#10-community

Some folks proactively reached out to me after I posted on the acquisition on LinkedIn - it’s definitely feeling very similar to the Influitive ownership-change playbook.

This is frustrating to hear, I wish I could understand what drives companies to sell to this specific PE, but they must offer a higher payout, for a struggling company... not that I would even know how to define what makes the company struggle.

That said, I would recommend that anyone on Khoros start researching what comes next, how will they manage these things (as seen with Influitive):

1. Major price increases
2. Very little success support
3. Very little or no growth, product map, etc
4. Contract negotiations and demands months before the end date
5. AI everything, for support, success, in their product, everywhere
6. Finding an alternative solution and getting it set up quickly

"I wish I could understand"... Literally a convo I had today. I can imagine people in suits looking at numbers... And that's it 🙃

😞

It's not easy to run a business, and in the tech world, things have changed so much in the last few years, a lot of companies are trying to get to profitability and can't seem to figure out the best approach to post sales success.

I was at an event yesterday, and there was a fireside chat with 2 celeb UK entrepreneurs, and one of them said "I hate that everything is always all about growth and getting bigger and doing more. Why can't more businesses just be satisfied about just doing a good job and serving a clear purpose?"
And yep, been thinking about all that a lot, both in my career and the businesses I work for, and of course this situation with Khoros.
Anyway, Friday Philosophical Moment /over

I've started working more in the community platform space over the last eight months, specifically with Higher Logic. I really like the people on their team, so if you're looking for an alternative, I'd be happy to make some introductions:)

<@U07V02XU2CB> - having AI-assisted CS, 100%. However they've replaced all CS coverage with AI, and are making CS redundant.

It does sound like the new company is going by their playbook. Strip out CS, add Ai, etc. With Influitive we also saw them over pricing for contract renewals and it felt like a manuever to get rid of the lower paying company customers.

Most of the people in EMEA have been made redundant this week. Nothing formal in the UK yet, but they are just waiting at this point :/

i think in the case of Influitive, they came in and almost instantly wiped out all employees. The issue with that is that Influitive was providing and required a good deal of best practice advisory and support. They then replaced them with different, more affordable resourcing that didn’t have any expertise in the field. This ended up backfiring for them, btw, and they had to pivot a bit.

Did folks see Richard’s post today on how it’s going and his thoughts for customers on Khoros: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richard-millington-5a32782_the-end-of-khoros-a-tragic-end-to-a-once-activity-7342876597848293378-l2sb?

Yeah - not the biggest fan of him, but he does a good summary. The UK team all received their redundancy notice last week, too. Urgh... so many feels :(

Yeah, I've been messaging the community team at Spotify this morning, they genuinely can't get hold of a human to figure out what's happening :/

I heard that Adobe was leaving Khoros…

Common alternatives I hear about today are:
• Discourse
• Higher Logic
• Gainsight Customer Communities (fka inSided)
• Slack X Tightknit

Gainsight Community (InSided) was built VERY differently, and agree with Christine, the customisations are limited - their latest investments were more in the back-end/analytics + integrations within the wider CS product suite (which has its value).

We had moved off Higher Logic (we were on the OG platform), beyond the product performance, issues with metrics and integrations, we had big account management/support issues with being in EMEA, and I would personally not want to work with them again.

What would you choose?

Ha, tricky one! It would depend on a lot of factors, including the existing tech stack & architecture, internal resources (development, project management, etc), requirements, audience and overall business case, then take into consideration the product itself (performance, features, roadmap, etc.) and support/experience with the vendor.

IF I am working for an organisation that is committed and has in-house development features, I wouldn't mind a white-labelled platform like Discourse, alternatively, if there is already a strong existing community on 3rd party platforms, I'd also be open to partnering with them, and figuring out a way I can tie potential investment back to the business case.

I'd challenge that you may not always need a forum/type platform/destination, depending on your audience, interactions styles and objectives.

1000% <@U08R6SQJA4X>
> I'd challenge that you may not always need a forum/type platform/destination, depending on your audience, interactions styles and objectives.

<@U08R6SQJA4X> I too wish companies could just be satisfied to do a good job and serve a need, but sadly that’s PE and Khoros went from Vists to Ignite :(

Brian Oblinger just dropped a discount code for the Advance Strategy: Platform Migration course on Community Strategy Academy 🤓

Details here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/community-strategy-academy_so-uh-i-guess-we-should-talk-about-migrations-activity-7343263139146190859-x0nK?