Esther (00:00:01) - There are two things you have to love. One, the product and two the customers. I think if you're missing these two things, you won't gain the level of expertise and authenticity around the work that you're doing as a marketer. And honestly, it's going to be very boring. You're not going to want to do it for very long if you don't love those two things.

Ariana (00:00:25) - Welcome to Secret Ops, the podcast Uncovering the world of operations. one episode at a time. I'm your host, Ariana Cofone, and today's guest is Esther Trapadoux, marketing and head of community at Amplitude. This whole episode came out of a conversation that Esther and I were having one day, and it was literally talking about our journey of building communities and the operation that goes behind it and what people don't know. And so I asked her if we could bring it into Secret Ops so that other people could connect and hear the things that we're learning and what goes into growth marketing, what building and online and physical community is like from an operations perspective.

Ariana (00:01:06) - So today I really hope you get to learn a thing or two because I know I did. Onto the show! Esther, I'm so excited to have you on Secret Ops because this episode came out of a conversation that we just had at a discussion about community building within the online space and all of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes operationally that no one really knows about. So I'm very grateful for you coming on and just giving us a peek into that world. So welcome. Thanks for being here.

Esther (00:01:42) - Hey, I'm so glad to be here and thanks for having me.

Ariana (00:01:45) - It's going to be fun. So right now you are in growth marketing and you had the community at Amplitude. So how did you get there? Where does your career trajectory come from to have you where you are today?

Esther (00:01:58) - Super interesting. I was actually going through this with my husband, so I started off in like a classic marketing role, much more on the content side storytelling side. This was right out of college and not knowing what I would do.

Esther (00:02:14) - And so I landed in a role that was interesting to me, but I felt like it was a bit fluffy when they came to hard skills. And that, I think, is just in nature, working at a really large company, you end up with fluffier marketing roles. From there I moved back up to the Bay Area Bay Area and I worked at the first startup that I ever worked at and it was small for me. So I went from like a 17,000 person company to like a 500 person company, and I realized how much I didn't know on how things worked. So you go from like a 17,000 person company. You work with a lot of agencies. You have a very small part of what actually ends up being executed on. Like you said, in a lot of meetings, you execute on very small things. You watch agencies do most of the work and you have no way of tying your work back to actual outcomes. And that seems very normal when you go to a 500 person company that is about to go public and everything matters and then once it goes public, everything matters even more because nobody knows how to be at a public company.

Esther (00:03:23) - All of a sudden it became like a really high stakes game. And I understood for the first time how important process was, how important analytics was actually, then this sounds really strange, but like, it was the first time I ever really looked at data. And from that, just naturally how important testing became when you're looking at fitting things within a process, but also trying to see if you can move the needle on certain metrics. So that was like my first taste in what I would call harder skills marketing. And then throughout my journey I stayed really close to the customer in my different marketing roles, I even worked at a really early stage startup. I took it upon myself to jump on sales calls and try to close deals as a way for me to understand better what the customer pain points were. And I found that I really fell in love with the customer, their pain. And it also brought me into a role that I think a lot of marketers don't have experience with is…you end up in the post sales world, right? Like everything in marketing is primarily pre sales.

Esther (00:04:29) - When you work in a role that is after the product or after the sale is made, you understand more deeply why things matter, why the product really matters, and why customer journeys and customer pain points matter. So from there, I think that taught me a bunch of things.I had this like storytelling foundation. I really started to understand process and analytics and testing, and then I fell in love with the customer. And I think all of these things really came together when I joined Amplitude. I originally was in your classic acquisition growth marketing role. And then about two quarters ago, the growth marketing team was given this remit to figure out community at Amplitude. How do we generate network, network effects, like how do we increase brand awareness, but also help like our new and power users? And that made a lot of sense to me because there was everything in marketing, everything in product and then everything very customer-centric, all coming together in one place.

Esther (00:05:32) - How I ended up where I am now.

Ariana (00:05:34) - I'm hearing so many interesting turns in your journey. I think the first is just working in a different size and a different maturity company. Huge, huge lessons learned. And I keep hearing the thing of having these sort of hard skills. And it's interesting because I feel like, especially within what's changed in the last decade, those hard skills have really changed. Like what was a hard skill ten years ago, with the data becoming more accessible with analytics happening like that, that changes the game. Also, just with the tools you have online to build a community, your whole sandbox changes of what's possible. So did you find the best way to learn all these skills was just on the job and learning by the need that you had? Or were you proactively trying to figure out, Oh, this is where things are headed in the next year…I should probably learn whatever this hard skill is.

Esther (00:06:30) - This is like one of the biggest moments of my own professional career, like defining moments is…so one of the startups that I worked at and this was a startup that I worked at where the founders were people that I worked with before, and they brought me back over.

