From Audience to Ecosystem: Why Community is the New Growth Engine
# Artificial Intelligence
# B2B
# B2C
# Business Transformation
# Customer Experience (CX)
# Customer-Centricity
# Data
# Digital Strategy
# Leadership
# Technology
# Value Creation
How Gradual is turning fragmented events into scalable engagement infrastructure
Heather Holst-Knudsen
There’s a lot of lip service paid to “community” in business right now. Every brand wants one. Every event organizer thinks they already have one. But few truly understand what community is, and even fewer know how to build one that delivers real, compounding business value.
That’s what I unpacked with Jerry Li, co-founder and CEO of Gradual, on the latest episode of the Revenue Room™ podcast.
Jerry didn’t just build a platform. He built ELC (Engineering Leadership Community)—the largest network of engineering leaders in the world—and then turned the tech he built to scale it into Gradual, a next-generation community platform now used by OpenAI, Scale AI, Fiverr, and more.
This episode isn’t about theory. It’s a masterclass in what actually works when building communities that grow enterprise value.
Why Events Aren’t Enough
Jerry began his journey out of frustration: learning how to lead was slow, isolating, and often came at the expense of your team. He didn’t want to “experiment on people” to figure out what made great leadership work, he wanted to learn from peers navigating the same challenges.
He tried live meetups. But while the Bay Area has thousands of them, none offered the curated, context-rich, trust-based conversations that real growth required. The result? He built his own.
The real problem wasn’t that events didn’t work—it’s that they ended. They weren’t designed to support the “what’s next.” There was no way to continue the conversation, build deeper connections, or act on what was learned.
That’s the gap Gradual now fills: an always-on, highly curated community infrastructure that extends the value of every event, conversation, and connection.
SEE OUR FULL INTERVIEW ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL
From Community to Ecosystem
One of Jerry’s most important insights is that real community is the bridge to an ecosystem. It starts with shared context and trust—but when you maintain that over time, something remarkable happens: people start bringing their full selves, their real problems, and their best ideas.
And they start inviting others to join.
In ELC’s case, events fueled community growth but only because they were relentlessly curated. Only engineering leaders were allowed in. Sponsors had to earn their way through aligned value. Jerry’s team was ruthless about protecting the trust of the group, even turning people away.
The result? Word-of-mouth exploded. One Slack employee attended and invited 30 colleagues the next day. That’s community-led growth, fueled by value, not vanity.
OpenAI: A Case Study in Strategic Community
Jerry shared how OpenAI built its first Gradual-powered community for just 200 world-class researchers. The goal wasn’t marketing, it was product influence and idea generation.
Then something interesting happened. One of those community members became OpenAI’s first enterprise sports client. Suddenly, the community wasn’t just a thought leadership hub but a go-to-market engine.
Today, OpenAI is running multiple communities via Gradual, including OpenAI Academy, their global AI literacy initiative. Each started with a narrow, specific use case. Each became a powerful growth lever.
Lesson? You don’t need to boil the ocean. Start with one real problem, solve it in community, and build from there.
What This Means for Media and Events
If you’re a media company or event organizer still treating “community” as a feature—or worse, a marketing tactic—it’s time to rethink everything.
Community isn’t a bolt-on. It’s the next infrastructure layer for business growth.
It’s the difference between hosting a dinner party and building a neighborhood. It’s how you extend brand trust into daily relevance. And it’s how you make sure you’re not just acquiring an audience but activating an ecosystem.
Gradual is giving us the tools to do this, combining events, content, connections, and data in one platform. And Jerry’s team is helping rewire how we all think about value creation.
The Future is Gradual—and Exponential
Jerry closed the episode with a vision of the future: AI-powered agents embedded in communities, surfacing insights, matching members to opportunities, and making every interaction exponentially more valuable.
At H2K Labs, we’re already seeing the impact Gradual is having inside Revenue Room™ Connect. But what excites me most is what’s ahead, where communities aren’t just engagement plays, but engines for GTM, innovation, and enterprise value.
Because if you’re not building community, you’re building churn. And if you’re only tracking metrics, you’re missing momentum.
The future belongs to businesses that build with their customers, not just for them.
And that future? It’s already here. It’s just gradual.
Heather Holst-Knudsen is a distinguished figure and expert in the events, media, marketing and technology sectors. Using her extensive experience, she guides clients in adapting to structural economic and market changes, seizing the chance to innovate and evolve. She specializes in digital and data disruption and opportunity, exploring how these overarching factors can impact revenue growth, customer-centricity, operational efficiency, profit margins, and the overall valuation of companies in both public and private markets.
Her journey began at her family business, Thomas Publishing Company, where she honed her skills. She further expanded her expertise by holding positions at early industry giants Miller Freeman, Reed Elsevier, and IDG. Returning to Thomas Publishing, Heather founded and spearheaded Manufacturing Enterprise Communications, an integrated media portfolio connecting buyers and sellers in the manufacturing and technology sectors. Starting in 2015 and spanning the next seven years, she leveraged her expertise as a revenue and business leader in various SaaS businesses, including Feathr, Gleanin, Brella and Edflex.
Heather is deeply passionate about digital innovation, data monetization, and AI and how these strategies fuel revenue growth, profitability, and company valuation. To serve and create value for clients in these areas, she launched H2K Labs, dedicated to generating and leveraging value through data for media, business information, events, and adjacent technology and service markets.
