Episode #20: Community-Led Growth - Mike Rizzo
How to Host a Million-Dollar Event
“It cost us about a million dollars. We did not run it profitably. We did take a 100K+ loan. I opened two other credit cards. I looked at taking a lien on my house…”
This is Mike Rizzo, matter-of-factly describing his experience hosting MOps-Apalooza (his first full-fledged conference) in November of 2023.
I had chatted with Mike in October, a few weeks before the event. He clearly had a lot on his mind but also seemed strangely non-plussed at hosting a million-dollar event without knowing whether it would break even.
Keep in mind - this isn’t a venture-backed company with dozens of event staff to make it all happen.
This is a small bootstrapped organization (Mike hopes to pay himself a salary for the first time in 2024) writing the community playbook in real time.
Speaking just a few weeks ago in February of 2024, I asked Mike frankly, “why did you do this?”.
A big part of the answer is that Mike truly does care about the community and about the vocation of marketing operations.
B2B communities are everywhere these days.
It taps into something incredibly powerful, even primal: people’s need to congregate with others around a shared interest or affinity.
It's easy to forget that 10 years ago, it wasn't nearly so easy to connect with peers, ask for unfiltered recommendations, celebrate wins, and commiserate about dumpster fires.
Mike Rizzo has made community his career - both in developing B2B customer communities and in building the top community of practice for marketing operations.
In this episode, we examine how B2B companies can leverage community as part of their GTM strategy, what makes a community tick, and the inside scoop on what it took to host MOps-Apalooza.
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About Today's Guest
Mike Rizzo is a career marketing operations professional passionate about community. In 2017 he also founded the growing community of MO Pros - a place where thousands of Marketing Operations Professionals connect, collaborate and help elevate the practice of Marketing Ops. He is also the co-host of the podcast called Ops Cast.
Take-Aways
Community is like a product
Mike describes the process of creating a community as very much like developing a product.
You start with a hypothesis about a problem that needs to be solved.
You interview people in your target market to gain insights and validation.
You identify a market need that you can fulfill.
You lead with things that people really care about and solve those pains.
Although a successful community may feel entirely natural to participants, there’s a lot of planning, iteration, and effort that goes on behind the scenes to achieve “community-market fit.”
The purview of marketing ops includes the entire revenue process
Mike points out that, while sales and customer success ops are both focused on very specific parts of the funnel, marketing ops spans the entirety of it.
Marketers are concerned with building relationships from the very earliest awareness stage, on into the sales process, and throughout the experience of using the product.
Marketing never stops.
To some degree, this creates incentives for marketing ops to interact with sales/CS ops that don’t exist in the other direction.
Marketing ops pros should consider this when building bridges with their revenue ops peers.
You need to create community programs that don’t feel icky
When balancing community and economic concerns for vendor-hosted communities, you need to thread the needle with delicate hands.
If you use the community as a way to collect sales signals or make the brand too overwhelming, you can turn off your audience.
At the same time, if the brand is totally absent, the parent company may not reap any benefit from the community.
Mike and I discuss a variety of ways to strengthen the brand without undermining the community.
One suggestion is to leverage partners in a support community, who can answer questions to build their own brand and also reinforce product value.
Another perspective is that the brand is the host of the party. They create an environment that supports you and makes you comfortable. But they shouldn’t overwhelm or intrude.
We also discussed the idea of community as a form of nurture. Given that most potential customers for a product aren’t in market at any given time, community is a way to develop relationships and trust with those people in a non-sales context.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:42] - Why start a MOPS community?
[05:17] - Community is like a product
[08:40] - Each community is a vibe
[10:40] - Maturity of marketing ops vs. sales ops
[16:37] - Lack of strategic MOPS leadership roles in the marketplace
[19:13] - MOPS pros should be like product managers
[21:08] - Community-led as a GTM motion
[25:40] - Balancing community and economic concerns
[33:22] - MOps-Apalooza
[39:59] - What motivated Mike to put on the event?
[42:26] - The future of marketing operations
Resources
MarketingOps.com - Official site for the MO Pros community
Ops Cast - The Ops Cast podcast
MOps-Apalooza - Official site for the 2024 conference