EP0005 A Tribe of Advocates
In this episode of the Daily Motivation Podcast’s Brand Builder playlist, host Corvay (Kaveh) explains why community is the engine behind a successful personal brand. He shares personal anecdotes from his high‑school music days and early brand‑building attempts, illustrating how a tight‑knit tribe creates lasting loyalty. The discussion moves through offline tactics (events, mastermind dinners, local meet‑ups), online tactics (Substack newsletters, Facebook groups, virtual masterminds, webinars), and the importance of delegating community‑management to dedicated staff. Corvay outlines a practical growth framework: start with a small pod of 10‑people, deliver high value, scale to 100+ members, then convert them into advocates who amplify the brand. He warns against common pitfalls such as chasing raw numbers without engagement, neglecting content batching, and taking long breaks that trigger algorithmic penalties. The episode also covers monetization experiments (low‑price subscriptions, tiered offerings), the role of AI in automating content creation and community operations, and partnership tactics like podcast swaps. Throughout, the tone is motivational yet instructional, urging listeners to treat community as the heart of their brand and to build systematic, scalable processes around it.
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Freedom! You're listening to the Daily Motivation Podcast. A place to take your life to the next level. Your business, your fitness, your dreams. Let's go! So what up, it's your boy, Corvay, Inspiration Engineer. You already know what it is. Welcome back to another episode of the Brand Builder playlist, the Personal Brand Playbook. Podcast newsletter where we talk all things influence, personal branding, marketing, media, AI, life design, motivation, music, and entrepreneurship in between. I am super excited, grateful to have you here. Wanted to jump right into this episode as we start talking about growing your personal brand through community. I want you to write this down: you thrive as a tribe. You thrive as a tribe. If you're driving, don't worry about writing it down. Make sure that you come back and you jot that down, that it is the people who are great at building communities that are great at building phenomenal brands. community building. When I was locally famous, I started to process and break down why and how did that happen. Like, honestly, I didn't know if— and I'm being 3,000% transparent with y'all— when I listen to the music that I was making at that time, I'm a freshman in high school. Which means you're about 14, 15 years old. When I think about the content that I was making at that time, and then I listen to it today, I laugh at how I create music today. But back then, to me, it was the hottest shit out, right? And I don't know if for everybody else that was the consumer of this product and the consumer of the brand, if they were just attached to the idea that, hey, this is a classmate and somebody I know and they're doing cool shit, or if the content was really dope. To this day, I would need to interview those people to figure out, you know, what it was for them. Matter of fact, something very funny is, uh, one of, uh, classmates that I knew, not a great friend, but I've known him since we were in 6th grade, so I don't know, quite a long time. Mm-hmm. But his wife reached out to me actually this past year and she asked me for his 40th birthday, would I perform one of the songs for his birthday, which was hilarious to me. But that is awesome and reminds me of those great times. But that is a question that I ask. But why do I bring up this story? In high school, I had some of the most amazing memories and experiences because of the community and the tribe that we built and we established. I was a part of a heterosexual male camaraderie friend group, primarily athletes, that we were just an energy. We were just a vibe. Meaning, you know, at every dance we competed who could bring the best color suit. We, um— Yeah. You know, when we go to an event, like, we were just good energy, good vibes, making people laugh, having fun, having a good time. And that was the energy we, we curated. Me personally, I didn't like the jock narrative. I didn't like, and I still don't like to this day, the stereotypes or the niches or the, the cliques, as they call them, where you're in this subgroup. Like, if I wanna— I'll never forget, there was these kids that were like skater, you know, kids, and they were playing hacky sack and they're kicking the hacky sack around. And I jump in to kick the hacky sack and they look at me like, what are you doing in our circle? What are you doing in our group? And I'm looking at them like, kick me the sack, yo, like, let me play with y'all, right? I just wanna play. Like, I don't, I don't care. And all those things, as far as people are people, humans are humans, and I'm learning that more so even traveling the world. But I say that same— that's just been the person that I've been. Yeah. And the fact that I did music, I think with the energy that I created, that I'm the silly side of me and the jokester, if you will, those I think elements attached to being in person with these people and now having something that they felt was