I am excited to share with you a Community Building Breakdown with Ruthie Berber.
She is the Director of Community at Grow Therapy and is well-known in the community building scene in NYC and globally.
Community-led growth at startups is becoming more popular. So I wanted to learn more about it and thankfully Ruthie was open to sharing some of her knowledge with us!
Below is a slightly edited transcript from a recorded video chat between Ruthie and me. I tried to leave in the spirit and soul of the conversation. If there are mistakes or typos, it is my fault!
Let’s dive in!
How would you say that you got your role?
Many months of job searching and being very particular and specific about what I wanted to do and the kinds of communities that I wanted to work with.
I think probably, in terms of getting the role, proving that I could apply all of my knowledge and skill-set of building B2B SaaS communities and applying that in some of my extracurriculars, like Women In Innovation, The Old Girls Club, and Led By Community. By doing the job, it was much easier to be hired for such a role.
Let's talk about that. What did “doing the job” look like before you got the job?
Proving that I can, you know, put on an unconference. Put on, you know, monthly regular programming, bring in speakers, find partnerships, create some kind of semblance of localization for communities. Pulling together, I think, events both online and offline. I think also for myself seeing that I could apply this universally, that it doesn't matter what the community is or who the community is for, there are some things that really do apply universally, and you just need to understand what levers to pull to be successful.
When you were interviewing how much was your prior experience important?
Very. They were really keen on and I also know this now, especially in hindsight being here, I know that the hiring managers were very specific about someone who had done community in an official capacity. More specifically, led community for business purposes versus social engagement. Really driving product adoption, driving success on the platform, driving satisfaction, increasing NPS scores, reducing load on support, all of these are parallel things that I needed to prove that I knew how to do, and how to work cross-functionally and add community as a business layer versus as a siloed side thing.
How do you compare this role or community building in this capacity, community-led growth, to your other involvement with like The Old Girls Club or Women In Innovation and Led By Community?
I think here it's quite clearly tied into the org. So I work cross-functionally with Product, with Support, with Recruitment, with Success, with Credentialing, with Partnerships. It is a fully cross-functional lever that we are using to drive business growth. It is something that is inherently connected to one of the biggest revenue sources, which is having these actual providers on the platform. And so the community building and all of it is really focused on success: their success on the platform, their success with clients, their success as clinicians and all of that.
And for The Old Girls Club or Women in Innovation, or Led by Community, these are all much more connection-driven success… The main goal is really just to drive connections and value, and that can be very subjective. At Grow Therapy, it's very objective.
You have a team, right? There's a community team? Where does that sit within the overall like org structure?
For context, when I joined, I had two direct reports and I've since quadrupled the team. There are now eight people on the team. They're not all focused on community. My entire team, which is now a little bit of like both community and marketing, sits under Provider Experience. So I roll up to the VP of Provider Experience, in a way, it's kind of a business within a business, I would say what would be probably equivalent to like Go-to-Market.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to get involved with community-led growth at a startup?
A few things: 1) ensure that community is not an after-thought, but rather something that is 100% tied into company OKRs, makes sense and aligns with the north star, is something that is invested in with intention and not like “checkbox, we have a community.” If that's the case, don't get involved. That's not the right startup. Don't do it. But if it is a startup that wants to actually invest in real, genuine community-led growth, then as the leader of that function, you need to make sure that everything you're doing rolls up and ties into an OKR. That you can then show directly correlates to the company's north star and the company's business interests. It must, must be business oriented.
2) Constantly checking yourself, constantly iterating, getting that feedback, getting a lot of stakeholder buy-in. I think if you were to start at a start-up tomorrow, to lead community-led growth, you should be spending enormous amounts of time absorbing the needs and requirements of your stakeholders in other business units and then developing and designing community-led growth that ties into it. It should be a layer that supports the entire business across all the departments, versus something that is a standalone.
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Alright, that’s a wrap! Thank you so much Ruthie!!! Make sure you follow her on LinkedIn where she often posts about events!
Speaking of events, if you are in New York this Wednesday, check out this event that Ruthie is cohosting. I will be there too!
NYC Events - my NYC Gatherings calendar is updated!
New Podcast Episode
Are you looking to work for a creator? Listen to this new episode with Bart Dziedzic and Max Zucker about how they started working with Mr.Beast. You will also learn about content creation, networking tips, community building and much more!
To social and community-led growth,
PS: who is a community builder that you want to learn more from? Reply back and let me know!
Ruthie is a star!