#335: Linda Lian Of Common Room, On Navigating Foundational Pivots On The Path To Product Market Fit And Building A Pandemic-Age Startup Serving Modern SaaS Companies

Linda Lian is the CEO and Co-Founder of Common Room, the first and only intelligent community growth platform that gathers community engagement, product usage, and customer data into a single place.

They use intelligence to surface insights from across your entire community and provide tools to act on those insights directly from the app. This allows teams to discover what’s most important, nurture key personas, measure the impact of their programs, and collaborate across their organization. They’ve raised over $50 million from top-tier investors including Greylock, Index, and Madrona to build the community platform for modern SaaS companies. They’re also backed by 25+ operators from community-first organizations such as Stripe, Airtable, Slack, Notion, Loom, and more.

Topics Covered by Linda Lian in this Episode

• Common Room as an intelligent community growth platform serving modern software companies

• Common Room’s origin story and building a product to enable this new engagement model

• Idea evolution on the path to product market fit and getting feedback from early stakeholders before building anything

• Navigating foundational pivots

• How the pandemic and the current market correction have fueled Common Room’s growth

• The 3 main buckets of Common Room’s ideal users and their primary use-cases

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