Community-Led Growth als Markteintrittsstrategie für Software-Startups im B2B-Umfeld

Community-driven marketing and sales activities have been steadily increasing since the pandemic and are already establishing themselves as a promising market entry strategy for software start-ups in the USA. The approach has been little discussed within entrepreneurial marketing research but holds great potential for generating value-adding interactions with users and customers by building a community at an early stage. In particular, the community-led growth approach can be used to address challenges faced by software start-ups in the B2B environment. If customer acquisition is particularly protracted and complex here, a community can be used to focus on customer-centered product development with many direct touchpoints. This may lead to reduced market entry barriers, increased expertise and credibility and initial contacts with subsequent sales channels and multipliers. This article provides a conceptual contribution to community-led growth and reflects on how the dynamics of communities along the customer journey can create value for companies, such as lower service costs or greater product affinity and, as a result, greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. Based on the Orbit Model and the Community Grid, two models are introduced to show how community members can be segmented and who belongs to the initial core of a community. Further, a comparison of three models for building communities (Community Canvas, Community-Led Growth Model and Community Experience) shows which internal and external requirements are necessary for building a community. Finally, recommendations for practical implication for software start-ups are derived based on a minimum viable community canvas and an extended framework with iterative and goal-oriented components is outlined.