For the past 1.5 year GoalGorilla (NL) has been building Open Social- an out-of-the-box social community platform.
Our goals were (and still are) threefold:

- Contribute to the Drupal Community and make a higher quality product based on developer feedback
- Set up a SaaS product for scalability and recurring income
- Set-up Enterprise projects based on Open Social, with low costs and high speed

While we are already booking successes on all fronts, in the beginning of 2017 we realised that we have been neglecting one important aspect:

Building a community tool is one thing, but making sure these communities are active, growing and reaching their KPI’s is a whole other world.

It basically required a shift in our engagement model between our clients and us. In a SaaS model, the customer pays a (much smaller) fee for the software each month. The vendor must therefore ensure the customer is using the solution and getting value from it, if they wanted to ensure the customer continues to pay their subscription fee.

We have a lot of experience building community software, even before Open Social.So community building isn’t new to us, but we haven’t previously actively advised clients in this area.
So in 2017 it was time to set-up a service around community building.

In this Session I will take you along our journey; How did we position ourselves as a strategic/consulting partner? How do we measure customer success? How do we onboard our customer? And more problems and hands-in tips..

Though our product is targeted at community building, we believe that each SaaS product is facing the same problem: how do you make sure your customers stick with you for a longer period of time.

This talk is interesting for anyone who is interested in growing recurring revenue and reducing churn.