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In this episode of the Surf and Sales podcast, hosts Richard, Scott, and special guest Eric Iannello, Head of Sales at Commsor, dive deep into the evolving landscape of sales outreach. The discussion covers a range of topics, including: Eric's journey from experiencing consecutive layoffs to embracing a network-driven sales approach, and how that shaped his perspective on the value of relationships. The pros and cons of leveraging AI and automation in the sales process, particularly when it comes to managing warm introductions and preserving the human element of prospecting. The panelists' predictions on the future of outbound sales tactics, with insights on the gradual decline of traditional cold calling and emailing, and the rise of more personalized, referral-based strategies. Thought-provoking perspectives on the ethics and challenges of scaling a network-driven sales model, including the potential pitfalls of over-automating relationship-building. Don't forget to join us at the next Surf and Sales event, www.surfandsales.com
What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Mac Reddin, Founder and CEO of Commsor. Summary: Mac treks through the Jurassic wilderness of modern sales, where outbound campaigns cannibalize themselves while AI-powered sequences are degrading response quality by the day. Real marketing power flows through human networks, forward-thinking companies are transforming their SDR teams into relationship architects who measure success through network depth and authentic engagement. Be the team that does better. Your competitive edge lives in human connections that no algorithm can replicate, requiring a complete rethinking of how we incentivize and measure revenue team success.About MacMac is a career-long entrepreneur, his first business was a gaming network built on top of Minecraft which peaked at 150k users per dayHe went on to create various bootstrapped businesses over the course of 5 yearsHe created a substack newsletter for the community space which eventually evolved into an actual community of over 10k people One day he took part in a no-code hackathon and the idea of Commsor was born, initially a community reporting and metrics platformToday Commsor is a 40-person company focused on curated introductions and building the go-to-network movementThe Origin of the Dinosaur Brand Came From a TypoA misspelled tweet transformed Commsor's brand identity forever. Someone wrote "Commsaur" instead of "Commsor" on Twitter, sparking an organic evolution that proves how authentic brand moments outperform manufactured marketing strategies.The story unfolds with raw honesty from Mac: "It became an inside joke, then our internal branding, and eventually our entire visual identity." No marketing committees. No focus groups. No desperate attempts to retrofit meaning into the accident. The team simply recognized the genuine enthusiasm building around their accidental dinosaur mascot and rolled with it.Consider these organic moments that cemented the dinosaur's place in Commsor's DNA:* A casual Slack screenshot sparked employee excitement* Internal conversations naturally incorporated dinosaur references* Team members added dinosaur emojis to their social profiles* Customers started associating the brand with its prehistoric mascotThe business impact materialized in unexpected ways. One prospect lost Commsor's name but remembered the dinosaur. They scoured LinkedIn for employees with dinosaur emojis in their profiles, found the company again, and booked a demo. This kind of brand recall demonstrates how authentic visual elements create deeper connections than carefully crafted corporate identities.Mac's experience teaches a powerful lesson about modern branding: manufactured meaning falls flat. When the team needed a new logo, they faced zero resistance to the dinosaur concept because it already represented their culture. You can't engineer this kind of organic brand evolution in a marketing workshop or through trend analysis.Key takeaway: Authentic brand moments emerge from genuine team interactions and customer connections. A typo-inspired dinosaur logo drives more business value than countless hours of strategic brand planning because it represents something real: a company culture that embraces creativity, humor, and happy accidents.Why Your Mass Outbound Strategy Cannibalizes ItselfMass outbound marketing operates like a ravenous snake devouring its own tail. Every blast campaign you send erodes response rates across the entire ecosystem, forcing you to send even more emails to hit your targets. Mac draws on the ancient Ouroboros symbol to illustrate this self-destructive pattern playing out in marketing departments worldwide.You feel the tension daily: outbound outreach serves essential business functions. Your team needs to:* Connect with potential podcast guests* Build strategic partnerships* Source vendor relationships* Develop sales opportunities* Nurture industry relationshipsYet the industrialization of this process through purchased contact lists and templated messages has created a toxic environment. Response rates plummet while marketing teams double down on volume, hoping quantity will save them. The math gets uglier each quarter: 10,000 emails become 20,000, then 50,000, as engagement metrics spiral downward. Your carefully crafted messages drown in an ocean of automated noise.Mac points to the last two years as a breaking point. Marketing teams hurtle toward catastrophe like Thelma and Louise, eyes locked on the dashboard metrics instead of the cliff ahead. The cognitive dissonance feels suffocating - everyone privately acknowledges the broken system while publicly defending increasingly desperate tactics. AI tools threaten to accelerate this race to the bottom by making it even easier to flood inboxes with personalized-but-soulless outreach.Your outbound strategy needs a reset focused on human connection. Replace mass automation with careful curation. Send fewer messages with deeper personalization. Study your target accounts' actual needs before reaching out. The marketers who thrive will build systems around quality interactions, not maximum velocity. This shift feels counterintuitive when every internal metric pushes for more volume, but the alternative leads off a cliff.Key takeaway: Break the cycle of mass outbound marketing by prioritizing quality over quantity. Build genuine connections through carefully researched, personalized outreach that demonstrates real value to your recipients. The future belongs to marketers who choose meaningful engagement over maximum velocity.The Brutal Math Behind Why Your Sales Outreach Dies UnreadB2B buyers now receive 500% more cold outreach than three years ago. The math becomes brutal: every sales message you craft competes with hundreds of others in an attention economy that's hitting its breaking point. Your thoughtfully personalized email drowns in the same inbox flood as automated spam blasts and LinkedIn form messages.Think of outbound sales channels like a public park destroyed by overuse. Each individual visitor might leave only a small trace, but multiply that impact by thousands. That's what's happening to email, phone, and social outreach. Even when you craft the perfect message, your prospects have already built defensive walls:* Automated email filters that quarantine anything resembling sales language* Phone settings that send unknown numbers straight to voicemail* Browser extensions that block LinkedIn connection requests* Calendar apps that require "approved sender" statusA recent conversation with a frustrated sales leader crystallized this reality. He argued that CEOs who ignore cold outreach risk missing game-changing opportunities. But flip that logic: as a CEO of a small company, Mac sees hundreds of pitches monthly. Each one demands attention, evaluation, and response time. For leaders at larger organizations, that number multiplies exponentially. The brutal reality is that most prospects physically lack the hours needed to evaluate your message, no matter how brilliant.The psychology of modern buyers reflects this overwhelm. When you receive 50+ sales messages daily, pattern recognition kicks in. Your brain builds shortcuts, filing anything that looks like outbound into the "deal with later" folder (which really means never). Sales teams chase prospects through an ever-shrinking window of attention, while buyers fortify their defenses against the growing assault on their time.Key takeaway: The outbound sales crisis stems from pure mathematics: too many messages chase too...
This week we chat with Mac Reddin! Mac Reddin is the Founder and CEO of Commsor. At Commsor he's focused on building tools to enable companies to embrace Go-to-Network, a more sustainable way to grow compared to traditional direct Go to Market motions.Prior to Commsor he bootstrapped and exited various businesses across gaming, fashion, and software.Follow us!Mac Reddin: TheTeaGunsCommsor: @CommsorErica Wenger: @erica_wengerDear Twentysomething: @deartwentysomething
You may recognize this week's guest by her interviews in a NYC carriage, by the running she coordinates at Inbound, or simply by the hat she has in her LinkedIn Profile. This week's guest studied Sociology, and has worked her way up from Customer Service Rep, to Account Manager, to Enterprise AE and the advisor to companies like Limelight, Sendspark, or Commsor. Now she is the Sales Manager of Americas at Dreamdata, where they connect B2B marketing to revenue enabling you to optimize and automate your marketing efforts with confidence. Please join me in welcoming this week's guest, Laura Erdem to the show. Studying Journalism/Sociology Sales/Marketing Alignment Feedback Loops Justifying Events Much More! Enjoy this week's episode with Laura Erdem. I am now in the early stages of writing my first book! It will cover my journey into sales, the lessons learned, and include stories and advice from top sales professionals around the world. I'm excited to share these interviews and bring you along on this journey! Like the show? Subscribe to the email: Subscribe Here I want your feedback! Reach out at 20percentpodcastquestions@gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. If you know anyone who would benefit from this show, please share it! If you have suggestions for guests, let me know! Enjoy the show!
This week's guest is a Master at Going-To-Network. What started as a Hack-A-Thon entry has turned into Commsor, a platform that helps companies turn their network of investors, advisors, champions and more into their #1 revenue channel. In this week's episode, I had the opportunity to chat with Mac Reddin, the Founder of Commsor. During our conversation, we discussed: Starting A Lego Business As A Child Moving to Denmark Taking Micro Breaks Having Fun And Solving Problems Leads To Business The Importance Of Building Blocks Taking Action How Commsor Started As A Hackathon Entry Much More! Please enjoy this week's episode with Mac Reddin. ____________________________________________________________________________ I am now in the early stages of writing my first book! In this book, I will be telling my story of getting into sales and the lessons I have learned so far, and intertwine stories, tips, and advice from the Top Sales Professionals In The World! As a first time author, I want to share these interviews with you all, and take you on this book writing journey with me! Like the show? Subscribe to the email: https://mailchi.mp/a71e58dacffb/welcome-to-the-20-podcast-community I want your feedback! Reach out to 20percentpodcastquestions@gmdail.com, or find me on LinkedIn. If you know anyone who would benefit from this show, share it along! If you know of anyone who would be great to interview, please drop me a line! Enjoy the show!
