At a Glance
Why Company Communities Struggle
Creating a Profession
What Founders Should Look For
With AI killing off old moats, community has become hot again.
But most companies approach it from a desire for loyalty. Meanwhile, customers just want to further their lives and work. This disconnect leads to a lot of dead Slack groups.
The community Cloudability helped create has more than 100,000 members. And it’s still active and growing, despite them getting acquired in 2019.
How did they do it? They helped create a new role.
The GTM Problem
Mat Ellis started Cloudability with J.R. Storment and Jon Frisby back in 2011. They built a product that helped companies manage cloud spend.
Customers loved it when they used it, but it was hard to get prospects, even with a huge ROI. “Apparently people don’t like being told ‘we know how to do your job better than you,’” Mat said.
Then they brought Jay Wampold in as CMO. Jay’s advice? Move from “We can help you manage cloud costs” to “There is a new discipline emerging. You can become excellent at it.”
Build a profession instead of another user group.
Jay helped create the DevOps movement at Chef, so he had a playbook. “People don’t want to hear more about your product,” he said. “They want to become more capable, credible, and connected.”
Don’t try to rally people around your org chart. Galvanize them around who they can become.
How It Worked
Cloudability worked with companies like Netflix and Adobe on best practices, a maturity model, and language. And CTO Erik Onnen gave it technical credibility. They called the whole thing “FinOps.” (Hey, the “...Ops” moniker worked before.)
But the cool, counterintuitive move? They created the “FinOps Foundation” as an independent nonprofit to be the community. Cloudability didn’t try to own FinOps.
Instead, the new org became like a modern trade association. Cloudability had a seat on the board, but didn’t control it. Industry leaders governed it, created the standards, built the curriculum, and trained others.
It gave the profession legitimacy. People trusted the network. And they trusted Cloudability due to its role in creating it. People got to know them and came when they were ready.
How to Do It
As Jay said, “In every emerging market, there is a small group already living in the future. They are your first 5 percent. Your job is to find them.”
(Interestingly, this is the same percentage from my newsletter on world-building with Andrew Green. He called it the “first acolytes.”)
Understand their language, rituals, ideas. Engage them. Then make that work available to others. Look for customers who:
Represent the future of the work;
Want to prove their increasing value in their organization;
Want a clearer career path and a “seat at the table;”
Are already self-organizing in small groups to help each other.
Like with Emotional Market Fit, first consider who your customer is trying to become. Then you can build the bridge to get them there.
With love,
Dave
Conversations like this in my new book (coming next Fall) on how inner work is becoming a huge competitive advantage. Have an issue you’re struggling with? Let me know!
