On The Offense: How Communities Demand New Business Models, With Victoria Mellor and Ashley Friedlein

Host David Foster interviews two Renewd members who have built their careers on monetizing communities: Victoria Mellor and Ashley Friedlein. Victoria built and sold Melcrum to what was then the largest global communities provider, CEB. Her new venture, Kademy, intends to take those models further. Ashley, meanwhile, the founder of eConsultancy, has published dozens of pieces about the transformative nature of communities on every aspect of our businesses, and then committed to his principles by founding Guild (Renewd will be moving to the Guild platform in the next 45 days).

Please join these two generous and thoughtful information industry leaders as they discuss why:

  • Enterprise and subscription sales models fail without engagement
  • The “customer experience” is no longer a nice-to-have bolt-on to your existing product and sales strategies
  • “Transactional” publishers (especially event producers) are losing market share to communities—never mind COVID
  • On-boarding never stops
  • Monetizing communities has different characteristics from nearly every other previous information industry business model (except perhaps SaaS).