cool, I think that created a fandom within them. And now we've got a tribe by necessity because we gotta go to school together every day, right? But it wasn't like as far as what we do today where we're creating content, we had a drip campaign, we're doing all the things. It wasn't that. We were in community. Being that we were in community, we were always having conversations, we were always having, always having discussions, we were always talking about whatever was trending at that time, right? This is in the MySpace era or right before that. And so you've got friends, right? Which is why you hear me say relationships over revenue, purpose over profit. You've got these people that have built these relationships with you, and now you've got a product or service or something that can solve a problem or can create a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or experience for them that they can't get anywhere else on the planet, and they'll never forget you for that. But building in community, building in tribes, very important. So a question that I get— Okay, well, how does that translate to today? What would you say to somebody today? On one of the previous episodes, we talked about influence is massive. There are so many ways to get a brand seen, heard, and experienced. One of these outlets, one of these ways, which I would encourage you— you need online and you need offline strategies— but community events, coworking events, investor events, content creator events, conferences, uh, workshops, uh, retreats. Being where people are. All right, that's how you create community from an offline standpoint. It's still good to shake hands and kiss babies like politicians do and move accordingly, right? But it doesn't have to be offline solely. I think for the kinesthetic side of it, it's wise. But let's look at the virtual side of it. You can have virtual masterminds, right? You can have virtual workshops, virtual webinars, virtual opportunities for people to get together and connect. That is important. It's not as easy to facilitate if you don't have a community manager and somebody that does this full-time. Right? As a solopreneur or a solo founder, if you're doing everything and now you've also got to build community, it's a lot. Okay, I would encourage you and I would, uh, employ you to really learn how to delegate, because doing everything is not a badge of honor. Okay, doing everything means that you really don't have the resources to scale the way you want to. I mean, real talk. Or you don't know how to lead, or you don't know how to delegate. It's one of those things. But having somebody who is sole purpose, the account manager, the customer support, the community manager that is managing all these relationships, getting people together, sending out invites, having events, remembering birthdays, remembering key dates, having someone that contributes to the community— Builds a tribe. That thrives. Now, Kaveh, what have you done and failed miserably at when it comes to community building? There was a season where I wanted to go quantitatively, and I was naive enough, I was ignorant enough to believe that if I built a platform with large numbers, people are going to see it because that's why you built the platform. Wrong. Once you build it, now you got to promote or pay to make sure that those same people see it, or you got to make sure that the community and the tribe is so engaged that when you publish content, people are commenting, sharing, liking from an organic standpoint, which triggers the algorithm and makes sure that that content is shown to more people. This is why you guys have heard me talk about Substack, and our brand— brand builder playlist was actually established on Substack. But the reason why people love Substack is because it still has some of the elements of true organic, okay? And this is one of those things. Majority of people that build a large Substack following, they do it within app, meaning they're not bringing their external email list to their Substack. They're actually building a community within Substack, okay? But I say that to say it still applies, right? It still applies that in order to be successful, you want to create a tribe of people that become fans of what you're doing. Okay. You want those people to evolve into a tribe of advocates that then become word-of-mouth warriors that go out and tell people about what you do and the amazing work and things and who you are. Right? But community is powerful. And in community, you can start with a— we call them a pod, like a small group. You can start with a pod of 10 people, right? Deliver amazing value and scale those 10 people. 