When Erica Kuhl joined Salesforce as employee #176, nothing about her role or title suggested she would go on to build one of the most influential customer communities in SaaS history. Given a broken website, no roadmap, no team, she hacked together the first Salesforce Community with duct-taped technologies, raw conviction, and a fierce belief that customers needed a place to help each other.
That grassroots experiment eventually grew into a 17 million-member global community, became a blueprint for digital customer success, and reshaped the way enterprise SaaS companies think about adoption, retention, and product feedback loops.
Today, Erica is EVP & GM at Gainsight, leading community, education, and in-app product experience—and shaping the emerging category of Digital Customer Success.
This episode is a masterclass in community-powered retention, scrappy innovation, and how one person can build an entirely new motion inside an organization long before the market knows it needs it.
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Timestamps
0:00 – Preview
0:58 – Meet Erica Kuhl: EVP at Gainsight & Former Employee #176 at Salesforce
3:39 – What Early Salesforce Adoption Actually Looked Like
6:25 – Teaching Admins Before Admins Existed
9:40 – Why Erica Pitched a Community Before “Community” Was a Thing
11:25 – Building the First Salesforce Community
13:43 – Scaling Without Support
19:30 – How Community Became a Strategic Retention Lever
24:44 – Defining Digital Customer Success
26:35 – Where to Start: Crawl–Walk–Run for Digital CS
30:25 – Why Community Multiplies GRR
31:28 – Closing Thoughts
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What You’ll Learn
- How the first modern SaaS community was built—from scratch, without buy-in
- Why peer-to-peer engagement scales support, adoption, and product feedback
- How to tie community engagement directly to retention (and why it’s essential)
- Why COVID reshaped the priority of customer marketing and always-on programs
- How community, education, and in-app experiences converge into Digital CS
- Where digital CS programs should start and how to avoid fragmented experiences
- The cultural mindset needed to build community programs that actually survive
- Practical tactics for early-stage community building: seeding, puppeteering, protecting, and aligning
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Check out the Key Takeaways & Transcripts: https://www.gainsight.com/presents/series/unchurned/
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Where to Find Erica:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericakuhl/
Podcast: In Before the Lock
Where to Find Josh:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/
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Resources Mentioned:
* Brian Oblinger’s Community Strategy Academy
* Skilljar