Community-Driven Marketing: Turning Early Users into Evangelists

Elastic is edging toward US $1 billion in ARR while spending barely a third of CrowdStrike’s marketing outlay. The secret is in the title: community.

CrowdStrike, with its $3 billion ARR, leans heavily on channel sales, accounting for 80% of its growth.

Scroll through Elastic’s forums and you’ll find threads where users aren’t just troubleshooting—they’re even asking how to reach the sales team.

Yet most cybersecurity startups still treat “community” as a buzzword rather than a GTM lever. Here’s how to fix that.

Building Evangelists: A Technical Playbook

1. Instrument Your Product for Advocacy

Tools like Pendo or Amplitude reveal power users who:

• Consistently use advanced features (e.g., custom IAM policies)
• Maintain 90%+ session retention
• Invite team members organically

Segment these users before outreach. You can increased referral conversions by targeting admins who’d configured conditional access policies.

2. Co-Create Content That Closes Deals

Evangelists won’t parrot marketing copy. Instead, collaborate on:

• Ungated breach post-mortems (“How we reduced MTTD by 72%”)
• Compliance templates (SOC 2, ISO 27001)
• GenAI-powered threat simulations

3. Promote “Merge-Ready” Contributions

Create labelled GitHub issues or plugin stubs marked “Good first PR”. Merged code is the strongest form of advocacy—it turns users into stakeholders who defend the roadmap as if it were their own.

4. Ship Enablement Kits for Champions

Draft a lightweight slide deck, a recorded demo and a one-pager outlining ROI. Hand these to your most active users—call them Field Champions. Make it effortless for them to present internally or at local meet-ups. Reward with early-access features, not swag.

5. Run Quarterly “Fix-It” Sprints (Okey, we are pushing now)

Pick a Friday, freeze new features and invite the community to squash bugs or write docs alongside your team on a live stream. Publish real-time leader-boards and end with a roadmap AMA. Contributors gain visibility; you gain burn-down velocity.

Community ROI isn’t fuzzy. Measure:

• Deal influence: % of opportunities mentioning community content (target 25%+)
• Cost reduction: Forrester found peer-driven deals close 34% faster

The Hard Question

When your next funding round hinges on efficient growth, can you afford to treat your happiest users as an afterthought?