Linda Lian: Community as the Top of the Funnel

One of the things that I love about you and your background is you've been in product and product marketing roles. I love it when I see founders who have built products that solve problems they have experienced themselves in the past. It feels like that's very much been your experience. I'd love to hear the story of how you got to where you are. What were the defining experiences of your career leading up to Common Room? And then what was the aha of, this is the thing that I need to go build?

So I am a little bit, as you mentioned, a jack of all trades, master of very little. I have been an early stage investor and product marketing manager. But I think part of what Common Room is trying to solve is that there's a massive transformation in how people discover and adopt and buy software. And there's a couple of pivotal moments in my career where this has come into stark relief.

The first is when I was an early stage venture capitalist at Madrona Venture Group, and I focused a lot when I was there on things like developer tooling, commercial open source. And I felt like these modern software companies that were breaking through, the Snowflakes, the incredible story of AWS, it wasn't this traditional enterprise tops down sales model. It's really about developers generating this massive turbine of education and awareness and growth, empowering these companies to really grow as quickly as they had.

And when I was at AWS leading product marketing for a really nascent and fast growing service line called serverless computing, which let developers provision and spin up infrastructure and resources without having to manage them, again, it was this disconnect between, I would go into our Salesforce CRM, see what our sales reps thought was happening. And then I would go and look on these digital channels, these watering holes where developers wanted to engage, and they were already convening on the internet, like Reddit and Slack and Discord and Stack Overflow. And I was like, wow, the modern buyer journey, or how people are going to find and adopt software, has shifted massively to these new digital channels. And how do we as modern, customer-obsessed organizations really start to visualize and get a handle on that new buyer journey?

And so today, our vision is we want to go transform how companies engage with people. And again, it's really this massive shift over the last two decades in how people discover and adopt and buy software. We want to be there to facilitate this new motion. So 25 years ago, thinking back to when Salesforce was founded in 1999, you might have some word of mouth, but largely you would be contacted by a sales rep and you would learn about services that way. And going along this path or this evolution or this transformation, 10 or 15 years ago, you largely interacted with the company's website.

Fast forward to today, we're at this massive inflection point. Software is more competitive than ever before. And so how do software companies really stand out? Today, it's about word of mouth. It's about brand. That focus from generating awareness to creating influence, building a thriving community. How are you going to create and grow and own a category? These are the things that are more important than ever before. And so these are all the things that modern SaaS companies have to think about.

And then I think on the flip side, you have this massive shift in consumer behavior and expectations for how consumers want to engage with their brand. People, they want to engage in the digital spaces where they're already spending their time. This is what I saw specifically with developers, but it's people of all types. You want to engage in Twitter and Reddit and Discord and Slack and TikTok. And so ultimately, what we do and what our platform does and what we believe is that with these new digital channels, you have to make sense of all that data. Whether it's a like on your content on LinkedIn or a question about your product in your Discord server or a spike in free trial usage that you're seeing in your product metrics, these are all what we call the digital footprints that make up the path of the modern customer journey. And what our platform does is we aggregate all these. And when these signals can be intelligently surfaced and routed, these are really the signals that companies need to take action off of.

It's becoming really clear that the best companies are really focused on their community. I joke, it's their vibes. They're putting their vibes out into the internet. But you look at a lot of very different communities that require a lot of very different things. You've got Plaid and Stripe that are super focused on their developer communities and people using their products. Then you have companies like Databricks or GitLab that not only have users of their products, but actually have an entire open source community that's contributing to their product and helping them build and improve it. And then finally, you've got folks like Figma or Notion, where it's more like user communities, where you want to be able to support them with guides and resources and sharing best practices. All of those are fairly different. How do you address such a broad surface area of different types of communities?

So you highlighted a bunch of the diversity of communities. What's been really interesting is the things that they all have in common. So at the end of the day, for a brand to really stand out today, you want to become what I call this platform of economic opportunity. And that is part and parcel with your ability to create and define and own a category. And so what happens is you go beyond the transactional, like, hey, I build a software product, you buy and use a software product.

So, for example, with all those communities that you called out, with Figma, with Databricks, with Atlassian, with Notion, all of their users believe and are enabled to build their career, their livelihood, their professional identity alongside this brand. It's bigger than a design tool. It's a way of life.