Jacob is the Founder and CEO of Superpower, a personal healthcare startup with an all-in-one app focused on preventing disease, optimizing performance, and promoting longevity. Previously, Jacob co-founded and sold Commsor, a user engagement software startup. He also co-founded Launch House, a cohort-based incubator program for founders, and continues to invest through Launch House which now functions as a more traditional venture fund. Follow Jacob on X @J__Cub. [0:00] - How his mother's battle with chronic illness drove Jacob to build in the healthcare industry [7:35] - Why Jacob was originally drawn to entrepreneurship [10:00] - How Jacob uses his understanding of emotional volatility to make life decisions [14:33] - Jacob's experience creating remote businesses and supporting remote cultures [24:48] - Fostering human connection through community [30:19] - The success and limits of Launch House [37:07] - An introduction to Superpower [39:13] - How Superpower bundles the world of health apps For more episodes, go to podofjake.com. Previous guests include Mark Cuban, Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, Balaji Srinivasan, Keith Rabois, Ali Spagnola, Anthony Pompliano, Raoul Pal, Julia Galef, Jack Butcher, Tim Draper, and over 100 others alike. Learn from founders and CEOs of companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Solana, Polygon, AngelList, Oura, and Replit, and investors from Founders Fund, a16z, Union Square Ventures, and many more. I appreciate your support and hope you enjoy. Thanks to Chase Devens for the show notes and Yiction for the music. Lastly, I love hearing from fans of the pod. Feel free to email me any time at jake@blogofjake.com. Thank you!
This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Melissa Moody, GM at Matcha. A full-stack marketing executive with a profound commitment to user-centric innovation, Melissa followed her 14-year tenure in large-partner marketing at Google with a role as Founder and CMO at tech start-up Gated. In her current role at Matcha, a Commsor brand, she champions the concept of “go-to-network” with a focus on the role of building connections for professional growth. Additionally, she is host of the 2 Pizza Marketing podcast for small-team marketers and recently launched a bootstrapped social advocacy tool. Melissa lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska. On the couch in this week's special episode of Revenue Rehab, in honour of International Women's Day, Brandi and Melissa will tackle Unleashing Potential: Women Empowering Women. Bullet Points of Key Topics + Chapter Markers: Topic #1 Wednesday Women [05:37] “About a year and a half ago, this wonderful woman named Leslie Greenwood had posted on her LinkedIn feed, I'd like to see more women CEOs in my feed, she just wasn't getting enough of them,” Melissa explains, “probably about six months ago, I posted in my feed, I'd like to see more women founders.” This alignment sparked a conversation between the two; “we said ‘we should do something, just a small pebble into the water, let's make a few ripples. And maybe it'll cause something bigger', and what happened was once a week on Wednesdays, as you might imagine, we started featuring an extraordinary executive woman.” Topic #2 Amplifying the Professional Voices of Women [18:05] “It does come back to what we do with Wednesday Women,” Melissa advises, “I would say just do something small, start small, put something out into the universe. Maybe you have a speaking opportunity that you weren't going to take, maybe you submit your bio to be on a podcast that you really, really love. Maybe you just start posting regularly, you know, twice a week on LinkedIn, just to add your little pebble to this pile…we need authenticity, we don't need you to be the best person who's ever run a demand generation campaign, we need you to be someone who's done it, and to talk about it and to talk about your lived experience.” Topic #3 Empowering More Women: [24:50] “I do think uplifting others is one of the best content strategies out there right now,” says Melissa, “so if we're talking to people who are actually running content teams, or running social media, consider how uplifting others, specifically in this case if we want to put the emphasis on women, uplifting women can be a part of your content strategy. So, by that, I mean, if you're spotlighting successful clients, do you have a balanced roster? If you are supporting folks who are great customers of yours are you uplifting people who are of both genders?” So, What's the One Thing You Can Do Today? Melissa's ‘One Thing' is: “Let me give a small and a large. So, if you need a small today, whoever's listening, write one of your public outputs, so maybe it's in your newsletter, maybe it's your podcast, maybe it's your LinkedIn post, make one of those purely uplifting someone else who is fantastic,” she says. “On the larger…if you have some budget, even a small amount, can go a long way toward making a difference in in creating more uplift and shining the spotlight. So yeah, we're shining a spotlight.” Buzzword Banishment: Melissa's Buzzword to Banish is ‘Bruh'. “Well, you told me I could pick anything, and it doesn't have to be professional,” Melissa says, “I have two teens. And you know, I went immediately to ‘motion' and ‘drinking from the firehose' and ‘circle back'. And I said no, what would I really want to disappear? It's ‘Bruh'.” Links: Get in touch with Melissa Moody: LinkedIn Matcha Podcast: 2 Pizza Marketing Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live
Mac Reddin is the CEO of Commsor. He discusses Commsor's evolution from community-led growth software to a go-to-network model, emphasizing the importance of various overlapping networks in a company's ecosystem. He shares his journey from running a Minecraft-based company as a teenager to founding Commsor, which initially began as a newsletter and evolved into a community and then a product. Mac stresses the effectiveness of authentic community building and relationship-based growth over traditional sales and marketing strategies. He criticizes cold calling and email tactics, advocating for genuine interactions and relationship-building. Commsor's approach, including personal onboarding of every user and fostering a company culture where employees are encouraged to express their individuality and interests, has shown success and satisfaction internally and in the market. Chad reflects on his experiences at thoughtbot, aligning with Reddin's perspective on community and user-centric approaches. He emphasizes trust and freedom within his team, allowing for authentic individual contributions to the company's growth and reputation. Together, they discuss the importance of personal connections in business and how modern sales tactics might need reevaluation in favor of more genuine, relationship-based approaches. Commsor (https://www.commsor.com/) Follow Commsor on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commsor/) or X (https://twitter.com/Commsor). Follow Mac Reddin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mac-reddin/), GitHub (https://github.com/teaguns), or X (https://twitter.com/TheTeaGuns). Visit his website at macredd.in (https://macredd.in/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me as co-host today is Sally Ladrach, Revenue Enablement Manager at thoughtbot, great company I've heard of. Sally, thank you for joining. SALLY: Yeah, thanks for having me on. CHAD: And also joining us today is Mac Reddin, Founder and CEO of Commsor, which builds tools to help individuals and companies of all sizes grow faster, more authentically, and more sustainably through the power of go-to-network. Mac, thanks for joining us. MAC: Thanks for having me. CHAD: Mac, can you tell us a little bit more about what Commsor is and how you sort of arrived at creating it? MAC: I struggle to do that every time someone asks me. It's always, like, a slightly different answer. So, we're about four years old now. But we kind of pivoted, soft pivoted, depending on how you want to look at it, into what we're doing now at the beginning of this year. So, we're kind of not that new and very new, depending on what perspective you look at. We were originally building what we called community-led growth software. So, we were helping companies measure their community as an intentional part of their go-to-market initiative. And there's a whole rabbit hole on why we changed, and how we changed, and how we ended up where we are now. But I think go-to-network is sort of an evolution of community-led from this realization that companies don't have a singular community. They might have a, you know, a forum, or a Slack, or a community manager, and there's, like, it's very easy to be like, that is their community. But in reality, there's influencers, investors, creators, advisors, personal brands, executives, champions, customers, community members, like, all these different overlapping networks, hence go-to-network, that actually make up this sort of ecosystem that enables a company to thrive. CHAD: Now, did you have a community, or, like, did it grow from something, or did you just have the idea? MAC: I started my first company when I was 17; built on top of Minecraft, and it was very community-centric, and I didn't really realize at the time. But I got lucky enough to sell that business. And, you know, after looking back at all the hats I've worn running a, you know, a tiny, bootstrapped company, I realized the community management part had been what I enjoyed the most and that the community part had been the kind of competitive advantage of that business. And that sent me down a path of thinking about community and business more intentionally after having kind of stumbled into it as a, I guess, late teenager. So, Commsor started...originally, I knew I wanted to build something in the community space. So, we actually started...it started as a newsletter, actually. It was a substack called Community Chat Weekly, which was just, like, an aggregation newsletter as I was, like, doing research into the more professional community world. And then it became a small Slack community, which then became the community club. And Commsor, as a product, was born out of building a community for community people and just diving headfirst into that world. SALLY: So much community, I love it [laughs]. MAC: Yeah. I try to say, like, a couple of different words, like world or something instead of community. SALLY: [laughs] MAC: And just, like, we used to joke that we were a community company for community people, by community people, with a community of community people. CHAD: [laughs] MAC: I was, like, just too much of the same word [laughs]. SALLY: I love that. So, it's interesting. One of the reasons why I really wanted to get you and Chad together, in particular, is because the whole go-to-network motion that you're so passionate about and that you've built this product around very closely aligns with how Chad has really led and grown thoughtbot over the last 20 years. And I thought it would be so cool to bring those perspectives together. And one of the things that you mentioned around community was that it gave you a competitive advantage. I'm curious to know, Chad, does that resonate with you? Have you seen that in thoughtbot over the last, you know, couple of decades as you've been doing this? CHAD: Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the things that is my sort of go-to talking points, both at conferences and that kind of thing, is that one thing that has been really a big part of thoughtbot's success is being willing to be clear about who we were and what we believe. And when we do that, then the people who want what we have and believe what we believe and are excited by that can find us and, you know, follow us. And, eventually, when they're in a position to need help, we're top of mind. And this idea, I think, holds back a lot of companies because you think your market is the total addressable market. And the reality is you're never going to work with the total addressable market. So, you're better off finding the people who believe what you believe in your niche and your community. And being that big fish in that small pond has been really beneficial for us. SALLY: That's awesome. Yeah, I think it was kind of a culture shock, honestly, coming to thoughtbot because I had been so immersed in sort of the SaaS world and the mass outreach, cold outreach, sort of, I want to say, traditional go-to-market motion that's been used over the last ten years. And I came here, and there were so many things that thoughtbot did or didn't do that I just was honestly kind of shocked, you know, as an example, not using third-party cookies on our website [laughs]. And, Mac, when we were talking, it sounded like you're also doing some of those things that we joked might make a CRO cry [laughs]. So, I was curious to ask what some of those things were and see how that kind of matches up to what thoughtbot is doing in our approach, too. I'd be curious to know. MAC: There are so many things. I mean, I get CROs all the time, not, like, yelling at me, but I get the whole like, "Young man, you don't understand how sales works," type comments all the time. I got one recently that was, "Don't talk about sales until you've sold in a recession." It was like, what do you think we've [laughter] been doing the last 18 months? But okay. But yeah, so we don't do cold calls. We don't do cold emails. We don't do any of that traditional stuff that software companies do. And I guess you all as a, you know, more of a, like, service-based product, as a founder building a software-based product, more than half of the cold outbound I get is, like, developer agencies and stuff like that. It's, like, the classic scourge of outbound in a lot of ways, right? So, there's an element of, like, zigging when everyone else zags. And one of my favorite stats...I can't remember the exact number, so don't fully quote me on it. But -- CHAD: It's not like we're recording or anything. It's totally fine. [laughter] MAC: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the gist of the message is more important than the exact number. And it was a stat that there's been a 100x increase in prospecting activities over the last decade. So, for every cold email, cold call, in-mail ad impression that you would have seen ten years ago, you now get 100 as a buyer. And I always say this thing to people; I'm like, it doesn't matter how good your outreach is. You can have the best well-crafted cold email, cold call; your timing can be perfect; everything could be right: relevance, timing, everything. The problem is, increasingly, buyers have been so pissed off at the deluge of shit they've gotten for ten years that it doesn't matter. Like, my phone does not ring if I don't have your number. I am physically uncoldcallable. And I've talked to a lot of CROs, and they're like, "Well, we'll just, you know, marketing will get your lead some other way. And then they'll pass it over to us, and we'll still get to you." And it's like, okay, like, that doesn't really solve the problem. So, like, there's a lot of these weird things where sales and marketing aren't aligned. They expect each other to solve the problem for each other. They're pure volume-based, and we don't do any of that. And a lot of CROs and a lot of VPs of sales love to point out how wrong we are for that, but it's working so far. And also, it's so much more enjoyable to build a company that way. Like, our salespeople, our SDRs, and all that stuff, they don't hate their jobs. They're not, like, sticking their face to the grindstone every morning and being like, "Oh yeah, I got to play pump-up music before I go to work. Otherwise, I'm not going to get through the day." It just creates a better work environment. It's better for us. It's better for the buyers. It's better all the way around. CHAD: So, for thoughtbot, I know that a lot of this has come naturally for us because, as developers and designers, we've produced a lot of open source that flows from our work that then builds community around it. We write on a blog, which we're very fortunate to have a lot of people read over the years, which fosters reputation for us and community around it. But what does that look like for other companies who maybe aren't, like, an agency like us doing that kind of thing? What are the kinds of things that it looks like? MAC: I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when you said it's about, like, showing off who you are and what you believe in and creating space so people can come to you. But in the, you know, the high growth SaaS world, the last ten years, people have not been a fan of waiting for people to come to you. It's, like, grow at all costs, blitzscale, all that sort of mentality. For us, the way it looks is...I guess an example–so, we did this sort of semi-accidental campaign on LinkedIn over the last, I guess, two and a half months with these purple hoodies. And there's a whole backstory. They were an accident, and we were like, "Shit, we have too many hoodies. What do we do with them?" So, we made a thing out of them. And we thought we were going to get 25. We ended up getting 250 [laughter]. It's a whole thing. We just started, like, we sent them to a few folks, and someone posted a photo without us asking being like, "Look at this awesome hoodie Commsor sent me." And their post went, like, insane. Like, by LinkedIn standards, it went insane. It was, like, 100 comments. Like, "How do I get one? Oh my God, I love it. It's so cool. Can I get one?" So, we just started sending them to people, like, no goals, no intention, just brand building, just building connections, building relationships. I personally, from hoodies that I can attribute, have booked over 200 calls about our product with our ICP doing that without trying to. There's almost this element of, like, by not trying to sell, it's become easier to sell. There's, like, an element of like, I'm just sending you a hoodie because I think you're cool, and I want to get to know you. And it's a fine line because I think a lot of companies try to do that. But you can always tell there's an undertone of, yeah, I'm sending you these cookies because, like, I'm really hoping you get on a sales call with me. But we genuinely were, like, we have too many hoodies. We're just trying to get rid of them. I don't want to pay to store them. Like, please, I'm begging you, please take our hoodie. SALLY: [laughs] MAC: And then, it just turned into this, like, whole FOMO game. It's like the authenticity was purely there. All in all, we spent about, including shipping, everything, like, $8,000 on hoodies, so not a tiny amount of money but also not huge by marketing budget standards. And I had a conversation with a CMO recently. He was like, "You should have just spent LinkedIn ads. That's such a waste of money. You can't track it. It's not attributable," et cetera. I was like, "We've gotten, I think, close to a million impressions on LinkedIn of people posting our hoodies talking about us. We couldn't have paid for that." So, there's, like, this whole area where it's like, if you actually just go out there and build relationships, build community, get to know people, tell them what you believe in, yeah, people will not agree with you. Like, when I say I think modern go-to-market is broken and the way people sell is broken, I get a lot of sales leaders who are like, "You're an idiot. Like, that's wrong. You objectively don't know what you're doing. You've never been a salesperson by title. Don't spread this shit." But then you get a lot of people who are like, "Yeah, you're right. It's not working. I want to hear what you have to say. I want to talk to you. I want to brainstorm with you." The amount of times that I get DMs from salespeople who are like, "Hey, I totally agree with that post you just wrote, but I can't publicly because my VP of sales is going to read me out if they see me agreeing with you. But like, yeah, this shit doesn't work anymore," like, 10 to 20 times a day, I get messages like that. SALLY: And as a consumer of LinkedIn feed, you know, I've been following Mac for a while, but also follow a couple of other folks at Commsor and people who are in their networks. I can 100% validate that the Dino Hoodie is, in fact, now a status symbol on LinkedIn. So [laughs], I thought that was, you know, brilliant. And I'm not going to lie; I had some FOMO, too. I was like, where's my Dino Hoodie? And, in fact, when I talked to Mac, I was like -- CHAD: [laughs] SALLY: I know that we just met, but can I get one of those? [laughs] CHAD: I see now. This was just a ploy to get a hoodie. MAC: I've gotten, like, reverse sales now. It's like, you know, you get pitch slapped on LinkedIn, or someone adds you, and right away, they're trying to sell to you. I've gotten that. [laughter] But they're trying to convince me to give them a hoodie. Like, somehow, we've created the reverse thing where, like, salespeople are reaching out to me to reverse pitch–so I can give them something. SALLY: That is hilarious. And I promise that was not my intention; was just to get a hoodie from you. But there's so much there that I think would be interesting to unpack. Chad, I'm just kind of curious to know your impression of what Mac has shared around the sort of flak that he's gotten around, you know, what you're doing isn't going to work, or whatever. Have you gotten any of that over the years? Are you surprised to hear that? Just interested to hear your thoughts. CHAD: No, I think it happens when you are willing to put yourself out there with an opinion, with a belief. And it's going to resonate with the people that it resonates with. And the flip side of that is there are going to be people who believe that you're wrong. You know, when we were doing very early on with test-driven development, for example, it was not an established industry practice. You could find blog posts from people out there saying. "It's bad. We tried it at my startup and our product failed, and it was too slow. It held us back from being successful." But the people who believe in it...if we were the only company in Boston who was doing it and a company that believes in test-driven development was never going to work with a company that didn't do test-driven development, so we were the one company that they could work with because we believed in the same practices. And that's the hard thing in that is, usually, if you're on the right track to finding the right niche or to the right belief that's going to really resonate with a group of people, the people that you're turning off is probably going to be a louder, more vocal group. And so, being strong in the face of that is really important. And I'll also just call out that, like, this is one area where it's easy to say, "Well, this works because you've been successful." There are other founders probably who, like, they have a legitimately bad idea. And they ignore all the sort of haters, and they say, "Oh, those are just the haters." And yet they don't get the success because there wasn't the people out there who actually did believe what they believe or had a need for the product that they were creating, or something like that. And I think it's important to ignore the noise or to push past the noise, but you do need to let it in a little bit so that you understand whether you're on the right track at all, I've found. What about you, Mac? MAC: Yeah, it's a never-ending battle to know what to listen to, and what to ignore, and how to apply it or if to apply it, and things like that. I agree. I think there is an element of, like, it's like, what's that [inaudible 14:47] saying? Like, if no one thinks you're crazy or wrong, you're probably too late as well with your idea, right? Like, if you're like, "Here's my idea," and everyone's like, "That's a great idea," It's been done. You're very late to the party at that point. There's no, like, right or wrong answer because there's always context. You always know your idea and your business, hopefully, better than anybody else does. So, you can't just, like, take other people's advice. I actually went through a whole period (It's like sort of a sidebar.), but where I was, like, impostor syndrome as a, you know, venture-backed CEO. I was like, oh, I got to, like, be the founder and run the company the way other people run companies at this stage. And it, like, objectively, almost killed us as a company. I have lived both sides of that extreme of like, being like, "No, I'm not going to listen to anybody's advice," and the negatives and positives of that, and the "I'm just going to follow everyone's advice and do what they say," and the negatives and positives of that. And now somewhere, maybe not quite in the middle, maybe a little bit leaning towards the ignore the advice because I believe in what we're doing. CHAD: And you need to actually believe what you're saying. I think this is the wrong tactic to take if you don't actually believe it. SALLY: [laughs] CHAD: Because if it's not authentic to you, it's going to be really hard to build an authentic community and message and those kinds of things, yeah. MAC: People can tell. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. SALLY: One of the things that you had mentioned before was sort of the technology that you've built Commsor on. And it was an interesting choice to me because it's not one of the more, you know, flashy or hot, new sort of programming languages that's out there. So, I was just kind of wondering, what is it? And why did you make the decision to build out the actual tool the way that you did? MAC: So, I definitely have to, like, put a giant asterisk over everything I'm about to say. I am not a technical founder [laughs]. So, like, anything I say here is just potentially wrong [laughter]. [inaudible 17:20] The decision was made because I had, you know, a great team that we put together and trusted them to make the decision, and that's the decision we've made. So, I mean, the bulk of the app is built on just, like, Ruby and React. It's pretty straightforward. We have had people be like, "Well, you should be using this," you know, whatever "Next.js, plus this, plus this, you know, it's better." But, like, the team we have, they've worked together in the past. So, they actually came into an acquihire. So, we're like, basically, like, you know, they'd worked together for three years in a company. They have systems in place. And at this stage, it's, like, debating what tool you're going to use when you start, like, just 99.9% of the time does not matter. There's no idea...you don't even know if it's going to work, the product, right? It's, like, and your customers don't care. Your customers don't care. Unless you're building a dev tool and it's, like, hyper-specific, but even then, they probably don't really care that much. So yeah, we have a good team. I trust them to make the decision. And it's what they know and what they're familiar with. So, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we just went with the thing that would let us get things done the fastest. SALLY: Chad, I'm interested to know...the trust factor that you mentioned, Mac, is really key to a lot of thoughtbot's success. I think that one of the things that Chad has done well as he's grown the company is hired great people and then trusted them to get the job done however [laughs] they thought that it might best be done. So, Chad, I'm curious to know: whether you're deciding on a tech stack or how you're going to go to market or anything like that, what has the impact of trust been at thoughtbot as you've grown and scaled the company? CHAD: I think trust is one of [laughs]...I think it's very important. It's one of our core values. And, for us, that comes from not just trust being a nice thing to have. It's the one value that I can also point to and say I intentionally created an environment of trust. I've been doing freelancing and consulting for a long time, even before thoughtbot. And I knew that at thoughtbot, we were going to continually form and reform teams of people that hadn't necessarily worked together closely before. And that if every time we did that, we were going to have to be building trust with each other, that it would detract from the success of the product that we were trying to create and from the relationship that we were needing to build trust on urgently which was with our new client. And so I tried really hard to create an environment where when people show up on day one, everyone inherently trusts that they belong there and trusts them. It's not easy, and it's not perfect. But I think we've made a lot of progress on that. And then, when you have that kind of environment, recognizing that it changes the way that you work with each other. And so, when it comes to, like, technology decisions and everything, I mean, that is essentially how we work is understanding that everyone has trust of each other and that when you are put in a position to make a decision, it is your decision to make. But part of making decisions and part of having a trusting environment is communicating with each other. So, even if you're responsible for making the decision, part of your responsibility, then, is for bringing everyone else along with you. And sometimes that means setting up an environment where, okay, the results speak for themselves. But other times, it means educating people about, "Here's what we're going to do, and here's why," even if it is as simple as "This is what we know. We've been doing it for three years, and let's just get right to it." I don't know if that directly answers your question. But it's a big part of how we've done things and tried to create the culture that we've created. And I happen to be biased, but Ruby is a great choice. SALLY: [laughs] CHAD: I think it's taken for granted because it has been around for so long. But I talk about strong beliefs. I am up to speed on lots of web development frameworks and the ways that you build applications across a variety of different platforms, and tech stacks, and that kind of thing. We didn't choose Ruby on Rails because we thought it was going to be popular back in 2005. We chose it because it fundamentally was the best way that we could see, out of all the platforms at the time, to build web applications. It allowed us to do things in one line that normally would have, at the time, taken 20. And that allowed us to be faster and work the ways that we wanted to work. And embedded in that culture is things like testing and test-driven development, which we also believe in. The simple fact of the matter is there hasn't been a paradigm shift in web frameworks that is actually fundamentally better in the way that Ruby on Rails was better in the early 2000s. So, you can choose something else, but it's not going to be significantly better than Rails in terms of productivity, in terms of what it can do for your early-stage product. It basically just then comes down to there's choices you can make that will slow you down, definitely, in terms of architecture and everything in other platforms. But yeah, you can't go wrong with Rails, and you can't really go wrong with Ruby. And you can't go wrong with choosing what you know and what you're comfortable with, especially in the early days. SALLY: Yeah, I love that. One of the themes that I'm sort of hearing from both of you in how you've approached building tools; building your business is putting users at the center. And, Mac, I know you were saying, you know, I have all these CROs coming at me, right? Like VPs of sales being like, "The way you're approaching things isn't going to work. It's dumb; it's stupid." But then you also have these salespeople DMing you like, "Hey, I agree with you. I just can't say it out loud because I might get in trouble." And, ultimately, that salesperson really is your user, right? Because they're the ones that are building their network, that are leveraging it to then go get the sales for the company. So, I thought it was interesting that sort of that user-centered approach was something that was coming out with both because I know for Ruby, in particular, it's very well-loved by developers that use it. It's, like, a very developer-friendly sort of language. And so, I'm just wondering, you know, how do you, Mac, continue to keep users at the center when you have voices coming at you, when you have [laughs], you know, people telling you you're doing it wrong? What are some things that you do tactically to make sure that you stay aligned? MAC: I mean, the simple answer is talk to them all the time. We actually...every single user who gets onboarded to our product right now gets an introduction to me directly. That's part of, like, seeing how the product works as well. But every single user ends up speaking to me. Who knows if that'll scale? But right now, it's like, I have spoken for at least 30 minutes with every single person we've onboarded to our product. We onboard every user by hand right now, which is totally counterintuitive for the price point our product's at. But it's been really helpful to build that relationship, build that trust, get the research and the understanding of what we need to do next really quickly, have tight feedback loops. We have, like, I Dm users all the time. Like, I [inaudible 24:28] I probably have 50 to 60 unique DMs on LinkedIn per day. And someone was telling me like, "That's a waste of time as CEO and founder." I'm like, it's literally the only thing that matters. I'm talking to users, hearing what the market is saying, like, hearing all that live, not hearing it from people. We're also working on, right now, enabling anyone on our team to do an onboarding so that when we do scale, my goal would be that every person on our team, from an engineer to a success person to the CEO, would be onboarding a customer at least once every few weeks just to maintain that closeness and that connectedness. We're also working on things... I'm a huge fan of...do you know Arc browser? SALLY: I'm not familiar, no. CHAD: I haven't used it, but I am familiar with it, yeah. MAC: I'm using it right now. CHAD: [laughs] MAC: Highly recommend. Not an ad, I promise; just a fan. But they do, like, little things that they do, for example, like, when they would change log, instead of being written or instead of being just a CEO, it'll be like, "Here are the four new things released." And the first thing is, "Oh, here's Mac, the developer who worked on this feature sharing it. And here's, you know, this person who worked on this feature." So, it's like, each individual person becomes the face of the thing they worked on, rather than just like, oh, it's the faceless company, or it's, like, it's always the same, like, spokesperson who's always talking about it. So, enabling it to not just be me who talks to users all the time but the whole company enables the whole company to be more user-centric. SALLY: That's so interesting. Again, there's, like, so many parallels between how I've seen thoughtbot approach things and how you're approaching things with Commsor. When you mentioned that your goal is to sort of make it so that several different people are the face, and it's not just like, oh, Commsor is Mac only [laughs], that's something that I think I've seen Chad do throughout the years. So, Chad, do you have any examples of sort of how you've tried to scale the company, putting different faces and putting our experts out there, trying to make it so that thoughtbot is not, like, the Chad show? Because I feel like that's one of the things that, you know, you're great [laughs]. But I think that the fact that we have so many contributors to communities and people speaking at events has been really, you know, just good for business and good for the company. So, what are some ways that you've done that? And what benefits have you seen of doing sort of what Mac is trying to do right now within Commsor? CHAD: I don't know that I've been super intentional about this. It just came naturally, as we're all people who would do this, right? Like, you can't stop us from doing it. And so, I mostly just try to create an environment where you're not stopping people from doing things that they would normally want to do anyway. And to then recognize when, you know, someone else goes and creates open source, or a blog post, or speaks at a conference, or whatever. That comes back to benefit us through the reputation that it builds and the community that it builds. And I think a lot of organizations and teams and everything do a really good job of getting in people's way from doing things [laughs] that they would want to do. And so, that's really all I've tried to do is not get in people's way. MAC: I've spoken to a lot of people who are, like, under the impression that their company owns their LinkedIn account, which I always think is super interesting, or companies who, like, go out of their way to be like, "No, you can't speak about, I don't know, that you like barbecuing," or, like, well, you can't, like, be a person. You have to, like, you are just a representative of the company. And it's so stupid. It's, like, 90% of the growth we have is either word of mouth or people referencing that they've, like, built a relation or a connection with someone on our team, not just me, but, like, Ben or Katrine on our team, like, people like them. And then they want to learn about Commsor because they get to know them. And I think there's this old model where, like, if you just draw, like, circles, right? Like, here's the company, and here's people. It used to be here's the company, and then all the people are inside of it. But more and more, like, the way we're trying to build it is, like, you have, like, the people are a ring around the bubble that is the company. It's like, the people actually are the kind of that first interface, which is always what it is anyways, whether companies act that way or not. At the end of the day, people are the interface. But so many companies try to control that and, like, you know, put everyone through this, like, brand voice funnel that just...it just doesn't work. Yeah. SALLY: Yeah. Well, and it's ironic because I've heard so many sales leaders harping on people buy from people. People buy from people. And then they don't allow their salespeople to actually go be a human being and a person in any sort of a public [laughs] forum like LinkedIn. I've had that same conversation with so many sales folks that I've worked with, you know, over the years, especially the last few years, where like, oh, I feel like I could