Ep # 114: Mastering Community-Led Growth in the AI Era ft. Zach Hawtof (CEO & Co-Founder, Tightknit)

Adil Saleh (0:00:03) - Hey, greetings everybody. This is Adeel, your host at Hyperengage podcast. Previously, like, we spoke to a lot of these startups and more than, I would say, 50%, they're going towards an easier route, which is underland and you know, product like everybody says, but they struggle like we are struggling, like making everything product, like growth and product led sales and all of that. It's good when you say it, but it's, you know, pretty much hard to do in the beginning. And a lot of them are trying and missing to, you know, have a community led approach which was basically, it came prior to AI and evolution and all the content that you guys see like founders populating content, like faces, you know, studies that their stories and everything that you might be, you know, might be tired of seeing on LinkedIn. But community, that is one thing that we didn't talk too much about. Like even for the companies that is starting early and they have limited resources and they don't have like dedicated people or community managers to do all of the, all of the stuff by the look of it, it seems, oh, you're going to set up the community on Slack. Like many other startups, like hundreds and thousands of startups, they have communities on Slack, which is good. But do you think that you have community moderators, like a lot of companies, like product hunt, like Appsumo, like these, if you're sitting in the first two years, it's not that because I can see it for myself. So that is why we are digging in deep with community led and we have a founder of Tightknit that are making this job really, really simple and easier for even a smaller to mid sized, even large companies. They have multiple communities and channels. Slack first insight Slack. But they're optimizing time and bandwidth and making everything seamless, you know, for Slack community to bring the business outcomes. So today we have Zach, who's, who's the CEO and co founder at Tightknit. I really appreciate Zach for taking the time. Zach Hawtof (0:02:04) - Yeah, no, thank you for having me today. Excited to be here. Adil Saleh (0:02:08) - Love that. Love that. So, you know, talking about Salesforce because you have a background connected with Salesforce like early in two thousands, like they moved from, you know, moved to a subscription model. Then the customer success got born. Like everybody thought, okay, this is a category. We need to build platforms. We need to see it differently now, because now we have to retain, we have to expand customers and all. And then to be able to do that, there comes communities, there come, you know, all the support, you know, all of these I would say customer centric communities like Heap is one of them. Like they have all of their customers pretty much in one slack community, which is good. So I think the evolution started from Salesforce. Like Salesforce. If you talk about subscription based economy, it seems like it's fair to say that Salesforce is one of the leaders. Back in early 2000 you've been a part of Salesforce team and how do you think that experience, that environment, that kind of customers engagements, the communities shift you into like a founder you are today and how you connected those? Zach Hawtof (0:03:13) - Yeah, so I started back at Salesforce in 2015 on the Salesforce community cloud. So it was, Salesforce is really their big first attempt at trying to be a B2B2C organization, right? They'd solve service cloud and sales cloud and they were solving for employees, but they realized that if they could bring the problems and the data directly to the customer so that they could solve their own problems, it would actually like gather, you know, it would create better benefits for the businesses themselves in order to solve those individual problems. And then I think you made another great point of like Salesforce as a community company was already really there. The trailblazer community is really the like one of the largest enterprise communities out there. There are people who have built their entire careers inside of the community that have never worked at Salesforce directly. And there's such an avid energy of actually building in the salesforce ecosystem. So a lot of businesses try to find a way to build that exact experience. So I used to work on community cloud. If you asked me was I in the community space, I would have probably said no back in the day. But over time learning a lot about how digital self service and engagement is a huge fundamental part of community to keep your members engaged, that's a massive part on sales, service, marketing, commerce, all of those different facets of your business all rely in some aspect on community to be able to be successful. Adil Saleh (0:04:51) - Interesting, interesting. And thinking about the challenges that we came across in the last 15 years and now I'm not sure if those gotten even bigger because the AI has come up and people have been more writing, more AI generated and it's easier to not ping your brain or your intuition and just write it. And that makes a lot of people that are generally trying to interact and have a human connection making it really difficult for them. How big of a challenge community led approach for a startup company or even company in the first three years is when it comes to building human connections with community led, you know, having slack first or discord let's not talk about the platform, but as a community, as a component of your business. Zach Hawtof (0:05:41) - Yeah, I know. I think you're touching on something really interesting, is that AI has both hurt and helped community at the same time. Right. I think what you're, you know, there was previously there was no experience that could act like a human, other than a human. And now you have these AI bots that can jump in and try to answer questions that only humans could answer in the past. And so I think there is this combination of both of using AI one to solve people's problems. But also on the flip side, I think where there's a ton of opportunity is not using AI to be that one on one conversation with a human, but really using AI to help take a person's question and point them to the right person or the right resource so that they can learn more and actually feel more engaged in the community. So there is actually this responsible way to take AI and build even better human to human relationships by better understanding what that person is looking for and guiding them to the right place in the community to either ask questions or learn more. And I think that's really what we're exploring with Tightknit, mostly on the AI space, is less around solving people's problems through AI, but really about bringing them to other conversational experiences with other humans that might be able to solve it and even enhance it with ideas that that customer never even thought to ask. Adil Saleh (0:07:07) - I'm glad you mentioned that because a lot of these developer platforms, platforms for engineering teams, they are totally on Slack. They don't have support desktop literally like they just like they just live inside Slack. Their entire development engineering team, they collaborate with the customers and they solve their problems. Any customer has a problem, they just come in private like a GitHub for, for developers. So they’re doing it. So thinking about those kind of, you know, customers where they like collaboratively solve their problems that are of course for more like open source platforms, they have communities, inside Slack like so how you see them, because a lot of them, they're listening here and they came like more than 13 I would say that we have, that are completely open source and they are either for developer or engineering teams. And how do you see it happening? Because I'm the use case, biggest use case, because you are one of the Tightknit is by the way, one of the platforms that we have actually tried, signed up, installed and got through all the integration process to make sure. And it's amazing. And this is one of the platform that we thought that more people more founders, more startups, more mid sized companies serving in a smaller SMB segment should be able to have this kind of community, seamless approach and very, very value added. So thinking about only developer teams and product engineering teams that are collaborating not just with your team, but with other customers as well. So they have a shared pool of customers and that collaborate and solve their problems. Zach Hawtof (0:08:39) - Yeah, I mean, I think we can touch on that in so many ways. Like, it's exciting to see how engaged, like, the Hyperengage community is, right? Like you're very much a community led founder, and a lot of founders are trying to figure out how to build their own communities. And I think what's unique, going back to like the whole, how do you take developers, AI and community and bring those together, is that when you go to chat GPT, it's you and the AI. But, but when you have slack or a discord or a larger conversational space, a larger conversational community is that you can actually have many different people interact with the same AI. So it's using kind of the AI not as like an answer bot, but really bringing people together in new and innovative ways. And I think when you tie that back to developers, developers are trying to constantly find new ways to take that tool and be able to develop further on it so that they can solve their problem. And so I think having AI as a discovery mechanism, essentially to point developers to the right place, to have them explore new examples, new code snippets, that's all an opportunity for a conversational community and AI to be able to really, really pull those users deeper into your products so they explore more, they find more, and they really discover kind of what your product can do for them. Adil Saleh (0:10:07) - Right, right. And thinking about like, I would say the roadblocks I just put right on us, like for all the teams that are less than 50, like 10-15 product teams, investors, just GTM revenue teams and founders, it is super hard to even like for them to even think about hiring a community manager that can keep all of these folks inside the community engaged. I'm a part of like 17 plus communities. I just checked on Slack before coming on this episode because I never cared, because a lot of them, they are not, they're not engaging, they're kind of dead. I mean, there's a lot going on in different channels, but nobody's pointing me, there's, there's nothing personalized to me, nothing pings me when I wake up every morning. So the biggest challenge for them, what they think is they need a, the biggest challenge but they think that they need a community manager that can keep the community engaged, try to elevate people interest and maybe create some, initiate some conversations and all. How do you see it happening with Tightknit? Because I tell you what, folks listening. It just took Zack ten minutes, less than ten minutes to set me up. Our entire community, our channel integrated with Slack, our app, it's direct