And so ultimately, there's two outcomes that companies drive when they're building any community, whether it's more of a product support community or more of that brand and lifestyle community. It's to grow their influence and facilitate people to be successful with their software and get hands on and adopt the product. And then ultimately, if they're having a great enough experience, you are looking for the right to convert them into customers. That's the modern buyer journey. You have awareness and influence at the top. Are you aware of this brand? Are you interested in this category?

And then you're using the free trial. You're trying before you buy. You don't want to talk to a sales rep right now or ever. You just want to be able to get hands on and see if it's the right solution for you. That's really where PLG comes in and we hear about the importance of product usage data. And then ultimately, I think for most companies today, there's still that human-led or sales-led element that they need to layer on in order to ultimately convert that customer into someone who's docusigned a contract. We always like to say, users adopt software, companies buy software.

And so we see this very common pattern with all of these companies. Every single company you called out follows this path. We're at the end of this PLG, CLG funnel. You want to be able to deploy your sales reps, your solutions engineers, your sales engineers, those humans to take it the last mile.

And so, again, the right customer intelligence platform today, you really want to map out that entire path. So, for example, we can show you, hey, here are all those influencers who are interested in your category and the problems that you're solving for. Or we know that they have X number of followers on Twitter, so they're a thought leader. And how do you really nurture and support those individuals so that you're creating more and more of that noise and awareness and influence about your brand within your certain category?

And then going deeper into the funnel, it's like, okay, now you have this owned community, your Discord, your forum, your Slack, where you might have product specialists or even support engineers or customer success folks really helping folks adopt the product in those channels. How do we then plug into those channels and help you really understand, like, hey, there's a POC happening over here with these sets of users and they're asking questions about a specific use case. You should probably put more attention on servicing this group of people.

And then ultimately it's like, okay, there's this conversion event that needs to happen. Your reps need to have the latest and greatest information on how a specific company is using the product or asking questions in the community. How do we give that context to the humans that then need to go and reach out with a personalized touchpoint, get the customer on the phone and ultimately convert them?

And so I think the best companies that are really successful with community very surgically figure out what's most important to them at that phase in their business life cycle, and what are the plays that'll help them build the kind of motion that they need.

So companies that are early on, let's say a seed stage or a Series A company, you're a couple founders, maybe you're technical founders. You might have a piece of software that you're selling to a technical audience. What do you do? Well, you probably want to first figure out where is the conversation happening? Is it on Twitter? Is it on Reddit? Where are people already discussing the things that you're building for, those problems that you're solving for? You want to bring them into a central place. A lot of brands use Discord or Slack today.

And then you want to make sure that there are people in there, whether it's your marketing team, your content team, really providing that educational content, but also people in there to support your ability to answer product questions as they come up. And then we see in the most mature communities, yeah, there's absolutely more customer facing teams in there. CSMs, sales reps. So it's really this maturity cycle that a lot of companies go on, which is, how do we build a thriving digital community? How do we then really plug this community into our customer journey, which ends with some goal of conversion at some point, hopefully.

You make it super clear that at every point throughout the funnel, there are different layers of engagement, different places people are talking about you. As you think about all those different layers of engagement, how do you prioritize? I'm picturing somebody who engages on Twitter, they're commenting on your subreddit, there's engagement data behind them. Maybe they're in the CRM because they've actually reached out for a trial or something. How do you think about that corpus of data and try to unify it and make sense of it when there's so much noise in so many different places?

I think this is one of the most exciting promises of AI. And so there's really three main ways that we think about all this modern trackable data. There's who you are, what action you've taken, whether it's increasing your usage in the product trial or asking a question in the Discord server. And then it's, how do all these individual end-user actions roll up into a view of an account or a company? And when you aggregate all that together, you can have some intelligent scoring on top of it.

So, for example, if you're a commercial open-source company, you're like, wow, filing an issue in GitHub is such a high signal intent that they are trialing our product, and they're looking for help. And we're looking for these specific titles, staff developer, DevOps engineer. So you can get really specific about those signals that you're looking for to qualify intent. And what's so great about what you can do in Common Room, or with that 360 view of your customer's engagement in general, is you can start to get really precise about it.

