This is cool! We used the word "love" a lot at DigitalOcean as one of the key/core values for how we thought about customers and community. Curious - 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?
> "We used the word "love" a lot at DigitalOcean as one of the key/core values for how we thought about customers and community. "
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.
As a customer: the content DO makes definitely makes me "love" it more. This is rather due to the format, many guides are exactly what I need, presented in the right way for the audience. No uselessness or BS. This suggests a good company culture, i.e. I believe that the company is good, not just the product.
That's because one of the co-founders, Moisey, drilled into us the importance of being genuinely kind and showing love and gratitude for each-other and the customer. Interestingly, this was also drilled into the early community team at DeviantART by one of the co-founders, and, it seems, what dang and co do here at HN. Kindness goes a long way.
I'm not the creator of NRG, but I feel like there's a bit of a "you know it when you see it"[1] thing going on when it comes to classifying a company's various marketing channels into "NRG" vs "not-NRG".
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.
so first of all i love the work you folks are doing to map out this very difficult problem, i think the 4 level orbit model is bang on and i tell everyone about it every chance i get.
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.
yeah if the metric goes up there is a difficulty of attributing it to particular team. However, I guess if that occurs in a local geographic region after a conference it likely it was the efforts of that conference.
Interesting but what if you already started sales? Would be very hard to distinguish "Organic Signups" as when you get a sales team you'll find adoption goes up. Following up on leads, helping them get going, etc (if the price point supports it, usually $200/mo+)
It’s less cold if you think of it as the return on the investment into community: justifying thoughtful moderation, creating guides, maintaining forums, etc. Those are good activities that a small business still needs to justify on some level.
