Hello, and welcome to Bad Community Advice.
This is the show where we ask community professionals to come on in share their terrible tips and toxic takeaways.
I'm your host.
My name is Seth Resler.
I am the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And on the show today, we have a special guest.
He is the head of ecosystem and community at Glide.
I wanna welcome Andy Claremont, Andy.
How are you? Good morning.
Good morning, Seth.
Thank you for having me on.
Thank you for being on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Uh, let's start here before we get to your bad advice.
Uh, what exactly is Glide for people who are not familiar? What do you do there? For sure.
So Glide is a no code development platform for business apps.
It's a long winded way of saying you can build custom software without writing code.
So we provide the platform for that.
You can go and build whatever apps you want to get more work done.
Got it.
And so when we talk about the community there, what does that community actually look like? Who's in it and what are they doing? Uh, we have a a a large amazing community, largely, uh, made of builders and our guide experts who are folks who build the guide apps for others are, like, the VIPs of the community.
They are the ones who contribute the most, participate the most, ask the most questions.
So Uh, yeah.
It's it's really folks who are building some glide apps.
Oh, very cool.
Uh, and talk to me a little bit about what the day to day looks like for you there.
I mean, what are you doing on an average day or week? Of sure.
Well, the the the funny thing about glide is because we are still an early stage startup, everybody wears multiple hats.
So for me, on an average day, it depends on what mode I'm in.
So if I'm in community manager mode, I am in the trenches dealing with customers, community members, uh, answering questions, uh, resolving issues, working with our community moderators, um, jumping into our private Slack community for Relide experts, That's that's community manager one zero one day.
Uh, other days, I'm more of a partner manager dealing with our ecosystem partners.
So it could be, uh, technology integration partners or a strategic partners that we build things with.
Um, yeah, it really shifts depending on the mode, but there's always, like, some project for the day that I'm focused on, um, banging out.
I I did wanna ask you about that.
What is the difference between community and ecosystem in this context? You know, it's funny because when I talk to a lot of other folks who identify as, you know, ecosystem builders or ecosystem leaders within their organizations, uh, it skews heavily towards partnerships But then within the realm of partnerships, it's largely folks coming from a sales background.
So maybe BD account managers, they've been doing channel partnerships or something for a long time.
I'm coming into ecosystem from a community background because I've been doing community stuff for fifteen ish years.
So I'm coming at it from this idea of facilitating connections between members and, you know, the the one plus one equals three and the greater sum the the output of the group while they're coming at it more from a, like, one to one relationship business development partnerships side.
So what I'm finding now in how we're trying to approach ecosystem and glide is that it's, like, a best of both worlds.
We wanna take that deeper one on one relationship with partners and really strengthen those.
We'll have the thing at the same time thinking about our partners as this more cohesive community.
It's a it's a big group of people that we're doing stuff with and through doing stuff with them, we're creating even more value for our mutual customers, mutual users, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
And you are working in the software as a service space.
Right? Uh, where I I I think the concept of community has been around for a little bit longer than a lot of other industries.
Uh, so and there may be people from other industries who are not as familiar with how this concept works.
So let's talk about it a little bit.
In this case, where does community sit in the org chart? Are you in customer success or customer support? Um, so community for Glined, sits within marketing, but community is a shared resource.
Right? So we have, uh, our, uh, customer success team are paying attention to the community because it's a great source of insights into the day to day issues users are having.
We crowdsource a lot of feedback, uh, suggestions, bug reports.
That that sort of thing, the classic community stuff that, um, SaaS companies have been using community programs for for a long time, customer success is is wired into that because it's the sort of thing that they care about because they can action the insights coming out of the community.
On the other side, product is paying close attention too because their, like, customer success, they're looking for the insights coming out of the users that they can feed back into the product development cycle.
So they are paying attention as well, uh, and our sales team too because there's that three sixty view on customers.
If you know not only the conversations you're having with them one on one, but are they posting in the forum? What questions are they asking there? Are they showing up at community events? Like, if we do webinars, um, what things are they interested in? All of this feeds back into the sales and account management side too.
So really community, even though we sit within marketing, uh, it's a shared resource for the entire organization.
Everybody gets value out of it in some way.
Got it.
And how do you measure what you're doing? I know that this is a a tricky question for a lot community managers.
