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14d • Discussion 💬
Atlassian is leaving Khoros
For our collective research, this is an interesting case study for two reasons.
FIRST, MIGRATION PROCESS
Atlassian is showing us what migrating a decade-old community can look like, and what a community owner or operator can learn from it while transitioning between Level 3 and Level 4 of Community Investment Mastery.
How do you prepare members?
How do you preserve relationships, trust, data, content and reputation?
And how do you make sure a technical migration doesn't destroy the value built over a decade?
SECOND, POST-ACQUSITION STRATEGY
When you acquire a community, aren't you buying more than just a mass of people with recurring membership revenue? You're buying relationships, leaders within the segment, trust between them and the collective intelligence that holds the entire community together. Retention isn't just about how many members stay. It's about whether the entire system that creates value, including that recurring revenue, stays intact after the acquisition.
And this is exactly why I wouldn't criticise IgniteTech (They acquired Khoros), Bending Spoons (They acquired Meetup) or Salesforce (They acquired Slack) for their early Community M&A transactions.
They didn't have anything to build on. There was practically no Community M&A playbook before them. We're only now creating one together. Every successful and unsuccessful acquisition they make creates know-how that the rest of us can learn from. And that's incredibly valuable for the evolution of the entire industry.
I also don't agree with the idea that a new owner has to ruin a community. They can save it too. There are communities that didn't disappear because they were acquired, but because their founder burned out or couldn't make the transition from Level 3 to Level 4 of Community Investment Mastery.
I take two things away from this case. First, don't underestimate the importance of scouting the right opportunity. A good community usually isn't going to be offered for sale by its current owner. If they do want to sell, it's worth finding out why.
Second, when I acquire a well-established community, my first job isn't to reinvent it. It's to understand why it works, preserve what works and change only what genuinely needs changing. It's like buying an apple orchard. Only a fool would cut down the trees after acquiring it and plant banana trees just because they love bananas.
Maybe that's one of the most important principles of Community M&A. You often create the most value not by changing things after the acquisition, but by preserving what already works, asking key community members what they're missing and what they'd improve, and making sure it can be passed on to future generations.
There's one thing I'd really like to know, although I probably never will. Did the new owner sit down with Atlassian and first thank them for 10+ years of building their community on Khoros, for their financial support and for the value they created?
And more importantly, did anyone ask them what they would need from the platform to stay for another 10 or perhaps even 100 years?
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Atlassian is leaving Khoros
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