Brittany Caldwell joins us on the podcast to chat about her role as Head of Community & Events Marketing at Webflow. She has over 13 years of experience building communities and has previously worked for companies like GitHub and Atlassian. On today’s episode, we cover her top strategies to kickstart a community with little to no budget, why she chooses to look at community like a product, and how she grew her user community over 114% in less than a year.
Brittany Caldwell joins us on the podcast to chat about her role as Head of Community & Events Marketing at Webflow. She has over 13 years of experience building communities and has previously worked for companies like GitHub and Atlassian. On today’s episode, we cover her top strategies to kickstart a community with little to no budget, why she chooses to look at community like a product, and how she grew her user community over 114% in less than a year.
Who is this episode great for?
Virtual event managers, In-person communities, Product marketers
What’s the biggest takeaway?
Brittany has been super successful growing the community at Webflow 114% over the past year. She attributes a lot of her success to the ability to view community like a product due to her extensive background in Product Marketing. Brittany starts any community with a go-to-market strategy and a deep audit of the product. She has also been successful using the strategy of piggybacking off of other company marketing initiatives (such as a traveling product roadshow) to make the best use of available budget in order to grow her community and get to know her members.
Speaker 1: (00:03)
In 2010, I co founded a company called startup grind with one goal, inspiring, educating and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet today. Startup grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members along the way. I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time, customer to customer marketing, C to C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wish we'd had when we start building our community. At decade ago, each episode, we talked to the brightest minds in companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Anderson. And this is the CDC podcast. I'm excited to have our next guest, Brittany Caldwell, who is the head of community and events marketing at Webflow. She has over 13 years of experience building communities and has previously worked companies like GitHub and Alaska. And on today's episode, we will cover her top strategies to kickstart a community
Speaker 2: (01:04)
With little to no budget. Take a listen. Brittany, can you describe what web flow is and what you do in your role there?
Speaker 3: (01:11)
Yeah. Um, so Webflow is a SAS platform for designers and marketers to build websites, web apps, and prototypes without having to code. And our vision is to empower everyone, to be able to create for the web without having to code. Um, my role is director of community and my team is responsible for all of our events, community initiatives, and a lot of our customer marketing campaigns.
Speaker 2: (01:38)
So when you got to Webflow, you had a decent sized community, not a lot of budget. Walk me through the strategy you put together and how much growth you saw, you know, following executing on that.
Speaker 3: (01:50)
So I think because I started my career at, at LaSeon, or it was for eight years, that, which at the time had no traditional sales team and centered all of our marketing around product marketing that I kind of can't help, but approach community growth as like a product marketer would approach user growth or product adoption. And I'm also married to a director of product marketing. So it's kind of a big influence in my life, but, um, I start growing any community or starting at any company with like a go to market strategy. So that starts with like a deep audit of the product. And, you know, I consider like my product being the community and, um, really focusing on like where we are, what platforms we're on, what initiatives we have in place, like what data we have and like what feedback we've received, trying to figure out like how people are learning about us and doing a lot of interviews and surveys at this point.
Speaker 3: (02:44)
And then building like community personas and putting them on a scale of most to least engaged and trying to find the commonalities of our most engaged members. Like where do they work? What do they like to do? And what are willing to share with us? What can I find out about them without having to do a ton of manual work? And basically this is like a quest to figure out like what the health of the community is. And so, you know, understanding what metrics we can already track and what holes we have, like what metrics are important for us and what we currently don't have the ability to track and using like our competitors as a benchmark to set like the health of the community. So like figuring out what the trends are. And then once, you know, we've done this like whole go to market strategy, basically, like you're coming up with your competitive advantage, like trying to find out what trends like what's jumping out at you from all the facts that you've collected, like putting that towards a vision of what you want to see your community at the end of the year, at the end of five years.
Speaker 3: (03:47)
And aligning that with like the biggest, you know, you're kind of like your SWAT for the community and aligning that with the company goals and target audiences and like the official product roadmap. This kind of gets me to figure out like what phase of growth we're in. And based on that, that helps me determine a budget and an easier way. So doing that with web flow, we start like when I started 11 months ago, we had 7,000 members in our meetup community and our total community had 29,000 members. And now in 11 months from then we have 20,000 meetup members and over 62,000 members. Um, so it's pretty crazy growth. We went from our strategy. Like I kind of looked at it like we're in like the adoption phase. There's kind of like, I kind of mapped that to like growth phases to the way like you would map like a marketing funnel or loop, whatever people are calling it these days, um, where there's like awareness, adoption, engagement and evangelism, and like awareness is kind of like building the foundations of the community.
Speaker 3: (04:52)
We were kind of in that adoption phase where the community existed and there was, um, it was growing really organically, but, um, we wanted to grow up more before putting like permanent structures in place that we weren't at the point where we really needed to scale yet. And then sort of the next phases are like driving engagement. And then once the community's really running on its own and well-managed then turning more ownership of that over to the community. But basically like our first year looked like doubling down on the programs that were providing the most value to us. And we really saw that people were the most engaged in our meetups. So we focused on equipping our leaders with resources they needed and giving them extra attention because we had a really small team and a small budget. So we wanted to make sure like our most engaged members were looked after and they knew that we had their back while we worked to fix some other issues.