10 to 30 is not hard to do. 30 to 50 is not hard to do. 50 to 100 is not hard to do. Okay, that's fairly simple to do. The modality and the method in which you do that is up to you, right? Whether that's webinars, whether that's masterminds, whether that's dinners. I read a phenomenal book by— I think his name is, uh, Jason Gangard. I'm not sure how you say it. I apologize if I'm butchering the name, but it was called Mastermind Dinners, which is inviting people out to dinner. How many people— these are old school things. These are very old school ways of connecting. Inviting people out to dinner where we're going to talk shop and we're going to educate, we're going to share, we're going to connect, and we're going to build. When I was in Austin, Texas, that's what I loved about Austin, Texas, was there was a meetup group for damn near anything you can think of, and people were connecting. I love Buenos Aires, which is where we started to move our hub, because there's so many co-working spaces, film studios, music studios. Oh, these are my people. Hello. Hola. Now I just need to get my Spanish up, right? Like, I speak some Spanish, un poquito, but I don't speak enough, right? But that's my point, is building a community, finding your people online and offline, right? And inviting them to opportunities, free opportunities where you can give them value, putting layers of value behind a paywall where they have to invest to get that value, right? Building case studies and testimonial stacking, right? And incentivizing, honestly, people to bring more people in. Majority of people are not, in my experience, just going to go share unless whatever you gave them was just mind-blowing and they just absolutely loved it. Majority of people are going to take their wins and keep it pushing and think about what they got to accomplish tomorrow, right? What they got to accomplish in the month, right? All the things going on in the personal and the professional life. In my experience, people are not radically— without an incentive, people are not radically motivated to share the great things that you do, that I do, that we do. That's just not the way people work. They're radically focused on themselves, right? So unless there's an incentive, unless there's a reason, or unless it is brought to their train of thought— hey, do you know 3 to 5 other people that would be a great fit for this tribe, right? We started a tribe of brand builders. Before that, it was Motivation Music Patreon subscribers, and we had a— when we were doing that test we were launching a subscription at $3.99 to figure out what the market would bear. And we had a very engaged audience, but $3.99 subscription, which is what people are willing to pay at that time, an individual contributor or content creator that is also on Spotify and everywhere else, it's like, all right, why would I pay more than $3.99 if I can go get your content on YouTube or Spotify or wherever it's at? So that was a difficult business model to scale, without millions of dollars— $1.5 million to be exact— $1.5 million to scale that business without even seeing a return on that investment. So I say that saying, we let that community slowly die. Unfortunately, bad choice. Then we launched Brand Builders, and we went through seasons, and we went through pockets where we were active and we were engaged and we were doing all the things. But again, when you are a solo founder or a solo, um, you know, preneur or small team, That— there's a lot of moving parts, people. There's a lot of moving parts. And so if you're not at that 6-figure mark at minimum, right, minimum, then you need to figure out, okay, where do I really need to apply my time within my tribe? And a lot of that time that you're going to be spending is going to be content creation and production, and then acquisition, which is sales. We call it relationship acquisition. Selling your services. The bloodline of a business is money. Like, facts. Didn't write the rule of the game, but I know how to play. Does that make sense? So those are going to be the two top priorities that you're going to have as a small team or a small organization. As you scale out and you've got capital now to employ the right people, you've got the right systems, to share with the people, the SOPs for them to execute on your behalf. Okay, things that you already know, you're going to want to implement systems, whether it's reward systems, gamification systems, connecting systems, you know, sharing systems— systems, hello— systems that number one, get people into the tribe. Once they're in, give— B, gives them a great experience and onboarding while they're there. C encourages them to bring others in, right? And D, now we're talking about advocacy. But having a community is so important because without one, you are constantly and regularly and consistently going into the void with no one to endorse that content. Now let me share one more thing with you. Mm-hmm. We took a year and a half away from the scene. I really wanted to get clear on my life direction, meaning that I thought I was going to start a part of my spiritual purpose, which is my higher purpose. Awaken the Dreamers is my fleshly purpose. I thought life was going to take me down a different direction, and I needed to take some time away to really get clear. And when I took that time away, no content was created, no engagement was sought after, no nothing was happening online. And whether you say it's the algorithm, or whether you say it was just the lack of inertia and momentum and energy, whatever it was, numbers got butchered. Instagram no longer showed our content to, to new, uh, prospective people. LinkedIn didn't show our content to the community that we built. Facebook, the same. And so it's like all that work that you did, you took a break, you took a pause, and you got penalized for it. Okay, you want to make sure that