Linda Lian, the co-founder and CEO of Common Room, is a prominent voice shaping the future of how companies interact with their users. Drawing from her experiences as an investor and a product marketer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), she champions a more authentic, community-centric approach to business. Her insights offer a compelling playbook for modern go-to-market strategy, company building, and leadership.
On Community-Led Growth and Go-to-Market Strategy
Direct Quotes:
- "We're trying to reinvent the relationship that software companies have had with their customers. It should be more authentic, and more personal."[1][2]
- "Many of the fastest-growing organizations today know that partnering with their community is critical to their ability to build a better product, have happier users, and grow faster."[3]
- "Community-led growth is really about in the age of the networked user... we find out about the tools that we want to use from our friends from our friends on the internet, but most importantly from strangers on the internet."[4]
- "You can't control the way in which your users or your community wants to engage with you."[5]
- On the problem Common Room solves: "A lack of intelligence in analytics meant that identifying signals from noise on customer feedback, or quickly surfacing customers that needed help was nearly impossible.”[3]
- "We fundamentally believe that your community is going to engage with you through all sorts of different modes. It could be a forum, it could be social. We're not opinionated about any of that."[5]
- On the shift in software adoption: "The next generation of software businesses will find customers differently – not through account managers and top-down company-wide contracts, but through communities."[1]
- "Community-led growth is so much the evolution of inbound marketing, being able to attract people provide them value before they're ever engaging with your products or your services."[4]
Key Learnings:
- Community is the new competitive advantage: The way software is evaluated and adopted has fundamentally changed, with communities of users and advocates now driving purchasing decisions.[5]
- The future of GTM is signal-based: Modern go-to-market strategies must move beyond legacy CRM systems and intent data to focus on "signal-based selling," leveraging real-time customer engagement as indicators of interest and need.[6]
- Authenticity trumps traditional marketing: Users, especially developers, are tired of top-down sales and marketing. They crave genuine, personal, and authentic engagement with the companies whose products they use.[1][7]
- Meet your community where they are: Companies can't dictate the channels of engagement. They must listen and interact across a wide array of platforms, from Slack and Discord to Twitter and GitHub.[5]
- Unify siloed data for a 360-degree view: To truly understand the customer journey, organizations need to break down data silos, combining community engagement, product usage, and revenue data into a single, actionable view.[5][6]
- Community drives tangible business outcomes: Investing in community isn't just a "nice-to-have." It leads to larger deal sizes, better product adoption, faster closing times, and increased user activation.[3][4]
- Enable, don't control: The goal is to provide tools that help community leaders nurture their communities proactively, not to control the conversation.[8]
- Every team is a community team: The insights from community interactions are valuable not just for community managers, but for product, support, marketing, and sales teams who need to engage directly with users.[8]
On Entrepreneurship and Founding a Company
Direct Quotes:
- "A lot of entrepreneurs might have a certain chip on their shoulder where the more that someone tells them that something can't become a reality, the more you want to make it real."[9]
- "Starting a company is a scary experience... it's hard to believe that anyone wants to start a company as a solo founder."[9]
- "I started to realize: I wanted to be a creator, not a critic. I wanted to go and build something.”[10]
- On her transition from VC to founder: "Being a founder or CEO can be lonely. Some of the main problems and challenges no one else in your organization really has."[10]
- "We're creating a new category that doesn't exist yet, so we have to take a consulting mindset advising on strategy, best practices and creating the playbook."[2]
Key Learnings:
- Relentlessly pursue your vision: Lian's journey to assemble her founding team was marked by persistence, including cold outreach on LinkedIn and refusing to take no for an answer.[6][9][10]
- Embrace a "jack of all trades" mindset: Her non-traditional career path through finance, venture capital, and product marketing gave her a 360-degree perspective that proved invaluable as a founder.[9]