app integration and API integrations. And it was just about it. And now whoever is going to connect, like, we're going to, like, we are also a community and we are going to, you know, host like more than 120 companies inside that community and everybody will be able to see pretty much on the web. I'm sure that will go into deep onto this problem that I've shared, like, because, and this is what a lot of founders, they're just holding themselves back. It's easier for them to wake up, write something, take chat, GPT, help write some story, customer story, and put it on LinkedIn, get like 150-200 people to react, have some DM's, get someone to the demo calls and close the deals. That is a natural motion going on, but it is getting harder now. So how do you think, like founder led in the mix with community led, how it can do the job? Zach Hawtof (0:12:10) - Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to me, the community manager position is only going to grow further. Like, I think it's becoming one of those hires that becomes earlier and earlier in a business. And you're starting to see it used to be you could only max out at the director of community, but we're starting to see senior directors, vps of community. And so it really is starting to get a bigger seat in terms of like where it sits in an organization. And you can find orgs that said that let's buy in totally into community like Notion. And they grew dramatically, right. Using community to their advantage to be really a viral product. But I do want to make sure that it's noted that, you know, community is not a silver bullet, right. You need both the product, organization sales, or the customer success to be successful for the community to be successful, you can't just pour gasoline on no fire, right? And so using community is just the ability to scale and accelerate all of your efforts across your business. It's really an accelerant across that. So community managers work with every part of the organization and they're not, they don't always have the hat that says, I'm a community manager, right. They sometimes come from customer success, they come from the marketing, and they have their own goals and KPI's. But once you're thrown into the community, it really is how do I solve this customer's problem? Whether it's learning more about the platform, solving an actual like bug in the system, you know, finding jobs around your ecosystem, all of those things that people want to do in the community is really what the community manager is trying to activate. Right. And this is a good point. Like there are a lot of communities that you see being formed that are not just communities of product where it's like about Hyperengage, but really communities of practice. So in your case, you know, go to market sales or go to market marketing and all of the abilities to take people that have an interest and own the space where they can discuss those interests. So even podcasting, you've done this for how many episodes have you done now? Adil Saleh (0:14:25) - It's about 130. Zach Hawtof (0:14:26) - Yeah, wild. I am sure you know way more about podcasting than most founders. The ability for you even to deliver, the ability to say, how does podcasting take founders the next level? You would be a community lead in that regard. There's a huge opportunity for founders to just be thought leaders in the space and use that. Not to really drive the product, but it's an after effect of saying, look, we're the best at it and we just so happen to be part of Hyperengage. Adil Saleh (0:14:56) - Yeah, absolutely. And it's all about seeking discomfort. Like as a founder, to be very honest, if I think that I've done these episodes because it was easy for me, you know, I was comfortable doing like I've always done this, like doing meetings. When it comes to writing blogs, newsletters, you know, posts, engaging in the community that's getting me out of, out of my comfort zone. And this is what we all need to do, you know, to learn, you know, a lot of things that you can delegate. These are things you got to make sure that you lead, you make the top ten decisions, right? And then bottom line would follow. You know, it's that simple. So, you know, like he mentioned, like, let's say we talk about customer success a lot and it's a company wide interest. It's not that, you know, a CEO, co founder, vp of success needs to, you know, make sure the success of the organization is their responsibility. It's similar to, you know, community success. If a product marketing, you know, engineer or product marketing guys inside this slack community, it's his job to make sure and do everything that's aligned to the success of the community and advance the higher purpose, which is sharing knowledge, solving problems, interacting with people, to discover new opportunities and that's what community is all about. And one of the platforms I would love to mention they're doing really, really great is AppSumo. AppSumo is basically a SaaS deal platform. Came about ten years back. Of course, it's a unicorn. And they have like very, very engaging community. Like they have more than I would say, 200,000 products they have sold so far in the, in the past ten years. It's pretty like largest marketplace that we have and I'm a part of their community because we launched some products back in the years with them. And that's when I first saw the power of slack community for the first time, you know, amazing. Because the point is, like a lot of these founders think, oh, Slack is pretty mainstream. Like, you know, we better do it on email or discord is