Build Community to Grow Faster, Abstraction Hacking as the New SEO - Tactician #0059

"Building a community to grow your business is like starting a cult, but the good kind. 'Come, join us. We have free Wi-Fi and shared values. And instead of Kool-Aid, we offer sustainable coffee and the occasional gluten-free pastry.'"

16/02/2024

Build Community to Grow Faster

Collin Stewart, CEO at Predictable Revenue, showcases Rocketlane's strategic approach to category creation, community building, and innovative marketing to demonstrate how startups can effectively enter and scale within new market spaces in “Category Creation and Community Building with Sri Ganesan”

• Building a Market Presence Beyond the Product:

  • "Rocketlane wasn’t just building a product; they were shaping an entire ecosystem around customer onboarding. The pre-launch phase created a content-rich environment, with podcasts, webinars, and LinkedIn posts that provided real value to their target audience."

• Community First, Product Second:

  • "A critical move in Rocketlane’s playbook was launching a community long before the product was ready. This community served as a knowledge-sharing platform, bringing together experts and practitioners in customer onboarding."

• A Launch That Felt Years in the Making:

  • "When launch day came, anyone landing on Rocketlane’s website might have mistaken them for a company that had been around for years. A comprehensive podcast series, an active community, and a wealth of thought leadership content gave Rocketlane an air of maturity and credibility."

• The Product Hunt Effect:

  • "Rocketlane’s launch strategy included a Product Hunt campaign that coincided with their funding announcement. This dual strategy created a buzz that propelled them to the top of Product Hunt for the day, driving significant traffic and interest."

• Rapping to Go Viral:

  • "Rocketlane celebrated their Series A funding with a rap song... This creative endeavor went viral, garnering 100,000 views on the first day... It buzzed through founder and marketing circles, posing, 'Why haven’t we done this yet?'"

Abstraction Hacking as the New SEO

Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer at Adobe, illuminates the transformative impact of large language models and AI on information consumption, web browsing, and the broader digital landscape in “The Era of Abstraction & New Creative Tensions”

• The Impact of AI on Information Consumption:

  • "When you zoom out and look at the impact of LLMs (large language models) and the roadmap ahead (especially multi-modal LLMs), it is clear that natural language and agent-assisted reasoning and automations will summarize most aspects of work and life and cover most workflows on our behalf. You want to read the news without the spin, clickbait, and ads? AI will summarize hundreds of articles on today’s topics of interest and give you the highlights."

• Abstraction in Everyday Tasks:

  • "You want to plan a trip? AI will propose a start-to-finish itinerary based on your interests (and abstracting away all the vendors, traveler reviews, and other elements that you’d normally engage with). Common in these two examples: abstraction. Over the coming years, we will go to the sources of everything less and less as the perfect summary, answer, or solution is generated and surfaced for us by trusted AI tools."

• The Threat to Biased Information Sources:

  • "Every source plagued (read: monetized) by bias will be under siege. Whether it’s Yelp for reviews, your favorite news site, your favorite travel magazine, or the everyday Google search, these sources of information are powered by bias. They either monetize by selling ads (designed and inserted to bias our purchase decisions) or they sell actual services (and bias their content is designed towards what they sell)."

• Abstraction Hacking as the New SEO:

  • "Given the scraping of Wikipedia and scores of blog posts to help train common LLMs (Large Language Models), I anticipate a growing and sophisticated effort to try and trick these models with highly choreographed edits and campaigns that literally 'hack' the knowledge and reasoning of AI. Similarly, you can expect a whole legion of 'training hackers' to emerge who infiltrate commonly scraped sources of training data to influence the standing of brands, people, and facts - SEO for the age of AI."

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