Sam Richard begins the episode by sharing a bit about her background. In her role on the Growth Team at OpenView, she’s hearing more of their portfolio companies - Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led - begin to focus on developing community strategy for their organization.   

For companies that are Sales-Led and building a community, they’re looking to empower their evangelists and customers, raising them up in the market to be thought leaders in the space.   

Sam is a believer in the “crawl, walk, run” approach for anything, and that includes community, and to hire someone to specifically own and manage the community efforts at the company. She discusses how companies can build a developer community and an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)-specific one from her experience.   

Next, Sam explains her top 2 points lessons from working with and watching companies launch communities to help others succeed.   Circling back to an earlier point, she breaks down the process for showing the ROI of a location-based community program that a company is executing.   

To close out the episode, Sam shares 3 community trends she’s seeing and watching for in 2022 and beyond.