So, for example, some companies might care a lot more about product usage signals because they don't have a massive digital community. They're not a Figma or a Notion. There's not just millions of people asking questions about the product every single day and trying to get help and adopt it. And so for those companies, product usage becomes the far more important weight in terms of qualifying intent signals, or when should a human reach out?

And I think our philosophy is really, it's all configurable. You can say, hey, these digital channels matter a lot more to me. We have a customer who does a ton of their pipeline and they're selling on Twitter. That's just where their brand resonates. They are just all in on Twitter. That's where their developers and their users want to engage. And so a question on Twitter, that means a lot more than even someone signing up for a free trial. And so you can start to score all these signals across the buckets that matter for your business and your brand and how your users find you and how they end up adopting you, to create really personalized and configurable scoring algorithms to help you parse that signal from the noise.

That's so interesting. Now translate that into the product for me, because I visualize this almost CRM-esque way of tracking lots of different people. Then you have just an ocean of signal that you're trying to not only correlate to the person, but also understand how important specific behaviors are. And then you have to take all of that really complicated data and put it into some interface or a consumable feed that somebody who's trying to understand the community can use to say, ah, now I need to go do X, Y, Z. Help me understand how that actually turns into the product for you guys.

What's interesting is Common Room doesn't really have any legacy analogs. And so we're not replacing a marketing automation tool or CRM. We're this platform that looks and feels like nothing before. And I think part of it is we latch onto this problem, and ultimately, our customers have pushed us in this really interesting direction with respect to our product development.

So the first thing we did is we integrate into every trackable touchpoint along this modern customer journey. We plug into those conversational or social channels where that digital engagement about your brand is happening, Slack, Discord, GitHub, Twitter, Reddit. We plug into your product usage data. We plug into your CRM data. We map it all together into this unified view. And we like to call it a digital relationship manager, in contrast to a CRM. And we show you who these relevant individuals are, what action they're taking, whether it's product usage metrics or asking a question in your community, and then how these individual actions or these individuals roll up into a view of that account or a company.

And as we started creating this digital log, this news feed of everything that everyone's saying and doing, this member directory of every single person who's engaging with you and doing something across all these digital touchpoints, this org view of all the accounts and organizations that we're identifying in your community, what we found is that customers, they want to take all this new and novel data and this new and novel data combination, and they wanted these automated workflows that they could set on top of the data for a ton of different use cases.

And so as we've gone out to market, we've gathered more and more customers and they're creating more and more of these plays. We're starting to identify some really interesting tactics and strategies that our customers and the brands that use us are leveraging to facilitate this modern customer experience.

So I'll give you a couple of examples. If you're a company and you're really interested in growing your influence, defining your category, building your community, you're very keen to find influencers with broad social reach on digital channels who are talking about your problem space. And you want to nurture them into champions. Notion does this so well, Webflow as well, Snowflake has a champion program, AWS has a champion program, but we see tons of these modern SaaS companies and brands, they build these influencer programs.

And so Common Room, for example, we can help automate everything from finding the new influencers based on a set of criteria or lookalike criteria. We can automate incentives like sending swag based on certain levels of engagement. We can help you measure the impact of your champion advocacy programs, which previously really wasn't possible. And so on the influence side, these programs, they really make a difference. So, for example, Asana found that companies where they had Asana ambassadors would adopt new features 3x more.

I'll give you another play that we're starting to see that's super common right now. Every single CRO or CMO I talk to, they're either focused on building their PLG motion or they're focused on building an enterprise discipline. I mentioned this earlier, I think most software companies, most SaaS companies, they're going to need to bridge that PLG or CLG motion with their human-led or sales-led motion. It's not one or the other, it's usually both.

And so we work with a ton of open source or commercial open source companies, ML and AI companies where they have a massive community of free adopters, whether that's their developers rolling their own stack and using the open source software, or using a free trial version of the commercial software. These developers are asking questions in the community, they're consuming educational content.

And so we can come in and say, hey, anytime you see a developer with this title from this size or industry of company who meet these criteria for you in terms of who your ideal customer profile is, and they're using the product in a certain way or they're asking these types of questions in the community, and we can set up alerts on keywords like pricing or security that signal super high intent. We want to make sure that in these moments we're alerting a human, a salesperson or a solutions engineer who can reach out with that really personalized, helpful message in that channel where that developer is engaging, something like a Slack or Discord or even Twitter DMs, and offer help with the hope that it earns them a conversion opportunity in the future.