really put some great stuff out on LinkedIn, build some relationships, but I just I feel sort of stifled from doing that for fear of reprimand, or losing my job, or whatever it is. So, I definitely appreciate that, at thoughtbot, I don't feel that. I have felt that in the past in some roles, but I don't feel that here. And I'm just so grateful that I feel empowered to go share my thought leadership and things like that on LinkedIn. And it's interesting because that has yielded opportunities that I wasn't even looking for. So, yeah, I'm curious, Chad, if you've also seen things that we weren't necessarily looking for happening that way. CHAD: I do. As you were talking, though, I was just thinking, this is harder than it was before. Like, you may be excited to talk on LinkedIn [laughs], but I would say the number of people at thoughtbot who are actually excited to do authentic stuff on social media these days is way, way down. And it's been trending down for years, and it's particularly bad these last couple. And, you know, we have the kind of culture where we don't force people to do it. Is that something that you've seen, Mac? It's, like, individuals' sort of engagement, willingness? I think a lot of social media is just a mess right now, that kind of thing. And how is that affecting what you see in your strategy? MAC: Yeah, I don't think...it doesn't have to necessarily be social media, like, once again, the browser company example of, like, the update videos including people in it, right? It's like it's...there's ways that the company can intentionally elevate their people first, rather than being like, "Oh, yeah, here's social media, like, have fun. Go build a brand. Please do free marketing for us." Because that's kind of, like, what you're subtly hoping happens if one of your team members builds an audience on Twitter or LinkedIn. You're like, cool, we'll get, like, the splashover effect. I would say, right now, about 25% of our team is doing it really well without us prompting. Like, they just want to do it, and they're leaning into it and enjoying it. 25% want to do it but maybe aren't sure how or where. And we've actually, like, built systems internally to help, like, build, like, you know, give them the space to do it and whatnot. And then, half are just like, yeah, I'm not doing that. I don't have any interest at all. CHAD: For me, it's more that you don't need to do that just because someone else is doing it. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to find the thing that you're passionate about and the way that you can find your voice or a thing to contribute to, even if it's an external sort of open-source project or something like that. MAC: Yeah, I mean, we have things like it doesn't have to be tied to the company. Like, a great example...so, Katrine, who's our head of sales, and my sister [laughter]...I guess I should -- CHAD: Full disclosure. MAC: Like, put a little asterisk, you know, on there as well, yeah. Not why she has the job, but just happens to be that way. So, she actually started running this, like, Women in Revenue meetup with Gong, another company, with this other woman Ashley, like, almost two years ago, like, after she started Commsor. It wasn't tied to Commsor or, like, it wasn't tied to our business or anything like that. And then she came to me, like, a year ago and was like, "Oh, me and Ashley want to start our own podcast. What do you think?" And we ended up actually, like, funding the podcast. Like, we pay for the editing, the hosting, like, all of a sudden, they need to, like, do it. And yeah, so we get to [inaudible 32:30], like, yeah, this podcast is, like, presented by Commsor, even though it's like Katrine and Ashley's podcast. We're, like, the permanent sponsor of it, basically. But it's been interesting. And now it's like, and now she's involved in this group called Wednesday Women where it's like, she wants to elevate other women in revenue roles. That's not what Commsor's mission is. I'm not saying we don't believe in it but, like, that's not the reason Commsor exists, right? But we were like, yeah, we gave her the space to do it. There has been so much good that has come to Commsor from that, from her running her own meetups, hosting her podcast, building a brand around that, elevating other women. Like, the amount of people who come to us and want to learn more about Commsor or [inaudible 33:05] want to work with us, whatever, because of the stuff she has done on a thing she cares about outside of work, I mean, it's obviously very tied to her work still, but it's not. It's not Commsor marketing. It's not for Commsor. It's not backed by Commsor, like, in an official capacity. So, there are ways that, like, if people have those passions, like you said, it'll bring people who are like-minded, who will get to know them, who then inherently want to be like, "Oh, well, I love what Katrine is doing. What does Katrine do at Commsor? Oh, cool. What does Commsor do?" Like, you know, it's like, there's a funnel. Like, not everybody will follow that path. But a not insignificant portion of the people that are aware of our brand have come in through that path. CHAD: And this is a good example of something that I talk a lot about is, is that the most effective thing that could probably happen? Probably not. But I would rather someone do the thing that is 60% effective and 100% fulfilling to them than doing something that is soul draining that they don't want to do that's 99%. MAC: Well, I'll also counter that they will show up and be a better employee and team member because they're...it's like, so even if they're, like, doing less by the numbers, long term, they'll do more, like, especially in sales, right? Like, SDR culture has been this, like, you basically grind it out for 12 months, maybe 18 months as an SDR, and you hope that you make it to the AE role, and if you don't, not very many people...you don't become an SDR for ten years. It is not a career. It is a stepping stone of, like, I'm going to stick my face in the boiling water. I'm going to deal with it. I'm going to suck it up, and hopefully it pays off in the long term. And, like, a huge percent of those folks end up churning out into customer success roles or completely different industries or whatever because it's, like, no one wants to keep their face on the grindstone for that long. But by, like, building a sales and a marketing system that's actually enjoyable for the people that are doing it, one, they bring their authentic selves to work, which means they're more likely to do it. They're more likely to stick around. They're more likely to have fun with it. And when they're having more fun with it, that also reflects on the people in the market because people can tell. People can tell that Commsor is having fun. Like, it sounds kind of dumb, but I think especially in B2B, like, having fun is actually kind of a competitive advantage. And I don't mean fun in the sense of, like, oh, we post memes on our LinkedIn account. Like, that's not, like, corporate fun, but, like, actually, like, real people personalities showing through the work fun, like the dinosaur thing, right? Like, I think my entire LinkedIn personality now is, like, anti-bad sales tactics, and dinosaurs are cool, which is also sad and kind of counterintuitive because, like, bad sales tactics are also things that dinosaurs [inaudible 35:40] [laughter], sort of a, like, sort of a funny play on things. But, like, I think my LinkedIn bio is: DM me for a fun fact about dinosaurs. It's not what we do at Commsor. It's not trying to pitch you on anything. And I have had so many conversations where someone's just like, "I want a fun fact about dinosaurs." I'm like, "Sure. All right, cool. Like, here you go." And sometimes, it ends up going further. And, you know, maybe Commsor comes up naturally. Other times, they're like, "Cool. That's an awesome fact that made my day, thanks," and then that's it. That's the end of it. But when you can enable those personalities, and that authenticity, and that fun to show through the work, both sides benefit. And when you're talking about things that don't scale, whatever, that's one of the classic pushbacks I get. - It's like, "Well, how does this, like, go-to-network relationship selling, how does it scale?" They're like, "I need to close 100 deals this year. I got to scale." It's like, I did a graphic...I can't remember the exact numbers, but looked at, like, you know, the stats on cold calling, for example. And it was like, to get one deal, you need five meetings because, on average, industry-wide in SaaS, 20% of those meetings become deals. To get five meetings, you have to cold call 250 or more individual accounts because that's how many, on average, it takes with cold call rates. But on average, it takes seven to eight cold calls to actually get someone to answer. So, I have to call Sally eight times to get an answer. So, I have to make over 2,000 cold calls to end up with one meeting. It's just insane. Whereas if you look at like relationship selling, warm intros, and warm paths like that, they close at a 78% rate across the board. So, it's actually like, okay, I can go out and get a pool of 250, 500, 1,000 contacts and try to get four leads, or I can go build relationships with ten people and get four deals that way. It's like, you don't need it to scale in the same way if you're building with that. The problem is that sales and marketing over the last decade have been built on the predictable revenue model. If I make X cold calls, I'll get X meetings, and I'll book Y deals. So, everyone is like, okay, it's scalable. If I want to close twice as much revenue, I need twice as many SDRs making twice as many cold calls to close twice as much. That just doesn't work anymore. The whole model that startup growth has been built on for ten years it doesn't work. I mean, even if you look at, like, the IPOs of tech companies over the last decade, it's like less than 5% of them have been consistently profitable for the last three years. So, if we're all trying to build our companies and everyone's like, ooh, look at the way that XYZ, Uber, or WeWork, whatever, did over the last ten years, they actually haven't worked. We've been trained and tricked on this system for 10, 15 years of, like, growth is everything. But, like, I don't know, just look at WeWork over the last month, right? Like, that's the shining star of, like, does it matter? Like, you can grow to a billion dollars in revenue. But if you're losing a billion to make a billion, the company making 20 million and spending 5 million to make that is actually a better company. CHAD: Yeah. It's totally...some people that is what they want. But it does change your motivation when what you're trying to do is create a company that you enjoy working at that maybe isn't taking over the world but making a positive contribution to it. That changes your approach. MAC: Yeah, you're not trying to consume everything in sight. There's a lot of different ways to do it. And yeah, I think the last ten years, especially in startup and SaaS land, have tricked a lot of people into thinking there's only one way to do things, and it's throw money in a grinder and hope to God that you get more money at the bottom of it than you put in the top of it, even though 99% of the time that's never the case. CHAD: Well, Mac, thank you so much for joining and sharing with us. If folks want to find out more about Commsor or get in touch with you, what are all the different ways that they can do that? MAC: Well, they can DM me on LinkedIn for a fun fact about dinosaurs before they ask what their real question is. It's just Mac Reddin. I think I'm the only one on LinkedIn with that name, so it shouldn't be too hard to find me. I'm the guy with the dinosaur emoji next to my name, just to really lean into it. Yeah, and then Commsor, it's commsor.com. We're, like, just now starting to reveal what we've been building over the last six or nine months with our pivot into this go-to-network world. So, we're early on that front. But you can keep your eyes peeled, and there'll be more to see over the next few months. CHAD: And Sally, thanks so much for joining today and help facilitating the conversation. I really appreciate it. SALLY: Absolutely. It's been really fun. CHAD: If folks want to get in touch with you or follow along, where are the places they can do that? SALLY: I am all up in LinkedIn, so feel free to hit me up there. That's probably the best place. Also, if anybody out there ends up using Commsor, you can also find me in the Herd, which is the community that Mac has built, so feel free to find me there as well. CHAD: And you, listener, can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Mastodon at cpytel@thoughtbot.social. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening, and see you next time. Special Guest: Mac Reddin.
