Human Relationships Change Everything: Building the Future of Community-Led Growth

Relationships start with a conversation. As conversations expand and more people participate, these relationships accumulate and coalesce into communities. It’s no different for an organization’s relationship with its users, developers, customers, champions, and partners. It can’t be transactional. It has to be human. Companies must cultivate communities that feel heard, supported, and connected—not just around a product, but around a shared mission. This movement is the way of the future, and there’s no going back.

We, as an industry, and as a world, need these relationships more than ever. The pandemic showed us how digital relationships can be just as strong as real-world ones, and can give birth to new organizational paradigms like DAOs. At the same time, our (gradual) return to in-person has helped us remember that a handshake, a shared meal, or the electric energy of an in-person conference or meetup has unique merit which can’t be lost. The current market volatility has made us realize that while businesses pivot, technology evolves, and people flow through the seamless borders between new opportunities, the things that will endure are the relationships we build. Relationships are what carry us into the future, and let us step into the unknown every day with confidence.

At Common Room, we seek to transform how companies connect with people by building technology that enables a human relationship between organizations and the people that matter most—their community.

Building community with and for our customers

In March, we announced the general availability of our intelligent community growth platform. Every startup has a 0-to-1 story, and ours is the story of our customers. They are organizations with the vision and unflinching belief that their success rests on the success of the relationships they build with their communities. They are community-led growth organizations like Atlassian, Asana, Confluent, dbt Labs, Figma, Grafana Labs, HubSpot, and Webflow. After a year of building with them, we were thrilled to make Common Room available to any organization that shares this vision.

If you work with us or know us, you know that Common Room is a customer-led organization. We start with the needs of our customers, and we work backwards with a maniacal focus on value, usability, and simplicity. We feel the urgency from our customers to evolve and adapt their approach to relationships in this community-first world, and we innovate on their behalf, fast.

Today, just two months after our general availability announcement, I get to share some core investment areas that will be coming online shortly that will enable community-led organizations to grow happier customers, measure outcomes, and drive business impact.

1. Integrate everywhere. Unify community, product, and customer data with the most extensive set of managed integrations in the market.
2. Automate and act. Build meaningful, human relationships at scale, without the manual toil.
3. Lead with advocacy. Find, nurture, and make your superfans successful to activate the community-led flywheel and have happier customers.
4. Intelligent support. Easily identify and answer what matters, across all channels.

Integrate everywhere

People are having conversations in more places than ever before. Online communities are convening across a Cambrian explosion of conversational and social platforms including forums (Khoros), communication tools (Slack, Discord, and Telegram), developer repos and discussions (GitHub and Stack Overflow), support channels (Intercom), open social platforms (LinkedIn and Twitter), and events of all shapes and sizes (Meetup and Bevy)—and more are being built all the time.

Community-led companies know they need to be where people want to have conversations across these channels, otherwise these conversations will happen without them. Until now, organizations lacked a unified Digital Relationship Manager to engage and nurture these people and conversations, and to bring these people and conversations into the operations of their business. This is critical to building better products and growing happier customers.

With Common Room, you can now instantly unify community, product, and customer data to unlock intelligent insights about the people, conversations, and organizations, and take action. Our Digital Relationship Manager forms a single unified identity for the members in your community, across all channels. We enable this through:

• Breadth and depth: We leverage integration partners like Zapier to deliver breadth of integrations and enable you to bring in data from anywhere. We build deep, native integrations for critical channels to ensure no detail is lost (and because we heard from you that emoji reactions matter 😉 ).
• Self-serve and fully-managed: You should focus on your community, not building and managing integrations that constantly experience downtime, disruptions, and out-of-date APIs. Our core integrations are self-serve and fully-managed, so with just a few clicks you can instantly see intelligence and take action and never worry about service disruption. No one has time for undifferentiated heavy lifting.
• API: There’s no community without an ecosystem and community-led organizations need more than a product—they need a platform. We’re constantly investing in deepening our API platform and capabilities, and are excited about the investments we’re making.

Our Digital Relationship Manager is built on a real-time community-context data platform. We layer machine learning and intelligence to unlock insights. Our configurable workflows enable you to take action on these insights, whether to give back and nurture your community, or to collaborate with your teams and bring your entire organization closer to your community.

Automate and act

Data visibility and analytics are a critical first step, but aren't enough on their own. Relationships don’t start with data. They start with a conversation. Then, if you’re lucky, you earn the right to keep talking. A community platform has to enable you to give back to your community in a human way, because community is a human place. The challenge comes when your community grows from a single meetup to a global movement. This is where advancements in intelligence and conversational AI can help us transform how companies connect with people through technology that fosters human relationships.

At our general availability, we enabled community managers to welcome individual members with an automated personalized message. A conversation no longer needs to start with a user problem or pitch from the sales team. It can now start with: “Hi, I’m Linda, and I’m glad you’re here.”

“Having an automated welcome message that comes from a person rather than a bot lets us engage with our community in a more human way, and members have been much more responsive to it. Since switching to Common Room’s welcome message workflow, not only do I get more replies from new members, but they're introducing themselves to our full community a lot more too.” — Max Pete, Customer & Community Support Lead at SuperHi

We’ve already extended our automations to include a check-in message to keep your members active and engaged, and we have more exciting announcements in this space coming soon.

Lead with advocacy

Leading with advocacy is a foundational pillar of any modern community strategy. We’ve learned from you that the advocates in your community are often the same people who are your champions in their own organizations, helping their teammates be successful with your product. You lead with advocacy to generate a flywheel of education, to recognize your champions who form the fabric of support and connectedness, and to grow happier, more successful customers.

The challenge of building technology to enable advocacy is that every community is unique. The specific community engagement and activities your members do to create the flywheel of advocacy (like presenting at a conference, writing a blog, or building a plugin) looks different across communities, and how you value them is different too.

To solve for this, our product and data science team worked backwards from your feedback and created a solution that lets you understand the influence and impact of each of your community members through Impact Points. It’s not a black-box or prescriptive approach—you know your community best, and you have specific and unique goals for your advocacy programs. Our data science team created a baseline algorithm (learned across all our communities) to get you started, but you’ll have deep control and configurability to identify your most impactful members, channels, and silent champions. Whether you’re supercharging your apps ecosystem, your global expansion, your customers, your content creators, or your developers, we’ll equip you to grow what you uniquely care about.

This set of features is coming soon—contact us for early access! We’re making deep investments in this space, and can’t wait to share more.

Intelligent support

Modern brands and winning organizations prioritize making their community feel connected, heard, and supported. They know that listening to their community helps them build better products, and supporting their community leads to happier customers.

We’re investing in a new product pillar called intelligent support to make finding and answering what matters easy, across any channel and leveraging the latest and greatest in machine learning and sentiment analysis. This enables organizations to build better products, and proactively and intelligently take action to grow happier customers.

We’re reimagining what support looks like in our digital, networked, and social age. If you want to build with us, you can contact the team (or DM me), and I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.

Join the community-led movement

Since March, we’ve been honored to work with customers across product-led growth SaaS, open source, web3 and crypto, all leading communities of developers, creators, designers, product managers, data practitioners, on-chain cyberpunks of the future, dreamers, doers, drivers, and more. Today’s is the first announcement in a series of exciting launches. Subscribe to our newsletter and join our community to stay up to date on what’s coming up.

Join us and let’s build the future of community together!

Interested in trying out Common Room for yourself? Get started for free today or request a demo. If you’re already a user, check out and stay up to date on the latest and greatest Common Room product features with our release notes.