But but what do you look at when you're looking for? Is this working? You know, it's funny because to it kinda goes back to that previous point about, like, it it depends on what you're trying to do.
Community is the shared resource.
Right? And when I talk to folks and I try to define where the community is, I always say that it's it's a persistent connected group of people with something in common.
It's about the people.
It's not about a particular platform or or or place, it's the group.
So if you are, um, focusing on, are we getting feedback from the community? Are we actioning that feedback? Are we resolving issues? Are we acting on suggestions and implementing them into the product, you know, are we closing the loop, basically? Um, on the other side, if we're talking more about support where to break fix, are we escalating issues to the right channel if we can't triage it and up public forum, um, are people getting responded to very quickly, um, that's one of the things I I really try to look for is, like, what is the response rate for anybody who posts in a community channel? Are they being heard? Are they being responded to? What's happening with those responses? So it it depends on the specific program that you're running with the community and looking at the sis the success metrics tied to that program.
Got it.
Uh, and I heard you mention Slack.
Is that the primary home for your community? It is one of the primary homes.
So we have a, uh, public forum, uh, hosted on discourse, which is a fantastic come traditional forum software, especially for a SaaS company.
Um, that's been around for six years.
Lots of, uh, rich insights in in there and and conversations and and guides from our contributors and experts.
So that's the bulk of it, but we have a private slack as well exclusive to our certified light experts.
So folks who have met certain criteria in our partner program, they get invited to this group.
That's about 300 some, uh, experts, uh, as of this week.
So there's action happening there that's behind closed doors, but we're feeding everything back into the organization.
We're we're paying attention to all of these different channels because they all serve different purposes and the dynamics are a bit different depending on, you know, um, what aspect of it you're looking at.
Got it.
Got it.
So that's what it all looks like.
Let's take a moment to talk about your bad advice.
Uh, and here's what it is.
Community marketing doesn't work.
Uh, so let's actually take a moment to talk about what we mean by community marketing and tell me the circumstances under which you receive this piece of advice.
So we're going back about eleven years at this point.
Um, at the time, I was really doing community more on the side.
Like, I've always done community stuff, uh, at some level.
But back then, it was a a thing that I was doing on the side in in terms of, like, organizing low local user groups, doing conferences, a lot of professional development type stuff, networking.
And I had this opportunity to join GoDaddy as their founding community manager for GoDaddy Pro.
Which was their partner program for folks like myself who were building websites for others doing web development for, uh, clients.
And when I spoke to my then, uh, boss about this opportunity, the the basic advice I got was like, don't do it.
This does this won't work.
Community Marketing doesn't work.
We've tried this before.
Um, it it won't succeed.
Um, in in hindsight, I'm I'm glad I did not uh, heed that advice.
Um, but that's what I ended up walking into was, um, the this this last piece of advice being what you're about to set out to do doesn't work.
And, you know, here we are eleven years later, and it's kind of defined my my career since then.
So Yeah.
Bad advice.
Now let's talk a little bit about the marketing role that community can play because it's interesting to me that that, you know, for you, you're in the marketing department, even though, obviously, like you said, you touch all these other departments.
Because I think a lot of software as a service company's view it as customer service or customer support, customers.
I I'm old.
I call it customer support, not customer success.
When I call up the cable company, I'm not looking for success.
I'm just looking for It's on the thing to work.
Right.
Um, for sure.
But but that's where I I I think it lives for a lot of people.
Talk about, um, community specifically, you know, with respect to marketing, uh, you know, and and what you've seen work there and why you think it works.
You know, to it's funny now because today, a community it seems like community has become this this factor that everyone acknowledges is is hugely powerful and and one of the best ways to do marketing because it's all based on building this strong following, turning that following into a community into this connected group and the multiplier effect of that in being able to reach a a larger audience, a larger, uh, market than you would be able to on your own, you know, or especially over the last ten years, the effectiveness of, um, performance marketing and doing, you know, paid conversion campaigns on social.
Like, that has started to really maybe not fall off a cliff, but does not it's not as effective as it used to be.
And now there's this realization that you know what? If we have this strong community of people who in line with us and we're doing things with them, we're gonna be able to tap into that and leverage that to be able to reach even more, uh, more people.