Esther (00:06:48) - So I knew this team and I was definitely a content person, right? Like I was definitely all about figuring out the challenge and communication, reaching people where they're at. So I was the first marketer on their team and there was a lot being asked of me that I wasn't asked of before, right? Like I knew how to use existing dashboards and existing platforms and existing analytics tools where like data was already in and things were set up and there are processes that were already created. And I knew how to read those numbers and understand the data behind it. What I didn't know is how to create those things myself and I would be asked to go to…and I feel a little bit embarrassed, but it's important. Like I was asked to go to meetings and present on how my marketing campaigns were performing. Really simple, basic stuff. And I had. No way of getting the same number twice.

Ariana (00:07:45) - That's actually such a problem across every roll too. I feel like that is such a human problem that we're having.

Ariana (00:07:53) - Yeah, it was so.

Esther (00:07:54) - Difficult and I like it was part me. It was part of our setup, like the way our marketing automation tooling was set up. It was part…so much of it was just terrible tracking, right? Really bad tracking practices and terrible taxonomy. Everything became manual, right? Because it was so messy and I didn't have a way of knowing what processes to put in place and move quickly. So I was always stuck in these meetings. The numbers never made sense. And there was a point where the CEO founder just said like Easter numbers just aren't your thing. And I was like, not now, but they will be. And I took it really hard and I believed him for a little bit. And then I decided, you know, data is going to be the only thing that's going to get me to a table, right? Like, I'm losing credibility. I have a lot of ideas and I can't fight for them. So if I own the data, then I own the story because most people don't take the time to own the data.

Esther (00:08:51) - And I worked really hard to figure out a bunch of analytics, taught myself Tableau. I taught myself how to clean data and how to prep data. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I think the nice thing about working in marketing is the data is so terrible, you're forced to understand how different data is integrated into a single platform, like Tableau, for example. And I think I got to a place where one, that's no longer my reputation and then two, it's a total strength, like it's a weapon that I have where now my ideas can get pushed forward because I'm the one that's looking at the data and I know how to.

Ariana (00:09:29) - Totally there's that moment whenever you're in a role where your gut is telling you something and the hard part is just having a gut instinct on something or an idea is not enough. You have to prove that it's coming from something. And I found the same thing in operations where it's like, this feels wrong, but I don't know what's right.

Ariana (00:09:49) - And I had to do the same process, which is learning technology, learning how to clean data, learning how to analyze data. And I'm still learning like I think there's so many levels that you could learn to deepen it that your story is one. I feel like we all actually very, very understand. I want to unpack two things within what you're doing today. So growth, marketing and community building… for people who don't know what growth marketing is, I think everybody has an idea of what marketing is, but how does growth marketing sort of sit within that umbrella? And then let's talk about like, what do we mean when we say community? Like what does that actually mean?

Esther (00:10:30) - So growth marketing is actually really well defined at Amplitude. And I think this is a model that a lot of companies should probably adopt. I think it works really well here and a lot of companies already do this where the line between product and marketing is extremely blurry. You can see that in a lot of B2C products, like what is the line between product and marketing when you look at companies like Amazon and Netflix or like Facebook or anything, right? Like it's basically the same thing to a certain extent.

Esther (00:11:00) - And a lot of that means product and marketing and working hand in hand in terms of messaging, understanding the customer, knowing what types of goals they want to reach and working together to reach that. Amplitude is a B2C, a B2B company, it's a SaaS company, and that actually makes product and marketing need to work even harder together because we offer things like a free plan. And that free plan means like a lot of messaging and testing in order to convert these free users into paying customers at the right moment, right? So someone needs to look at the data and the trends and come up with a list of experiments in order to work well both on the product side and then also on the marketing side. And those things need to happen in lockstep and that's, I think probably the best way to think about it is if you're running a lot of experiments to acquire users, move them into something like a free plan and then figure out how to monetize them by keeping them engaged in the product and increasing value. Then you have likely a growth product team and then you have a growth marketing team and the other product functions and marketing functions or are working on in more traditional roles where they're building new feature sets and improving their product, but less with an eye towards like how can product and marketing work together to help the product actually generate more revenue?

Ariana (00:12:18) - It makes so much sense and it actually puts a very clear framework around things that I've seen, but I didn't really know how to define.

Ariana (00:12:26) - Now, community is a huge part of this, right? So talk to me about the connection between the two. And also let's just define community within how we're talking about it within a more digital space because everybody's got their own sort of idea of. What it is, but how would you define it within your world?

