Zach Hawtof is the CEO and co-founder of Tightknit, a platform that helps businesses run communities on Slack. Before founding Tightknit, Zach spent nearly six years at Salesforce, where he became deeply immersed in the power of community at enterprise scale. He later joined Airkit, where he learned the zero-to-one startup journey before taking the leap to build Tightknit in 2023.

In this episode:

- The power of community: why businesses should invest in it

- What Salesforce taught Zach about product, marketing, and go-to-market

- How AI and the changing workplace are reshaping how professionals engage with communities

- The future of community-led growth in B2B SaaS

- The journey of Tightknit's pricing strategy, from early experiments to its evolving monetization model

𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀:

1️⃣ Know Your Buyer First, Then Price Accordingly – “Different teams think about pricing differently. Engineers expect usage-based models, marketers want predictability. Your pricing model should align with how your buyers think.”

2️⃣ Make Pricing Transparent but Scalable – “Early on, we show customers everything about our pricing, but we also think about how we grow with them. The key is balancing simplicity with expansion levers.”

3️⃣ Optimize for Adoption Before Optimization – “Right now, we’re focused on getting the right customers at the right entry points. Optimization comes later. The goal is to fit where our customers are today and scale as they grow.”

⏳ Chapters:

00:00 Introduction and Zach’s Background

05:12 Lessons from Salesforce and Airkit

13:47 The Role of Community in B2B SaaS

20:33 Building and Scaling Tightknit

30:12 The Future of Community-Led Growth

40:58 Tightknit’s Pricing Journey and Lessons Learned

48:06 The Importance of Aligning Pricing with Buyer Mindset