Um, ten years ago, there was maybe an inkling of a sense of that, but it wasn't at the level that it is today.
So when I came into this and and started thinking about community marketing ten years ago, it was this really simple belief that I drew on my experience doing, you know, open source software and and web development communities, then that if you're able to help people succeed at using your product, but even more than that helping them succeed at whatever it is that they're trying to do, you're leading by helping.
And it's not just doing one on one, but you're doing it in a group setting.
So that interaction can scale and help more people that's going to have a knock on effect because then other people are gonna see what they're missing out on.
They're gonna be able to to benefit from this group interaction, and then it can carry carry on from there.
That that's how I thought about it coming into, um, the role.
And since then, it's been more and more of not just how does community marketing work as a practice on its own, but how does community as a a thing become, uh, beneficial for all these other functions within the organization.
But marketing was where I started.
Yeah.
You know, it's, uh, interesting to hear that you say that.
I I keep hearing the term lately community as a moat.
And I think what they're saying is that, uh, the barrier to entry to so many of these other channels, you know, you mentioned performance marketing.
Uh, I come from content marketing, you know, and and, uh, I'm old enough that when I started my career, if you wanted to create content and reach a large number of people.
You needed a television station, a radio tower, a printing press, uh, and now anybody with a phone can do it, the the the robots can do it, you know, and so we're starting to see that there's just no barrier to entry.
You know, but it's exactly like you said, is that it's it's not just that I need the content.
I I need somebody to help me use that content and figure out how to get me to do whatever it is I'm trying to do.
Uh, I think it's the role the community plays.
Yeah.
Like, and and there's this other thing too about, um, how audience evolves to become community because they they're very much related, but they're two different things.
You know? Like, audience, to your point about you think back to broadcast, uh, and and where everything started, it's you on stage to an audience.
It's one to many.
Community takes that and says, okay.
Well, what if we were to take that audience and instead of everybody facing the stage? We have these people facing each other.
And now instead of the interaction, the the collaboration being like, I'm gonna do something.
Maybe there's a crowd work.
Maybe there's a little bit of call and response.
Instead of that, it's we're going to facilitate as community managers, community leaders.
Maybe we'll get we'll break the ice.
We'll get it some things seeded out there with the the content that we create.
But it's really more about getting this group that's in front of us to do things together because all of those relationships, all of those interactions, all that collaboration that we are able to, uh, inspire and sustain is going to be able to do more than what we can do ourselves.
So that's where you start to see the energy grow in a community.
And then if you think about it in terms of, like, radiating out from the center, that's the mode because suddenly you have this community, these people bought into the same vision and the same thing that you're doing.
So now it's much harder for, um, you know, someone else to hit that level because you've you're already further long you have that community growing and scaling, um, the impact that you can make because they're doing stuff on their own.
Right? So when you're thinking about how do we enter a market if there's a a business that already has a as we especially in SAS.
Like, there's a SAS company that has a thriving community.
Well, what does that mean? That means that there's probably partnerships going on.
There's contributions coming in in terms of, like, other people, uh, adding to the plat form, maybe extending it, complimenting it in certain ways, uh, adding additional services on top of that.
Um, and and that's where you start getting into the ecosystem side in, uh, in SAS.
But it it really is that, like, all these people, all that all that energy, that's the moat.
Right? Um, and you're facilitating versus just, like, pushing out to an audience.
Yeah.
I I love what you said there.
You know, because I find that in dealing with people who are not, you know, well versed in the world of community.
Uh, the difference between audience and community, even if they get it at a surface level, it takes a while to to sink in.
And you said something there that has become an analogy that's helped me a lot is to to look at the seats.
And look at the ways that they pointed.
And, uh, you know, I've done a lot of event production.
My first, uh, experience in event production was producing concerts.
And concerts are fantastic, but they don't necessarily build a lot of community because, you know, anytime the seats are all pointed in one direction, whether it's to a stage or a screen, you're probably building audience.
And and what you pointed out there is that when you turn the seats and all of a sudden people are talking to each other Yep.
That's when you really start building the the community.
Right? Yeah.
That that's exactly it.
One of my favorite, um, formats for this, um, because I I I cut my teeth on doing these user conferences and and events like that.
So there's always, like, someone on stage.
Great.