And so we've seen incredible stats like 40% increase in pipeline and 20% increase in conversion through just understanding this type of data and this engagement and automating that action to help your sales team or your marketing team meet your users where they are today. So it's really incredible what happens when you take all this modern buyer journey data and you start to layer on top these workflows that help you engage in a modern way. You're not sending a cold outreach email. You're saying, hey, thanks for asking that question in our Discord server. Can we hop on a call and can I help you walk through that problem you're having?

What is the most common thing that pushes someone to go looking for a solution like Common Room? And among the customers that see the most success from the platform, what's the DNA of the ideal customer for you?

So today it's really, hey, are you a brand that's thinking, where do I go and engage my users? Should I start a Discord server? Should I start a Slack? Am I having conversations with them on Reddit, on Twitter? Do I have open source code and a GitHub repo?

And so if you're a brand that has these front doors, we're an amazing fit for you. We're best for these modern B2B software companies that have a free trial, that engage with their users on these fragmented digital channels. And so that means that we have a lot of customers in the developer tooling space, Databricks, MongoDB, Elastic, Snowflake, AWS. A lot of commercial open source companies use us, Temporal, Pulumi, Imply, Starburst, StarTree. And we also have a lot of customers in that AI/ML space, which looks a lot like commercial open source or developer tooling, Cohere, Replit, OpenAI. And then I think the last bucket is really PLG SaaS. Notion, Airtable, Asana, Figma, Webflow. These are also customers of ours. And so I like to call it modern SaaS. It's really companies that understand the value of user-led growth and user-led engagement.

That's a heck of a list. What do you feel are the most powerful tailwinds in the market that you're trying to position yourself to take advantage of as things change?

I think there's some really massive fundamental ones. The increase in digital literacy, the availability of cloud infrastructure. It's easier than ever to build a software company. It's harder than ever to build a software brand.

I think there's incredible tailwinds that AI might ultimately drive. AI search is making it so that any transactional piece of knowledge, you're going to be able to get right away. You're not going to have to do as much research. A lot of that AI is going to take over. And so in a world where you ask AI a certain question and they return four or five answers, how do you really go and do that research? You're going to want to flock towards communities of real humans who are championing a product or telling their stories, because all the facts you'll be able to get right away. And so where do you go for that human interaction? You're going to go to communities. Those are going to be the trusted, genuine places.

And I think ultimately, if I think about the new generation, I have a niece and a nephew and they're 10 years old. And when I look at them and how they get information and where they're going, I can't imagine them picking up a cold call from a sales rep. I don't even know if they pick up the phone. It's all going to be on these digital channels and they're going to expect to engage with brands in the places where they already seek knowledge. And it's going to be TikTok. And so how do we project ourselves forward 20 years and ask, what does software look like? What does software consumption and adoption look like? It's going to look a lot more consumer-like. I really think this concept of enterprise largely goes away.

Do you guys have a TikTok integration? Are you listening to that signal as well?

Well, we're working on it, and it's definitely one we've been asked more often than you would think, from brands you would not expect.

That is hilarious. It's such a good framing, and I hadn't really thought about it because I feel like I am in the whatever elder millennial group where I have TikTok, but it's definitely not a part of my DNA. But you hear that TikTok has become almost the nearest competitor to Google because that's where people go for information. To your point, it's figuring out where they are going to congregate. They get to decide where they want to congregate. It's just our job to be really good at listening to it.

Totally. I mean, look at how even more traditional brands have had to learn this the hard way. So, for example, Silicon Valley Bank. A big part of what caused the bank run was not that they weren't communicating. It's the avenue and the channels on which they were communicating through. SVB's issuing SEC reports, and where was the conversation and the fear happening? It was happening in digital channels like Twitter. And as a brand, if you're not there to be part of that conversation and to direct the traffic, to keep a pulse on it, things can really spin out of control.

