How Community-Led Marketing Drives Sustainable B2B SaaS Growth With Derek Weeks

Revenue Engine Podcast

Derek Weeks is the Chief Marketing Officer at Katalon, a company that provides an AI-augmented software quality management platform for automating testing and improving software development workflows. He brings over 30 years of marketing experience, including leadership roles at Sonatype and the Linux Foundation. Derek co-founded All Day DevOps and has pioneered efforts in open-source software supply chain security. He is also the author of Unfair Mindshare: A CMO’s Guide to Community-Led Marketing in a Product-Led World.

In this episode…

Building a loyal audience is harder than ever in the crowded B2B SaaS landscape. Traditional marketing tactics can struggle to break through, and customer acquisition costs continue to rise. How can companies create authentic connections that lead to long-term growth?

According to Derek Weeks, a seasoned marketing leader and pioneer in community-led strategies, the answer is to put audience needs first and consistently provide value before selling anything. He highlights that trust is earned by creating spaces where people can learn, share, and engage without feeling pitched. By leveraging user-generated content and empowering practitioners to create authentic conversations, he has seen communities grow to hundreds of thousands of members.

In this episode of the Revenue Engine Podcast, host Alex Gluz sits down with Derek Weeks, Chief Marketing Officer at Katalon, to discuss how community-led marketing drives sustainable B2B SaaS growth. They explore strategies to scale a product community from 60,000 to 117,000 members, why user-generated content lowers acquisition costs, and how to adapt content for the age of LLM search. Derek also shares lessons from building the All Day DevOps community and keeping audiences engaged over time.