Turning community-led growth to a predictable revenue machine

Ten years ago, if you wanted a recommendation on a tool or to learn how to solve a certain problem, you Googled it.

This is no longer true today.

Google has been ruined by marketing. When you Google nowadays, you only get well-crafted blog posts written by professional content writers according to the specifications of SEO managers.

This is why influencers, thought-leaders, and online communities are on the rise: these are not anonymous content writers but people you can actually trust.

Marketing has largely adapted to this change. Many of the early-stage startups that I work with are open-sourcing their software, sponsoring posts by Linkedin thought leaders, working with influencers on YouTube, etc. 

This works great. I know many startups that have reached amazing heights by only making their users happy and having them tell others about it.

There is only one problem: it doesn't scale.

If a YouTuber posts a video about your product or a thought-leader posts something nice about your brand in a Slack group, you'll see a boost in signups, but it will only last for a day or two. Afterwards, you will resume your normal growth rate.

This is a problem, especially if you are post round-A and have aggressive goals.

Community-led growth is too fluctuating for these kind of startups. They need a predictable revenue machine where budgets are put in on one side and revenue is extracted on the other, not a bunch of good days.

That’s why these startups got millions from VCs, to build that machine.

Amplifying community-led growth with paid advertising

Community-led growth is great, but startups should realize 99% of the time, scale comes from paid ads.

That's not to say I recommend paid advertising instead of community-led growth, but rather to use paid advertising to amp up community-led growth.

These are some ideas for how: 

• Your product was mentioned in a video by an influencer? Distribute the video with a paid campaign.  

• Someone on Linkedin wrote something positive about your brand? Take a screenshot and use it as an ad.  

• Also, contact the thought leader and ask them to co-host a workshop with you. Distribute the recording in Linkedin after the workshop is completed. 

• A user expressed his love for your product in your Slack channel? Ask them for a 60-second video testimonial and use it in a remarketing campaign.

The idea is the same: take your community-led growth resources, re-package them so they can be consumed with paid advertising, and distribute them as social media ads.

This is how community-led growth turns into a predictable revenue machine.