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BigCommerce also played it neutral in that list by listing the competitors in alphabetical order. So, Shopify was way down and BigCommerce was anyway the first... Unless, they chose to not list any competitors starting with A.

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Good call out - that allows it to feel very neutral. Shopify didn’t take the same approach in their own version of that content: https://www.shopify.com/blog/best-ecommerce-platforms

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Aah, not a good sign that. :-)

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Very interesting. I was surprised by the HubSpot 'word of mouth' number. I wonder how much of this is nurtured through interactions on social media, especially on LinkedIn, Reddit and depending on the offer even things like TikTok. I wonder if we need a new concept to support content marketing, conversation marketing. I manage the 188,000 member design thinking group on LinkedIn. We get a lot of link spam and I reject about 95% of posts. But I do allow in posts that are meant to trigger conversations and I am more lenient with people who engage in conversations.

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Good food for thought, Steven! The rise of “community” is so important right now & helps accelerate word of mouth referrals.

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At Ibbaka we have a framework where we look at five different growth models and then look at how they are being combined. One of the most exciting combinations is that of Product Led Growth and Community Led Growth. This is an emergent pattern, but I agree it could come to be very powerful, even dominant.

The five growth models we are studying are

- Product Led Growth

- Sales Led Growth

- Service Led Growth

- Community Led Growth

- Relationship Led Growth

Each has a characteristic growth flywheel.

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