must be like SEO driving it. But nobody knows that person came to maybe three webinars or attended an in person event and what was the dynamic that drove it? And so I think as technology gets better or some way to figure out how community contributes more tangibly, I think there's a technology play there eventually.

It's a great point. And the attribution on it is really challenging. I think there's ways to simplify it to give you a directional answer, even if it's not like the absolute truth. But even that's not the easiest thing to do, certainly. And as a vc, we are in the same boat. Right. Like for me, can I go to the rest of the partnership and say our community efforts around PLG or around usage based pricing have generated this many new investments? Probably not. There's so many touch points that go into us making investment and a company choosing OpenView as a VC. But there are signals that you can point to I think are indicative of whether or not it's having an impact with the target audience you're trying to reach. And so I suspect that other folks can get creative with how they measure some of these impacts to prove the result the community is having.

Definitely. There are so many ways.

Right.

A lot of people who say they can attribute is a cop out. I mean you do a webinar or you do an activity or in person conference or any community activity, you can see at least the simplest thing is the week of action that happens. Right. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out like a day before, after a few days before, after. And there are ways to track that impact. If you look at it from a we did X activities and why people engage with those activities, then you can assign points to each of those activities and multiply. There's like different ways you can come up with it. The hard part is the offline stuff, the brand stuff you can't like you said Jeff Lawson was on this ages ago and he said if you ab test and try to hyper analyze the data on everything, every website will become a porn site. What he meant by it is sometimes as a founder you need to have a little bit of conviction on what are the things that are good for the business long term that'll drive customer love and brand and not look at short term monetary gain because sometimes you just need to have that gut.

So another thing is document the wins. Right. A lot of times maybe anecdotal a sales rep goes, I just had a great conversation and so and so said they referred by X and they have been part of the community at webinars xyz. And so when you have those wins, even if the things that they're not necessarily quantitative, you don't have a B test around it. Being able to point to real stories and real life examples. I think it's something that folks understand and it can resonate with executives. So you can't rely 100% on anecdotes, but when you get those anecdotes, document them and make sure that folks know about them.

Yeah. And eventually you get to a point where you can institute tools like the testimonial IO Testimonial IO or other things where people will share, right? Or partner stack things like that, where people will share and you can track the value of the shared ability, right. Eventually, if you're really having people come hard on you to say, hey, do we cut community? Because I think that's the last thing you cut. If you cut community, you kill efforts that could generate maybe one, two years down the road. And then you get into this immediate motion of I need more SDRs, more AES and I need more sort of ad dollars.

And that's not sustainable long term, right? Yeah, absolutely.

To close this out, what are the different types of community strategies? Maybe with some tactical examples, you had a great graphic and I can use that in the show notes, but perhaps dive into that. The different types of community strategies you've seen with some examples.

First off, be active within existing communities. Sense that lying through, everyone wants to start with their own community. But if you're actually a trusted voice where your users are already hanging out, you can get more immediate rewards by leveraging an audience and engaged group that already exists. So especially if you're for instance, a Shopify merchant, being active within the. Or if you're selling to Shopify merchants, right? Or want to be on the Shopify app store, being active within the Shopify merchant community is a no brainer. Second is think about ways that you can connect users with their peers. And this is especially relevant if you have a new category or you're targeting a specific Persona that's maybe underserved. Just have a new approach to the market. An example of this that I love is Pocus's product led sales community. And to your point, they've actually started with more of a community of product led sales leaders, folks thinking about how to do product led sales. That even means they started with that community before they even had a finished product. And they learned from the community how to build a great product. And then the third thing is amplifying community creators. And so you want to look for those power users, those evangelists, those people doing innovative things, using your product in ways that you hadn't thought of and elevate their voices, right? Get not just the testimonial or the case study, but hey, can you take what they've done and turn it into a template or showcase their work so that other people can see it. And I think an example is Notion's template Gallery. They actually even let creators sell templates or Miro's Miroverse Community driven Template gallery. And then a final thing is Content is naturally, I think a great community facilitator, especially if it's high value, like thought leadership that people really respond to it and it really helps educate folks about how to do something. And content can be a good kickstarter for a community and build that audience, but it has to be really high quality, really thoughtful content. And that to me is digitalocean strategy. As it really started with, they treated their content as a product itself, really made high value content and then have turned that into much more user generated and community driven content strategy.

Fantastic. If you had to start your community over again, what would you do different?

I probably would have started it sooner first of all, and I would have. The biggest thing is starting it sooner and then I think the other thing is involve more people that are champions that are really advocating for it. Find ways to give them much more of an active role and do that earlier on.

Fantastic. Great session. Kyle. You're active on LinkedIn. Everyone knows you. You're a household name in B2B SaaS and tech. But where can people find you?

Folks can find me on LinkedIn and then the OpenView blog, or I've got a substack newsletter called Growth Unhinged that I publish once every couple of weeks. Got 10,000 community members on there, so be part of that. The Growth Unhinged group.

We'll share all the links. Kyle Poyer, ladies and gentlemen. Kyle, thanks so much for joining us. This was fantastic. A lot of great community nuggets and gold here for us to build and scale our communities. Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot. This is fun.

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