wHat is ComMuNiTy aNd hOw dO yOu MeaSuRe iT?

Part 2: The questions everyone kept asking me and eventually I had to answer

I hate the word community. If I could delete it from our collective vocabulary, I would.

For a long time I led a global, scaled team that held a lot of different functions we lumped together under the word “community” at Figma. It felt nice—oh, community! We care about people! But even I was confused about what it actually meant. It touched every part of the business: launches, brand, new user growth, even MQLs. What was community? What wasn’t ?

But we were hyper scaling and everything was working, so there wasn’t time to pause and define it. I did have a sneaking suspicion I’d eventually have to explain it. So I started researching. What I found when I looked at various community frameworks from very smart people didn’t reflect what we were doing.

For us, community wasn’t a program. It was a lens. It was our go-to-market motion. That’s what led me to abandon the word “community” and adopt a new one: Bottoms-up GTM.

Welcome to part 2 of my three-part series on Bottoms-up GTM:

• Part 1: Bottoms-up GTM and marketing’s role in PLG

• Part 2: What is community and how do you measure it? (this post)

• Part 3: The 4 phases of a Bottoms-up GTM

This is not a how-to guide for building community. It’s a tactical look at how I made sense of “community” and how to measure it in the context of a Bottoms-up GTM for myself.

‼️One important caveat: The measurement part only becomes valuable once you’re scaling and need to defend your work. Until then, please skip the dashboards and focus on the work itself. More on that in part 3 of the series.

🫣 Community, Community Programs, Community-led Growth and Bottoms-up GTM… oh my

Let’s start with definitions so we can separate these four different things that so often get conflated but are actually different.

• Community: A group of people who feel connected through shared interests, goals, or values.

• Community spaces: places where people are talking about your company and users are interacting with each other. Some are owned, structured, observable, and measurable programs (ie Discord, user groups, conferences) others are places where you are visiting (ie Twitter, Reddit).

• Community-led growth: When people in your community actively spread the word—bringing in the next layer of awareness, signups, and engaged users. It’s peer-to-peer growth.

• Bottoms-up GTM: A specific form of community-led growth where users also happen to work at companies and bring the product to their companies. By bringing a product to an org you move from B2C to B2C2B and create an outsized revenue impact.

📐 The Framework

So how do these fit together? We’ve got two parts:

• People (inputs): Individuals who interact with your company—your advocates and your community

• Outcomes (outputs): The business results those people influence—brand and ARR

Here’s how I define each:

• Advocates: People who love the product and actively spread it.

• Community: People who engage in your community spaces (includes advocates).

• Brand: The external impact of community-led growth—perception, awareness, and new user growth.

• ARR: The business impact of Bottoms-up GTM—when advocates bring your product into their companies.

This framework helps connect the dots between all the “soft” work and the business results. Let’s break it down.

👥 Part 1: People (Inputs)

You could call this whole section “community”—but it’s helpful to separate people by how actively they engage. Someone tweeting about you is not the same as someone attending a livestream. For simplicity, I’m breaking it into two groups: advocates and community.

💬 Advocates

Advocates are your champions. They tweet about you, bring your product into their org, join betas, give feedback, host meetups, and speak at events.

Early on, their names might live in someone’s head. Later, it’s a dozen spreadsheets. I ran our social handle for years and just remembered who tweeted about us. Someone would ask—who can speak at this London conference? Who’s that person always ranting about grids? And I’d just remember.

As you grow, you’ll have a mix of formal and informal programs: user group leads, social influencers, product feedback experts, internal champions. These people are too different to force into one bucket. Instead, build a flexible system to recognize and support advocates in all the ways they contribute.

The key is to consolidate the data — the stuff in peoples brains and your formal programs. You need a single profile that shows how someone engages across every touchpoint. 1M disconnected spreadsheets → 1 CRM.

Combining this on the back end allows you to:

• Measure impact

• Track growth over time (by region, segment, etc)

• Avoid internal overlap or over-asking people to do things

• Quickly pull lists when you need to access specific data (ie, oh, we are launching this new product. Who should be in the beta?)