In this episode of The Anonymous Marketer, Kirsti Lang dives into the world of community engagement with Alex Angel. With a rich background in community development at Reddit, Nike, and Commsor, Alex brings a wealth of experience. They explore the transformation of support communities into dynamic spaces for learning and knowledge sharing.Alex emphasizes the importance of understanding the 'why' behind wanting to shift a community's focus. It's crucial to align these changes with broader company goals and understand the benefits for the organization. This approach ensures that the community evolves in a way that's beneficial and sustainable.The discussion moves to engagement strategies and the benefits of different community types. Alex highlights the value in relationship building, marketing, customer support, and product development through community engagement. They also touch on the importance of understanding community member motivations and whether the current community aligns with the desired changes.Join the conversation on The Anonymous Marketer podcast. Submit your question, and it could be featured in our next episode with host Kirsti Lang and industry experts like Alex Angel.How to Submit:Visit https://marketersindemand.com/anonymous/Fill out the simple form - it's quick and easy.Stay anonymous - we respect your privacyTune in to see if your question sparks our next big discussion!Don't miss this opportunity to get expert advice tailored to your needs. Submit your question now and be a part of the marketing conversation that's shaping the industry!
In today's sales climate, account executives and partnerships teams need to collaborate more than ever before to win deals. Enter Mac Reddin, CEO of Commsor which is pivoting into sales enablement with their product Bronto. Mac has been an outspoken contrarian this past year (follow him on LinkedIn) and is joining me today to share his views on partnerships, sales, and go-to-market. On today's episode, Mac and I discuss: How Mac interprets “The people are your partners” as a strategy Why partner people talking to partner about partnerships people doesn't move the needle How can partnerships people actually move the needle for their org Community vs partners The future of partnerships What Mac is and would do differently with a SaaS GTM strategy for the next two years The honest truth about partnerships as a team and process And we end with some advice on how to fix co-selling It get particularly good after minute 20, so hang in there… you'll be happy you did. Sponsors: Reveal - A free account mapping solution. Partnerhub® - for finding and managing your partnerships.
In this interview, we chat with Mac Reddin, founder & CEO of Commsor, a platform helping organizations to become community-led. https://www.commsor.com/Hosted by Jonny PriceProduced by Amalia Stern "Wefunder does not endorse, recommend, or advise investing in any company”
Today on the podcast I sat down with Jacob Peters. Jacob is the Co-Founder of Launch House, Commsor, and Community Club. Follow Jacob on Twitter: https://twitter.com/J__Cub Learn more about Jacob Peters: https://jacobpeters.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mac Reddin, Founder and CEO of Commsor joins us in looking at how community can help companies adopt strategies that increase organic customer (and potential customer) relationships in a way that strengthens business goals. From looking at community as a potential first touchpoint to creating communities of practice that allow anyone to join in sharing knowledge and resources, organizations can move beyond the algorithmic advertisement model and into conversations. You can find Mac here --- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.
Mac Reddin, Founder and CEO of Commsor joins us in looking at how community can help companies adopt strategies that increase organic customer (and potential customer) relationships in a way that strengthens business goals. From looking at community as a potential first touchpoint to creating communities of practice that allow anyone to join in sharing knowledge and resources, organizations can move beyond the algorithmic advertisement model and into conversations. You can find Mac here --- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.
Erica and Brian explore how Autodesk, Splunk, and Salesforce built pages for their superuser programs. Community Industry News: DL Grant joined Commsor as Community Operations Manager Isabel Ruiz joined Mews as Community Manager Cody A. was promoted to Community Support Specialist at Reddit Mike H. was promoted to Community Engagement Manager at Reddit Leah Knowles joined Vanta as Community Lead Thea Silayro joined G2i as Community Manager Melissa Ly joined Auditboard as Community Manager Emily Hanssen Arent joined Hibob as Head of Community Jessica Hobbs joined CMX as Director of Community Programming Community Launch Guide — now in German! Superuser Program Pages: Autodesk Expert Elite Program SplunkTrust Salesforce MVPs
Welcome to Community Life! Here we talk with the community experts about their lives, and today our guest is Holly Firestone, baby and doggy mama, a great charity donater, VP of community and exec team at Venafi, and investor at Commsor and Bevy.
Welcome to Community Life! Here we talk with the community experts about their lives and today our guest is Brian Oblinger, an almighty 1999 forum moderator, SVP of new products at Commsor, and the co-host of the In before the lock podcast!
Hello and welcome to CHAOSScast Community podcast, where we share use cases and experiences with measuring open source community health. Elevating conversations about metrics, analytics, and software from the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software, or short CHAOSS Project, to wherever you like to listen. Venia is super excited about this episode because you may know our guests from around the community. Today, we have Brian Oblinger, Senior Vice President of New Products at Commsor, and Lori Goldman, Community Manager at ForgeRock. Our conversations touch on how Brian and Lori found themselves in community and their experiences with measuring community health over the years. We also learn about some start-ups in the community, what CMX has done in the community, where the community is going in a post 2022 world, and some projects Lori and Brian are working on. Download this episode now to find out much more, and don't forget to subscribe for free to this podcast on your favorite podcast app and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues! [00:01:11] Brian and Lori share their stories on how they found themselves in community and measuring community health. [00:04:58] We hear about some start-ups such as Commsor, Orbit, and Common Room. [00:06:24] Lori and Brian talk about their experiences with measuring community health over the years. [00:10:26] Venia wonders how we're supposed to bring businesses back into the discussion about measurement marketing, and Brian explains it's about understanding who you're talking to and understanding their language and Lori mentions monetizing it. [00:13:05] Lori speaks about the conversation about metrics and the wrapping in of community and CMX. [00:18:08] Venia explains her take on managing metrics, and Lori and Brian share some thoughts. [00:20:06] We find out how this community measurement is going to look like in a post-2022, post pandemic, and the problems that need to be solved. [00:24:23] Lori brings up the interconnection between community and developer relations and how do we work best with that function since it's so important, and Brian and Venia share their thoughts. [00:27:56] Find out what Lori and Brian are doing as far as projects in the next six months to a year with community metrics. Value Adds (Picks) of the week: [00:31:12] Brian's picks are a meeting series built by Tiffany Oda and Cassie Mayes called Community OPServations and subscribing to MasterClass. [00:32:29] Lori's picks are Duolingo to learn Spanish and to start a personal podcast. [00:34:08] Venia's pick is an information diet campaign she put together. Panelist: Venia Logan Guests: Brian Oblinger Lori Goldman Sponsor: SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) Links: CHAOSS (https://chaoss.community/) CHAOSS Project Twitter (https://twitter.com/chaossproj?lang=en) CHAOSScast Podcast (https://podcast.chaoss.community/) podcast@chaoss.community (mailto:podcast@chaoss.community) Ford Foundation (https://www.fordfoundation.org/) Venia Logan Twitter (https://twitter.com/SamanthaVenia?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Brian Oblinger Website (https://brianoblinger.com/) Brian Oblinger Twitter (https://twitter.com/brianoblinger) Brian Oblinger LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianoblinger) Lori Goldman LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-goldman-054b323) ForgeRock (https://www.forgerock.com/) Commsor (https://www.commsor.com/) Orbit (https://orbit.love/) Common Room (https://www.commonroom.io/) CMX Summit 2022 (https://cmxhub.com/) Community OPServations (https://lu.ma/opservations) MasterClass (https://www.masterclass.com/) Duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com/) [The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption by Clay A. Johnson](https://www.amazon.com/Information-Diet-Case-Conscious-Consumption-dp-1449304680/dp/1449304680/ref=mtother?encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1654033854) How to go on an information diet by Anne-Laure Le Cunff (Ness Labs) (https://nesslabs.com/information-diet) Special Guests: Brian Oblinger and Lori Goldman.
Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips
In episode #2084, Neil and Eric talk about 7 Marketing Tools For Q3 2022. Discover the best new tools for managing your social media, including Taplio for all your LinkedIn needs as well as Tweet Hunter for scheduling and managing tweets, threads, and more. Learn how Orbit.love can help you organize your community and how Commsor unlocks the power of community-led growth. For all the latest on tips, tools, and gadgets, make sure you tune in today! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:20] Today's topic: 7 Marketing Tools For Q3 2022. [00:25] Learn how Tweet Hunter allows you to schedule tweets, threads, and more. [01:01] The benefits of Sprout Social in managing social media for any enterprise company. [01:22] How Taplio can help you manage your LinkedIn posts. [01:52] Quickly and easily automate your favorite apps and devices with IFTTT (If This Then That). [02:09] Why Orbit.love is a great tool for community management. [03:01] Why Kickbox is a fantastic tool for managing your email marketing. [03:31] How Commsor unlocks the power of Community-Led Growth. [03:52] That's it for today! Go to school.io/talent to learn how you can join our Talent Collective! [04:22] Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast! [04:22] Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Tweet Hunter Sprout Social Meet Edgar Taplio IFTTT Zapier Orbit.love Discord Kickbox Commsor Subscribe to our premium podcast (with tons of goodies!): https://www.marketingschool.io/pro Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu
In this episode of Cut to the Crypto, we're talking to Mac Reddin, Co-Founder and CEO at Commsor — a full-stack company that provides companies with everything they need to unlock community-led growth.Together, we're going to dive into the question, “Why are software companies creating NFT projects? And what does community building look like in Web3?”Mac talks about what drove him to launch Commsor and why they are launching their own NFT. We discuss whether more companies will start to create their own NFTs and what might spark them to start doing so.We talk about the difference between Web2 and Web3, how to bridge the gap between these two worlds, and the concept of the ownership economy. Finally, Mac shares some ideas about how Web3 projects can be more welcoming and how communities can remain open to everyone as opposed to being exclusive, as well as the importance of intentionality when building communities.
#033 Mac Reddin runs a company called Commsor, which builds software for community teams, and runs a community for community builders called the Community Club. They're showing community leaders how to “flip the script,” to build communities at the core of the business rather than in service of the business or the product. And their software helps put community data in one place so it's easier to work with. They're even using NFTs in ways that help people feel like more valued members of the community. Show notes and more at SmartPassiveIncome.com/cx033.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Presenting your strategy to an executive audience. Community Industry News: Sweta Shetty joined Hindustan Times as Community Manager Amanda Martin was promoted to Head of Community at Unbounce Kemi Kale was promoted to Head of Community Management, Community and Impact at Meta Jelena Zanko was promoted to Director, Community Management at Imply Commsor raises $50M in a Series B round Brian joined Commsor as SVP, New Products Community-Led Product Ideas Survey Executive readouts and alignment: 23: Be bold. Be brief. Be gone. Elements we discussed: Opportunity Statement/Why Scope Research Company/Community Goals Business ROI Health Metrics/Benchmarks Integrated Approach/Collaboration Strategy Components Personas Programs Staffing Plans/Resources Required Platforms Milestones & Roadmap Next Steps Aftershow: Jada on the process
This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex connected a slew of seemingly-unrelated news items to answer a big question:How do we balance community and capitalism?The original question we sought to explore was "can you buy a community?" The answer to that question, after further exploration, felt obvious enough: no, so no what? Combining Epic Games' recent acquisition of Bandcamp, Commsor's latest raise, and Lolita Taub's new venture firm, community has a set of sharper standards around it. And nobody wants to let the buzzword go unchecked.Evergreen reminder to take advantage of code “EQUITY” when subscribing to TechCrunch+ for a hefty discount, and gratitude from your favorite trio of tech nerds.We're really enjoying using our Wednesday show to chat through trends and major topics. Tweet us with things you want us to hit on, if you have a particular bee in your bonnet!
What is up PartnerUp?!I looked at my phone the other day, and realized how bombarded I was by notifications. Tell me if this sounds familiar: too many Slack groups, a crowded email inbox, and memberships galore. I can't keep up! Some win my attention, but most don't. That leaves me with a big question -- how do we create communities that cut through the noise?When it comes to communities, Ashley Taylor, VP of Partnerships at Commsor, is top-notch. Throughout this episode, she reframes our thinking and answers some hard-pressed questions.There are a lot of ideas about what community is, and about what it's not.The temptation is to view community only as a function of a business, but that view can steal your imagination. Community isn't one-dimensional. Ashley explains why community touches every aspect of an org, and why it's not limited to our technology.“Community is going to happen whether or not you, as an org, intentionally create it.”Fun fact: Jared and Ashley used to work together at Drift. Want to know why Jared was a “pain” to work with? Tune in.—-Never miss an episode by subscribing to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a visual person, sub to our YouTube, and see the full recording of the episode.Share the episode with your commentary on LinkedIn and hash #partnerup #partnerhacker. We love to hear your thoughts on each episode, and would love to comment and share back!Check out all past and future the PartnerUp episodes at https://www.partneruppodcast.com and subscribe NOW to our new newsletter at https://partnerhacker.com/
“What are the top reasons you see new communities fail?” — Vishwas Katti Brought to you by Commsor.
“What differentiating values, if any, do you see in having a new customer join a community versus one who has been using your product for a good amount of time?” — Avi Lekowsky Brought to you by Commsor.
“How do I deal with competitors in my community?” — Seth Wylie Brought to you by Commsor.
“Do you think there is a minimum size of customers/users that you need to have to make a community successful?” — Yeori Hokken Brought to you by Commsor.
How motivating Partners to engage in your community can accelerate outcomes. Community Industry News: Gainsight acquired inSided Sofia Losada joined Sisense as Community Content Manager Katie Bapple joined Building Brave as Chief Community Officer Zoe Hartsfield joined Spekit as Community Manager Christine Gritmon joined Agorpulse as Senior Editor, Community Kelly Schott joined Pragmatic Institute as Manager of Community Programs Noele Flowers was promoted to Director of Community Education at Commsor Chris Detzel was promoted to Director of Customer Community and Engagement at Reltio Kannaa Chilla joins InVision as Community Manager Celina Zamora joins Cypress.io as Director of Community Sara Ott was promoted to Head of Community Experience at hound.vet Jill Ross joined Fivetran as Director of Community Lauren Hagerty joined PowerToFly Director of Marketing and Community Aftershow: BJO Estes Park Sponsored by: Commsor combines software, community, and strategic services to give your team the complete, integrated solution you need to succeed. Boulder County Wildfire Fund: On December 30th, 2021 the most destructive wildfire in the state's history, the Marshall fire, destroyed nearly 1,000 homes in Boulder County. Lend a helping hand with a donation of any size.
“What is the best way to get stakeholders excited about getting involved and engaging in your company community?” — Tessa Kriesel. Brought to you by Commsor.
How you can integrate learning and community to drive product affinity, customer happiness, and retention. Community Industry News: Facebook was down Erik Martin joined Commsor as VP of Services Nádia Vieira was promoted to Senior Global Program Manager, Community at LinkedIn Tim Lopez joined Saviynt as Director, Community Cindy Au joined Reddit Andreia Tulcidas was promoted to Community Advocacy Lead at Outsystems Patrick O'Keefe joined CNN full-time as Community Lead Brad Fitzgerald joined UCLA Anderson School of Management as Community Manager Community & Learning: Salesforce Trailhead Alteryx Academy Joe Miller Sponsored By: Super Forum 2021 is the largest and most comprehensive conference for executives, community managers, marketing, membership, and customer success professionals who want to connect, engage, and create better customer and member experiences. Meetsy enables you to Connect your community, one introduction at a time. Create serendipity and unlock the power of networks in your community by enabling your members to easily connect with each other.
Deep Dive into growing a venture startup on Twitter. Lambda School, On Deck, Product Hunt, Pitch, Superhuman case studies. Benchmark metrics and tools like Commsor to manage influence and community. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com
Should you host your community on Slack, Discord, or a purpose-built community platform? Community Industry News: Jenny Weigle launched her community consulting business Taylor Harrington joined Groove as Head of Community Jocelyn Hsu was promoted to Senior Manager, Creator Community at PicsArt Shaveta Sharma was promoted to Deliver Manager Online Communities at Grazitti Slack vs. Community Platforms Forums are over! “But one of the things that I think it takes people a while to wrap their heads around is Slack is specifically designed for some group of people who are aligned around the accomplishment of some goal or set of goals, as opposed to we're all interested in Star Wars or something like that. It's a lousy social network in the broad, generic sense. It's a lousy replacement for a bulletin board or discussion. Reddit is better at being Reddit than Slack.” - Stewart Butterfield (CEO Slack), Stratechery July 2020 Sponsored By: The CX Confessions podcast from Khoros connects you to voices from the C-suite to share their secrets for creating sensational customer experiences. Commsor integrates with all the tools you already use, tying your community data together and enabling you to unlock insights, measure impact, and build a community-led company.
