Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / How CMOs Use Community-Led Growth to Drive Revenue
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's a term that's been floating around the last couple of years in marketing circles — community-led growth. And I think for a lot of CMOs, it still sounds soft. Like, 'We'll start a Slack group, maybe a LinkedIn page, and somehow the pipeline will fill itself.' Luna: Right — it gets lumped in with brand-building, not demand generation. Hard to defend a budget line item that doesn't have a direct cost per lead attached to it. Lucas: Exactly. But the companies that have actually executed community-led growth well — they're not treating it as a warm and fuzzy initiative. They're treating it as a revenue channel with specific metrics, a specific funnel, and a specific cost structure. And the canonical example here is Figma. Luna: Figma — before the Adobe deal fell through, it was valued at something like twenty billion dollars. And they had a famously tiny sales team. How much of that valuation was actually driven by community? Lucas: A huge chunk. Figma's head of community early on, she's on record saying that their community program directly influenced over fifty percent of new paid team sign-ups at one point. Not through gated content or demo requests — through users sharing templates, plugins, and design files publicly. Luna: So the community itself became the product demo. I didn't have to talk to a salesperson; I just opened a file someone else made, saw how it worked, and decided to upgrade. Lucas: And that's the core mechanism. Community-led growth works when the user's interaction with other users creates a pull toward the paid product. Figma's template library — anyone could publish a template, and anyone could use it for free. But if you wanted to use it with your team and collaborate in real time, you needed the professional plan. Luna: So the growth loop is: user creates a template, that template attracts new users, those users hit a collaboration limit, they upgrade, and then those upgraded users create more templates. It's a flywheel, not a funnel. Lucas: Exactly. And Figma measured that flywheel with specific metrics. They tracked what they called 'community-influenced revenue' — any paid account where the first interaction was through a community asset. They also tracked template adoption rates and the net promoter score of community participants versus non-participants. Luna: What were the numbers? I remember reading that community members had a significantly higher net promoter score — like, forty points higher than the average user. Lucas: That's right. And their customer acquisition cost for community-sourced leads was about forty percent lower than for outbound or even paid search. Because the community did the educating and the convincing for them. Luna: Okay, but the pushback I hear from CMOs in more traditional industries is: 'Figma is a design tool for designers. Of course they have a community. My product is industrial valves or insurance software — nobody's building a community around that.' What do you say to them? Lucas: I'd say look at Sephora. Beauty Insider isn't a product community in the same way — it's a loyalty program that functions as a community. But Sephora built a space where customers post reviews, share looks, ask for advice. And those community interactions drive purchase behavior. Sephora found that members who engage with the community spend two and a half times more than those who don't. Luna: So it's not just for SaaS. Any brand where customers have expertise or opinions they want to share — and that's almost every category — can build a community. The question is whether the CMO is willing to invest in the platform and the moderation and the content strategy. Lucas: And that's the real barrier. Community-led growth requires a different mindset. Instead of spending on ads to bring people to a landing page, you're spending on community managers, on user-generated content programs, on tools like Discourse or Circle or even just a well-moderated subreddit. Luna: And it takes time. The CFO wants to see ROI in a quarter. Community takes longer to build. So how do you frame the investment to the rest of the executive team? Lucas: You frame it around customer lifetime value and retention. The data from both Figma and Sephora shows that community members have higher retention rates — they churn less, they buy more, and they advocate for the brand. So even if the initial acquisition cost is higher in year one, the lifetime value more than compensates. Luna: And you can start small. You don't need a million-person community to prove the model. Even a few hundred active members can generate enough data to show the trend. Lucas: Right. And that's the practical takeaway for any CMO listening. Pick one segment of your customer base — power users, maybe — and build a private community for them. Give them early access, ask for feedback, encourage them to share tips. Measure their behavior against a control group. Within six months, you'll see whether the model works for your brand. Luna: If today's episode gave you a concrete idea you might actually try — whether it's measuring community-influenced revenue or starting that power-user group — that's exactly why we do this show ad-free. And the way we keep it that way is listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small way to make sure we can keep digging into the specifics without any sponsor interruptions. Appreciate anyone who chips in. Luna: Alright, back to the playbook. So once you have that initial community, how do you scale it without losing the intimacy that made it work? Lucas: That's the hardest part. Figma handled it by empowering super-users. They created a 'Community Champions' program — these were designers who got early access to new features, direct lines to product managers, and recognition within the community. In exchange, they moderated forums, created templates, and onboarded new users. Luna: So you're essentially outsourcing community management to the most engaged members. That keeps costs down and keeps the culture authentic. Lucas: Exactly. And the champions felt invested in Figma's success. Some of them even became employees later. It's a talent pipeline as much as a marketing channel. Luna: Let's talk about metrics again. If a CMO comes to you and says, 'I've got a community, but I don't know how to report on it to the board,' what do you tell them to track? Lucas: Start with three things. One: community-influenced revenue — that's the number of closed-won deals that had at least one community touchpoint. Two: community engagement rate — not vanity metrics like total members, but active contributors per week. And three: net promoter score differential between community members and non-members. Luna: And if you can show that community members refer others at a higher rate, you can also argue for a reduced customer acquisition cost over time. Lucas: Right. And there's a fourth metric I'd add: content amplification. When community members share your blog posts, templates, or webinars, that's earned media. You can calculate the advertising equivalency value — what it would have cost to get those impressions through paid channels. Luna: That's a compelling number for a CFO. 'We got five million dollars' worth of impressions for the cost of two community managers.' Lucas: Exactly. And that's the story. Community-led growth isn't about being nice — it's about building a self-sustaining acquisition and retention engine. The best CMOs are starting to see it not as a side project, but as a core growth channel. Luna: So what's the first step for a CMO who's convinced but hasn't started? Lucas: Identify your most passionate customers. Interview them. Find out what they wish they could share with each other. Then build the smallest possible container for that interaction — a Slack group, a forum, even a monthly Zoom call. And then just listen for three months. The community will tell you what it needs. Luna: It's almost anti-marketing in a way. You're not broadcasting; you're facilitating. Lucas: Exactly. And that shift — from broadcasting to facilitating — is maybe the single biggest change in marketing over the last decade. Community-led growth is just the most structured version of that idea.