deemed, you know, it's not about the platform. It's about like Zach mentioned, like it's about how you want to drive it, how it aligns with your value and how you keep everybody under one operating principle. And you know, you just get in people, a lot of these communities, they're qualifying people, you know, for, for their slack invoice. So it's all about, you know, you, you get people that are aligned with the values or they believe the things that you believe, you know, it's all about, you know, making sure and starting with founders. Like, you know, we have a founder club as well coming up. So there's going to be one close knit community in slack. Using Tightknit will be a part of, you know, founders club that will, all of the founders who get together, some doing like conversational AI, some doing people AI, some doing product analytics. It's going to be super interesting. So at the end of the day, at the bottom of the funnel, I don't need anything monetary. I just need really smart people getting on one page, brainstorming, talking about some big ideas, thinking about future. And that's all about me. Zach Hawtof (0:17:57) - No, I mean, I think you mentioned something that I think is a question I get a lot is people are, as always are asking what's the best community platform? And I don't think there is a good answer. It's really what is the best community platform for your users and your members? Because there are a lot of community platforms out there and it depends on what you're selling or what you're delivering. And really where do your users and members, your ideal community member, where do they want to be? And the ones that we tend to work with in slack tend to be people that use slack for their day to day. It's one of the reasons that I think companies that we've succeeded with the most are associations and collectives of professionals as well as startups that are in the B2B space. But if you're going into gaming, for instance, if you're a gaming focused company, if you're unity, you're probably going to go to something like discord for at least most of the gaming oriented developers that you're trying to go and target. I do not think discord is the best for every type of user. I do not think Slack is the best for every type of user. When you're deciding as a community platform, we often hear the problems of when a community manager chooses it based on they just like one platform versus the next, but they never ask their end users where they would prefer to be. And that is the most important question you should be asking is where would you like to meet the individuals that actually use it? Because community is not just built by a community manager, it is really built by the community and the community manager is truly just there to make sure it operates and fundamentally stays in place. And you can run campaigns to keep it active, but at the end of the day, it really is up to the community itself to keep itself alive. Adil Saleh (0:19:56) - Absolutely, absolutely. Because as a product, as a B2B SaaS company, all that you're doing, you're doing it for your customers, you're doing it for the people that have trusted your platform and made a decision on your platform. So knowing your customer is super important. Like, like I said, like you gotta be customer obsessed throughout your, you know, your, the journey of your business from a commercial standpoint, from a success standpoint, all of this. So you know, knowing your customers is super important. That's why we come across a lot of these platforms that are only developer focused. And we tell them, hey, you don't use intercom, you don't need any, you know, HubSpot, any Sierra. They do everything in slack or GitHub or these kind of platforms where they have, it's a community for them and it's doing the job because they care for their customers. They know their customers, developers are not going to be sitting inside, you know, intercom and solving tickets. So it's all about like you mentioned, knowing your customers, knowing the industry, the segment that you're pushing. And it is super fun now talking about tightening, thinking about you. Of course in the first year you're trying to, you just recently launched Tightknit. Could you tell us a little bit about your plans, the roadmap, the kind of integration that you got, you know, you're directly integrated with Slack. So they have like a ton of integrations. Like we have notion integrated. We have all our chat bots integrated inside Slack and our platform is also, you know, integrated with Slack. So, you know, gives all the triggers inside slack. So how you're enabling communities, you know, communities meaning only for our segment, like B2B SaaS they have like engagements going on for customer success, sales, revenue teams, product teams, like product managers. So how you're trying and making your efforts or taking initiatives towards enabling them to stay within their workflows and still be able to engage with the community. If a product manager wants to interact with the community, have some news to share, you know, vp of sales want to share something, they don't have to go out of the way, you know, to different Slack channels. Like how does that work? That integrates with their workload? Zach Hawtof (0:22:06) - Yeah. And I think that's a good question is like also why did we choose Slack, right? And I think, you know, I got started with Slack back in, I want to say, 2017 when I was at Salesforce. It was like, you know, we were using hipchat at, at the time and I was our first Slack admin to push slack inside of my team at Salesforce and eventually