Speaker 3: (05:44)
Um, and then we really needed to build up marketing channels. So because our community had grown so organically, which is like a great problem to have, it was really fragmented. We had people on meetup.com and people on Facebook, we had on their forums and we had no way to connect with everyone in one place. And we didn't have, and still don't have some of the critical data that we need in order to, um, succeed longterm. So, you know, building a website and instituting a monthly newsletter and monthly events with our leaders, like allowed us to have one source of truth and to be able to onboard people more easily and gauge like what percentage of the community is actually engaged with us. Um, we didn't even have like everyone's email addresses on 11 months ago. Um, and then the other few things were just like increasing content that was produced from the community and using that on those marketing channels that we built.
Speaker 3: (06:42)
So like we started a weekly visual podcast called coffee talk. Um, and we started a lot of new events. We held our first ever conference, which was really beneficial in bringing the community together and really refocusing our parks. Um, like a lot of the times we hear from like amazing companies like Salesforce, um, who has a really strong user community. And when we ask how they got there, they're like, Oh, we gave, you know, VIP front row tickets to Dreamforce. And a lot of companies can't do stuff like that. Um, and actually our community manager off Sean crushy, who's like wonderful. She pointed out that like, um, people aren't in it for the swag and if they are, then they probably shouldn't be leading your community. Uh, you don't have to treat them like they're VIP, even though, you know, they're very special, but you really just need to treat them like they're on your team and that's what they want. Um, so refocusing some of the parks so that it wasn't focused on just like swag, but more driving engagement, deeper engagement to the community. One
Speaker 2: (07:45)
Thing that you said right at the beginning, which really resonated with me, and that was that you look at community as a product. And that's always how I described startup grind was we always looked at it as a product and I'm also a product marketing background so that this all, like all the things you're saying, like it all is like, sort of speaks to me and, and the way that we did a we're doing, eh, or whether we, we built startup grind. But I just wonder, like, that's not really the natural way that I think a lot of community professionals look at it, they don't look at, they, they kind of look at it as an extension of something else. And I think we end up sort of cheapening the value of what we're building is community people, because of that, because it's sort of like this sort of thing that sort of helps something else, but the way you talk about it, it almost feels like it's own sort of living, breathing, organism, its own product inside the organization. And if you kill this product, uh, it could have all these repercussions on other products that, that are sort of the lifeblood of the company. Do people internally perceive it as a product? Is that something that other people have been able to understand? Is that the best way for you to frame it for your like, love to hear more about that?
Speaker 3: (08:57)
So, yeah, for me, it just makes sense because there's so many great things of like, about the way product marketing, people like go about, you know, driving growth, like a go to market strategy in and of itself. Like you can Google it and find so many templates online, but it starts with like research and just showing and figuring out what you have and letting the answers kind of like pop up at you. Like once you have everything all in place, you can literally see what the trends are instead of having to sit there and rock your brain for like, what's the most creative program to come up with that, you know, no one's ever done before. And for me, I just it's, honestly, I can't think of any other way just because like I grew up as a marketing person in that environment, but I, the answer of like, do people, other people see it that way is no, I've had a really, I have a hard time like explaining that internally, like, Oh, is this a separate roadmap?
Speaker 3: (09:51)
We know this is literally just for our community. Like it's not going to affect the product moment, but once you've done it and you see like, you know, I kind of turn it into what I did at web. It was kind of turned it into like a state of the union report. So like that was when I, um, started, uh, presenting it to other teams and to the executive team, it was like, here's everything that we found on the community. Here's the health of it. Here's the opportunity. Here's like the metrics that we, um, here's what we need. Then it starts making sense because most marketing people do come from that upbringing or like that way of thinking. And when you put it into their terms, then it makes sense more that like is part of, um, what they're doing and something that's really important.
Speaker 2: (10:34)
I know you've done this 12 city product focus world tour. Love to just hear about how you executed that, what that was in sort of benefits that, that created.
Speaker 3: (10:44)
Yeah. Um, so it's actually coming up, but basically this started as, you know, another way this kind of theme today is like how to kickstart communities without budget. And one way that I've done it many times has been by piggybacking off of product road shows and, you know, trade shows around the world when other teams are traveling and already spending the money to go somewhere and doing events. Um, you know, this is one of the first times at web flow where like I'm running events and community, but community hasn't always been on the events team or I've been on at other companies. So I'll kind of like piggyback off of that. And like, after you have an event in that area, then the next day he hosts user group. And I usually spend like the entire time I'm traveling, getting the community to meet our product teams and come to like the roadshow event, but also find a new leader.
Speaker 3: (11:35)
And the truth is like, you need that FaceTime and you need that interpersonal bond in order to really have the community. And so it, it does wonders when you can show up for them. And it also shows you that like, as you're making programs that scale and that you can support five user groups around the world, you, you remember like going on a road show once a year, however often, like when you go to Berlin or when you go to London, like there's something different about each community. Um, and you remember to like, keep that into your planning as you scale. So the world tour that web hosting this year kind of came about by me proposing like a community version of a roadshow for web flow. And we just really truthfully didn't have the budget to make it work in 2020 and our plan, maybe not our plan B, but like our plan C was possibly to do it remotely.
