Hypergrowth Marketing Playbook: The OpenAI Case Study - Part 3
Part 3: Growth, Expansion and Community
After “riding the lightning” through Atlassian’s hypergrowth, I became obsessed with the circumstances surrounding hypergrowth (how do you pick the right company) and actions hypergrowth companies take (how can you juice the moment?). I’ve tracked down most of the top tech CMOs who rode through hypergrowth to public scale and asked them dozens of questions over many years. I’ve thought deeply about the playbooks and what marketers should do now. OpenAI is a very unique hypergrowth company with circumstances most of us can never replicate. But all of us can and do implement aspects of the hypergrowth playbook. Today is Part 3 of a 3-part series.
Riding the Mega-Market Tsunami: Why Timing is Everything
The First Mover Advantage: Hard to Catch if They Execute Well
Beyond the Hype: Why Product Excellence is Non-Negotiable
The Power of Partnerships: Why Distribution Channels Make or Break Success
Fanning the Flames: Earned Media is Way Better than Advertising
Welcome to the Social Age: Where Market Momentum Goes Viral
Content as Currency: Building Trust Through Value
The User Content Engine: Amplifying Authentic Voices
Part 3 today covers:
Friction-Free Growth: Make it Easy to Learn, Buy and Expand
The Community Catalyst: Turning Users into Advocates
The Certification Game: Building an Army of Experts
The Expansion Playbook: Growing Beyond Core Markets
The Importance of Pricing: Value Must Exceed Cost
The Perpetual Chase: Why Hypergrowth Never Sleeps
What All of Us Can Take from the Hypergrowth Playbook
Friction-Free Growth: Make it Easy to Learn, Buy and Expand
To optimize hypergrowth, you must maximize revenue from all of your word-of-mouth and inbound interest. To do this, you MUST make sure your website, content, sales, and nurture streams are up to the challenge of helping people learn, buy, succeed, and expand quickly and easily. So much goes into this bucket, including:
differentiated, clear positioning
easy navigation for different use cases, demos, customer stories, and FAQs,
great homepage, web navigation, infrastructure, and load times,
ungated content across many different channels
deep technical guides and responsive support
effective privacy and security policies
clear and helpful pricing
minimum required signup fields
well-trained, responsive salespeople for the right deals and more.
Best-in-class companies are doing aggressive growth testing to minimize every possible point of friction in learning, trialing, buying, succeeding, and expanding.
OpenAI still has some work to do here. On their website specifically, they haven’t been able scale by use case yet by industry, role, or use cases outside of Developers. Their news site was laid out like a stream of consciousness – but they updated it while I was writing this article into subcategories (yay!). They don’t have an events page they’ve kept up to date with upcoming events or replays (you have to follow different execs on LinkedIn to know about the marketing case study webinar or the finance case study webinar.) It’s hard to find your way around their different resources. They’re playing a catch-up game since the market is moving so fast, and they have so many launches. On a recent “How OpenAI uses ChatGPT for Marketing” webinar, the Enterprise team gave us a sneak peek into how much they’ve been producing with a tiny, growing team (for Enterprise):
The Community Catalyst: Turning Users into Advocates
A huge aspect of surfing the hypergrowth wave is providing space for people to connect with other rabid fans. At Atlassian, our user groups were a HUGE contributor to our hypergrowth. For the cost of a few pizzas and beer, we’d get tens of thousands of people to meet frequently in cities around the world. Partners wanted to sponsor, customers wanted to share best practices, and prospects could go and get context without being sold to. People love to learn and be in community, even developers.
As mentioned above, OpenAI has had a developer conference, but attendance has been very limited, and it hasn’t been live-streamed or recorded. They have a Discord community that’s gaining momentum and an online community site for developers. They had a small Build Hour I found on someone’s LinkedIn. To my knowledge, user groups don’t exist yet. They have a unique advantage in the community since an ecosystem of entrepreneurs around them has been organizing meet-ups, training, and more - building community for them. It will be interesting to see how and where they lean into this from a corporate perspective.
The Certification Game: Building an Army of Experts
People LOVE to get certified in the market-leading technology – and this can be a huge flywheel of awareness and endorsement. Many hypergrowth companies end up creating an ecosystem of partners and people who make money from their company expertise. They love being anointed or certified officially by the company to prove they are more of an expert and charge more accordingly. This has been a critical part of every scaled software company — Salesforce’s Trailblazers being one of the most successful examples.