Esther (00:12:44) - Within my world, which is the Amplitude world, and I'm really new to community building. Like I've only started it since like January, February. So I'm not an expert by any means, but community exists at Amplitude for a couple of things. One of our biggest differentiators and greatest strengths are our own customers, right? Like they bring something and create something with a product that is incredibly powerful, whether it's driving growth or alignment or investing in ideas and like building really cool products and bringing them to market. And those stories happen naturally when they come out in a community setting. Otherwise you work traditionally, like in a silo. So just for people who are listening, Amplitude is an analytics platform, and that alone comes with some interesting challenges where when you have an analytics solution, there are a lot of stories that you can tell, but a lot of times people are either afraid to tell those stories because they think, you know, they'll lose some sort of competitive differentiator or secrets.

Esther (00:13:52) - Most people are afraid to tell their stories because they are ashamed of their data. They don't think that their conversion rates are good enough. They don't think that they know how to use analytics very well. They think that they're really basic users when in fact most of them are really very advanced. So that lack of confidence and insecurity is one of the reasons I think that prevents a lot of our customers from sharing really incredible stories. So we built this community space within this context of “we’re an analytics platform” for one big reason, which is to help people build confidence in the work that they're doing, whether they're a new user power user, not even an Amplitude user like we want you to be able to build confidence. And so you're better at your job, you're better in front of your peers, etc. And the other thing is Amplitude is one of these…and maybe this is just a lot of SaaS products. Amplitude is a product where there isn't a lot of natural viral acquisition, right? Like there's lots of natural viral acquisition for like Spotify.

Esther (00:14:56) - Miro is a really good example. Like everyone's sharing their Miro boards, everyone sharing Notion links, everyone is sharing their Figma templates and their figma boards. But there's not a lot that would make me want to share my Amplitude dashboard with somebody who doesn't work at Amplitude, right? Like what's really interesting about that. So the viral acquisition loop doesn't really exist for a product like Amplitude. So creating a community to help start manufacturing some of these acquisition loops and getting people to tell their stories and showcase what they're doing in Amplitude is partly why we created this community as well.

Ariana (00:15:33) - It's interesting because people understand or they try to understand their data and their analytics, but the story behind it, like that's the thing actually that can you can sort of reverse engineer how to look at your data through stories like, data is black and white, you know, it's very static in some ways and very dynamic in other ways. So it's hard to really know what to do with it.

Ariana (00:15:56) - And I definitely have been inspired by how other people have learned about their company through their data and the stories that they're telling. I mean, ultimately we as humans connect with stories and how can we use data to help tell those stories and then build the community to support each other and inspire each other and enable that? That makes a lot of sense. So I think this is a natural transition into the trifecta, which is when it comes to operations, we're talking about people process and technology and of course data that's threading through all of those things. And I would love to start with the people aspect of community building within growth marketing, because so many times…it's interesting to hear you say how much you care about the users. Like I don't know if I've heard someone in marketing care as much as I've heard you say this, which I think says something about you as a person. But also, you know, ultimately everything that you're doing is trying to help and impact users. So how do you begin building a community through the lens of “how do I serve my users best?”

Esther (00:17:03) - This is a really tricky question.

Esther (00:17:07) - So when we first started out, this community, we thought…we want it to be open to everybody, right? It doesn't have to be an Amplitude user community only because analytics really should be available to everyone. And that speaks very deeply for me. Thinking about the CEO that told me I was like that told me numbers aren't my thing, right? Like I saw how it transformed my own journey. And we first started out with this idea of like, Oh, we're going to build this community and it's going to be fantastic and everyone's going to be learning and building confidence and the hard part is we are paid and employed by Amplitude, right? Like, we can't build a community that just loves helping people with their analytic skills and driving growth. Right? We're on a timeline, and I thought that timeline was like a year. And with the economy the way it was and with Amplitude having layoffs like a few months ago, the timeline kind of shrank and I started hearing things like business outcomes, what can we tie this back to? Like no pressure but kind of pressure.

Esther (00:18:14) - And I think that's just true. It's the reality of life, we're not running this beautiful community for the sake of the community. So things had to take form a lot faster than I thought it would. And that that becomes an interesting decision of like, how much of a product are you willing to sell into a community that you want to be available to everybody, right? Like it's not a direct marketing play, it's not a direct sales play. But we did realize that we have to really orchestrate and design a lot of the programming ourselves versus it being open to anything, right? It's not Reddit, it's not Quora. The other thing is, it was really shortsighted to think like a community for everybody means we can't talk about Amplitude because they said earlier, our biggest strength are our customers, right? And they have stories and they want to learn. And I kept getting message after message after message like, Oh, I'm an Amplitude customer. I just found this place and I can't wait to learn from others, like every single day, multiple messages.

