Product-Led Communities Need Picks and Shovels

Talent will increasingly own their audience, with the rise of “channels of one” and community-as-a-service... Equivalents to Substack (where you build and monetize your own email list) will emerge in video, communities, branded products (like Borgo, still pre-launch) and other ways to build, manage, and monetize your audience. Some early breakouts ... See more

 - Khoros (fka Lithium) - Samsung, Sephora, Microsoft, Airbnb, Powerschool, eBay, Etsy  - Higher Logic (Acq. Vanilla Forums) - Tesla, Electronic Arts, and a lot of nonprofits. They also have good onboarding - Salesforce Experience Cloud - Farmers Insurance (Agents), UC BerkeleyAnd there are a few new entrants that might be inter... See more

While Peloton had no problem growing its community with best-in-class engagement and advocacy, it did experience pain points in managing its community. This came down to a lack of community-specific tools and limitations of existing platforms like Facebook. It was time-consuming and manual to draw important insights, and challenging to manage workf... See more

Sarah Tavel says she’s looking particularly closely at what she calls "Participatory Social" (e.g. Robolox, Fortnight, Discord) — platforms where communities and their members actually interact with one another, as opposed to Facebook where the model is based on content consumption.