Pre-PMF enterprise startups can turn customer advisory boards into evangelists
Camille Ricketts · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts · Dec 11, 2022 · at 34:27
Camille Ricketts, former Head of Marketing at Notion, explains how enterprise startups can structure early community efforts before achieving product-market fit.
0:00 / 0:35exact quote · 35.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Let's say that you're still on your way to product market fit and you're a strongly enterprise oriented product. I think that you have the opportunity to do customer advisory boards, which is really convening, like even smaller circles of ideal fit users. And making sure that they are connected to each other as well as you, and then incentivized to provide you with feedback understanding that they're really on the ground floor of this journey with you, and that they're going to be able to have influence over whatever you do in the future. Those folks can end up growing into your biggest evangelists”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Camille Ricketts
Community ubiquity de-risks enterprise adoption and enables upmarket expansion
“In terms of how I think about what it actually is, it's when your community helps you achieve such ubiquity and such name recognition that it actually allows you to start moving up market into the enterprise.”
Early-stage community builders should not prioritize quantitative metrics
“And actually one of my number one recommendations for anybody who suspects the community could be a big growth driver is to not make metrics the be all end all at the very beginning.”
Community succeeds when products generate shareable, self-expressive artifacts
“Like I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves.”
Delaying early monetization protects user enthusiasm and word-of-mouth momentum
“I think if we look at a lot of the companies that have been just wildly successful from the start, they're people who have pushed off maybe monetizing every little thing. If it's going to really put a damper on that type of enthusiasm and momentum that people …”
Users are more resilient through outages than founders typically think
“There's more resilience built into the system than you might think.”
Net new website visitors is the most instructive brand awareness metric
“And the one that I found to be the most instructive was net new visitors to the notion website. So month over month, how many new people who had never been there before were motivated enough to come and actually learn about the product.”