Growing your product-led business is hard.
Doing it alone is even harder.
Have you ever faced a challenge if your business where you just wanted someone to give you their unbiased advice? Or you knew someone must have gone through this exact problem before and found a solution – but you just didn’t know where to find these people.
Or maybe you were just too shy to ask strangers for advice.
By tapping into a group of entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey, you can learn from their mistakes, implement their experience-backed advice, and gain different perspectives on all of the unique challenges you are facing.
This post explores why free communities are specifically challenging for SaaS founders, and how an exclusive community can help them scale faster.
Let’s dig in.
Why free communities are challenging for SaaS founders
There are specific challenges that come with free communities:
- Users can be nervous about sharing with a large group of people.
In our Slack community alone, there are more than 16,000 members. And it can be a great place to find answers to challenges you’re facing building a product-led business.
But as any community grows, you start to notice that it loses that feeling of exclusiveness. People are less vulnerable; they're not sharing as much. Normally, they're hiding because they’re not sure if they want to post a conversation with 16,000 people.
- The noise-to-signal ratio is really loud.
Aside from communities, a lot of other founders use other platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to learn more about product growth. But that also has a super high noise-to-signal ratio.
While their advice is helpful and full of experience, it doesn’t typically translate well to your own business.
It also doesn’t help when you get flooded with tactical advice at all hours of the day. What do you prioritize as a business owner?
This can be extremely overwhelming, don't you think?
Why SaaS founders should seek out help from other SaaS founders
Founders play a unique and powerful role in their company:
- They have the biggest impact long-term with what their go-to-market strategy is.
- At the end of the day, the founder's job is basically just to find out how to make something work and then move out of the way and hire someone better than themselves.
We've helped hundreds of companies really understand how to build a product-led business. What we've found is that SaaS founders really are the OG product manager. They need to understand how everything works.
By joining a group of other SaaS founders who understand this better than anyone, you're going to get the best advice that makes sense for your specific role.
The biggest benefit of joining an exclusive community
The people in the room matter a lot.
Typically, these types of communities are structured so that you’re grouped with three to five other founders, who are at a similar stage in their business.
Whenever you have a big challenge or decision that you need some feedback on in your business, you can speak to this group about it for their advice. Chances are, one of them has already been through a similar problem. And they can challenge your current thinking. You might be surprised by their perspective; when you're in the weeds of the day-to-day and the business, sometimes it's hard to miss some of the really simple stuff.
So the benefit of talking to this same group of people, is that they’ve been listening to you every month. They can help you identify the root issues faster since they’re an unbiased third party.
A great example of this is in action is from ProductLed's founder Wes Bush.
Before it was named ProductLed, the business was called Traffic is Currency.
It’s true!
He had a checklist of everything in his head that could make him stand out in the product-led category – a summit, a blog, a book. So he had a number of items that had “product-led” instinctively in the definition of what it was.
So he brought this to his mastermind group, and they all told him to kill the name Traffic is Currency.
And ProductLed was born!
But making these kinds of decisions and following through with them is hard. So having a group to help you move through them and keep you accountable is extremely beneficial to the growth of your business.
How to make the most of being in a community
Our community of product-led professionals is smart.
Heck, every time we host a workshop or a live event, we’re blown away by the insights and feedback from the audience.
By speaking with others about your specific challenge, and gathering experience-backed advice from professionals who have already “been there, done that” can be extremely powerful.
You can identify root issues quicker.
You are challenged to think differently.
All of this means you can accelerate the growth of your business – together, with others by your side.
Join our new exclusive ProductLed Founder’s community
Every community is different, and its structure of it can really have a massive impact on how encouraged you are to participate.
In our ProductLed Founders community, we’ve honed in on these features to ensure anyone who joins gets a world-class experience:
- Low noise-to-signal ratio: It’s a group of highly-vetted peers. There's an application process that takes about seven minutes to fill out. So this is one of the most important features – we don't accept everybody.
- Minimum Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $250,000: It’s important for us to ensure that all members have a somewhat established business.
- A small founder’s board: As we’ve said before, the people in the room matter a lot. Your founder's board is made up of three to five other entrepreneurs, and you all meet together bi-weekly or once a month. On those calls, you speak with them about your specific challenges and get feedback.
- Access to every other founder: Aside from your founder’s board, you’ll be inside a dedicated platform that every other founder also has access to. This is where you can ask them any question and get specific advice from other founders pretty quickly.
By learning together with a group of ambitious entrepreneurs, you’ll be learning alongside them and can reach your goal a lot quicker.
Remember, you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
If you’re ready to be part of a community like this, you can learn more and apply here.
