After two years of testing and $52 million in funding, Common Room is releasing its software in the wild.
The Seattle startup on Thursday made its “intelligent community growth platform” available to all companies and revealed more details about the product.
Founded in 2020 by four Seattle-area tech vets, Common Room aims to help companies build a better conduit between their orgs and people in their communities. It integrates with communication apps such as Slack, Twitter, Discord, and more. The idea is to make “community” a competitive advantage, connecting users with each other and soliciting product feedback.
The company has been testing its software with a handful of customers including Asana, Confluent, HubSpot, and others. Common Room CEO Linda Lian said the startup has closed “multiple six-figure deals.” Its target market is wide, including organizations of all sizes and from various industries. The company offers a free tier; a team tier starting at $1,250/month; and a custom enterprise tier.
The problem Common Room is trying to address, according to Lian, is that the way software is being evaluated and adopted has fundamentally shifted. Companies are increasingly influenced by their communities of users and champions who provide feedback across an assortment of engagement channels.
But those companies don’t have an easy way to surface all those comments and act on them, Lian said. That’s where Common Room comes in — “high intense signal” is how Lian describes what it offers.
“You can’t control the way in which your users or your community wants to engage with you,” Lian said. “We tie all of this community engagement and conversation, and marry it with internal product usage and revenue data.”
Lian said there are no existing “incumbent solutions” that compete with Common Room, but noted there are several similar startups. “Our space is very early,” she said.
There are also countless free forum software options, and existing platforms such as Stack Overflow and ZenDesk that help gather community and customer feedback.
“We fundamentally believe that your community is going to engage with you through all sorts of different modes,” Lian said. “It could be a forum, it could be social. We’re not opinionated about any of that. We’re really tying together all those places into a centralized view for the community and developer advocacy teams, to see the community across all of these silos and disparate systems.”
Lian is a former associate at Madrona Venture Group and senior product marketing manager at Amazon Web Services. Other Common Room co-founders include:
- Chief Architect Tom Kleinpeter, most recently a principal engineer at Dropbox who sold a music streaming startup to the cloud giant in 2012.
- Design Chief Francis Luu is a designer who spent 10 years at Facebook.
- CTO Viraj Mody was formerly the engineering director at Dropbox and technical advisor to the CEO at Seattle startup Convoy.
Last year the company brought on Karen Ng, a former exec at Microsoft and Google, as vice president of product, and in February hired Jake Randall, former longtime exec at Okta, as chief operating officer.
Common Room, a finalist for Startup of the Year at the GeekWire Awards, raised a $32.3 million Series B round led by Greylock a year ago. Other backers include Index Ventures; Madrona Venture Group; Next Play Ventures; 01 Advisors; and a bevy of angel investors — including Etsy CEO Josh Silverman; former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; and former Axiom CEO Elena Donio.