Esther (00:19:16) - And I thought, like, we can't ignore this need. So think when it comes to a company running a community like ours, B2B SaaS, you have to realize that it is marketing, right? Like it's not a nonprofit, you know, like everybody is welcome and we're just going to support them like it is marketing. And so we're really thinking now how to help non-Amplitude users learn and practice and how to help Amplitude users become better in their own practice on the platform. And really striking this balance of not selling but by showing and by doing and we haven't quite figured that out yet.

Ariana (00:20:04) - There's a fine balance it feels like. I mean, you're always a little bit on a tightrope. I mean, I even find that with Secret Ops, we're launching a research survey for our listeners and I'm like, where do I take this thing so that best serves you but is genuine to the mission that I have and I have with Secret Ops but also like, you know, where do we take this? So it's impactful for our users.

Ariana (00:20:27) - But also I can develop something around this, a business around this. It has to be a viable movement forward. It is such a fine line though, and I never…I feel like you only know when you do the wrong thing and then you're like, Oh, no, but then you know, those failures help you sort of refine and really get in touch with who you're helping. How do you collect the feedback from users? Is it more like people just dropping in comments? How do you gather that temperature check with your users?

Esther (00:20:59) - So we use a platform called Common Room, and Common Room is…so community is interesting, right? It's not a product, but it is a product. But at least with the product, at least most of them, everything lives in one space. So when you track user data and user behavior, it's like web and mobile, right? Like you just have to track things there. In the product though, with community, you have like your owned spaces.

Esther (00:21:27) - Like we have a support community platform, we have Slack, we have a lot of events, most of them virtual. We've just started in-person and this is like impossible to track what's happening. And then we have like decentralized communities where we have LinkedIn and Twitter and we have a bunch of Amplitude people there…Amplitude fans there. So Common Room gives us this identity resolution. And then we are also able to use that to integrate with Salesforce to understand how many of these people in our community are prospects versus new users or a certain type of paying customer with that, you can just keep cutting the data and creating segments to understand like where you're starting to see interesting pockets of growth that we might want to start experimenting into. We have this idea of like a community member journey and we're really trying to measure what is the right journey. And the most important thing with any product is like, where are we creating value and how do we create more value for the users that we really care the most about.

Ariana (00:22:27) - I guess this is the technology part of the trifecta. So I guess how do you pick that suite of tools to be flexible enough to experiment, but to be structured enough where you can have clean data accessible to then understand what's going on within the community.

Esther (00:22:41) - Yeah, like it's very hacky right now. It's very hacky right now. There are basic integrations that we need to automate a couple of workflows. So Slack integration was important because we knew Slack was going to be an important platform for us in terms of engagement. Our support platform– we use inSited, that kind of integration was also important. But I think there are a couple of things that are missing and there is this whole promise of snowflake. There's little promise of data warehousing where we just have it on the roadmap somewhere to build these data pipelines, to get everything in one place. And the goal, the dream one day is to be able to match community member data over time and then be able to correlate that with Amplitude, product usage or whatever we're seeing in Salesforce.

Esther (00:23:32) - That's the goal with the dream of snowflake. But we're nowhere near there. It's very growth-hacky. It's very like me building manual metrics, maps to understand where we're seeing some pockets of growth and it's not sustainable.

Ariana (00:23:51) - That is truly the best way to describe it, even just across operations within a business, is that, you know, I'm sort of deciding what are the foundational tools that must integrate with whatever we add in. And I think you're right, like Slack or Microsoft teams, you know, what's those main centers of your internal team that we have to make sure it integrates into whatever we're doing. And then, you know, every new tool that you add is at a different stage of development. So you just pray that there's like a native integration. Most of the time, though, there's not. And you got to use Zapier or a webhook or you're downloading and you know you're doing all this crazy stuff, which I feel like might be something that we actually see within the next couple of years.

Ariana (00:24:32) - I've seen a lot of tools that their promise is about integrating your… integrating all of your platforms together into. I think that is going to be probably a huge trend that will need to move towards because everybody wants their data in a central location. Everybody wants dashboarding, everybody wants to understand their metrics. Obviously, that's also what Amplitude is about, right? So it's this really I feel like we're going to see it even more so over the years. And people who are non-technical or non-developers will be targeted for new products like Zapier is a great example. You don't have to be a developer to integrate your tools. Let's talk about process because it's ever evolving. You know, this is the part where it's like, how do you create a process around something that is about testing and evolving, you know, day by day, week by week. But how do you create a process that allows the chaos to be somewhat logical and to understand the progress? So I guess, what tips have you found? And I think it's extra useful that you're six months into this journey, I guess, what have you found within building those processes that has worked? And what are some tips on “I tried it, didn't work for us, maybe avoid that.”

