Catherine Graham’s 5-Minute Overview: How Community Powers commonsku

Canada is home to some big names in the technology world: Shopify, Hootsuite, and Freshbooks, to name a few. Toronto is the 4th largest city in North America with a population of over 6 million and is home to a robust tech community.

TechToronto is an organization that hosts a monthly meetup of Toronto’s tech founders, innovators, and enthusiasts. Each month, leaders give presentations on innovations and developments to an audience of peers.

Catherine Graham, CEO at commonsku, delivered a brief presentation on how community makes a platform stickier. “Stickiness” is a term used to describe customer loyalty: building something compelling enough that customers want to stay.

When a product is sticky, you can experience what’s known in the SaaS world as “negative churn,” meaning, more licenses are added from existing customers than are lost from people leaving the platform.  We have been fortunate to have experienced negative churn since inception, which means that we are delivering on our mission of helping our customers grow.

From our content online, to our events like commonsku University, skucamp, and skucon, Catherine speaks to how the intangible factors like collaboration, education, and sharing, make commonsku a vibrant community. commonsku is not only a platform where entrepreneurs maximize their efficiency, but also an offline movement that mirrors the online experience, where purposeful connections build meaning and confidence into the entrepreneurial journey.