👋 Hi, I’m Kyle from OpenView1 and welcome to my newsletter, Growth Unhinged. Every other week I take a closer look at what drives a SaaS company’s growth. Expect deep dive takes on SaaS pricing, product-led growth, benchmarks, and much more.

In a product-led (PLG) business, some of the tried-and-true SaaS growth tactics aren’t at your disposal.

Since you’re initially focused on users rather than executive buyers, outbound cold calling loses its effectiveness (although that may change as you scale). Since users can get started for free, you can’t always afford to outbid your competitors on search and other paid channels.

But your end user focus is actually your biggest advantage, and it’s a growth lever hiding in plain sight. That’s where community comes into play.

Community is an incredible multiplier on a PLG strategy. In my opinion, a community strategy can be applied to nearly every PLG business; the question is finding the right community strategy. Community is a win-win on so many levels:

But what is a “community” anyway and how should a founder implement a community strategy for the first time? Hot take: it’s way more complex than just launching a Slack group.

I’ll break down fascinating non-Slack community plays to get inspired by and elaborate on two community + PLG case studies: Notion and Productboard.

Special thanks to Ben Lang (Head of Community, Notion) and Scott Baldwin (Community Lead and Product Evangelist, Productboard) for sharing their insights.

Your best users find new and creative ways of using your product to power their own working lives. After spending hours on their creations, these users are often excited to share their work back with others.

This community sharing tends to happen organically and seemingly spontaneously. You can amplify it to reach new users and inspire existing users to do more with your product.

Notion, the team workspace now valued at an eye-popping $10B, makes a great case study.

Ben Lang discovered Notion on Product Hunt well before the product had taken off and become a household name. After using Notion for a couple of days, he was blown away by the power of what he could create. That’s when Ben decided to tweet his Notion setup and start building a template gallery for other users to do the same. Not long after, Ben’s template gallery side project was attracting as many as 70,000 visits per month.

All of that took place before Ben ever formally connected with the Notion team. But it wasn’t long before Notion recruited him to join full-time as Head of Community and one of the first 10 or so employees.

Since then Ben and his team have doubled down on amplifying Notion creators and superfans. Their community efforts include:

Even now that Notion’s community efforts have taken off, Ben’s team is still pushing further in new and creative areas. For example, Notion has recently leaned into helping creators build a business with Notion through consulting, instructional courses, and premium templates that can be sold via the Template Gallery (here’s an example).

Many SaaS companies build products for one specific function or industry. That level of focus allows them to play a unique role in the working lives of their users: that of the connector.

Playing the role of connector helps existing users become more successful and helps attract prospective users who want to replicate this success.

From my vantage point, connecting users with their peers is something that many companies try to do, but few truly succeed. It can be difficult for a SaaS company’s peer community to stand out when there are other 3rd party community organizations vying for attention. It can also be challenging to demonstrate ROI, especially since peer communities need to be seen as community-centric rather than commercially-motivated.

All that said, it’s relatively straightforward and cost-effective to get these peer communities off the ground. From there you can double down if and when you get sufficient pull from your community members.

Productboard, the product management platform and newly minted unicorn, did exactly that.

The company’s community v1 was a Slack workspace built for product learning; Productboard invited select customers to share feedback and ideas into the product roadmap. It wasn’t widely advertised or formally managed at first. Over time, this Slack group started taking on more and more use cases like support, customer success, and as a forum for users to share their experiences.

Scott Baldwin, now Productboard’s Community Lead and Product Evangelist, was one of the company’s very early customers. In fact, he watched the company present at TechCrunch Disrupt and bought it soon after. Not surprisingly, Scott was an active member of Productboard’s v1 Slack community. He then formally joined Productboard in 2020 with a mandate to amplify these peer community efforts and migrate off Slack.

Scott’s team decided to launch the Product Makers Community, a standalone home for Productboard’s community members to connect and learn about product excellence. The Product Makers community includes a few different elements:

To measure success, Scott and his team monitor acquisition and engagement: size of the community, growth in membership, active usage, attracting non-customers as members. The end goal is to generate an ongoing pool Community Qualified Leads (CQLs), similar to Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) but identified based on community activity instead of product activity.