Behind the Scenes: How Atomicwork got community right

Lessons from how we succeeded (after stumbling a lot) in building a CIO community

Even before we wrote a line of copy or a positioning statement for Atomicwork, my boss, co-founder and CEO Vijay Rayapati, gave me a clear directive, that we had to start our marketing with a community.

This was in mid-2022, and surprising to me for a couple of reasons: One, community is not what engineer-founders typically tell you to do when they want to start off the marketing; and two, they generally don’t start with marketing at all. So I knew I was in for a ride. I strapped up and started thinking about this.

Why community?

Firstly why is community marketing important at all? I’ll give you a few reasons. Because SaaS has moved upmarket, we are all chasing higher ACVs from more important ICPs. And because relying on content and paid demand gen in the age of AI seems like gambling. Anything can change any minute. So you need channels direct to your audience. The move towards community building is part of that understanding and movement.

That my CEO understood all this was great for me. I didn’t have to go around convincing him to invest in community. He was already sold. He even had a complete plan for it, I just had to execute.

First moves

The first avatar of Atomicwork’s community was aimed at HR professionals. Why? We thought they were the ICP for us at that point. It was an assumption, but an informed one, and backed by experience and an understanding of the problem we were aiming to solve.

So we put together a place for folks to congregate. This was obviously on Slack, because it gave us the most options. Plus professionals were more at home with the platform. I got some freelancer help, designed a few things, and tried hard to get things to pick up, for it to become a place for people to hang out and talk about things related to employee experience.

And though we tried very hard, it just didn’t work. It wasn’t something people wanted to do naturally, so engagement had to be seeded, and even that required a lot of heavy-lifting. But as we realised, the larger issue was that we just didn’t have a value proposition that was powerful enough for decision makers to come spend time on. This was also a problem of network effects: Our US-based ICPs weren’t there on the platform, didn’t see any need to be there, and therefore we didn’t get any lift-off.

The pivot

In the meantime, our product evolved, and we had had another realisation: Our ICP wasn’t the one we had been gunning for, and the product wasn’t an employee experience platform at all. It was an ITSM and ESM platform. We had also gotten lucky with our timing. A couple months into our official existence, ChatGPT had launched.

We saw the opportunity to use AI to solve the exact same problem, just with a different approach, and went for it. As for the ICP, our clarity had come from the age-old truth of making software products, that you had to ask for money from the people who actually have it. It turned out that that department for us was IT, and our ICP was the CIO or the Director of IT (there are a few more, like Director of Digital Transformation, but for our purposes, this is enough).

The challenges, and how we tackled them

Let me recap our challenges first.

1. Our ICP had shifted
2. We weren’t able to attract US based folks
3. It was also a lot for a two person marketing team with no experience in community

I was able to tackle the last thing first. Because I had my CEO’s backing and his vision, I could actually go out and hire for this role. I went straight to my best mate Sajeesh Sahadevan, because he had (international) experience in bringing together people in engaged, highly active learning groups. This knowledge was not something we (Sadhana and I) had. Once he joined, the whole effort speeded up.

Then we came to the ICP problem. One of the other reasons we had Sajeesh lead the effort was also because he had extensive ITSM experience. One of the first things he said to me was that we were never going to get CIOs and IT leaders to hang around on Slack. Neither do they have the time, and nor are they networkers (unlike, say, marketers). Fair enough, I said. But how do we build a community then? Hold that question.

The final challenge was not being able to attract attention from our desired geography, the US. This is not easily solvable, because however high the quality of your marketing team, you are still sitting in India, and don’t have the network that can kickstart something like this.

How we actually built a community

It was almost a year and a half later from when we started that we actually got to the starting of a solution. Except they did not look at all like the approaches we had started with.

1. As we tried to get CIOs to pay attention to us, we came to a realisation we should have arrived at some time ago: A community doesn’t need to be an actual virtual place, like Slack or WhatsApp. It could be a set of events, media, and experiences that were actually useful to the ICP. We called them touch-points and they would be like separate little magnets in the Atomicwork force-field. Our podcast, Atomic Conversations falls in this bucket too. It was a content and field-led community approach.

2. As it became more and more clear to us that we needed ground presence in the US, our CEO moved quickly, hiring former top CIO and Silicon Valley executive Lenin Gali to lead our push into US cities. This he did by leading small events on CIO-top-of-mind topics all over the US. Lenin is our Chief Business Officer, but his work into building IRL community events for Atomicwork was a major factor for our brand recognition and recall. These small events became, for many CIOs, their first entry into the Atomicwork ecosystem.

3. With the content, we doubled down. With webinars, podcasts, newsletters, and social media aimed squarely at the CIO populace, we amassed a following of IT leaders who actually thought about, and looked forward to what we had to say. This thought leadership was hard won, and is a continuous process.

The crowning jewel of our community initiatives is coming up in September, when we are hosting FUSION, our inaugural CIO leadership forum. We are convening more than 100 CIOs, digital transformation executives, and IT leaders to discuss (among other things) how modern enterprises can get more out of using Agentic AI. It is, make no mistake, a culmination of all our efforts into community building.

Lessons

Finally, something we have also realised, especially as we tried learning from a lot of other startups, is that community building is not playbook-able. Each ICP, each marketing team, each CEO’s vision - all of these play a role in how the community is created, energised, and continued. But if you want one thing common to all of us: It takes time, and it’s a journey.

We are on ours, and I hope you have the patience, the clarity, and the backing to go on your own.

---

If you think your CIO and IT leaders should attend FUSION, it’s on September 24 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and you can request an invite for your executive here, or send the page to him. I would really appreciate that.

---

Other writing

Somehow made enough time last week to write something other than the newsletter. It is about a place that had been on my mind for a while, and which we go to every week - the neighbourhood barber shop.

And yes, if you have not yet subscribed to the newsletter as are reading this, you should do so now. :)