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For B2B companies to make the B2D transition, they have to invest long-term in value _creation_ for their community. Short-term optimizations design for incremental value _capture_ like gated content, drip campaigns, unsolicited outbound, A/B tests, do more harm than good.
Part of this is generational - the upcoming generation of developers (and business buyers) grew up on self-service. They buy SaaS on the company card w/o an approval process. They grew up on the internet, answering their own questions with search queries instead of phone calls.
To assess a product's worthiness, they look to channels like GitHub and Twitter. They form an opinion based on the people who are using and advocating for the product. In other words, based on the community.
They also have an expectation around how much value the company is creating relative to what it's capturing. Developers expect even young companies to have generous free plans, polished product, excellent docs, chat-level support, and a brand + mission they can get behind.
Once a developer has gotten a ton of value from a company, that's when they start to warm up to the idea of paying. That's when they'll put in the credit card or ask their boss to join a phone call with an advocate or a rep from the company if it's a bigger purchase.
The more value they've gotten to that point, the easier it is to establish the commercial relationship. They become value-qualified leads.
The dominant questions in the adoption-centric new world are not:
- How do we pour more people on top of the funnel?
- How do we push people through the funnel faster?
They are:
- How do we create more value for more people?
- How do we measure the value we're creating?
- How do we pour more people on top of the funnel?
- How do we push people through the funnel faster?
They are:
- How do we create more value for more people?
- How do we measure the value we're creating?
We live in the internet age. If we're creating a ton value for developers (or whoever our customer is), we can be sure they're going to talk about it. Why do we create a community? So that when our customers talk, there are people there to hear it.
Not only that, but the relationships our customers form with _each other_ is huge value we can create for them. The old business world doesn't look at customers talking to each other in a positive light. It ruins an information asymmetry that weak companies work hard to create.
In the new world, smart companies will leap to introduce their customers to each other, because this forms a an extremely powerful mesh called "community". A community provides extraordinary 2nd and 3rd order effects to the business that stewards it.
Customers who are active in the community are less likely to churn, more likely to adopt new features, more likely to make qualified referrals. Why?
1) They're happy: they are getting extra value they didn't expect from the network.
2) They now share the incentive to help the company they're buying from grow.
Why? As the company grows, the network gets better! Thus will the product. It's the virtuous community flywheel.
2) They now share the incentive to help the company they're buying from grow.
Why? As the company grows, the network gets better! Thus will the product. It's the virtuous community flywheel.
The idea of product-led growth has been around for a while. There is even the Product-led Growth Collective who makes this excellent website about it. I agree with them enthusiastically:
"The funnel is dead. Long live the Flywheel!"
https://www.productled.org/foundations/the-product-led-growth-flywheel
"The funnel is dead. Long live the Flywheel!"
https://www.productled.org/foundations/the-product-led-growth-flywheel
What we are building and advocating for at @OrbitModel is the community-led flywheel. Community-led growth. It is @timoreilly's ‘Create More Value Than You Capture’ https://contently.com/2012/04/06/tim-oreilly-value-creation/
We had Tim on our Developer Love podcast recently. It was a crazy moment for us to be talking to *the* guy who helped make this value creation >> capture mindset popular, building O'Reilly Media on this principle. https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/developer-love/ep-6-enabling-an-ecosystem-with-tim-oreilly/
For any company reading this, if you are struggling with building your community, ask yourself what value are you sitting on that you could give to the community?
Maybe it's an internal project you could open source. Maybe it's a blog post (or an unnumbered tweet thread).
Maybe it's an internal project you could open source. Maybe it's a blog post (or an unnumbered tweet thread).
Maybe it's some of your time, or inviting members to share time with each other. Whatever it is, do more of it. It will make you feel more vulnerable than staring at data and scratching your head, but it will also work better.
The question of "how can companies create more value for their community?" is the one we've taken up at Orbit. The secondary questions of "how do we measure the value?" and "how do we then capture some of it? we are a business after all" are also super important.
We are actively looking for folks to join us to explore this question, build tools for community builders, and help the next generation of businesses think community-first and succeed at getting their products and services adopted.
We have 4 roles open today. 2 in engineering and 2 in advocacy (1 technical, 1 non-technical). The team is 3 today. The next folks to join are employees 2-5. We have incredible investors behind us, most of whom have built community-led businesses in the developer space.
If you care about this mission and have been waiting for your moment to join a company's very early founding team, I really want to talk to you. Chances are you're reasonably happy somewhere right now making a ton of money.
But maybe you're tired of the politics or feel like your job has become to color in between someone else's lines? Maybe your brain is 10% utilized?
Join Orbit and be the person drawing the lines.
Tabula rasa. We have all the things to build. 100% potential brain utilization.
Join Orbit and be the person drawing the lines.
Tabula rasa. We have all the things to build. 100% potential brain utilization.
I was an early employee 3 times before co-founding Orbit. Roughly employees 1, 3, and 40. I would never be a founder today without those experiences and the mentorship of the founders I worked for. If you want to be a founder someday, join Orbit today, and we will get you there.
My DMs are open. My email is josh at orbit dot love. Check out our open roles at https://orbit.love/careers/ .
Cheers for reading this far. It's Tuesday. Enjoy the rest of your week. Call me. Bye!
Cheers for reading this far. It's Tuesday. Enjoy the rest of your week. Call me. Bye!
