Executive Lighting Talk: How to scale self-service revenue with community initiatives

deploy – our first-ever, 24-hour global virtual conference deploy kicked off last Tuesday. And what a launch day it was. With speakers from all over the world, it was an inspiring day with sessions discussing everything from how developers can create personal brands through their online presence and creating inclusive learning experiences to DevOps from virtual Minecraft worlds and headless e-commerce. We learned about Python, Kubernetes, observability platforms, CI/CD as it relates to infrastructure as code, how Droplets are made, and escaping the walls of PaaS. 

I continue to be impressed by the brilliance among my colleagues and those of you who make up our community. Because our community is the foundation of all we are DigitalOcean, I spent my session focusing on the importance – and value – of community initiatives. 

In my session on Tuesday – Executive Lighting Talk: Scaling self-service revenue with community initiatives – I discussed how creating authentic community experiences and easy-to-navigate customer journeys allows customers to lead their own way through a funnel. This translates to community engagement, community growth, conversions, customer loyalty, and revenue. 

I believe that this type of marketing in action, which focuses on customer needs, marries psychology and marketing. By truly understanding your target audience, you can create experiences that tailor a journey to a customer’s needs, provide value and education along the way, and make conversions an organic byproduct of thoughtful journey mapping – requiring little, if any, hands-on support. This is a win-win for both the customers and the business, and has a measurable impact on a business’ bottom line.

I’ve learned that customers desire a solution they can figure out on their own – from the time they first do a Google search until the time in which they sign up for a product or service. In the session, I outline how we’ve organized and aligned our DigitalOcean teams to do just this. 

I hope you’ll give it a listen, and encourage you to comment below should you have any questions, insights, or stories you’d like to share. You can also watch other deploy sessions here.