How to drive 1000's of leads before you have a product - the power of community building

In early 2017, I joined Spoke as their first marketing hire. The tricky part, we didn't actually have a product yet to share with the world. Our engineering team was heads down building a solution for IT leaders to streamline internal ticketing at their companies.

One of the big priorities early on was getting feedback directly from IT professionals as we were developing the product. It wasn’t easy. It seemed like everyone was trying to get in front of this audience to sell them something, and we were just another startup. We needed to take a creative approach.

I decided to dig into what IT leaders felt was missing from existing communities they belonged to. After reaching out and having conversations, it quickly became clear they were passionate about discovering new tools, getting recognition internally for their work, and learning from peers. Diving into the product discovery angle, I figured there might be an opportunity there.

As a Product Hunt fan, I thought we could something similar, but for the IT crowd. We called it IT Kit, bought the itkit.co domain, and I brought on a talented freelance designer/developer to actually build it out. Within just a few weeks, we had a site featuring a curated list of products (selected with the help of an advisory board of respected IT leaders), simple upvoting, and a newsletter signup. On the site, we noted that this community was powered by Spoke. We didn’t want it to feel too promotional, but wanted to make sure people knew who was behind this project.

On launch day, we shared IT Kit in every IT community we know about. The IT Kit advisory board promoted it to their networks. We asked the companies listed on the site to help spread the word. We posted it to Product Hunt. I messaged every IT influencer I could find to tell them about it.

The response was fantastic. Traffic grew consistently week over week and people were upvoting their favorite products. Within 3 months we had 3,000 people subscribed to the newsletter. We started to rank highly on Google for anyone searching for the companies listed on IT Kit. One of the companies featured on the site even started driving paid ads towards IT Kit because the site was converting so well for them. I was able to build great relationships with the founders of many of the companies listed on IT Kit, they were all thrilled to be a part of this.

We partnered with some of the bigger brands featured on IT Kit to co-host events. Slack and Bettercloud, who were much further along than our pre-product startup, both agreed to partner with us on events. We were able to attract 50-100 IT professionals at each event and bring the community momentum in-person. Without these partners, we likely would not have been able to get even a handful of people to show up to an event on our own. It was also much easier finding reputable speakers with these brands behind us.

Ultimately, a chunk of these IT Kit subscribers wanted to learn more about Spoke based solely on the goodwill and value we had built through the community. They saw us not as another vendor, but as a company truly looking to support the IT world.

Key takeaways:

• Building a community before you have a product is doable and can be very impactful. Working in a silo might work for some product builders, but for many, getting ongoing feedback from prospective users is critical. Approaching these potential users as a giver instead of as a taker can generate a lot of goodwill over time.
• You can build big things with relatively little resources. We launched IT Kit within a few weeks of coming up with the idea. We brought on a contractor for a few weeks who was able to design and build this independently. We invested less than $5K to get this off the ground, without taking away from any of our own internal engineering/design efforts.
• There will always be ways to stand out and add value beyond the product you are building. In my initial coffees and Zoom calls with IT leaders I learned a bunch and was able to quickly identify gaps we could fill. That’s how I came up with the idea for IT Kit.
• Find ways to collaborate with bigger players in the market. By tapping into their larger audience sizes, you'll be able to supercharge your efforts and reach more people faster. We featured some well-known IT products on IT Kit early on and made sure those companies were excited to be a part of this. Without IT Kit, those companies likely would not have paid much attention to a pre-product, seed-stage company.

As always, if you have any feedback or questions, welcome to reach out!