It's one thing to have your auditorium classroom set up all these chairs and everyone's just staring at the stage, then that's good for some things, maybe inspirational keynotes, whatever.
But my favorite setup is when you have, uh, the the, you know, you go to to group lunches, and it's just all these round tables everywhere, those breakouts.
To me, that's the best.
Because suddenly, it's you know what? We're going to put you at this table with a handful of other people because it's real it's really hard to build community with hundreds or thousands of people.
But when you break it down, what these actually are are more discreet units of smaller groups of people? Like, how many people can you fit in a car? Four or five people sitting at a table, getting to know each other, and then, you know, breaking away, maybe going at another table, meeting some other people, and you're starting to build those connections and opportunities between people.
Like, to me, that that is it.
Like, it's more of a, um, a a mix of, uh, dinner and a show than it is going to see a concert trying to stick with your analogy there.
Wait.
Well, you know, I mean, I noticed that in my own experience over the years, I could never explain why.
I I'm starting to be able to now, but when I would go to conferences, I hated the lobby.
I hated the, you know, and I just remember being at certain conferences in the, you know, the hotel elevator doors would open, and you could hear the lobby before you'd see it, and my stomach would would sort of turn.
And I always liked peeling off into those small groups that you're talking about.
You know, I've heard, um, Carrie Melissa Jones and and Charles Vogle, for example, call them Campfires, you know, where people sort of break into these smaller groups, these subgroups.
Um, and I've I've been at conferences with things like Braindates where they set up people in, you know, roundtable to cut talk at once to a certain topic.
Yeah.
I really like that.
How do you facilitate that within your own community? So there's there's a few things that, um, there well, there's there's there's three big things.
Um, the first one is, uh, I'm I'm surprised it's taken this long actually for there to be this much appetite board, but it it's the, uh, intentional networking.
Like, facilitating the matchmaking and the connection between members, um, there has been a little uptick in startups and and products coming online to do this sort of thing, whereas, like, you, hey, you have this community of hundreds of people.
They want to connect with others in the group.
Like, that's one of the reasons they'll join a community, especially, like, a peer associate occasion or a professional community group.
They want to connect with others like themselves or people that they want to learn from, but we haven't done a ton to facilitate those intentional connections.
So one of the easy things that you can do to start with is just make it, uh, like, a self serve thing that you can come into the community and be like, this is the stuff that I I'm I can help others with.
These are the things that I need help with or the things that I'm interested in and being able to do that sort of match making.
This kinda, like, prefer tender within the community of, like, who do you wanna connect with? So that that's a, uh, you know, like a self serve next step from a member's directory.
The second thing that, um, we've started doing I'm actually just had our our first go yesterday, which with our, uh, glide experts is just setting time on the calendar for people to jump into a Zoom call, and then we hit the breakout rooms button.
And it's completely random.
But for people who want that time and they want that face to face and they want to connect with new people within the group, we tested, uh, this out last fall with this cohort that we ran, um, for our partners, and it went over really, really well.
And based on the feedback, it was one of the top three things that everybody loved from that program.
So yesterday, we started up the new series to do this again, not just with that cohort of a 120 people, but now for the hundreds of experts in the community, um, to give them that chance.
You know, every week, we're gonna do a breakout session, and you're gonna come in.
We'll we'll have a banter, and then we're gonna hit the breakouts, and you're gonna go and be paired with two or three other people.
So you can start to get to know who else is in this community.
So there's a campfire instead of this giant lobby.
Right? Uh, and then the third thing is being much more it's it's being much, much more intentional about, uh, introducing people.
So, like, proactively knowing that, hey, you, as a community member, um, have these traits and and you're working on these things, who else in the community should I connect you with? And make making making it a proactive motion as a community leader to make those introductions.
These sorts of things, um, these facilitations make the community stronger because those relationships add resiliency to the group overall because hey, my buddy's in this group.
I don't wanna leave this group.
I wanna be active in this group because I know this guy, this guy, this girl, this girl, we know each other.
That's what makes us stronger as a community.
So if I'm hearing you, right, you view some of your role as being a matchmaker.
As connecting the right Yeah.
Yeah.
And just may and just making that part of the the job as a community manager.
Like, we don't we're not we can do some content creation and and stuff, but really our ultimate response is to facilitate.
Like, there's a content creation role in that.
