Level Up Your Company with Community with Anna Maste

For its first five years, Boondockers Welcome did almost no marketing, with no paid advertising, blog, or SEO content, yet reached $65,000 ARR.

Three ways to leverage community-led growth: ① Create an amazing product that people talk about. ② Offer your product for free to influencers within the community. ③ Create a public space for the community to gather, then get out of the way.

The key metric for influencers is not the size of their audience, but where that audience is on their customer journey. Viewers who watch a 15-minute detailed video are more likely to purchase.

Attending MicroConf for the first time in 2019, and hearing from other entrepreneurs comments like '$100,000 ARR, that's my dream right now,' she realized that validation from peers is as important as validation from customers.

Insights gained at MicroConf led her to reject the initial low acquisition offer. After growing the company for another two years, she successfully sold it for more than 10 times the original offer.

She hired a customer support person from their community, and received over 180 applicants by posting the job only on their newsletter and social channels.

Not only validation from customers, but validation from fellow entrepreneurs in the same position is equally important, and one might not even realize it's missing.