- Maximize for learning: Lian has intentionally chosen roles throughout her career that pushed her out of her comfort zone to gain new skills and experiences.[9]
- You don't need to have all the skills yourself: Acknowledge your weaknesses and build a founding team with complementary skills. Lian, who is not an engineer or designer, knew she needed to recruit experts in those areas.[9]
- Trust and transparency are foundational for co-founders: From the beginning, it's critical to be able to speak transparently with co-founders about all potential upside and downside scenarios.[9]
- Validate the problem before you build: Before founding Common Room, Lian spent time talking to people in the developer space to confirm that the challenges she faced at AWS were widespread.[7]
- Navigating foundational pivots is part of the journey: The path to product-market fit is not linear; founders must be prepared to evolve their ideas based on early stakeholder feedback.[11][12][13]
- The founder's journey is often lonely: The unique challenges and pressures faced by a CEO are something no one else in the organization can fully understand. The ability to be comfortable with that loneliness is a key trait.[10]
On Leadership and Building a Team
Direct Quotes:
- "As a leader, I've found that people bias toward, 'No, this can't happen.' But if I've learned anything, it's that there's a 20 to 30 to 40 percent overachievement that you can get from a team or group of people by saying, 'Actually, you can do this.'"[10]
- "I've learned a lot about how to be a compassionate leader. It's one thing to be this maniacal 'creator' with really perfectionistic tendencies. It's another to inspire a group of people to achieve something they can't."[10]
- "Growing up, I was always told there was nothing I couldn't achieve.”[10]
Key Learnings:
- Push your team to overachieve: A leader's role is to instill the belief in their team that they can accomplish more than they think is possible.[10]
- Recruiting top talent is a founder's job: Lian's ability to attract veteran co-founders and team members from companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Dropbox was crucial to getting Common Room off the ground.[10]
- Leadership requires both drive and compassion: While having high standards is important, inspiring a team requires empathy and the ability to connect with people on a human level.[10]
- Grit and resilience are superpowers: Lian credits her immigrant upbringing for instilling in her the determination and work ethic that are essential for a founder.[10]
- Build a customer-centric culture from day one: Instilling a deep focus on the customer across the entire organization is a key strategy for success.[6]
- Hire for a 360-degree perspective: Building a well-rounded team with diverse experiences is critical for navigating the complexities of a startup.[9]
On Personal Philosophy and Vision
Direct Quotes:
- "But if there's any super-lesson we've learned in the past few decades of the internet, it's that the 'how' matters – it matters how we grow our companies, how we treat our employees and our customers."[8]
- "I think that what really drives me, and it has from an early age, is to build something of value to prove that I can do it."[9]
- On her immigrant experience: "Caring about the 'how' often felt like a big luxury."[8] This shaped her later focus on the importance of how companies are built.[7]
- On feeling like an outsider: "I've collected a very three-dimensional perspective of how to build companies."[7]
Key Learnings:
- The 'How' matters more than the 'What': In a mature technology landscape, how you build your company, treat people, and engage with customers is more important than just hitting goals at all costs.[7][8]
- Turn being an outsider into an advantage: Her experience as an immigrant and feeling like an outsider gave her a unique, unbiased perspective that has been useful in company building.[7][10]
- Mission matters: Common Room's mission is to enable better communication and collaboration between companies and their communities to build a shared vision together.[8]
- Embrace a nontraditional career path: A varied background can be a significant strength, providing a broad base of knowledge and adaptability.[9]
- Solve your own problems: The idea for Common Room was born directly from the pain points Lian and her team experienced trying to manage the massive AWS developer community.[3][7]
- Look for the "high-intensity signal": The core value proposition of a community intelligence platform is its ability to cut through the noise and identify the most important conversations and insights.[5]
- Democratize data: The goal is to provide tools that give all customer-facing teams access to the insights they need to do their jobs better.[8]
- Enable others to shine: A key motivation is to build a platform that helps community leaders prove their business impact and get the resources they need to succeed.[4]
Sources