Esther (00:25:45) - So there's like two parts to this question, I think. I think that's part of the rant too, is when you're building a community that is vendor led, right? And that's an Amplitude community, Amplitude has a couple different go-to-market functions, and most of the go-to-market function is about generating revenue as quickly as possible, right? It's short term, one quarter or two quarter types of wins versus community, which is a very, very, very long term play. And so if you work at a vendor-led community where processes are set up to hit short term goals, then it's not in service of the people that you're putting into a long term journey. And what this usually looks like is how do I keep my community members out of a direct sales play? You know, like if I get them into the database and then into Salesforce, how do I keep them out, keep them from up and dialing and from somebody trying to book a demo immediately. Like, that's not that's not the purpose, right? Like why they joined the community was not to show intent to buy a product, but processes don't know that very well, right? Like even MQL, like how do I keep community members out of MQL scoring within Marketo? And like our current process when all of our goals are to hit very aggressive MQL and early stage pipeline targets?

Ariana (00:27:12) - When you say MQL, can you just break that down a little bit?

Esther (00:27:15) - Marketing Qualified Lead where it's just like a scoring model and customer fit model to identify people who are more likely in-market to buy a product based on the behavior that they've shown and who are also a good fit to be a customer, right? So like a student who is always looking at Amplitude and accessing our content and using our product may not be a good fit.

Esther (00:27:39) - So they probably wouldn't. Things like that. But our community members, a lot of them are probably going to MQL, but they're not at all engaging with marketing content for Amplitude. They're just engaging a lot in the community. So we built a lot of work to keep them out of our process. If that makes sense. Like we did a lot of work to do that and keep them out of there.

Ariana (00:28:04) - You're trying to set up boundaries, right? Like and you have established boundaries of the company being driven by certain goals and metrics, and you've got that cadence that just might not be appropriate for the community or segments of the community. So then how do you make sure you are maintaining and growing the community intentionally, knowing that you've got these sort of rigid time-sensitive things, but also giving the space to experiment within that community goal setting and adapting to those goals? Because I think you walk into building any community with assumptions and some data of what you think that community is going to engage with and how they're going to behave.

Ariana (00:28:45) - And then you got to see…you have to actually understand what happens once you put it out there in the world and kind of iterate on that.

Esther (00:28:53) - A couple of things actually worked for us. One, not having to follow our standard processes actually allowed me to move a lot faster because I was in the wild and building my own journeys using whatever I could get to like get members into a frictionless journey. But I was still able to capture their data. Common Room was really critical to this because I needed a place to house them that wasn't our Salesforce instance, for example. So like Common Room really kind of saved the day and I was able to use that as like my, I would call that my community CRM. And then the third thing, and I think this is the most important thing is I had a human on my side and it took some time to get there because most of the organization, including the team that this person reported into, was like, community is so small, what does it matter? You know, we deal with tens and tens and thousands of people, you know, in our campaigns.

Esther (00:29:49) - And Esther's built a community of like a couple hundred or now she's at like a couple thousand. Like this is just a drop in the ocean of what they have to focus their time and efforts on. Plus, it's a long term play, like there's no revenue coming out of this so we have to focus our resources somewhere else. And I was really fortunate to have somebody in our marketing operations team…not that the other people didn't believe in it, but there was something extra there where he really just like got it and got it in a way where he was willing to put in the extra effort and put in the time to figure out how to un-silo community. Because everything I did was basically to silo community, right? And that's not the right thing either. And what he did was he found some really simple, really elegant solutions on the back end, in Marketo to un-silo community, but also put them in a journey that didn't compromise what we wanted for our members, right? Not direct sales and not direct marketing, but actually slowly integrated them with some of the marketing that made sense.

Esther (00:30:54) - Like some of the programs that we ran, they do make sense for our members and we want them to get that value. But we were completely blocking them off and that was a really critical piece, having this human figure out how to do that, spend the extra time to build out these little channels between like community and our normal like go-to-market functions.

Ariana (00:31:14) - For those listening who aren't familiar with Marketo, can you just give a quick summary of what Marketo is as a platform?

Esther (00:31:20) - Yeah, Marketo is a marketing automation tool. A lot of people use it to automate their email campaigns. Like you're in a group, you get invited to an event, you don't sign up for the event. So Marketo knows that you didn't sign up, so they give you a second email and then maybe a confirmation email if you sign up. It does a lot more than that, but it essentially builds out like this programming for the type of email campaign experience you want to give to people like landing pages.

Esther (00:31:49) - But it's also a database and that database allows you to segment and that's where it becomes really powerful.

Ariana (00:31:55) - So for our listeners, you know, you get an email from something that you've engaged with on a community basis or on a marketing or product basis, and sometimes you can see the sort of triggers of communication, and each of those are dependent on like what segment of that pathway that you are kind of labeled as as a potential user or community member. So I think a lot of us are familiar with physical products, right? You order a product, they send the confirmation, oh, here's an email about how to use the product. Oh, like it's been three months. So there's like those sort of segmented ways of engaging and also getting that feedback loop of your users and your community members. So let's talk about the inside scoop, and I want to focus on marketing operations. And the connection between community operations. How would you distinguish the difference between marketing operations and community operations? How are they different and how are they similar?

