Mastermind Masterclass: How Community-Led Growth Drives Product-Led Growth with Notion's CRO
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The document discusses product-led growth and the importance of building community. It outlines three waves of growth: top-down, bottom-up, and community-led. It recommends starting a community now by enabling education and inspiration sharing, empowering community members to help customers, and engaging ambassadors. It provides examples of how Notion builds community through forums, groups, and certified consultants. The key lessons are to align interests, build distribution networks, empower serving customers, don't over-regulate community, start scrappy and stay grateful.
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Mastermind Masterclass: How Community-Led Growth Drives Product-Led Growth with Notion's CRO
- 1. For product-led growth, start building community now Olivia Nottebohm Chief Revenue Officer Notion @ONottebohm
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- 5. Number of public SaaS companies by Revenue Scale — 2021 6
- 6. 7 The Three Waves Wave 1: Top down Wave 2: Bottom up Wave 3: Community-led
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- 10. 11 What this looks like 👀 Enable community distro of education & inspiration Empower your community to serve your customers Engage ambassadors to extend your reach
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- 17. 18 34K+ Korea Facebook group members
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- 26. 27 Recap Top of funnel Identify who will tell your story and help them do it. Mid-funnel Align distribution of your content with their goals. Bottom of funnel Give your community the tools and access to supplement your go-to-market needs, like Success. 1 2 3
- 27. 28 Choose the community that’s right for you
- 29. 30 Lessons from the road 🙌 1. Community drives the rapid adoption you need for PLG to scale. 2. Align your interests with community members’ personal goals. 3. Build distribution networks for education and inspiration. 4. Empower community members to serve your customers. 5. Don’t try to own or regulate community engagement. 6. Start and stay scrappy. Don’t over-optimize. 7. Be grateful and find new ways to show it.
- 30. 31 Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, I'm Olivia and I joined Notion recently, but this title is an observation that was clear to me about the company even before I started. I'd contend it's an important thing for any company here relying on PLG to internalize - and my goal is to share a lot of helpful tactics around this.
- But, first as a little warmup to what I’m about to share: Who here knows what app this is? Who here has bought enterprise software they saw on this app? Yeah, I thought so. Who believes me that I will credibly weave TikTok into this talk about enterprise Saas? If you see hands -> “Ooh thank you for your belief in me! You are some prescient folks.” If you see no hands -> “Ha! Okay, well I love a challenge, so let’s see how I do.”
- Okay, so why am I up here? Especially because I’m not TikTok’s target market ;) I've spent my career thinking about different types of growth. In 2014, I co-wrote an article titled "Grow Fast or Die Slow” ...
- ...Which funnily enough popped up in a Silicon Valley episode with that title. The data was clear: Rapid, early adoption was non-optional to succeed. (Incidentally, this is the face expression saying that usually elicits from folks.)
- Now with so many huge incumbents in the market, it’s harder than ever for startups to gain market share fast enough. Rapid adoption has different drivers. And they are constantly changing. To drive that point home, consider the number of SaaS startups that exist today, and how many fail to reach 150 million dollars in revenue, let alone 1 billion. In the last 10 years alone, our industry has seen 3 waves when it comes to how enterprises buy SaaS products.
- Throughout time, this type of growth was been achieved in different ways. We’re on the precipice of needing to do something different to succeed and win Hint: It’s this one (CLICK and little check will appear next to wave 3) To quickly review...
- It used to be these tools were only bought by heads of departments and executives, then handed down to teams Think of Salesforce and SAP Individuals had very little say in these tooling decisions.
- Then we saw something shift after 2010, and really come to the forefront with Slack Individuals started gravitating strongly to better user experiences and brands that spoke to them directly Especially brands that didn't try to sell them, but realized they needed to demonstrate value first and at scale. They brought tools into companies and made it clear to leadership this is what they wanted to use - and executives listened. Word of mouth, social media, content marketing, and broader digital marketing started to eclipse the usual enterprise motions.
