Written by our Master Duke Urbanik
Companies develop, then build products or provide services, and sell those to their customers. End of story, or…….
Before a customer became “the” customer, she/he had to find a.k.a. notice the offering, feel the need (pain) to acquire it, validate that the offering was meeting expectations and quality requirements, price, and whether the company’s reputation was up to par.
Most of the companies deal with these process steps through their marketing and sales tools. If they do it well, there will be quotes from happy customers on the website, there is an after sales service of some sort and they measure the happiness of their customers.
The new scaling mantra: Community-Led Growth!
There is a new addition to all this, and it is called Community-Led Growth: bring customers together, have them propose new features, give feedback, and sometimes help each other to get the max out of YOUR product.
More and more well-known brands have their dedicated forum where customers can post questions, reviews and answers, and where the company can feed new ideas and listen to complaints and requests from their customers.
Some have this on their own website and under their own control, but the most flourishing ones are run by fans of the product. A well-known and probably biggest one is the Tesla Motors Club which has tens of thousands of members who are providing a wealth of information about the brand and its products.
Cloud-based platforms offering services and software solutions – who invented Customer Led Growth – often take this a step further and offer possibilities to develop and sell solutions to their customers. A good example is Apple and its AppStore; with its 30% fee on all sales they have generated a substantial additional revenue stream and its users benefit from additional functionality.
Below are some interesting articles on Community-Led Growth:
What is Community-Led Growth & Why is it the Future?
Community-Led Growth Is Taking Tech by Storm
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