Within this group, before connecting to business outcomes you can also track:

• Total advocates – people across all programs

• Advocate activities – actions those people took

It sounds simple, but getting all of this data out of people’s heads and into a singular CRM takes real change management.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Community

There are a million definitions of “community” in business. The most standard is a branded (or unbranded) platform everyone joins—like Salesforce Trailblazers or Gong Visioneers. Amazing! But also hard to pull off, especially early on when people may not care enough to go to your owned space. You often need more flexibility. In our case, the community grew too fast and too organically to contain.

If you can’t do a mega space, you can take a more inclusive approach, which is what we did. Start by defining what counts as a community space: Twitter, forums, events, user groups, creator programs, etc. Then, connect those spaces into a single user-level database that combines owned and external data to give you a unified view of how people engage.

This allows you to:

• Measure broader impact

• See larger trends across regions, products, and globally

• Better understand overall engagement and its change over time

Key metrics (later you can segment by region and product):

• Community membership – unique users in community spaces

• Community activity – total actions taken

• Community engagement – actions per person

At first, the tools didn’t exist to do this kind of aggregation at the person-level well, especially if there isn’t a unique identifier like email (ie twitter/x). But there are tools now to help you do this! Now tools like Common Room, Clay, Pocus, Commsor make this kind of connection more accessible.

📈 Part 2: Outcomes (outputs)

Ok, so your community is growing and you can show that. Great step one. But that’s not enough friends! We’ve gotta connect to higher-level business outcomes: brand and ARR.

📣 Brand

Brand is notoriously hard to measure, especially in early-stage or B2B companies. You’re probably not running formal brand trackers like they do in CPG. But there are directional ways to show impact—starting with word of mouth.

The simplest version? Someone signs up because they heard about you from someone else. That’s “community-led growth,” and you can track it with a self-reported “How did you hear about us?” field at sign up, if you can convince your growth team to add it.

Other useful metrics:

• Earned impressions – how many people saw content not produced by you

• Sentiment – quality of what’s being said about you

• Self-reported new user attribution – if you can get it at sign up

💸 ARR

Everything we do is ultimately in service of ARR. Attribution is also the most contested and hardest to get right. If you’ve unified your advocate and community data, you can connect that to sales data (aka salesforce) to see influence on pipeline and deals.

Some banger metrics you can eventually get to:

• ARR – the advocate / community member brings the tool to the org (attribution or influence)

• Direct pipeline – leads from advocacy / community

• Comparative impact – ie, when there is a member of an opportunity participates in community, they are close faster or are larger sales

You won’t do this alone (nor should you). It takes alignment with data science, marketing, and sales. But increasingly, this kind of attribution is essential, especially as growth teams look for places to pour more budget.

And yes, tools are getting better. Some even surface opportunities proactively, not just after the deal closes.

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🛠️ Putting it into Practice

Community, community spaces/programs and community-led growth are all part of a Bottoms-up GTM. Defining and measuring them turns what sounds like fluff into a measurable, strategic motion.

Getting here for me was a journey. It is hard (really hard) to get a large team aligned on this work. It is even harder to get a global, distributed team to track stuff in one CRM. Rolling out a system like this takes time, buy-in, and a ton of change management, and I’ve never seen it implemented perfectly.

🔥 Hot take: Even after writing this whole post, I still think this level of measurement is not always worth it. The framework helps you explain the motion and structure thinking, but in practice you're probably better off spending time shipping and engaging, not proving your worth.

But as you scale, I learned you have to have metrics to protect and grow what you do. The first time I saw someone else use these metrics in a presentation I wasn’t part of, I think I cried (ok I’m not actually crying about metric adoption, but I was pretty stoked).

In Part 3, I’ll cover how to adapt this model based on your company stage. Because what this looks like early looks very different from at scale.

See you then ✌️

PS: to troll me, my team made me posters to commemorate this journey. LMK if you want to pre order 😂