Founded in 2003, ActiveCampaign has managed to make noise in a very crowded space, to the tune of $5m ARR.
How do they differentiate?
This posts explains…
One time a junior employee in my SaaS marketing team (let’s call them Billy) walked over to my desk and said:
Boss, I think we should start a Meetup.
I thought this was a fantastic idea…
Really great, get a load of potential customers in the room and pitch them. HARD.Â
The only problem was…
Billy didn’t want to mention the name of our SaaS in the name of the Meetup or evening during the event itself.
This didn’t makes sense.
We’re in the business to sell software.
Not give people a warm feeling inside when they make nice friends at our “Meetup”.
Outrageous.
I was busy building a new funnel at this point so I waved Billy away with a max budget of a few hundred dollars to kick start his little gathering.
Long story short, over the next 12 months that Meetup grew into an awareness machine, monster lead generator, partnership builder and churn buster.
And it seems like ActiveCampaign has done something similar.
They run free Facebook Groups:
They run free Meetups:
They run an annual conference:
They maintain a free Slack Community => activecampaign-group.slack.com    Â
I have only been a part of AC’s community for a few months (learning from the best) and I have yet to be pitched.
Active Campaign is playing the long game.
They bring together prospects, customers, and partners together in real and online spaces, enabling them to connect around common ground.
That common ground is normally email marketing automation and personalization, which just so happens to be the topic that ActiveCampign build really good software for…
And now they’re sitting on $5m ARR.
What did we learn?
Community counts. Over the long term.
ActiveCampaign currently sits on $60m ARR with 400 employees, $150k per employee.
How can you connect prospects, customers, and partners together in real or virtual spaces so they can bond over the thing you are great at?
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