From adoption to advocacy: How Replit used Common Room to speed up support and uncover high-fit customers

Background

Replit is a developer platform that helps users create and deploy apps in more than 100 programming languages. Over 23 million developers in more than 200 countries have already used Replit to create 250 million Repls (or projects), and its customer growth is keeping pace.

Keep up with community activity

Replit’s user community is made up of builders and software creators of all stripes and skill levels. As Head of Community at Replit, it’s Lena Vu Sawyer's job to educate and enable these users as they turn their ideas into products.

“Our users in the community are constantly pushing the limits of what Replit can do,” Lena said. “And that means we're always being challenged in a really inspiring way to continue raising the ceiling—adding better AI features, enhancing the workspace experience, improving on reliability and speed.”

While Replit’s community is key to product development, it's also a driving force behind product adoption and advocacy. Community members help each other discover new ways to build and ship applications using Replit, and the products they create help fuel word-of-mouth marketing.

“Because people are building on Replit, it means that we get a lot of really impressive content from our users,” Lena said. “We shine a light on users and it makes us glow brighter because the stuff they’re building is so impressive.”

The ability to find and highlight concrete customer stories is especially important in the artificial intelligence space. Replit’s community helps the company stand out in a crowded market.

“When we see people using Ghostwriter, our AI code assistant, all the way from initial idea to finished product, those are the stories that we want to highlight because it shows it's something that you can really use,” Lena said. “Our job is to find those users, enable them, and highlight those use cases where the AI features we’ve built are making a difference in a way that's very tangible.”

But keeping up with a widely dispersed community is easier said than done, both from a product support and product champion standpoint.

Replit’s official community channels—the Replit Community and Ask Forum—are natively built and Discord-based, respectively. User anonymity is the norm across both. Meanwhile, plenty of product users are spread across other digital channels, including Reddit, GitHub, and more.

A lack of identity matching makes it difficult to tie community activity to business impact. And siloed channels create fragmented, manual work streams that eat up valuable time.

To identify and deliver more value to high-fit customers—efficiently and at scale—Replit needed visibility into the people that make up its community and what they’re saying and doing.

Playbook

Build an automated Discord verification system

Uncover that member satoshi1984 is really Dorian Nakamoto.

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Support product users

Common Room allows Replit to bring together all its digital interaction, product, and customer data in one place via dozens of natively built and fully managed integrations. This helps Lena and the team centralize and analyze all activity across digital channels, including Discord, Discourse, GitHub, LinkedIn, Reddit, Stack Overflow, YouTube, and more.

“We want to find users to shine the spotlight on, and Common Room helps us surface those users,” Lena said.

In terms of product support, Replit uses Common Room’s reporting to keep tabs on emerging issues and how quickly they’re resolved, either with help from the Replit team or other community members.

“Our Ask Forum helps us scale existing support efforts because our users come in and help each other, which reduces the support load for our team,” Lena said. “Common Room allows us to measure how long it takes people to get a response, how many people are responded to, and how many of those involve our staff.”

Common Room’s auto-categories feature uses AI to detect sentiment, group content into relevant topics, and categorize conversations. This allows the team at Replit to quickly identify product questions or issues and determine the optimal follow-up action. Using filters, activity can easily be organized based on whether or not it’s already received a response.

Plus, with automated team alerts, Lena can be notified in real time whenever a support question comes through on any connected channel.

“We can jump into any post where there's no response yet or there hasn't been a response for a certain amount of time and make sure they get help,” Lena said.

Playbook

Meet your support SLAs with no sweat

Never let a service-level agreement fizzle again.

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Surface product champions

Common Room provides Replit with a bird’s eye view of all activity across digital channels. Using topics and categories, the team can quickly zero in on opportunities to spotlight product users and generate credible, authentic customer stories.

“We have a Slack channel where we get pinged every time someone deploys an app,” Lena said. “It’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notifications. But using Common Room, we can search for people who are mentioning deployments, or who are mentioning AI or ML, alongside Replit. We can immediately reach out to those people and signal boost the features that they’re using. Common Room is great for that.”

Replit can quickly see what has people talking and the sentiment surrounding it. Common Room’s AI-powered natural language processing makes it easy to spot trends, surface insights, and get a pulse on meaningful conversations.

The company can also make sure it’s always the first to know about business-relevant activity. Just as it can use automated team alerts to identify product support issues, the team can use them to automatically get notified about certain actions or conversations, such as those concerning AI technologies.

Tags allow the team to filter community members by certain attributes—such as whether they’re regular contributors or influencers with broad reach. This makes it easier for Replit to understand which individuals drive the most impact across digital channels.

“We can see whenever a feature is being talked about,” Lena said. “It's like we have a spotlight, and Common Room helps us decide who to shine it on.”

Playbook

Identify active champions in your dark funnel

Identify and engage with folks who love your product.

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Results

As a go-to tool for professional developers, Replit wants to make sure it understands and delivers value to its ideal customers.

And that starts with knowing who they are.

Common Room provides Replit with a unified view of community members by automatically creating a profile based on their interactions across collaborative surfaces.

Using Common Room, Replit can easily add product users who fit its ideal customer profile (ICP) to dedicated segments. The company can tag and connect with members of a segment all at once using automated workflows.

“Common Room helps us focus on the organizations that get the most value from our product," Lena said. "We know which attributes make someone a great fit for Replit. Before Common Room, I wasn't able to find and build relationships with these people."

Just as importantly, Replit can meet customers where they are and deliver value to them on their preferred communication channels.

"Common Room lets us know the best places to connect with our customers, whether it's Reddit, LinkedIn, or some other channel," Lena said. "That makes it easier for us to personalize our communications and make sure we're interacting with our users in the right place."

This way the team at Replit can inform its go-to-market activities based on the channels where its ideal customers are most likely to be found. The company not only knows who its high-fit customers are, but the best ways to reach them.

“We can do targeted engagement using pre-existing user-generated content to share very authentic stories of people using Replit,” Lena said.

And with comprehensive reporting and helpful automations, Common Room also helps Replit save valuable time on product support, all while making sure users get the help they need.

“The information around responsiveness and understanding how much staff engagement we need is actually a really big deal,” Lena said. “When I asked my colleague how much it helped decrease the support load for his team, the answer was, ‘Massively.’ That's a big business win.”

Users flock to Replit to work faster, smarter, and more effectively. Replit uses Common Room to do the same.

Find and support your ideal customers with Common Room

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