How a note-taking tool uses its ardent customers to grow the business
Original Publish Date: May 10, 2021
Imagine you can pass the challenge of growing your business to your most ardent customers.
What would that look like in reality? How can you set it all up? A company by the name of Roam Research offers an interesting case study – a roadmap of sorts – to this interesting world where customers take the mantle of growing your business.
But before we explore what Roam Research is all about and unpack its playbook; let’s wrap our heads around the idea of a customer-centric business.
WHAT DOES A WORKING MODEL FOR CUSTOMER CENTRICITY LOOK LIKE?
There are several HBR articles and a popular book (seemingly catered to the MBA programs) by Peter Faber on customer centricity. Yet I want to build on a very accessible model from InSites Consulting that brings it all together perfectly geared towards the customer.
Customer Centricity lies at the intersection of so many short- and long-term choices made about the customer.
How do we uncover value for the customer and capture it? How do we acquire and retain our customers while trying to maximize their overall spend with us? How do we think about our ongoing and post-sale interactions with the customer?
Source: InSites Consulting
I want to dig deeper into the ‘customer experience’ piece since that serves the rest of this write-up too.
What does experience include? Among other things, customer experience includes how we execute on the value we promised the customer. It also includes the support we offer in that whole process, the ability to gauge feedback from the customer and keep an open ear. Finally, if the whole experience piece is well-conceived, it should also be about creating advocates. Turning customers into messengers, evangelists on your behalf.
ROAM RESEARCH AND ITS ARMY OF ADVOCATES
Roam Research labels itself as a “note-taking tool for networked thought”. The benefit of the tool stems from uncovering connections using bi-directional links within the notes to improve research, organize notes better, and create better ideas. These connections show your web of knowledge.
“Each note has relationships to other notes, but no note lives *inside* another note or notebook. All of the information is fluid in the sense that you flow between notes based on their relationships, not because they’re all in the same folder or hierarchy.” – Nat Eliason
Source: Roam Research Homepage
Other common use cases for Roam Research besides note-taking are journaling, goal tracking, personal CRM, second brain, idea generator. Let’s now look at part of Roam Research’s playbook to get its customers to supercharge the company’s growth engine.
Create a cult-like allegiance
"Call us old fashioned - but our model is: build something people want, charge them for it, use the money to hire more people and make it better. Most VC money ends up spent on ads, we don't seem to need those." – @RoamResearch
There’s a certain sense of exclusivity that’s in play once you become part of the #roamcult. The note-taking tool, as many of the current power users would easily admit, is not very easy to use, to say the least. The initial learning curve to become familiar with the product becomes a bonding experience for a new user with fellow established users.
The time it takes for a new user to use the tool to its utmost potential takes commitment. Roam Research benefits from this commitment as it filters for only the fervent users. This steep learning curve works as an initiation for these new users to also in time turn into product evangelists.
Reward your early adopters
"Your support has been critical to our success thus far and we want you to participate in any upside we create as we continue to grow and improve” – Roam Research Company Email
Roam Research raised $9MM at a valuation of $200MM last September. Recently, Roam allowed early users of its product to also participate in fundraising.
The crowdfunding campaign through Wefunder was set to raise only $500K but managed to raise $1.6MM within a day. The CEO of Roam Research hinted at the opportunity for other early users to be part of future crowdfunding campaigns.
This whole experience highlights the option for companies who can emulate the cult-like following of Roam to start thinking outside the confines of VCs. Blake Barlett (of OpenView Partners) also speculates that community might be the future of startup fundraising.
Let your fans build the support ecosystem
The true mark of a community of product evangelists is the self-curated content that comes out to attract new users.
A quick survey of the resources available to learn about using Roam Research links back to power users/ fans – be it courses (ex: Effortless Output, Roam Essentials), information hubs (ex: Roam Stack, Roam Brain), weekly newsletters (ex: Roam Research Weekly), video tutorials (ex: Shu Omi).
Roam Research has so many limitations – no mobile app, no API, no offline access, long loading times, occasionally buggy, no option to store external files, substantially higher pricing compared to competitors – to name a few. Still, the users are not thrown off to leave the tool.
All that leaves us with the real question you should be asking…
What are you doing right now to turn your customers into an army of advocates?