A new SaaS metric for demonstrating the ROI of community
orbit.love
orbit.love
Right on! We think the language we choose for our frameworks has many downstream effects, and we specifically use "Love" (versus something like “engagement”) in the Orbit Model: https://github.com/orbit-love/orbit-model
> "how do you think of blogs and content marketing w.r.t this? Is that a "big marketing effort" or does it fit into community?"
There’s definitely lots of overlap between content and community, and generally we don’t try to draw hard lines, as context matters so much.
For the purposes of this question, though, we can think in terms of a spectrum. On one end, all content would be community-generated, and on the other, all content would be produce and distributed by the company.
In most cases, you’ll have a mix of both.
In the case of NRG, the formula discussed in the article, the question is “how fast are we growing before layering on incremental investments in sales and marketing.”
For the purposes of this metric, I think the spirit of the law would say that company-generated content would fall outside of scope, but stuff that folks in the community were organically creating could reasonably be included.
One way to think about it: "If you stopped investing in [CHANNEL X] would all the benefits from it disappear tomorrow?"
In that sense I would definitely classify blogs and content as organic.
Another way to look at it, building on this intent from the original article: [2]
> The rationale behind the Natural Rate of Growth is our conviction that PLG businesses have an organic, self-service growth engine at their core because they’re built to attract the end user. These companies solve for end user pain, make it easy to get started, deliver value before the paywall and hire sales last.
With that in mind, it absolutely makes sense to include writing, how-tos and docs in NRG.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it [2] https://openviewpartners.com/blog/new-saas-metric/
objection 1:
this NRG formula – i dont know. as you already note, its kinda indirect what is attributable to product centric upsells, and content marketing SEO. i understand that you can make the case that all this comes from community work, but it can feel like a landgrab to the other people who already do this job and dont exist in the "community org". (of course people shouldnt be that political, they're all on the same team, etc etc). it's less useful because Product, Marketing, Community all could feasibly lay claim to this same metric, and importantly, when its not doing well, they each can blame the other.
objection 2:
internal politics aside, i think my primary source of discomfort comes from 2 angles - A) punting the "what is the value of community" question to the "what % of our signups are organic" question (which as we know is often up for manipulation/debate), and B) ARR from services doesn't count?
anyway, its no worse than the nothing we currently have, so i think a worthwhile exercise, even if not objective.