Atlassian, too, had a huge army of people and companies who built their careers around being JIRA experts. They would feature their official certification on their LinkedIn and resumes. They would pay for training, add-on training, deep-dive training, and more. They would take JIRA to their next company with them and train their team members for us. We had an army of certified experts selling for us around the world.
OpenAI isn’t here yet, but you can see the demand is very high on sites like Reddit. You can see other companies filling in the vacuum with training. Watch, it’s coming.
The Expansion Playbook: Growing Beyond Core Markets
A huge part of hypergrowth is continuing to expand your total addressable market. The first step is usually adding additional products. This is crucial so that you can sell more to your existing customers. After that, you often expand globally and to more diverse audiences or categories. It’s a critical aspect of continued growth and sometimes existential existence. Lyft lost to Uber because Uber diversified from rides only to food delivery, sustaining it through the pandemic and extending its reach.
At Atlassian, we started with just JIRA and then added more products. Then we went from being tools just for developers to being used for customer support teams and all business teams. Over time, we built out deep content and experiences by title, industry, and different company sizes, ultimately to where we are today:
OpenAI has strong starting breadth with both consumer and enterprise offerings. They have been pulled globally by customers, but most likely don’t have significant localized business or marketing operations globally yet.
As mentioned above and in earlier articles, they have shown deep investment in the developer, business user, and consumer use cases. But outside of developer, their content is more broad and general vs. deep and specific. They’re very early in deeper content for specific use cases and audiences, as shown by their website navigation this morning. They hosted a OpenAI for Marketing event last week that I covered in my newsletter and an OpenAI for Finance webinar before that. But there doesn’t seem to be a deep and coordinated campaign yet. Too much to do, too little time. They’ll get there.
The Importance of Pricing: Value Must Exceed Cost
The impact of pricing cannot be understated, yet it is often a hot potato of ownership within scaling companies. Atlassian’s founders had an underlying philosophy that we wanted to make our product inexpensive so it was easier to buy and love… and then we could go back to monetize more later. Note that Atlassian was profitable - we didn’t subscribe to market conquest at huge losses, but they did think it was okay to leave money on the table for the good of the long term. It worked.
Pricing strategy is a huge area of constant work that deserves the equivalent of product managers, a multi-year roadmap, expert advice, and thoughtful transitions to help customers feel like they are still getting great value for the price. I’ve seen many growth companies encounter challenges in the last few years as they’ve increased prices to offset the tight market dynamics. Changing from single-product to suite pricing can be challenging. It’s critical to have appropriate price increases year after year so you don’t have to do big, uncomfortable lifts after years of flat prices. So much to unpack here, blog-to-come.
OpenAI, which has been offering inexpensive products while losing billions, is planning to raise the price of individual ChatGPT subscriptions from $20 per month to $22 per month by the end of the year, according to the NYTimes. The same article reports that a steeper increase will come over the next five years; by 2029, OpenAI expects it’ll charge $44 per month for ChatGPT Plus. I expect they are doing similar pricing exercises across developer and enterprise offerings.
The Perpetual Chase: Why Hypergrowth Never Sleeps
One of the ironies of hypergrowth is that it’s never enough. If you are growing at 40%, you target 60%. If you’re 2x-ing, you’re going for 3x. If you’re 10xing, maybe you wonder how you can get to 20x. One of the hardest quarters of my career was also one of the highest growth.
There’s also never enough money. When I was running Oracle’s Awareness advertising, we were spending $80M just on advertising, and it felt too limited to compete with SAP and IBM’s 2x and 3x budgets. On the growth ride, there’s never enough growth, time, or money.
It’s easy to be a pundit suggesting what OpenAI might do - much harder to be on the inside with so many competing priorities and demands.
What All of Us Can Take from the Hypergrowth Playbook
While most of us aren’t at AI or a hypergrowth company, many of the elements of the core playbook apply to us all. Picking the right market, having a phenomenal product, building helpful content and community, building awareness through earned media, and driving social virality are all critical. Growth testing, having a pricing roadmap, and certifying experts to sell for you can also help move any growth needle. In hypergrowth, luck and timing play a huge role, but strong execution powers the long-term growth.
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.