Tip
Camille Ricketts talks about building Notion’s community: “One of my number one recommendations for anybody who suspects the community could be a big growth driver is to not make metrics the be all end all at the very beginning. So we didn’t necessarily start measuring things very concretely until last year with community. Mostly because we had already seen so much organic scale that we saw being tied to our community efforts… One of the worst things you can do is say, let’s cut this off at the knees if it’s not generating ROI.”
Turns out AI community building works the same way.
Your team wants to launch an AI community—Discord for power users, monthly meetups, content creators sharing their implementations. Finance asks: “What’s the ROI? How do we know this is working?” You can’t prove ROI yet. There’s no conversion tracking. But you’re seeing organic signals: people are showing up, sharing use cases, building on each other’s work. The vibe is real even if the metrics aren’t.
Younger growth leaders kill these initiatives because they can’t prove short-term ROI. They need dashboards showing conversion rates, attributed revenue, CAC payback. You know better. You’ve watched enough community initiatives over the years to recognize the pattern: organic fervor that starts small and compounds slowly. You’ve seen Salesforce consultants, HubSpot agencies, Slack evangelists—communities that took years to show ROI but became moats.
This judgment—knowing when to trust qualitative signals over quantitative proof—comes from seeing the full arc play out multiple times. You know what early organic excitement looks like before it scales. You know the difference between “this isn’t working” and “this is working but metrics lag reality.” That pattern recognition lets you protect initiatives that need time to compound.
This doesn’t mean ignore metrics forever. It means: when you see genuine organic scale, geographic expansion, passionate users, don’t cut it because you can’t attribute revenue yet. Give it time to prove itself qualitatively first.
Context
Camille Ricketts was the first marketing hire at Notion (employee. #11) and built their community-led growth strategy that helped grow the company to a $10B valuation. She didn’t start measuring community ROI concretely until years into the program because the organic signals were so strong—people hosting events globally, building template businesses, evangelizing without incentives. For experienced growth leaders, this judgment about when to nurture versus when to kill initiatives comes from watching enough growth experiments over decades to recognize which ones compound slowly versus which ones are genuinely not working. That’s pattern recognition younger leaders don’t have yet.