Product-Led Startup Vs Community-Led one
Grisel Dugarte
5 replies
I can't stop seeing material about product-led growth... community-led, sales-led............
But I feel at the same time you always need to build on your community!
So would you actually choose one to focus on first?
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Daniel Kyne@daniel_kyne
From my understanding of community-led, it doesn't necessarily overlap in a contradictory way with product-led. Eg. Airtable is a product-led company that leveraged community as one of the core aspects of its strategy. You can have both, community just tends to come slightly later than product (once you reach an inflection point of organic pull where there's enough weight to sustain a community while product-led is from the very start usually). Just my opinion :)
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@daniel_kyne I like your vision, I keep reading so many versions and love to open the discussion. I kind of feel that there is nothing like, one rules works all, you could choose to be community-led and that doesn't mean "not product", just give all your focus on community first and actually co-create with them, in that case the decision of product-led will stay as second.
@gd77 Very true! We actually do a lot of co-creation work at our startup, using a method called Customer Problem Stack Ranking to crowdsource the biggest problem our users have so that we can be more user-centric in our product management: https://www.opinionx.co/blog/cus...
Community-led looks to be quite new concept, I need to make more research about it. This event looks like a good place for it: https://local.saastock.com/event...
From my experience in early stage, you want to have a lot of feedback from you user. So Product-led isn't the best, as if your product doesn't convert, you will not know why. I usually have a sales led approach in early stage startup, but community led might be a good alternative.
@fabian_maume totally agree with you.
Oh sales-led is very important as well, but It is a great choice to let community be your protagonist for a bit longer... it is a way to accelerate the chance to truly understand your user. Key!!