Speaker 3: (12:30)
And then the pandemic kit. And I feel like, honestly, so grateful that that was even something that we thought of before we even do. Um, but yeah, so now it's going to be a virtual world tour. And right now, you know, the struggle is like, how do you make online events interactive? How do you foster those interpersonal relationships? I've always, always been someone who said that, like, it's a marriage between online and offline. You can't run a community, having it be all events and, and not talking to them online in between. And you know, it'll be a very different community if you have no events and it's all just forums or online. So we're still trying to figure out like what the best way to make online events interactive is. But like with the world tour, we're actually doing 12 events across nine times zones over three weeks, like in a road show style.
Speaker 3: (13:20)
Um, so each event might have like the same talk from Webflow, but we'll have local customers showcase at each event and we're doing it in that time zone. So we're waking up at 5:00 AM or staying up until midnight for some areas. And I think that's kind of our way of showing our community that we're not just doing like one event that's convenient for some people, which is really easy to do online and say like, okay, we're going to record this. And just like, here you go. Here's one thing. But, um, we're making that effort and I'm trying to still do what we used to do a little bit, but doing it online. So let you know how that goes in August 1st time for everything,
Speaker 2: (14:02)
You know, it sounds amazing how you're sort of adjusting to all of this stuff. I think I've talked to so many people, both local community organizers, and then also people working in enterprises and big companies and, you know, in April was like, Hey, I'm an in person person. So we'll, we'll just ride this out. And, um, I think the impact that we've seen with virtual events has sort of changed a lot of peoples in the impact the virtual hands have had on us have changed a lot of people's paintings on that. But as a longtime community person, as very much an in person events person that you are, how have you shifted your own thinking about the value that you bring to an organization or the community that you build, or is it, are you still able to do the same things just in slightly different way? Like how are you looking at all with sort of who you are and the place that you're at inside of your company?
Speaker 3: (14:54)
It's, you know, the question of the year, and I wish I had a great answer for this, but the truth is like I'm taking it day by day. Um, the three, I would say main things that I'm doing is like one, just spending more time listening to community leaders and just equipping them with what they need. So that is different from what it used to be. Um, you know, if you had a really rigid program, like I remember at the time I left it last year and like our program is so big and we had pretty, you know, rigid, um, structure for like where we're offering like food and beverage for meetups. A lot, like Webflow was offering that too, because we're smaller now that looked really different independent make. And some people now want their wifi paid for one month or want something different each month.
Speaker 3: (15:42)
And we are being as flexible and understanding as we can. And we're lucky to, you know, I'm at a smaller company, we have a small team, but we're able to kind of like do one off cases and, and figure out what is working for each, um, community, you know, just like people need space to hold meetups. You know, we're paying for their zoom accounts and we're paying hopefully going to pay for bevies and I'd get like a base Miro, basically like anything that they need, um, in order to make their events work for them. We're also keeping a close eye on like new habits that are being adopted by people. So for me, like there's social distancing is like, you know, I, the reality is we're not going to go back to the old version of what we considered normal. Um, I've no idea what our new normal really is going to look like, but they say it takes 21 days to like build new habits.
Speaker 3: (16:35)
And I think there's going to be a lot of new habits that people are building throughout this time. And so basically just trying to, you know, figure out what those new habits in your community are and being really open minded about them and not thinking in absolutes and trying to like anticipate that some of those are gonna be part of your future. Um, and then keeping in contact with like vendors, you know, also just to make sure like they're doing OK. Cause that industry was really, really hard. A lot of our vendors are suffering. How can we best support each other? And also they talk to companies all day long. So like, you know, if you're close to some of them, they might help you figure out what other companies are doing to play in longterm. But like the honest to God truth is like, I have no idea. And I don't know if anybody really has an idea because like we have no code comp usually in November and we know now we're not going to do that, but I've got a bunch of dates on hold for 2021. And you know, I'm not sure which one to pick, you know, it's like every day, it's like, which one should you know? So we'll see.
Speaker 2: (17:36)
All right, as we close up, I'd love to hear about a community that you love and tell us why you love it.
Speaker 3: (17:43)
I think my favorite like corporate community has to be Ted when I started as community manager. Like this is probably, this is right before meetup was even a thing. So I guess that makes me old, but I just always have tried to emulate them. They, to me strike the perfect balance of having a company that obviously cannot run without community content and community organizers, but they didn't feel like they had to employ like an open source strategy to community building where then which isn't necessarily bad, but a community then kind of gained so much power that like sometimes, you know, your polished brand looks different from that. And maybe the quality suffers in certain things, but they've done such a good job of keeping people like front and center. People are still on their website. They're not using like, you know, the vanity metrics, but they've super high quality standard for content and are still, you know, the community company I would say. So
Speaker 4: (18:40)
[inaudible]
Speaker 1: (18:42)
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevy labs.com/pod that's B E V Y L a V s.com/pod.