Yeah, 100%. I don't know if you've ever seen this old video of, I think it's Keegan-Michael Key acting as Obama's translator, where he's allowed to be angry or whatever. Obama's talking in this very political speech, and then this guy's standing behind him screaming what Obama really wants to be saying. I feel like every company is going to get to the point where they need a legalese, corporatese translator, where they're like, listen, if you're SVB, I understand you're putting out filings. I get that you think that you're communicating, but here's this guy and he's going to come along and say it the way the internet is going to hear it. And the internet is going to hear massive alarm bells and everything's falling apart, and it's going to cause a bank run.

I want to talk a little bit about how you think about differentiating yourself, to your point, in a world where moats are much fluffier than they ever have been. I hear folks talk about this as effectively a PLG CRM, where we just take engagement data and translate that into leads. Other folks want to become the forum themselves, where rather than managing things in a Discord or a Slack, you're managing it in this platform. It feels like you all are very different from either of those approaches, but I'm curious how you think about positioning yourself in the competitive landscape.

So for us, we want to go solve that problem of, what is that modern customer journey? How do we let you take action at every step? And so I think on the one hand, you have a lot of awesome, we'll call it PLG sales tools. They layer on top existing data you already have around product usage signals or CRM data. And I think over and over again, we found that that type of signal just isn't really enough. You're value extracting from the free trial signups and you're viewing this very, very narrow slice of that user journey, from when they start a product trial to before they convert. And yeah, there's a lot of rich signal in there, but if you're just empowering a sales team to really extract that data, that's really interesting. We just take this perspective that that's only one piece of delivering that modern customer experience.

I think the other piece of it is around community and influencers and really getting that digital awareness and that noise going out on the internet. And there's so many different ways that this creates this user-led growth flywheel. It could be the right amount of content or the right type of content you're putting out to educate people in a more scaled manner. It could be, again, I spoke about those influence and champion and advocacy programs. It could be things like automating swag dole-outs every time you see an influencer tweet about you three times.

How do we enable modern brands to also build up, I call it the reservoir? So if you think about product-led sales as really value extracting once people are starting a free trial, how do you build that reservoir of people who are thinking about your problem space, talking about your brand, championing what you guys do, and almost that top of the funnel traditionally?

And so I think ultimately we want to be able to service that entire experience. Part of it is, I think in this user-led growth space, there's going to be a platform takes all, winner takes all component. And ultimately, I think the company that can figure out, what is that platform solution? How do you visualize this entire customer journey? Not just a slice of it, but really that whole thing. I think that's why at the end of the day, we like to think of what we're building as a digital relationship manager. It's for companies that believe that digital relationships with their end users is going to be so key in how they grow and innovate going into the future.

You brought up this really interesting discussion of value creation and value capture. One of the things I feel has really pushed people towards this community-centric way of consumption is also a feeling of not wanting to be sold to. People love the idea of getting sold things that are perfect for them, but they don't want it to feel transactional. They want it to feel personal and unique. You look at the customer base that you mentioned earlier, and you have very different models for how to capture value, from AWS and Snowflake to Stripe and Plaid. You also want Common Room to feel like a really personalized solution, where you can customize this to your needs. So how do you guys think about balancing wanting to create as much value as possible, but also at the end of the day, needing to be able to capture some of that value?

It's really cool to see how the macro often influences what companies focus on. I was at this networking event and I spoke with the CFO who really illuminated this perspective in me, which is, when times are good, everyone is focused on growth at all costs. When times are tough, you suddenly start to care about things like efficiency or profitability. Well, it'd be the wrong thing during the growth at all costs time to be hammering on efficiency and profitability. That would be the wrong thing to do in terms of how you think about the strategy of your company. And so it's less about, oh, should we have done this or should we have done that? More about, what is the macro telling you you need to do to survive and deliver customer value?

So last year, I would say companies and brands were very focused on helping make sure that their communities felt heard and supported and connected. 2020, 2021 was a big boom time for community and digital engagement. We saw Web3 and crypto and these community native things pop up. And I think the ethos then was very like, let's give to the community. Let's make sure that we're giving them everything, all the value we could possibly provide. And there was no sense of, how do we realize value out of it?

