As regulation and platform policies make it more difficult to track people across the internet, it has forced companies to rethink how to understand and get to know their customers. If they can’t stalk them surreptitiously, how can they gain a full understanding of their needs and wants?
The answer may lie in building or buying communities of individuals whose interests align with your company’s.
Many SaaS companies are doing just that, from big players like Salesforce and Hubspot to smaller startups, which understand the power of building a community of interested individuals who can answer questions, act as quasi-evangelists and give the company honest feedback about products and services.
The rise of Slack and Discord are related to this trend because both make it easy to set up a community for like-minded folks to gather and chat online. It certainly requires moderation to avoid muddying your brand with misinformation or harassment, but generally, companies find this a cost worth paying to gain such unfettered access to customers and interested parties.
We spoke to a number of industry experts to get their take on this phenomenon and what it means for SaaS companies as they look for growth opportunities in a changing privacy landscape.
Community-minded
Many startups today are using communities as a way to drive interest and discussion in their early-stage companies long before they even have revenue. While this is particularly true for open source projects, which are community-centric by their nature, any startup can benefit from having a group of people discussing its products and services.
This is especially worthwhile for products focused on a particular group of users like developers, data scientists or analysts — anyone with a real stake in the product or service your company is offering. And the barriers to entry are very low with lots of free tools like Slack and Discord available.
Communities can also provide a place for startups to show that there is real interest in the company long before there are paying customers. In fact, having an active community on Slack or Discord can be a positive signal for venture capitalists thinking about investing in your startup. Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, said it’s definitely a data point he looks at, even more so than GitHub stars, especially for companies built on top of open source projects.
“User growth metrics on Slack or Discord indicate real user engagement for open source projects, while GitHub stars have turned into bookmarks for developers who wish to track interesting projects. Therefore, investors are likely to analyze Slack/Discord metrics rather than GitHub stars before funding open source projects,” he said.
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, said from a customer engagement perspective, communities are a great way to talk to your most interested customers.
“One of the things that has been accelerated with the pandemic is the need for companies to have direct channels and pathways for interaction and engagement with customers. … With third-party cookies eventually going away and platform changes from Apple completely upending the ability of companies to digitally stalk us with their ads, the art of building actual meaningful relationships with customers has moved up the list of priorities,” Leary told me.
Leary says if you build authentic relationships in these communities, they have the potential to be much more valuable than customer tracking ever was. “Those companies able to build strong communities around their brand, where the community is treated as an equal and not just a series of transactions, will be the ones better equipped to succeed as we move deeper into a [post-tracking] world,” he explained.
Value from your customers
Bevy co-founder and CEO Derek Andersen, whose company built a virtual conference and community events platform, said having people talk about you in a community setting is so much more powerful than hearing it from the company itself because these are actual customers without a stake in the success of the business.
“Building community is the most authentic way to speak to a customer and to market to a customer because you can’t force what someone in the community says about you. So the truth will come out, and it’s a much more trusted source than coming from a sales team,” Andersen explained.
Neil Jain, partner in the high-tech and software practice at digital consultancy West Monroe, said these communities also help reduce customer service calls because you often have users helping users.
“It allows customers to learn from and share with peers, get leading practices, resolve issues quickly, etc. It’s also a vibrant source of product feedback. Lastly, it helps deflect some support volume and lower costs. We are seeing software companies foster communities as a means to build demand for their products and product category,” Jain explained.
In a 2020 Harvard Business Review article titled “When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage,” authors Jeffrey Bussgang and Jono Bacon describe community as a way to speak directly with customers and generate value directly and indirectly.
“While communities generate tangible value for businesses — such as content, events, online advocacy and marketing, technology production, customer support and education — it is the intangible value that members derive from the experience that makes these environments truly ‘sticky,’” the authors wrote in the HBR post.
Buying versus building
Companies who want to build their own communities have lots of options that are popular with startups and established companies alike. As the HBR article states, there are so many free or low-cost tools available to get started easily:
“With the ground seeded, many cheap, scalable tools for building communities both digitally and locally have been developed. These include Discourse, Slack, GitHub, Meetup.com and WordPress, all of which make it practically effortless to convene and engage like-minded individuals and, as a result, are increasingly popular,” the authors wrote.
Bevy agreed that tools like Slack and Discord are great starting points because they are low friction and provide an easy way to start building a community, but he said that larger organizations are probably going to outgrow them over time.
“I think Slack, Discord or Facebook Groups are great places to start, and most people start there. They have a very low barrier to entry. They’re free. They have an embedded user base, but most enterprise communities [eventually] scale beyond those platforms,” he said.
He said that’s because companies require features like their own brand, being on their own domain and single sign-on.
But if you have the resources, sometimes you may want to simply buy a community that is related to your products. That’s what Salesforce did when it bought The CMO Club in March 2020. Jon Suarez-Davis, SVP for marketing strategy and innovation at Salesforce, said that the company successfully built Trailblazers, its customer community, which is focused on users helping users and more formal training modules. With that in place, the company began thinking about how to get more direct access to C-suite-level marketing execs.
But building such a community as a vendor could prove difficult. While many companies have executive roundtables with key customers, they were looking for something a little more than that. They recognized how long it had taken to build Trailblazers, even with a large and engaged built-in customer base and the Dreamforce customer conference to help drive membership.
They turned their attention to the idea of buying but wondered how different buying a community would be from buying another tech company, and they mapped out a clear path regarding what they were looking for.
“We really had a great disciplined approach about what we were acquiring and what we were not. We were not acquiring a technology platform. We weren’t acquiring reach or scale. What we were looking for was the most engaged community. And so, you know, we [settled] on acquiring The CMO Club,” Suarez-Davis told TechCrunch.
Salesforce saw an organization that gave it access to a group of key people who were in the very positions they were trying to reach as a company.
“We bought this because they were truly a group of very engaged growth leaders that had proven over a decade of coming together to help educate, inspire each other and solve their biggest challenges. And that really lined up with our values at Salesforce,” he said.
The challenge was to expand the group while letting them stay true to who they were. Suarez-Davis said they put the group on the Salesforce platform to help them grow as an organization but tried to stay out of the way in terms of the way the club operates. Since Salesforce bought the club, it has grown from 600 members to 1,400 today, with significant growth internationally in both Europe and the APAC regions.
While not every startup can simply buy an audience like a company with the resources of Salesforce can, starting a community is within reach of just about everyone. Free tools can get you started, and you can look to more sophisticated options as you grow.
But having the voice of your customers speaking on your behalf in an unfiltered way offers an invaluable communications link that isn’t possible when that message comes from your company. Building a community can give you that and more, and this is even more important in a post-tracking world.
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