- We're now in a third wave where it's all about building community around your product. And this is truly a wave - a huge wave you can harness if you do it right. It’s the culmination of everything that came before → the new agency individual employees have, combined with the surround sound of user-generated content, the overwhelming power of influencers and social media, review sites (which even drive analyst reports now), and new modes of sharing - YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Slack communities, Facebook groups, etc. Content marketing is no longer as effective as it once was - people would rather hear from other users like themselves, not your brand.
- So what does this movement look like? Well, community should influence every part of your funnel. When it comes to raising awareness, your community of ambassadors and supporters can help get your name out there. They can serve as your arms and legs, especially early on, to help talk about your product. Once you have more users, you must help them understand the value of your product quickly and easily This is where education, content, and insight come in, helping those users become experts Finally, you have to harness that community that you have built and activated to expand their use of your product. Let’s dig into the specifics of how you accomplish each of these steps.
- A raw Instagram video of one of your customers saying they had a great experience is more valuable than 10 posts you write about it. They want to see others benefiting and getting the value they want. Product-led growth says you simply need to build something great to win. The truth, as I've seen it, is that you need people to tell each other your product is great to win. And you need some of those people to be influential inside of companies to help you both land and expand. Today, this is more important than ever. But it's also incredibly difficult to get right, and there are a lot of ways to get it wrong. For each key part of the customer journey, I'd love to offer some tactics for how community can overcome the biggest challenges PLG companies face.
- Especially when you're early and small and need rapid adoption the most, you have the least resources to devote to it yourself. You can't write a ton of posts and hope for SEO juice at the same time that you're running a ton of paid (you won't have the budget it for it anyway), and comms AND brand. If you try, you will burn out. You need other people out there in the world telling your story.
- There are a few ways to do this - but it boils down to figuring out who will tell your story and helping them do that in the ways they want Early on at Notion, the team saw the same 10 people being vocal about the product on Twitter and invited them into the first version of an Ambassadors community. Here you can see the first ever Slack sent to that community and people sort of filing in saying hello. We launched this as an experiment without a real sense of what it could become. We gave them visibility into the company and early features. We equipped them with more information, and connected them in a scrappy Slack instance so they could learn from each other. We heard that they wanted to start putting together events (pre-pandemic of course) - so we gave them stipends for venues and food and helped them promote in their local areas with social and email. You can see how some of them came together [CLICK] first in Seoul where we ended up with a big group. [CLICK] And then in Paris - this photo always looks so cozy and chic to me And many other places People were getting together simply to show off what they were building. That seemed to be at the crux of it - the ability to self express with a group of likeminded folks. Today, this group has over 200 people in 23 countries around the world.
- The other big advantage was having someone on the team full-time dedicated to getting to know all these people, their specific interests and goals, how they wanted to get involved and how we could help them. First, we hired Ben Lang, who is one of the rising geniuses of the community space. I’m trying to get him on stage like this more often :) We found Ben because he was running a Notion fan site that was getting 80,000 hits a month. He was already part of the community and really understood them. Since then we’ve also added Francisco, who is now full-time moderating and running programs for our ambassadors so Ben can turn his attention to some of the other things I’m mentioning. But both of them are are true super-connectors. And there’s one other person who also needed to be super engaged with our community, and that’s Ivan, our Co-founder and CEO
- A quick story about this: In 2019, before these very weird times, Ivan and Akshay were in Singapore for a day Akshay tweeted about how they’d be in town and would be up for grabbing coffee. 20+ people showed up with less than 8 hours notice in the driving rain. The community would not be as vibrant as it is today without the total buy in and willingness to participate from folks like Ivan and Akshay. Even today, we regularly do AMAs with our Head of Engineering and others who take the time. That’s an example of a high touch way to keep your early community thriving, but sometimes growing the community means letting it flourish on its own too...
