Hacking together the first Salesforce Community

When Erica Kuhl joined Salesforce as employee #176, nothing about her role or title suggested she would go on to build one of the most influential customer communities in SaaS history. Given a broken website, no roadmap, no team, she hacked together the first Salesforce Community with duct-taped technologies, raw conviction, and a fierce belief that customers needed a place to help each other.

That grassroots experiment eventually grew into a 17 million-member global community, became a blueprint for digital customer success, and reshaped the way enterprise SaaS companies think about adoption, retention, and product feedback loops.

Today, Erica is EVP & GM at Gainsight, leading community, education, and in-app product experience—and shaping the emerging category of Digital Customer Success.

This episode is a masterclass in community-powered retention, scrappy innovation, and how one person can build an entirely new motion inside an organization long before the market knows it needs it.

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Timestamps

0:00 – Preview

0:58 – Meet Erica Kuhl: EVP at Gainsight & Former Employee #176 at Salesforce

3:39 – What Early Salesforce Adoption Actually Looked Like

6:25 – Teaching Admins Before Admins Existed

9:40 – Why Erica Pitched a Community Before “Community” Was a Thing

11:25 – Building the First Salesforce Community

13:43 – Scaling Without Support

19:30 – How Community Became a Strategic Retention Lever

24:44 – Defining Digital Customer Success

26:35 – Where to Start: Crawl–Walk–Run for Digital CS

30:25 – Why Community Multiplies GRR

31:28 – Closing Thoughts

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What You’ll Learn

- How the first modern SaaS community was built—from scratch, without buy-in

- Why peer-to-peer engagement scales support, adoption, and product feedback

- How to tie community engagement directly to retention (and why it’s essential)

- Why COVID reshaped the priority of customer marketing and always-on programs

- How community, education, and in-app experiences converge into Digital CS

- Where digital CS programs should start and how to avoid fragmented experiences

- The cultural mindset needed to build community programs that actually survive

- Practical tactics for early-stage community building: seeding, puppeteering, protecting, and aligning

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Check out the Key Takeaways & Transcripts: https://www.gainsight.com/presents/series/unchurned/

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Where to Find Erica:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericakuhl/

Podcast: In Before the Lock

Where to Find Josh:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/

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Resources Mentioned:

* Gainsight Community

* Brian Oblinger’s Community Strategy Academy

* Skilljar

* Salesforce Community