Esther (00:32:50) - There are a lot of similarities.

Esther (00:32:54) - A lot of the activity categories will look the same, right? There are content programs, event programs. A lot of the channels look the same, the spaces look very different. Most marketing programs are either driving you to the company's website, different landing pages, or they're driving you to the product. And so that is one big difference, community is driving you to all kinds of different spaces where we see, you know, different programs will live and different engagement will live. And that's a problem in itself. And lots of companies are trying to figure out the community-fragmented platform problem. But whatever, it doesn't bother me that much. The other I think the big difference is goals like as I touched on earlier, direct marketing is interested in shorter term goals that can be accomplished for a B2B SaaS company. We're thinking 3 to 6 months, right? So 1 or 2 quarters, maybe, maybe three quarters.

Esther (00:33:54) - And then community is looking at different metrics. We're ultimately looking at business outcomes like new opportunities or new sales opportunities that are created or new free plans that are open or improvement in product usage. But the amount of time it takes to get there is a huge investment in quality versus quantity, right? Like marketing teams are often looking at quantity in order to hit their numbers, improve a conversion metric so that they can get closer to their target. If I stuff like 10,000 people into this campaign, maybe like 100 of them will qualify into talking to sales. Community is not thinking about that type of…I think this is actually one of the things that annoys me the most actually about communities right now is people asking how big is your community? And I think that's a crazy vanity metric because it's all about the quality of relationships, both on a large medium and one on one level that really matters.

Ariana (00:34:56) - So they're taking sort of the success metrics of marketing in general, which is quantity, reach, engagement.

Esther (00:35:00) - Exactly.

Ariana (00:35:03) - Yeah. And then they're trying to put it on something that is within the same umbrella but is a different niche of that. And I guess measuring quality is difficult. How do you measure quality within a community operations?

Esther (00:35:16) - You can come up with a lot of proxy metrics for engagement, right? Like your classic active member. Are they reading, engaging, liking, showing up? There are more interesting ones like are you getting the same people at events or are you getting the same people? And is that number growing? Is your recurring number of engaged members growing whether they're going to events or something? I think there are a lot of other interesting measures of quality, like if there are inviting team members or if they're inviting friends and you see them actively using this join link, or referral link, then that's a really good notion of quality. One thing that I look for is our 1 to 1 engagements growing as quickly as our large engagements. It's easy to have an event where you have this really amazing speaker and they're able to bring in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people and that number is going to grow no matter what.

Esther (00:36:15) - You just have to be smart about your event programming and that number is going to grow. But I look really closely at what's happening in DMs and is that number growing as well, especially like new DMs and unique DMs over time? Because that tells me relationships are being formed and like the 1 to 1 level of activity is hugely important. This is why people will come back, right? Like people will come back because they've made a friend and they've made a connection in the community. If that number isn't growing and we're only growing our big event numbers and our overall community size, I think that's a pretty good indicator that you may not have a very healthy community.

Ariana (00:36:54) - Wow, that's so interesting. It feels counterintuitive based on the things that we've learned over the years, but it makes total sense because ultimately you're looking for that deeper connection and it makes so much sense. It's so funny that you lay it out now. I'm like, of course, but would not have thought of that if we hadn't had this discussion that it's really about, you know, if you're bringing a community to your inner circle that says something. Even thinking about newsletters I'll share or podcasts I'll share, I will only share the top of the top because I really think it's amazing because again, that reflects back on me as well as an individual. That is interesting. So I guess let's talk about like hardest part of building a community within an operations capacity. You know, again, I think it's so perfect that you've been at this for the last six months because you have felt those pain points. So what do you think is the most painful part about building that online community?

Esther (00:37:57) - I think it's the identity resolution. It's that reconciliation that's really difficult. So if we're this super vendor-centric community where our main sources of truth are either Amplitude, the product…so, you know, what company do you work for and what are you doing in the product? Because that'll tie that back.

Esther (00:38:19) - And then the other source of truth is Salesforce, because that's where we're looking at revenue outcomes and revenue activity. And a lot of the spaces that we use, use personal email addresses like Slack and then LinkedIn like a lot of these things. And so, the identity resolution is extremely painful in that sense. And if you don't get that right, like if your user is not the user that you think they are, then you don't know what's actually growing and it also informs like the programs. Like if I don't know that there are actually 100 customers and I only think there are two, like that's going to change the kind of programming that I have. So that's one thing that we're still struggling to get right. Even with an amazing tool like Common Room, it's really difficult to do that in a legal way.