- For instance, our subreddit has 145,000 followers. Notion doesn't employ its Reddit moderators - they're all community-chosen. Ben Smith and Alex Sherwood run it, two Notion ambassadors. However, we see many of the same faces, such as our Slack moderators participating in discussions on Reddit as well. We really work to support the community, but let it thrive on its own - jumping in when people need extra help
- Another example of communities flourishing on their own with authentic user discussions is the Korean Notion Facebook group. When we launched in Korean last year, our community members there gave media interviews, hosted a livestream 8,000 people attended, and fielded help questions. Many of these folks are influential creators across social channels, giving us access to megaphones on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. The Notion Facebook group in Korea has over 34,000 members, and that’s just one country’s group - there are so many more, like Vietnam, France, Japan… Those early meetups in local areas that we encouraged have now taken on a life of their own and become self-sustaining communities in their own right. Speaking of thriving...
- [CLICK to play video - 30 seconds] I achieved weaving in TikTok, but this isn’t the first time the combination of words “TikTok” and “enterprise” have been used together. Earlier this year, The Verge wrote an article about how TikTok teens’ latest passion is enterprise software - particularly Notion. People showed how to set up Notion accounts, their daily routines on the app, and how to make their workspaces aesthetically pleasing. Some users even built whole platforms dedicated to Notion on TikTok. Many of these videos gained over 1 million views - and quickly! This virality was global and organic - Notion doesn’t even have its own TikTok account, and it even sparked substantial growth for us in new regions.
- Notion didn't even have paid marketing until last fall. And we haven't even meaningfully turned on those engines - community drove all our organic growth. I know not every company will have a community of this size and shape, but no matter what, you can identify customers who will talk about you for different reasons on the channels that make the most sense to them. The important thing is to meet them there, and help them get value out of it. One of our key learnings about this distribution was that we always need to be aligning with our community members' interests. Many want to build their own platform - because that's a currency now Some folks just build templates and share them out to the community, like Red Gregory, who has a YouTube channel and a site with free templates and articles. Many want to build a business. [CLICK] Like Marie, who had 100 Twitter followers when she first met us, and now she has 21k followers and sells her mastery course - and she’s made more money than ever before; Which is a good segue to the next phase of the funnel where community can have outsized impact.
- Once you get folks in the door, the challenge becomes helping them realize compelling value from your product immediately. The odds are stacked against you. Most users churn right away. Most products are so complex that it's hard to anchor users with enough engaging content. Without understanding what they can do and feeling supported, this new generation of users will never come back.
- A lot of people only think about community at the top of the funnel. But its impact really shines in the mid-funnel. If you're able to give your community access to the tools, information, and insight they need to become experts - they will teach your audience at scale. It gives you the leverage to scale education and inspiration. First, let’s talk about education. We have the education we produce on our website - articles and videos. And they let us tackle very specific topics and generate SEO juice. But they also take a lot of time to produce. We just can’t churn out that many. And we can only really do it in English for now. But by enabling members of our community, we’re able to multiply the reach of product education infinitely, and in the many markets where we can’t be present because we’re still small. We’re not the first to do this. [CLICK] One of Google’s big wins early on was creating public forums where users would crowd-source help center content for everyone. But now this looks different. It looks like courses taught by community members across all channels in a way that generates money and impact for themselves. That's where the incentive to build a platform or a business comes in. [CLICK] Take August Bradley. When we met August, he was just a fan. He had a YouTube channel with 6 subscribers. We got to know him, brought him into the Ambassadors community, amplified his work on our channels. Now he has 41,000 subscribers, and sold out a single 2 week course on Notion for over $200,000. His is just one of dozens of courses that have popped up, led by users. We foster this type of sharing by: Amplifying to our audience on social media and email Sponsoring creators we know are enthusiastic about Notion already (and only these folks), and Giving creators access to our team so they are the best equipped to speak about new features and how to use them. Like AMAs with our Head of Engineering Michael Manapat. [CLICK] We even started sponsoring YouTubers to create courses for other YouTubers, showing them how Notion can help them succeed in their Youtubing.
