community-led-growth
(19)
Trina Moitra Bet Her Career on the Marketing You Cannot Scale
She went from an engineering degree and $10-an-hour writing jobs to Convert’s C-suite. Her durable advantage is deliberately inefficient: useful work, close relationships, and the patience to let trust compound.
Kris Lande Is Betting AI’s Future on an Old Technology: Trust
After helping turn Salesforce learning into a global community, the OutSystems CMO has a new brief: make enterprise AI credible, useful, and human - one carefully designed detail at a time.
Clair Byrd Runs Marketing Like a Dinner Service: Everything in Its Place, Everyone Trusted to Move
The Temporal CMO began on the line, learned Silicon Valley by doing, and never surrendered the kitchen. Her career is a study in service, useful risk and the quiet discipline of getting every ingredient ready before the heat arrives.
Beatriz Gomez Is Making Payroll a Dinner Conversation
Ontop's CMO traded the mass-marketing megaphone for tables of 15, then built a data engine behind the dinner. Her playbook is a study in intimacy, local context and the useful art of listening.
Olav Kriken Sent 400 DMs. Four People Replied. Then Tana Found Its First Crowd.
The Tana CEO’s playbook began with an unglamorous bet: find four people, listen closely, and make the product worth talking about. His path from Norway’s west coast to Palo Alto is a study in community, conviction, and the useful art of doing what does not scale.
Linda Lian Learned to Read the Room - Then She Built One for the Internet
The Common Room founder turned a lonely childhood, a critic’s career and an AWS blind spot into a new way of seeing buyers - then carried that idea into Zoom.
The VC Who Bet Against Unicorns - and Started Posting
Erica Wenger raised $4.3 million from 130 backers to fund 'elephants, not unicorns.' The unusual part isn't the thesis - it's that she built a following first.
Everybody Wants To Own Your Crowd
Uscreen, Bevy, Almabase, Personify, Zendesk and Gradual are all selling the same promise - a place to gather your people - and quietly disagreeing about who those people actually belong to.
You Don't Own the Community You Built
Skool, Circle, Discourse, Gainsight, Salesforce and Gravyty are all selling the same thing - a place for your people to gather. The difference is who keeps the keys.
The Land Grab for Communities Social Media Left Behind
Almabase, Hivebrite, Gravyty, Zapnito, Threado, Khoros and a pack of forum-software veterans are all selling one promise - a place your people gather that you actually own. The market got crowded, then it started eating itself.
The Land Grab for Communities the Algorithm Can't Touch
Zapnito, Almabase, Disciple, XenForo, Gainsight and CMNTY are quietly selling brands a way to own their audience instead of renting it from a feed. Here is how one market splits into six very different bets.
Bevy Made Community a Line Item the Fortune 500 Pays For
Bevy started as software for running meetups. Now the Palo Alto company sells Twitch, Salesforce and Adobe on the idea that a well-run community is a measurable business asset - and it has just bolted a squad of AI agents onto the pitch.
Gradual Runs The Community Behind OpenAI And Perplexity
The startup collapsed events, courses, and forums into one branded platform - and quietly won over the AI labs everyone else is chasing. Founder Jerry Li built it out of a side-project mailing list for engineers.
Commsor Bet That Your Network Was the Product
The community-software startup spent six years arguing that trust, not cold email, is how companies actually grow - then folded the idea, and itself, into The Swarm.
Gradual
Gradual is the seamless place to host events, educate and engage members, and grow your brand.
Commsor
It started as software for online communities and became the company that told sales teams to stop cold-calling and start asking friends. The dinosaur was optional; the warm intro was the point.
Bevy
Bevy is an enterprise community engagement platform that helps large companies run events, forums, groups, and member programs from one system. Born out of Startup Grind's own struggle to coordinate hundreds of local chapters, Bevy now powers customer and developer communities for brands like Twitch, Salesforce, Adobe, Atlassian, and Notion, and has folded in the CMX professional network and AI 'agents' to help teams grow communities and prove their return on investment.
Biju Ashokan
Biju Ashokan is the co-founder and CEO of Radius, a San Francisco-based AI-native operating system for real estate brokers and agents. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer who started his first real estate startup in India, Biju built Radius (originally Agentdesks) into an 85,000-strong agent community before charging a single dollar for access - then turned that captive audience into a $3.1M revenue business. Backed by Pete Flint (Trulia founder), Spencer Rascoff (Zillow co-founder), and AXA Venture Partners, Radius has raised $19.55M+ total and won back-to-back Inman Proptech Entrepreneur of the Year awards. The company's AI assistant 'Mel' and suite of brokerage tools are reshaping how independent agents run their businesses.
Krystal Wu
Krystal Wu is a Boston-based community and marketing program manager known for building engaged B2B communities at HubSpot, Shopify, and Common Room. She spent nearly five years at HubSpot growing their social media community before moving into senior roles at Shopify and ZoomInfo. At Common Room, she built an events engine from scratch that generated $1M+ in pipeline in a single quarter, earning her a reputation as one of the more results-oriented voices in the community-led growth space.