Customer Communities

14Law 10: Bring Your Culture and Values to Your Community: Build with a Human-First Mindset

By Nick Mehta

April 10, 2018, was a big day in our company's history and an even bigger one in Nick's life. That Tuesday morning in San Mateo, California, at our Pulse conference marked the beginning of his unlikely rap music career. And a few minutes later, that day also coincided with its end.

The lineage of the one-hit customer success software wonder hip hop tribute, “Who's Fired Up?” started with a throwaway line from Nick's Pulse keynote five years earlier in 2013. To engage the audience in the first-ever Pulse conference, Nick opened the event with his eventual catchphrase: “Who's excited? Who's fired up?” Little did he know that that statement would become a mantra for the energy of the Pulse community. Over the years, Nick would open every event with the same cliched welcome to raucous enthusiasm from attendees. Eventually, Nick and Gainsight's former chief marketing officer, Anthony Kennada, had the idea to playfully turn the meme into a parody rap song about customer success, so “Who's Fired Up?” appeared on Spotify and YouTube.

While this certainly sounds like a plot from the satirical HBO TV show Silicon Valley, this story captures something more fundamental about communities: the most successful ones enable the attendees and organizers to be their true selves, quirks and all. At Gainsight, we coined the term “Human-First” to capture this spirit. The best communities have ...