Community isn't the top investment for high-touch enterprise software
Camille Ricketts · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts · Dec 11, 2022 · at 20:16
Former Notion Head of Marketing Camille Ricketts explains when community-led growth fits a product model.
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“I think if you have a long sales cycle or a high price point where there has to be many, many, many touch points in order to get somebody to decide to buy, I'm not sure that community should be the number one thing that you invest in.”
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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.”