As the Chief Community Officer at Commsor, Alex Angel is a community-management expert for online environments. She manages a community of community managers. Accordingly, she helps define best practices and guidelines for her entire industry along with industry colleagues (who are part of her community.) Alex previously worked at Reddit and Nike, and did community management consulting.Community managers ensure community health for private, online communities established by a business or a brand. Responsibilities include: transformation, amplification, engagement, and retention.The community management field is growing and there is a lot of opportunity. Many community managers got into the industry by chance or because they were already managing other communities unpaid and learned it could be a career. It may be a good fit if you're a generalist that is good with transition, has strong written and verbal communication skills, enjoys planning and strategizing, is tech-savvy, and you have strong personal boundaries and analytical skills. ResourcesCommunity ClubThe Community RoundtableContact Info:Alex AngelAlex on LinkedInJulie Berman - Hostwww.womenwithcooljobs.com@womencooljobs (Instagram)
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This week, Natasha and Danny, otherwise known as your two new favorite Book influencers (inside joke, you'll get if you listen to the show), hopped on the mics to take everyone threw the news, with Grace and Chris in the background.Here's what we got into: Wise announced plans to go public via direct listing, making it the biggest company to use this route to debut on the London Stock Exchange. Andreessen Horowitz goes into publishing with Future, so Danny and Natasha took turns fawning over why everyone has hot takes about a blog, and what could be in the future for Future. Harry Stebbings turned up the volume on 20VC with new $140M fund. Natasha broke down why it matters for emerging fund managers, and why it might quiet some concerns about the growth potential of micro-funds. After we left our usually programmed media and venture conversation, we turned to community. Commsor bought Meetsy to build community tools for all for an undisclosed price. Danny found hobby-market fit with BookClub, a startup that just raised $20 million to make reading experiences more engaging with author-led discussions. Then, the edtech convo continued with Formative's $70 million financing event from this week. Danny had the scoop on Gusto's first-ever acquisition as well as Clair, a tool that is skipping the direct deposit and heading straight for the paycheck. To close out the funding round section, we spoke about Carbyne making emergencies more streamlined, and what Natasha argued is the headline o' the week: Neo4j raises Neo$325m as graph-based data analysis takes hold in enterprise. To close, we spoke to HBCUvc's $1 million fund to back overlooked founders, and onramp aspiring investors.Well, as you can tell, it's been a busy writing and speaking week for your humble hosts. We're grateful for the opportunity, and will be back in your ears on Monday.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This week, Natasha and Danny, otherwise known as your two new favorite Book influencers (inside joke, you'll get if you listen to the show), hopped on the mics to take everyone threw the news, with Grace and Chris in the background.Here's what we got into: Wise announced plans to go public via direct listing, making it the biggest company to use this route to debut on the London Stock Exchange. Andreessen Horowitz goes into publishing with Future, so Danny and Natasha took turns fawning over why everyone has hot takes about a blog, and what could be in the future for Future. Harry Stebbings turned up the volume on 20VC with new $140M fund. Natasha broke down why it matters for emerging fund managers, and why it might quiet some concerns about the growth potential of micro-funds. After we left our usually programmed media and venture conversation, we turned to community. Commsor bought Meetsy to build community tools for all for an undisclosed price. Danny found hobby-market fit with BookClub, a startup that just raised $20 million to make reading experiences more engaging with author-led discussions. Then, the edtech convo continued with Formative's $70 million financing event from this week. Danny had the scoop on Gusto's first-ever acquisition as well as Clair, a tool that is skipping the direct deposit and heading straight for the paycheck. To close out the funding round section, we spoke about Carbyne making emergencies more streamlined, and what Natasha argued is the headline o' the week: Neo4j raises Neo$325m as graph-based data analysis takes hold in enterprise. To close, we spoke to HBCUvc's $1 million fund to back overlooked founders, and onramp aspiring investors.Well, as you can tell, it's been a busy writing and speaking week for your humble hosts. We're grateful for the opportunity, and will be back in your ears on Monday.
Soft Launch — the who, what, when, where, and why. Erica and Brian talk through how you can use it to set your new community up for success. Community Industry News: Orbit raised a $15m Series A StackOverflow Sold for $1.8B Commsor announced 5 new integrations Celina Zamora joined Makerpad as Head of Community Willa Tellekson-Flash was promoted to Director of Community at Public.com Austin Grimes joined Flexera as Senior Digital Community Manager Bailey Richardson joined Substack as Head of Community Ryan Sloane joined Facebook as Community Programs Manager Joe Miller joined Incorta as Sr. Director, Community & Customer Enablement Shannon Emery joined Alteryx as Manager, Community Recognition Kristie Preston joined Inherit Learning Company as Digital Community Manager Piper Wilson joined Grazitti as a Community Manager Soft Launch: Community Launch Guide: Soft Launch Bar Rescue Sponsored By: Higher Logic partnered with Community Roundtable on this year's State of Community Management report. Go download the report today! Commsor knows that no two communities look the same, function in the same way, or have the same needs. Which is why they announced new integrations to enable Community Managers to bring all their members together in a single dashboard — no matter which platform those members engage on — and connect the dots between them.
How to successfully (and unsuccessfully) migrate your community to a new platform. Community Industry News: Mary Yakuri Hodges was promoted to Community Manager at Workato Paul Bradley joined Agorapulse as Head of Global Community Marissa Dimino Burns joined Salesforce as Senior Community Manager Tiffany Oda joined Venafi as Director, Community Operations Stephanie Nakano joined Coda as Community Manager Brian joined Commsor as an Advisor Migrations: Community Launch Guide: Migrations Sample Platform Migration Announcement Aftershow: Oops. Sponsored By: Commsor integrates with all the tools you already use, tying your community data together and enabling you to unlock insights, measure impact, and build a community-led company. Higher Logic Acquires Vanilla: Better Together - Combining two, industry-leading platforms to bring human-focused engagement to more people than ever before.
Today, we’ll sit down and hear from Jacob Peters, co-founder of Launch House and Commsor, two community-led and data-driven startups. As a frequently uprooted army brat, Jacob prioritized fitting in with his peers. So, he dumbed himself down and hid his genuine interests, including math and LEGOs. He led a double life playing the part of a “cool kid” at school while secretly running a LEGO empire with the help of his family. After suffering a traumatic brain injury, Jacob finally dropped the facade and followed his authentic passions. Jacob immersed himself in the world of data science and started creating internal incubators at JP Morgan. In his role, he used the networking skills he’d developed as a LEGO mogul and the emotional intelligence he’d gained as an undercover nerd to build an authentic data science community. This authentic community served as rocket fuel for Jacob’s entrepreneurial endeavors and would ultimately lead to his startup today: Launch House. Relevant Links Community Club https://www.community.club/ Commsor https://www.commsor.com/ Commsor Twitter https://twitter.com/commsor?lang=en Launch House article on TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/15/founders-hacker-hype-homes-remote-work/ Launch House Twitter https://twitter.com/launch_house?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Brain Injury Association of America https://www.biausa.org/ Brainline https://www.brainline.org/people-brain-injury/community-support LEGO’s Adult Fandom https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lego-60-anniversary-afol-community-adult-lego-fans LEGO – Turning Your Customers into Your Community https://hbr.org/2020/01/turn-your-customers-into-your-community LEGO and Community Building https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/what-lego-taught-me-about-community-building --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support
Theme of the week: Should community managers know how to babysit? Community management sometimes feels a lot like babysitting to Alex Angel. She is the Chief Community Officer at Commsor and she joined our podcast to discuss community management and what community managers do all day. Spoiler: never day is the same. We also talked about: What counts as a “community”? Why do people join communities and what do they expect? What drives engagement in a community? What’s a community manager’s role? How does a community manager’s daily life look like? Which are the characteristics of a good community manager? How are developer communities different from non-developer communities? What is the business value of communities? How do we measure success? What’s a community success story that stands out to her How will communities evolve in the future? And more! Listen to this episode to better understand community managers. Let’s talk Data! This is the graph we discuss with Alex: https://www.devrelx.com/trends?lightbox=comp-kisqz2fe3__item-kisrbi1b_runtime_dataItem-kisqz2ff (Information sources used by desktop developers). You can find the https://www.slashdata.co/free-resources/ (State of the Developer Nation 20th edition free report) here and register at the https://www.futuredeveloper.io/ (Future Developer Summit). Alex Angel is a community expert with 10 years of experience in community and product management, transforming, amplifying, and growing engagement, retention, and community health at Reddit and Nike. She focuses on building places and products that people love and is skilled at creating structure from chaos.
Mac Reddin, Co-Founder and CEO at Commsor, comes to the Gain Grow Retain CS Leadership Office Hours to talk to us about community. -- If you want to join the discussion with thousands of other customer success leaders, join Gain Grow Retain: http://gaingrowretain.com/ This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach... Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/ Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach
Mac Reddin, Co-Founder and CEO at Commsor, comes to the Gain Grow Retain CS Leadership Office Hours to talk to us about community.--If you want to join the discussion with thousands of other customer success leaders, join Gain Grow Retain: http://gaingrowretain.com/This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach...Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach
Jacob Peters works at the intersection of technology, data and community, so in this episode we take a dive into the math of community. Jacob is a serial community builder, starting at age 10 with a serious passion for Legos and a knack for bringing people together. He spent the past few years building a community of data scientists at an unlikely place – a big bank on Wall Street. Today, Jacob is the Co-Founder of Commsor, a powerful new tool that helps organizations better understand and measure their communities. Episode Notes: https://www.createcommunitypod.com/episodes/jacob-peters
Revenue Generator Podcast: Sales + Marketing + Product + Customer Success = Revenue Growth
Today we're going to discuss the value of building a community as a marketing channel. Joining us is Jacob Peters, a Co-Founder of Commsor, which is a community control center that places powerful analytics, automations, and engagement tools for world-class communities, focusing on B2B SAS brands. In part 3 of our conversation, we're going to discuss how to drive engagement and results from your community. Show NotesConnect With:Jacob Peters: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Revenue Generator Podcast: Sales + Marketing + Product + Customer Success = Revenue Growth
Today we're going to discuss the value of building a community as a marketing channel. Joining us is Jacob Peters, a Co-Founder of Commsor, which is a community control center that places powerful analytics, automations, and engagement tools for world-class communities, focusing on B2B SAS brands. In part 2 of our conversation, we're going to discuss how to set up a community for long-term success. Show NotesConnect With:Jacob Peters: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Revenue Generator Podcast: Sales + Marketing + Product + Customer Success = Revenue Growth
Today we're going to discuss the value of building a community as a marketing channel. Joining us is Jacob Peters, a Co-Founder of Commsor, which is a community control center that places powerful analytics, automations, and engagement tools for world-class communities, focusing on B2B SAS brands. In part 1 of our conversation, we're going to discuss the value of owning your community. Show NotesConnect With:Jacob Peters: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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