Ariana (00:39:10) - Totally. From a GDPR. Data privacy standpoint to understand because you want to obviously be respectful of the privacy, but you also don't want to be building things that are not serving the people that are actually engaging.

Ariana (00:39:23) - It's this kind of weird back and forth. So I guess flipping it now that you've been building this community, like what are some things that have just brought you just joy or happiness in doing this? And it can even be accidental. Maybe you stumbled on something or you had an effect that you didn't think that you would have had in doing the work that you're doing.

Esther (00:39:43) - This actually ties back to operations as well as any like, imagine any cool community center. Like there is probably a bulletin board, lots of flyers, lots of announcements for different types of programs, like different ways to help people in different groups of people. Like that's the ultimate community dream. And I think when we first started, it was so focused on acquisition and getting people to talk to each other, right? It was really painful. It's like, Oh, how many people do we have? And like, why are they doing nothing in Slack? This is awful. And it felt like a really big deal whenever somebody posted in a public channel and I would get a lot of DMs, but somebody posting in a public channel, which would happen once a month maybe like honestly, it was so painful.

Esther (00:40:35) - And I really measured my own value and success based on things like that and what I realized over time…and this actually creates a lot of operational complexities is that you need programs for all different kinds of people based on where they are in their journey and their needs. And that means big programs and small programs. And that's not always going to drive big numbers, but it's going to improve quality and that is very complex. When you're like one full time person running a community, you have to run like a million different programs to serve different needs. But that actually makes me really excited because I realize how many people at so many different levels we can help and we can genuinely serve, whether it's new users or power users or people who are completely new on their journey. And then the other thing is I learned the power of the one-on-one. Like I learned the power of private conversations and encouraging people and building a relationship with people to the point where they start posting in public channels and they start asking questions and they start replying and helping other people.

Esther (00:41:40) - And I've had people tell me this repeatedly, and I always thought like, whatever, I'm just going to get them. If my topic is interesting enough, they'll reply right? But it's really about their relationships and manufacturing this flywheel until like the flywheel starts kicking in and building on itself and that's allowed me to slow down and really listen to people again and force me to understand individuals and individual-level problems.

Ariana (00:42:09) - Any time that we get off a call, my brain is always like percolating and just… it's very easy to get distracted because we're moving fast. We have a lot of, you know, different platforms or places that we’re engaging in with others. But the most impact that I have found in my personal life is the one on one. I think you're right. It completely reframes. It also allows you to be vulnerable, especially when we're talking about analytics. Like you can't always be vulnerable on a big platform or with a big post, right? I think about a LinkedIn post that you sent, which is what you would call the scary hour. It was such a perfect way of describing something that we all feel, which is like, what is the part of our week that makes us just squirm in our seat or like not want to do it? And when you ask what it was, I was like, Oh, this even makes me uncomfortable but I have to engage with it because it seemed like you had sort of taken that feeling in the one on one and you brought it into a fun space externally, which I really enjoyed. And and that really is, I think when I see a community kind of bridging that gap between the one-on-one and an external platform or that outward message, they're able to take the feelings that are very vulnerable and approach it in a way that everyone can understand, maybe laugh at, but then engage with earnestly. And that post reminded me of that. So let's talk about…people are listening to you and they're like, alright, growth, marketing, community operations.

Ariana (00:43:37) - Yes, Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Analytics. I want to learn all these things. How would you recommend getting into this?

Esther (00:43:43) - Getting into…interesting. I don't know how I would have found it. I think community led growth is a really hot topic right now. I don't know how they would get into this. I think…and this isn't this isn't an answer to your question, but I think if you are a marketer, right, like let's say you are a marketer, there are two things you have to love. One, the product and two the customers. And I've had a lot of healthy discussions where I really disagree with people who just think you have to love the product and that's enough. And somehow if you love the product, you inherently by nature love the problems that we're solving through the product and you love the customers. It's totally wrong. Like I think you have to love the customers and what they're doing in their entire job, not just the problems that you're solving for through your product.

Esther (00:44:31) - And you have to really believe in the product too. I think if you're missing these two things, you won't gain the level of expertise and just authenticity around the work that you're doing as a marketer and honestly, it's going to be very boring. You're not going to want to do it for very long if you don't love those two things. And then community building, I actually have no idea how to get into this role. Like, I don't even know if people really want to because every time I talk to community people, they're like, Oh, I'm so burnt out. But I think there's one thing that I learned as an introvert who has a really difficult time with empathy…is, even people like me can start building a community, right? Like, it's still possible. You don't have to be an extrovert. It's like one thing that I learned.