slack in a great way, like a virus spread throughout the entire organization. So much so that obviously at some point salesforce recognized that that was a pure value prop and actually bought the whole company. At the time I was at Salesforce in community cloud and we got to see this transition and we spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, but we never went out to go solve it while at Salesforce. So when I went out to go kick off, what was my next idea for building a company, I knew, I knew the community space well and I had just left a company called Airkit, which now runs Einstein co pilot at Salesforce that got acquired back. I was like, how do I take AI and community and bring those two things together in a meaningful way? And Slack has, people don't know this. There are about 50 million users of slack, monthly active users, and about half, this is a crazy number. About half of those users use it for community and not for productivity. Most people don't know that, right? Adil Saleh (0:23:33) - Most people think, oh my gosh, I was searching in the Internet, by the way, before this episode. I would do some research and I was thinking that, let me see if I get a rough number. How many active communities are hosted on Slack yes, you got it now, right? Zach Hawtof (0:23:45) - Think about you, right? You're in probably one productivity slack workspace, but you mentioned you're in nine community workspaces. So you're already 90% using Slack not as a productivity tool, but as a community product. And so there is a huge opportunity to obviously take Slack and turn it into a first class community product. And we, you know, we have the team to do it where, you know, a lot of ex community leaders that have built for the enterprise, we understand the requirements and we're really set out to build the best community platform for Slack because Slack is very much focused on being a productivity tool, but we don't want them to give up on the ability to be a fundamentally great collaboration tool. And that's really why Slack as a community platform has succeeded for so long without Slack investing heavily in it is, it is the best collaboration, collaboration tool at work today. And I think that was the kickoff for us. And so the very big mission of Tightknit is really just to help Slack community managers solve the gaps that they see on slack. So what we're doing is we're building SEO around Slack. So you can have SEO that actually powers content that you want to share to social, you want to share it in an RSS feed, you can embed slack into your application and into your own website. Take community and embed it into other places. And we're slowly starting to work on events and gamification and all of the things one would need to really drive engagement inside of slack and be able to deliver first class experiences for their customers. Adil Saleh (0:25:28) - Amazing. First time I looked at Tightknit when we of course thought about integrating, Tightknit, you know, I wanted to just look at it. How is it different than, you know, I asking my co founder, hey, we want a slack community. Just let's create some channels and do like a conventional and traditional way to do, you know, Slack community. And then I looked at titles, their website, on one page I saw like a lot of people, they're introducing themselves in a slack channel, that those were slack notifications, like slack messages showing up on the web. I was saying, hey man, what is that? You know what, it's happening right in front on the web. And it's because from a marketing standpoint, because I have a certain background on the marketing as well, how it powers, like, you don't have to, it is cutting off the double word, you know, when it, from an SEO standpoint, you know, people interacting, people sharing knowledge, and that's getting onto your web pages, embedded on the web pages, you're not doing any extra. It's just getting people visibility. And they're joining right from the, joining the conversation right from the web page. You know, if they want to join this Slack community, there's, there was a. But I just went in and I just saw the entire channel, entire trail of introduction messages. So that is one thing that was quite different that I found internally. Amazing. Amazing. So now thinking about your go to market, like in the first year, like how you're trying to position your platform, it's quite simple. Like it is for slack managers, community managers, and empowering them to, you know, drive more engagements, drive more value out of the community. Everything is tied to the business outcomes. That's good. Like what kind of customer segments you're talking. Everybody goes from startup to upmarket that you have this leverage because a lot of mid sized companies talking about them, they're slightly more engaged than even bigger companies. So how you're thinking of penetrating in a go to market motion? Zach Hawtof (0:27:22) - Yeah, I mean, so I just want to cover one thing because you kind of said it in the beginning, is like, why even build a community and really cover, like, as a founder, what does building a community mean? Because I think when we kicked off this company, it really did change the mindset of what it meant to build a company because we were talking to a bunch of slack community managers. And you realize that the job of a community is really to help people that want to solve their problem and you want to solve their problem with them. And if you have a common goal with your community as a founder, and you give people the opportunity to even promote your business, and many