in life, with life circumstances, you are building with the possibilities of what can happen if you're not actively creating content, which we've talked about the importance of batching content. This is why, right? And having enough content for a year, right? And you're not actively creating that content. It's a system working for you that gets people in your tribe that moves people through a process that builds that relationship, nurtures that relationship, gives them value, and is a self-fulfilling engine in itself, right? Having that, setting it up is— is— I'm not going to front, if you don't know how to do it, you don't have a coach doing it for you, you don't have somebody to do it for you, if it's your first time, it, it, it takes— it's not just like a, a, you know, drag and drop or click and play. But just like anything that's out there in the marketplace, you can learn it, you can master it. I would encourage you, I would employ you to get people that have already mastered it, you know what I mean? Reach out to people like me that have a system already that is plug and play, because we got a license that you can just license the system, right? Understanding the engine within the content creation and what we call the content assembly line in-house, and understanding what that factory looks like and what you need to produce, and being able to take the time out to batch out the content that you need to batch so that you get enough content, blogs, you know, podcasts, everything, and then you can syndicate it and become omnipresent without the overwhelm and the burnout. Being able to hire the right people that know how to do that so you don't have to do everything if you're a small team. And again, we work with a lot of people, I would say, at the $2.5 million level and below. All right, we have a lot of people that connect with us under $100,000. Okay, the lack of resources, all that means is that now you got to do more of the work. And so that's where AI comes into play and why we've added AI, because AI can do so many things of a full damn department, right? Hours and hours and hours and hours of work that you can knock out in an hour. Crazy stuff. Okay, but I say that same— Hey. The community is the heart. The people you serve is the heart. Talking with prospective buyers is the heart. Always connecting with your prospective customers and your customers is the heart of the business. There is no business and no revenue— the bloodline of business— without the customers. So it may make sense to spend adequate time to build within the community that you want to serve, to show up. Yeah. In the community that you want to serve, going to their events. That's why a lot of people do podcast swaps, like, hey, you get on my podcast, I get on your podcast, okay, let's jam, right? Being able to tap into other groups wherever people hang out. Where are your people? Figuring out where your people are and then tapping in, okay, is very vital. And I want to share one last thing. We had a A client— we actually fired this client, it just wasn't a good fit. Um, but fairly recently we had a client that was an intimacy relationship coach. Like, she worked with you to get your sex life together. That's what she did, right? And I guess based on the policies of Facebook and all the things that Facebook got going on, you couldn't say like you're a sex coach or something like that. We had to work with her on a strategy to even change that. We said, all right, intimacy coaching, right? That's what you do, right? And so she's like, well, I don't know where my people are. And it's like, well, have you looked at any Facebook groups? That is the good side of a saturated platform, is if they have groups, you can find subsets of your groups, or you can find your audience, you can find your tribe in other groups. So no, we couldn't find sex, sex groups because it's banned. But what could we find? Romantic groups, right? Intimacy groups. Trauma group. She was a trauma coach. I, I, you know, that was really what she did. We could have those other subsidiary groups that you're now syndicating content in to build relationships, and the people that engage are people that you might want to bring into your tribe and your community, right? But it starts with, with putting something out that makes people connect with that, or maybe it's just you. And then once you have that Now it's like, all right, for every person that engages and interacts with that content, to turn that into a conversation, right? And then it goes right back to what we were talking about on previous episodes was, do you know how to take a lead or somebody that is, in this case, generated from a piece of content and turn that into a customer, or in this case, a subscriber, or in another case, hey, come into this community and come hang out? Do you know how to take them through the process? And the mastery of the ability to be able to do that is gonna revolutionize and change the game in the way in which that you get things done. Okay, have to master that if you are going to be a personal brand portfolio. It is your boy, Kaveh. I love you, I appreciate you. I'm so grateful that I got this opportunity to serve you with this message. And until the next time, you already know what it is. Boom! Boom!