Ariana (00:45:15) - I totally agree, even though I seem quite extroverted. Obviously…podcast. I'm very introverted. I get my energy from being by myself and I have found like the hack in whatever community, sort of niche of what you're doing.

Ariana (00:45:28) - And it doesn't need to be community building in general. It could just be within your team or within your specialty is having that authentic passion about the user. Like you said, the work, the product. If you have the authenticity, you could nerd out about it, you know, 24/7, it doesn't matter.

Esther (00:45:46) - Yeah!

Ariana (00:45:47) - Right.

Esther (00:45:47) - Yeah. It's not about your social skills.

Ariana (00:45:50) - It's the small talk that drains you, but it's the authenticity…really trying to like, dig into it, nerd out about it. I mean, that's literally that's why I made this was just to have a space that other people like doing that as well as me. So that makes a lot of sense. Esther, you are such a joy. I adore how you articulate things. I always walk away from our conversations needing to like journal, because I've always got a million things. I want to walk away from Secret Ops with some rapid fire questions to learn more about you as a human being.

Ariana (00:46:24) - So we're just going to shoot these at you, answer them as quickly as possible and then we'll wrap up for this episode. So first one is what is the favorite part of your day?

Esther (00:46:34) - Right after I finished working, my husband and I have some time together. It's really nice outside. I live in France and it's June, early June and we have this really big tree called a Teil, and the kids play, they’re home. My husband gives me a rosé and we sit out in these little hammock-like seats. And then we spend an hour doing that. And it's very relaxing because we work from home so we don't have a commute to like shift gears. So we do that.

Ariana (00:47:05) - Wow. I want a hammock chair swing. What do you think is the best thing that you've bought under $50?

Esther (00:47:12) - I know this is really cheesy. I was at the airport yesterday because I did a really short trip to London, and then my daughter always wants a gift and I usually let her down and I buy her something and then she's like, Oh, that's nice.

Esther (00:47:25) - She's four. And everything I buy, even though she asks for it, like, she's really disappointed. And then I saw this little unicorn bag and I bought it on a whim, even though it wasn't instructed. And she is dying over it. And I feel like I nailed it. Like I feel like I got it right and like, I don't know, it feels so little. But like every single trip, I think I went on 15 of them last year, I got it wrong.

Ariana (00:47:48) - That's a big win. That is a big win.

Esther (00:47:50) - I don't.

Ariana (00:47:51) - Yeah. What book are you currently reading?

Esther (00:47:54) - Ooh, so I'm reading Making of a Manager. It's this book by Julie Zhuo. I can't even pronounce her last name. And it's about, like, how to be a better manager. My boss is really pushing me to be a people manager. I'm pushing back a lot because I'm not good with people, and I figure this book will help me figure out whether or not I should be a manager or maybe really just kind of confirm for me that I shouldn't.

Ariana (00:48:21) - I'm surprised to hear that you think that about yourself. I think you're great with people. That's my two cents. What is your favorite quote?

Esther (00:48:31) - Well, there's a quote that's on my wall from John Cutler, and. And he wrote, “good luck getting some things cranking, so you can focus your energy” because he probably thinks I work on too many things. And then my favorite, favorite quote is progress, not perfection.

Ariana (00:48:50) - Oh, nice shout out to you, John Cutler. What is the most important lesson you've learned in your life so far?

Esther (00:48:58) - I think the most important lesson I've learned is something that I haven't been able to do even now, and it's to practice a lot of kindness. That's like so completely out of my reach, you know, Like you put a goal in front of me, you put an achievement in front of me, you put like a really big challenge where you have to get a lot of things done and work super hard, even though you can't anymore in front of me.

Esther (00:49:21) - And like, I can do that and then I'll ask for more. But being kind has been extremely elusive for me, and I see it a lot in my husband. I see a lot in my kids and I'm so glad that like, it's around me. So, you know, without me knowing, maybe sometimes I'm kind. But that's been a really big lesson, is knowing that it's not something I do well, but it's like so important and valuable.

Ariana (00:49:51) - Wow. Kindness goes so far. And it's something we don't really talk about always. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Esther (00:50:01) - Think I can just do this forever. I really think so. So this!

Ariana (00:50:05) - Cool. I love it. Esther, it's been such a joy. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on to Secret Ops. People are listening to you. They adore you like I adore you. Where can they find you?

Esther (00:50:19) - I mean, find me on LinkedIn. I post about my rants a lot.

Esther (00:50:23) - I also post about this community.

Ariana (00:50:25) - Thank you so much. I just really appreciate you just jumping in, you know, full trust-fall into this interview to talk about this. Thank you very, very much. Secret Ops listeners, thank you so much for listening, supporting all the things with Secret Ops. Please remember to follow us wherever you find your podcast and make sure to check us out at secret-ops.com. We'll see you next time.