I think this year, everyone is looking at a very different situation. They're asking themselves, how are we going to hit our pipeline goals? How are we going to grow? How are we going to really narrow in the focus on who our ICP is so that our humans spend as much targeted time as possible converting those highest intent opportunities? And so this year, there's a lot more around, hey, can we take that reservoir of all this digital engagement, product usage data, and can we parse out the signal of who we need to be converting right now? Who are the highest intent organizations?

So it changes year over year. And I think the way that we've built our platform is really, again, those really configurable workflows and those automations based on whatever criteria you want to set, so that it's really applicable across so many different use cases. But it's definitely been interesting to see the plays that have come to the forefront this year, a lot of which is about bridging PLG and CLG signals with an enterprise human-led motion.

How does that translate to your own business model? If you think about a community that explodes and takes off, and Common Room is the big driving force behind understanding that community, is there a way to capture that value as they grow? Is it based on the number of seats of people managing the community? Is it based on the volume in the community? How have you guys thought about that for yourselves?

This is a great and very timely question. We actually just had a customer of ours go from hundreds of thousands of members in their community to almost 10 million. I'm not going to say who, but it was quite the ascent. And so I think in terms of our pricing, we always want to map, again, the value we're realizing with the value that we're providing. And the number of community members doesn't always correlate exactly.

So you could have, let's say, your community that went viral, and now you have an insane number of members and there's a lot of noise. There's very little signal. We would really want to price on metrics that help you realize the value from that incredible amount of noise. So what does that mean? It could mean things like the number of leads that we're going to pass to your Salesforce CRM, the number of accounts that we're going to augment with the questions that people are asking and the context of what they're doing. Are we going to bring in the bots that are making a bunch of noise and tweeting random nonsense? No, we wouldn't want to charge on that.

And so I think things like usage-based pricing is not always so black and white in our space because some of the biggest, most noisy communities are also the lowest signal, unfortunately. And that's the nature of the internet that you have to protect against.

That's so interesting. Isolating that is also really important for customers to feel heard. You look at things like Splunk. Splunk's pricing for a long time made people feel very penalized, because it was almost purely linear in terms of volume. It's like, I don't feel like I'm getting three times as much value, but I'm paying three times as much as I was last year. This is crazy. Internally at Common Room, what is that guiding North Star for you all as you think about measuring your own success? Is it valuable connections created? Is it just number of customers? Is it something else?

We have very practical and, I think, ROI driven ways to think about our metrics. So for example, we'll think about things like how much of our current sets of customers originated first in a community touchpoint, whether it was engaging with our LinkedIn content or our Twitter content or joining our Slack community or attending one of our meetups. What percentage of our customer base did we actually convert through one of these channels? We'll look at metrics like, what are the conversion cycles for folks engaged in our community? Are they faster than the conversion cycles of those that don't? Obviously the growth of our community, but who is growing? What are those titles? Are they part of our ideal customer persona? Are we creating value for the right type of people to join the conversation?

And so we have very customer centric metrics for community because ultimately it ties into, again, this concept we have, which is community is your reservoir, your top of the funnel for your customer journey. If we're bringing in a lot of folks into our community who have nothing to do with the types of people that use our product or ultimately convert, that's not really a viable community strategy for us. If we're not providing amazing amounts of support in our community for people who are free trialing our product, and they're not converting faster, and we don't see that in the data, then what's the goal there? So we always try to map it back to the things we care about, which is, are we building something of value for customers and are they becoming successful on it?

A final question for you. When you think about the elevator pitch for what you're building, what's the most poignant or powerful way of presenting the Common Room story that most often resonates with people?

I think at the end of the day, Common Room integrates into every trackable digital touchpoint along your modern customer journey. And we combine what people are saying with what they're doing with your product, with who they are as a customer, and we map it into this unified view that lets you take action to grow awareness, grow pipeline, and convert customers. And that's really at the heart of it.

And I think it's really interesting, because we do have a lot of customers now, hundreds of customers. And I think there definitely is a, what is this thing? How does it work? And I think part of the challenge there is, again, we're not marketing automation, we're not sales automation, we're not CRM, we're not social listening. We don't really fit into a category. And so I think looking ahead for us, it's exactly what we tell our customers that they have to do, and what we talked about. We have to go and really define and own and influence a category, and help people learn from each other and expose all the plays and the ways that people are using the tool to go and deliver a modern customer experience for their buyers.