- As a product-led growth company, you should always be on a mission to help people get the value they want from your product as soon as possible. Yes, you want to teach people how to do this. But even more important is showing them and inspiring them about the type of value they could get. Inspiration content is critical to moving people down your funnel. The standard way to do this is customer stories - telling the tale of how your product helped folks your customers can relate to achieve something significant. But again, these are costly to produce. You have to rigorously prioritize just to tell a subset of possible stories that don’t cover that much ground as fast as you need. Most importantly - they don’t bring people into your product. [CLICK] That’s why templates are such a useful and worthy of investment. The community can contribute their own, covering way more use cases way faster - some beyond our imagination. Other users can discover them via SEO or the makers’ social media, bringing them to your website where they’re encouraged to sign up to use the template. The teams we’ve done customer stories with have also contributed templates, making their experience much more tangible. Not only can users understand the value of your product in a way that’s super relevant to them, they can instantly have the same experience. [CLICK] The community has taken this concept and turned it into a marketplace. While the initial impulse might be to create as many templates as possible and make them available for free (a lot of companies do that) - we’ve learned that encouraging the exchange of money for these types of goods drives even faster and higher quality production. The other default might be to try to control this marketplace - we’ve seen the virtue of it living across multiple locations on the internet, making this content even more discoverable to long-tail audiences. [CLICK] And this is generating real returns for creators. This one newsletter template generated over $35,000 for its maker Janel Loi in just a few months. Now there’s a template for every conceivable use case across audiences, industries, team sizes, languages, and more.
- Okay, so let's say you get people through activation and they've paid for your product. If you're looking at product-led growth, then that's not enough. You need to get existing users to upgrade to new product offerings, or expand their use of the product, so that they scale how much they’re paying you over time. At Notion, most of our revenue comes from expansion as customers buy more seats to bring more people into their workspace. The actual mode of expansion can be different depending on your product, but the mechanisms for prompting expansion are usually the same What drives this sort of motion? Two things: Demonstrating even more tailored value - speaking to specific needs in a high-touch way Empowering customers to get the budget they need and promote your product internally Both require a high-touch sales relationship or customer success program - and even then, it can be hard to drive expansion inside a customer because you’re not there. Doing either of these things at scale is a pipe dream for most startups. Which is another reason why large incumbents with their armies of sales and solutions engineers continue to win.
- So how does community factor in all the way at the bottom of the funnel? If you equip and incentivize community members the right way, they can play the role of customer success. In some ways this is even an advantage - the community can support customers in other languages, and be hyper-responsive/available where you cannot. I mentioned the folks who teach courses earlier. There’s also dozens of power users who consult with teams and companies to set up their workspaces. Last year, we decided to bring them all together in a directory so they’re more easily discoverable by customers - and to make it easy for our small CS team to recommend people custom to their goals and needs. You can see it’s pretty scrappy but it works. Teams can pay them directly for this help. Sometimes we subsidize the engagement if it’s a high priority customer our own CS team doesn’t have the bandwidth to support. This has also made it economical for us to provide support to smaller customers that may grow into bigger customers, instead of only allocating resources to our enterprise plan customers. This is critical. If CS is limited to your top paying customers, you’re probably missing out on your fastest growing customers. To ensure quality, we have a certification program all consultants we work with have to go through. It includes an interview and a test that most Notion employees couldn’t pass, ensuring their ability to work closely with teams of all sizes.
- So that’s one way to provide more tailored support at scale when your team is early. It ends up being a win-win and bringing your community members closer to you, the product, and the business. But then there’s helping to market inside of companies to secure more budget, convert decision-makers, and add seats. You have to first understand this dynamic - usually 1-2 people who are passionate about your product bring you into a company or team Everyone else doesn’t know who you are, probably doesn’t want to have to learn a new tool, and needs to be brought along. The more successful you can make your 1-2 champions at evangelizing and teaching your product, the better chance you stick and grow. Just like we’ve been able to bring together moderators of external communities like our subreddit, we’ve also created a community just for team champions. They become our portals for distributing helpful content in-house - much of it made by other community members that we’ve bundled by persona and use case. They get early access to features and the chance to provide feedback that makes it into product development. We regularly have our customer success team run AMAs, and teach them how to teach others about Notion. This allows us to scale CS, usually a 1-to-1 motion, into a 1-to-many operation We’ve seen the impact of this on monthly actives inside accounts, and it makes a big difference. Plus we end up turning more folks into champions - which gives us a leg up in those upgrade conversations. We could not be more thankful to all the brilliant folks in this and our other communities who truly do make our product-led growth possible.
