“I think people underestimate the power of connection … but even with just one experience with Matcha and the program I've built – they totally get it. They get the power of connection, unlocked with one conversation. It almost becomes addictive.”

Tamara Grominksy, previously VP of Product Marketing at Kajabi, knows the importance of peer-to-peer engagement for senior product marketing leaders. Driven by personal experience and seeing a gap in the market, she founded PMM Camp – a community built for and by product marketing leaders.  

With over 4,000+ members – ‘campers’ as they are called – PMM Camp is a thriving, member-powered space built on a foundation of connection. In fact, when people join PMM Camp they report that the “leading value prop is our one-on-one matching program. That’s the thing they’re most excited about.”

Commitment to Community

It’s a leap of faith to leave a full-time job in SaaS and build your own community from scratch.  But Tamara's vision was clear: to fill the void in the market with a community tailored specifically for mid- to late-career product marketers. 

She explains: “There are a lot of spaces and content and conversations for product marketers, generally. But really none for senior product marketers. Mid- to late-career product marketers. And so I wanted to create a space where we went deeper than the general content that's available.”

Indeed, today’s digital world serves up information for any topic, platform, or job function. What Tamara realized was missing was the personal component – a curated way to connect with others who can share, inspire, guide, and relate. 

This helps PMM Camp stand out from the crowd. “It’s different than many communities because I’m not the teacher. They don't get access to courses or anything like that. It's really about connection. That's at the heart of PMM Camp.”

Building Connection the Right Way

From the beginning, Tamara had a vision for a platform where members come together intentionally around mutual interest or shared professional experience. Solo PMMs who want someone to riff and commiserate with. Leaders working to get product-led motions up and running.  

Those individual members, collectively, have a lot of knowledge to share.  “I have over 4000 subscribers, all product marketers. I get tons of questions from them like ‘can you cover this concept’ or ‘can you help me with this topic?’ And I thought: wouldn't it be cool to connect people together?”

The members themselves were looking for this as well. “I did a bunch of customer interviews of campers in my community and many people said one of the things they wanted out of PMM camp was more one on one connection. So I knew it was a priority.”

However, as a product leader, Tamara has high standards. She’d seen other solutions that left much to be desired. Random pairings without intelligent matching. Introductions that dead-end on Slack. Meetings that never get scheduled.

“I wanted to facilitate one on one connection. And I wanted to do it in an intelligent way,”

Matcha provides that seamless and intelligent platform experience, while integrating easily with her tool stack and process. As a baseline, the platform's intuitive interface and intelligent algorithm ensure that members are paired based on relevant criteria. 

“One person in my paid community said: ‘How good is Matcha?... It connected me with someone who I already had a meeting scheduled with because we had already identified that we should meet. The logic is that good.”

These relevant conversations, in turn, provide energy and inspiration into the group. Tamara explains: “I've heard members say it’s an awesome chance to feel heard, make a new friend, make a new connection, chat with someone else going through the same experience that I'm going through.”

Additionally, the Camper Connections program has matched up people as far away as India and California, enabling exposure to individuals that might not otherwise have the chance to meet. 

The Compounding Benefits of a Matcha Program

It may seem simple, but bringing people together with a matching program has created a compounding impact on the success of the community itself. 

Participation in the Camper Connections matching program…

→ Leads to more newsletter subscribers, a prerequisite to joining the program.

→ Helps foster inclusion and move people toward a paid membership

→ Sustains and builds engagement on a much deeper level than just reading content

→ Spurs individuals to share about PMM Camp and the program on social, resulting in increased brand awareness and unpaid exposure

“The program creates good word-of-mouth opportunity. Several people who participated in the program then posted on LinkedIn about it. … I can't necessarily measure the impact of that, but I'm very happy when more people are organically promoting my brand.”

Simplicity and integration

Like most professionals today, Tamara is busy and wants to keep her tech stack uncomplicated. So, from the beginning, she appreciated the simplicity of Matcha.

“I'm a one-person business. I run my entire business myself and Matcha has simplified my tech stack, not complicated it. It's totally possible for a solopreneur to use this tool and didn't require me to lean on anyone else.”

Matcha also fits right into the PMM Camp workflow. Whenever a new member joins, they receive an automated email update that includes information about how to join the program. And members can easily find and click through to the one-on-one matching program via the Resources tab in their Kajabi community.

A large variety of community platforms provide different features; Matcha is designed to work easily alongside them to power peer-to-peer engagement, without all the work.  

The intangible power of opportunity and connection

Building a business or your professional success has an element of luck to it. But Tamara believes you can make more space for that luck. You can intentionally create more opportunity for success to occur. 

“You can actually create opportunities for luck to come your way. By creating space to take a meeting and meet someone new, you're inviting a really amazing opportunity that might be your next best friend or your next job offer, or your next consulting gig. So, for me, every day I think: How could I increase my luck surface today? The Camper Connections program is my effort to increase the luck surface of everyone in my community.”

There is certainly an inherent challenge in measuring the impact of intangible things like luck, opportunity, community.  

When it comes to building community, a high degree of the work that is done remains hard-to-measure in a quantitative way. Rather than see that as an obstacle, Tamara uses the intangible nature of her work as a launchpad. 

“It's like you either understand the power of connection or you don't. There's no number. But I am confident that this is going to have compounding benefits on my business. And more importantly, it will have benefits for my mission – to connect product marketing leaders. I believe the more we can connect with each other, the more we can lift each other up, support each other, and grow together.”

Learn more about PMM Camp, their community, and Matcha today.