1-2-3: The Power of Community

This newsletter was originally released Sept 30, 2023. Originally named 'The Community' it evolved to 'The Collab'.

Welcome to my first-ever newsletter.

Thanks for signing up to read this.

I’ve built some really powerful communities, but I’m still a student.

I’m going to share the most powerful lessons I’ve learned to help you build and leverage the power of community to scale.

Community will be the most potent and cost-effective growth channel for you.

Promise,

Jared

The Big Idea

Community saves.

After being a top seller in my 20s, I was fired or laid off 3 times in my mid-30s.

I found myself directionless in a period when I was supposed to have ‘figured it out’.

I lacked confidence in what was next or if I’d ever be successful.

And this ate at me. My friends were all doing bigger things and I was going around in circles.

After losing my job at the beginning of Covid, I decided to lean into LinkedIn and build a DM chat of others leaning in too.

Essentially a small ‘community’ of folks in sales and marketing in SaaS.

My goal was to leverage this group to find a new job in Sales leadership.

The energy of the the group was palpable; we all fed off each other and because we kept breaking LinkedIn chat, moved to Slack.

We added in RevOps & Customer Success pros to the mix to make it a complete 'go-to-market' community.

Two recruiters saw the insane growth and told me to stop interviewing for jobs to build this thing out.

Building Community was going to be my new job.

BUT I NEEDED MONEY NOW! And, we weren't making it (yet).

I took a bet that this community, now named ‘RevGenius’ was my calling and went all in.

I grew RevGenius to 40k GTM Professionals within 3 years and I hired myself along the way as revenue grew.

We did 7 figures in revenue last year.

I’m no longer directionless.

Community saved me.

Tapping into the power of community for your clients, prospects, and friends can and will be THAT potent.

Swim gently and be ready to ride the wave.

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The Gap I see in the space:

So many SaaS founders and marketers want to build community to help scale their growth but don’t know where to start with community building.

This is why I started this newsletter.

My calling is to help SaaS companies build community-led motions to help solve their GTM challenges and give more people a space for belonging.

2 Resources

I. Don’t build a brand build a movement:

When you’re building an online business, you’re not just crafting a brand — you’re building a movement. From Justin Welsh (read more)

II. Sendlane CEO says to build a Community:

Jimmy Kim , CEO of Sendlane, talks bout the key to selling SaaS software is humanizing it. (read more)

3 Tools

I. Common Room

Common Room addresses the challenge that 70% of your prospect’s buying process happens within the dark funnel before a sales intro call – e.g. LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, Reddit, Meetup, etc. Common Room gives you visibility into this so you can make smarter decisions to close more deals. (try it)

II. Lead Delta

Lead Delta is what I use to prune my connections on LinkedIn to make sure I’m only speaking to the most relevant ones. This helps me build my niche audience and community. (try it)

III. Superwave

Superwave is an awesome community platform built by the folks at Hopin. My homies @Dave Schools, Shane Lennox, and co. are taking a content-first approach to building a really interactive space to focus on what Slack/Discord doesn’t - a clean repository of community content. (try it)

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Reply to this email and let us know what you’d like to see more. And a big thank you to all who made it to this point.

Until next week,

Jared

p.s. What is one important problem you would like community to solve for you?