- Okay, just to reiterate each stage of what was discussed: Community flows through every part of your funnel Identify your ambassadors and supporters to help start you on your community building journey. Once you have users, empower them with educational resources to help them become experts. Then, give them the tools and access they need to supplement your own go-to-market strategy and further expand your reach.
- One of my first thoughts when I was putting together this presentation was that many folks in this room wouldn’t relate to the need for community. Let’s say you sell big ticket enterprise software to a small market. You may not think this is for you. Let’s say you’re pre-product/market fit and you don’t think your product has the same viral potential that others might. This may not seem like it’s for you. However, given the tactics we’ve tried and the results we’ve observed, I still posit that there is a form of community that is right for everyone.
- You may not be in the same situation as Notion right now, but there are ways to think about this as a pattern that can fit many businesses. One way to think about this is with a two by two matrix. On the X-axis we have the shape of the customer you’re trying to go after. On one side, large enterprises that have historically needed high touch from sales. On the other, individual consumers who can make fast, inexpensive purchasing decisions. On the Y-axis we have your product/market-fit. High or pre-product/market fit. Different community motions are appropriate based on where you land here. [CLICK] For example, if you’re still figuring out what your product should be, and you’re mostly building for consumers or SMBs, you’re looking for rapid and strong feedback loops among relevant audiences, from people who are interested, and can give you concrete feedback. A focus group model would help you get there faster. And if you do it right and incentivize well, members become your first customers and biggest evangelists. [CLICK] If you have high-product market fit, ambassadors and creators can help you reach a large consumer audience, while consultants & champions can help you educate, inspire, convert, and expand your enterprise customers. This is where Notion is playing for now, and where community has helped us build a much bigger business and brand than our team size would imply - all while building their own businesses and platforms. [CLICK] If you are pre-product market fit - or you are constantly testing and shipping new products or features for the enterprise - customer advisory boards are a great way to unify your most important customers around helping you help them better. This is something we’re just now putting together at Notion, but I have seen it work wonders at other companies in my career. [CLICK] And finally, once you get through that stage, consultants and public champions of your product can work wonders to build community even for products that are targeting large enterprises. Ultimately, it’s important to have all of these activities in your company’s journey so you can innovate for your enterprise audience quickly and effectively For all the quadrants above, I wanted to share some key takeaways to hopefully help get you started and succeed at building the right community.
- If there’s one thing I hope to share, it’s that product-led growth doesn’t work if you depend only on the product. Community is the pre-requisite. But community won’t work unless you take the time to deeply understand what the people you invite into it want. From their work. From their lives. From this relationship with you. It’s not enough to offer them deals or early access to features. You have to enable something fundamental for them - help them make more money, get a promotion, build a business, gain followers - whatever it is. Align your brand with whatever it is. Think about distribution networks for the information your users need to see value in your product and feel capable using it themselves. What would incentivize your community to share? Make that content. Don’t draw a bright line between community and your team if one can extend the other and help you scale. Don’t try to put firm rules around how community works. Don’t underestimate how much people love connecting with others who value something they value. Let them do it in the ways they want. Not how you want or how you hoped things would work. Communities are living breathing networks. People want to have fun. Follow where they want to go. We don’t try to moderate all our communities. We don’t prescribe ways for our community to interact with us - i.e. hosting events or building templates - we see what they want to do. We let them use our branding - even to make their own swag. The result has been unbounded growth and creativity. Don’t feel like you have to build something super fancy to host all this activity. Slack works great. It’s more important you stay nimble and adapt because things change fast. And finally, always honor the commitment and contributions of your community. It’s the most incredible gift your users can give to you. Nurture and celebrate it. I hope this has been helpful. We certainly don’t have it all figured out and there’s so much more for us to learn and try. Looking forward to doing that side by side with the community in this room.
- Thanks everyone!