But it's more about getting other people, uh, up and running, getting them along for the ride, um, because the community is all of us.
It's not an audience.
Right? Like, the activity has to be there for it to to really thrive.
Uh, let's go back to your bad advice because, you know, when you said it originally, you know, community marketing won't work, I assumed that it was in the context of you know, this is not a good marketing strategy, but it sounds like it was in the context of career advice.
It was, you know, don't pursue community marketing as a path.
Um, can you talk about how you have seen that evolve in the time that you've been doing.
And what would you say to people who are thinking about community marketing as a path now? But I would say now if you're thinking about community marketing explicitly, I would say this is it's one area to start.
But then, uh, if you're if you're really thinking about community and you're driven by community.
It's what el what what other things can community contribute to? What other things can community do? Community marketing, I think, is a really strong starting point because if you can get community activities and can be these connections and and things going early on, there's the The the value of that is in incredibly strong.
Being able to pull out things like the the the testimonials and the case studies and the the the just the stories of these individuals who are in the community.
And when we think well, what is marketing ultimately is about how you show up in market? Right? You just get down to the bare bones of it.
So how do you show up in market? It's not just about you.
It's about the people that you're helping, and it's about the pe the their stories and how they're succeeding.
And we talk about that all the time.
Look at the hero's journey.
Right? And as a a brand, you don't wanna be the hero.
You're Yoda.
You're Obi wan.
You're helping the hero progress.
So starting with community marketing and thinking about your community members, it's how do we tell the stories of our community members and make them the heroes and where where how how do we facilitate them? How do we do that? And then you you can go from there.
Because that in itself, you're gonna get the the deliverables that marketing cares about because it all comes back to like, what are you putting out there? What's the reach? How does it resonate? You're getting those things, but then it becomes just like stepping off point for, you know, when we're having these conversations and we're making these introductions, there are things that we'll over here, uh, and that we can bring back to the rest of the team.
So suddenly, you're also doing a little bit of research and there's some market research reconnaissance going on there and that's really valuable.
So you're just kinda like plus one plus one plus one as you find momentum and start getting those wins.
And then you can start, you know, branching out.
I I wanna take that analogy you used of Obi wan or Yoda, and, uh, I I kinda wanna expand it out, but then it feels for labor.
If you're selling lightsabers, what you really wanna do is train Jedi nights.
But Well, sell the well, what what's his name? You sell the pickaxe? Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
But absolutely.
Well, look, this has been fantastic let me ask you one final question, and this is a a question that I ask.
Oh my guess.
Make a prediction.
I mean, where do you think, you know, community is going to be in five years? What do you think we're gonna see in this space? So five years ago, I made a prediction that we would would see the the I I said the pendulum would swing back from these massive social media platforms into more intentional niche groups of interesting purpose.
And I I feel like that's happened.
I feel like we're we're on that track and we're we're seeing a lot of that now with, um, platforms like circle that are creating the spaces and and the the tooling needed to facilitate those groups.
So I think what we're gonna see over the next five years, especially as AI just continues to to crank, and there's more and more, um, stuff out there, uh, demanding our attention, community becomes that refuse.
Where you are trying to find that genuine person to person relationship, that person to person connection because there's the trust and the humanity in that, and that's where community thrives.
Because it's not just about chatting with Claude or chatting with Chagie, VT and and asking questions and getting answers, it's about the context of it.
Right? So it's one thing for me to get an answer from an LLM that's trained up on a bunch of data.
It's another thing to talk to somebody who maybe maybe there appears like myself, They're they're a parent.
They have a young kid or young kids.
Uh, they're at a certain position in their life and in their career.
Like, all of those things influence that relationship.
I'm not gonna get that from AI.
And that's where community comes in to help you find those connections because they will matter over the next ten years over the next five years more than ever before.
That's my prediction.
Yeah.
Uh, I think you're right.
How uh, I don't know how old your kids are, but let me tell you when they when they get ready to get their first cell phone, I've been through this.
Not there yet.
Thank goodness.
But I wouldn't have yet to be able to talk to somebody who has been through it.
So yes.
Um, Andy Claremont, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us.
I really appreciate it.
You're the head of ecosystem and community at Glide, and you have wonderful bad community advice.
Thanks for having me.
Hold on
