The Three Cs of Accelerating Word-of-Mouth
Right people, right content, right communities to amplify organic growth
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
When a company already sees some word-of-mouth, Dietrich prescribes three concrete levers to lean into and accelerate it: thought leadership from your own people, a strong content strategy in existing communities, and building your own community. The through-line is that no one sells your product better than your own happy customers and experts.
Origin
Carilu Dietrich's playbook from Atlassian's user groups and clients like Weights & Biases and HubSpot.
Core principles
- 01No one sells your product better than your own happy customers
- 02Bringing prospects and existing customers together creates more buzz than separate events
- 03Deeply engaged technical experts create word-of-mouth by giving away concepts and learning, not just product
How to run it
- 1
Empower your people as thought leaders
Hire and elevate deeply engaged experts who write, teach, and participate in developer forums and communities, the way Atlassian's CEO stayed active in dev forums even at $150-200M.
Pro tip Give internal experts and engineers evangelist status so they can publicly engage as super experts.
- 2
Run a strong content strategy in existing communities
Provide genuinely helpful content, certifications, and concepts inside communities that already exist online or in open source.
Pro tip HubSpot's secret was thoughtful helpful content and certifications for marketers.
- 3
Build your own community
Facilitate local user groups and gatherings, mixing customers and prospects so customers sell to prospects naturally.
Pro tip Atlassian simply paid for beer and pizza and facilitated local in-city leaders to meet, talk products, and grow their networks.
Watch out Customer-only events feel small and prospect-only events feel salesy; combine them so everyone has a better time.
In the wild
Atlassian facilitated local city leaders to host meetups where they simply covered beer and pizza, and people came to talk about the products and about development generally while growing their careers and networks.
→ A low-cost community engine became one of Atlassian's secrets for driving durable word-of-mouth.
Common mistakes
Segregating customers and prospects at events
Customer-only gatherings lack buzz and prospect-only ones feel salesy; keeping them apart wastes the chance for happy customers to sell to prospects.
Treating content as pure promotion
Word-of-mouth comes from giving away genuinely useful concepts and learning; purely product-pushing content fails to build the expert credibility that drives sharing.
Is it for you?
Best for
A marketing or growth leader at a company already seeing early organic traction who wants to amplify it
Not ideal for
A company with no product-love or organic signal yet, where there is nothing to amplify
From the transcript
“no one sells your product better than your own happy customers”
“Word of Mouth can be driven by thought leadership which is hiring the right people to like really be deeply engaged as super experts”
“atlassian one of our secrets was this amazing User Group Community where we just paid for a beer and a pizza”
From the episode
How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career
Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password)