of them will if you give them the opportunity to. It's a great way to keep people engaged and become advocates. Right. You're really trying, like a lot of communities around building customer advocacy, where by building the best possible product and the best possible community around it, you really enable people to be better in their own business, and then you get promoted through them. Like I used to tell any new product manager in the B2B space, it's kind of, you know, it's obviously boiling it down to one little thing is what's your job as a product manager? And I would tell people your job. And obviously there are many different jobs to be done, but I'd say your job is whoever, as a B2B PM is buying your product. If you can get them promoted or you can get them a raise or get them a compliment from their boss, they are going to buy and your product every single place they go. And I don't care what you build. I don't even care if you don't build anything at all. But if you can solve that problem in a creative solution, and it happens to be a product, you're doing the right job. So anyway, going back to your original question on ICP, I think the ones that we've discovered are the real best ones for us. These professional associations of people that join these slack workspaces want to be a part of a community of sales leaders, or marketing leaders, or support leaders, and having a place where they can come and join like minded individuals either across industry or location. And those could be paid, could be paid memberships, memberships. But those associations are community driven companies and we have found a lot of great attention from them to be able to build towards their common goal. And you find also that a lot of startups have that similar mindset, right? Like if you're going after a community led growth solution, your job is not to build a product, your job is to build towards what people want, right? And so if you can build the community where people are telling you what to build, they're telling you the problems that they're having. It gives you this amazing opportunity to hit people where they actually need, like they have a particular problem and they're asking for you. And so having that as a startup, as a high growth startup, is super valuable to be able to deliver best in class experiences. And then of course, I think the other two worth mentioning are education and charitable work or any sort of public organization. You are also a community based organization and we're doing a lot of work. We've always believed in the pledge 1% with Salesforce trying to give out our product as much as we can to any charities that are hoping to kind of drive community as a first class partner of their organization. So I think those four tend to be the best fit for us. But of course, anyone that's community driven and building on slack is going to fit our use case. Adil Saleh (0:31:15) - I'm glad you mentioned that. I'm a huge fan of Mark Benioff and all his initiatives. He took in the days when it was hard and nobody clapped at him. And now everybody sees how it yields over the two decades. Okay, cool. Now one last thing before I just push off. We are pretty much past time thinking of how easy it is to integrate Tightknit and using Tightknit for Slack for all of their communities. Because a lot of these founders listing this, they might have communities, or they might be thinking about community led, because in a B2B SaaS. You're, a lot of people say that your product has to be bigger than marketing, but I say for the first time owners or maybe, you know, for all the SaaS businesses in the first two years, their community has to be bigger than their marketing. So that is the new norm coming up and I think this can be really, really powerful and more platforms. Getting to see more platforms like Tightknit. So how easy it is to integrate. Zach Hawtof (0:32:16) - Yeah, I mean, our number one goal when we were building Tightknit as a product was time to market. Really. We don't want community managers, like you said, do not have time. And so our very first step was how do we make it super simple to set up a community and get it going. And I think our backgrounds at Salesforce, you would think, oh, these are two Salesforce guys that Salesforce is not known for a quick and easy setup. No one at Salesforce will say it's easier than a lot of the little startups, but it's very powerful. And our goal from the beginning has been how do we take it and learn from what we knew at Salesforce and what we could do to make it even better. We took that and pushed that into a startup's journey of let's get set up really quick but make it incredibly powerful and connected experiences. And so that's been our very first step is getting you set up within ten minutes so you can get going. And everything from there on out is iterative rather than a required first step. Adil Saleh (0:33:19) - Amazing, amazing. Zach, it was really nice meeting you. Really, really nice meeting you. I got to learn a lot about your community and your background at Salesforce and how it was, because again, Salesforce is one of the leaders when it comes to customer success. Subscription based community led all of this. Everybody looks at Salesforce, oh, what are they going to do next? And then it creates a category. So thank you very much for sharing that experience and getting it turned out to build something like tight knit, which is powerful and unique and it's going to enable a lot of these founding teams listening to this episode. Zach Hawtof (0:33:55) - Yeah, and thank you for having me. Of course.