#146: Strategy | Community Building with Greg Isenberg

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit. Exit.

Exit.

All right, Greg is here. Greg is the founder and CEO of an interesting company called Late Checkout. They start and incubate a bunch of communities all across the world. I know that now because we just spent 12 minutes talking and this damn thing didn't record which we've all been there before. But I'll just give people the quick summary. So you run your company's called Late Checkout. Eight figures in revenue, a hundred team members across all those businesses. In your career you've started well, you've now invested in 50 plus community based businesses, you've started and sold three companies and you define yourself as a one trick pony in the community space, which I love. And I'm excited to talk to you about community today. So before we got kicked out of our other thing, now that we're live for everybody that's going to be listening to this. You were giving me a definition of community. And is your definition of community, does that mean, like, it has to be, like, behind a paywall, logged, like, logged into some site? Or can I think of community? Do you see community building as I could have an Instagram account with a lot of followers or an email list?

Yeah. So I think the mistake a lot of people make is they think of an Instagram page as a community, and it's just not necessarily the case. Because if you stop posting on that Instagram page two, three, four, five months down the road, there's just going to be no engagement. That, to me, is not a community. That's an audience. And I build my businesses with the same funnel in mind. I call it the ACP funnel. Audience. A for audience, C for community, and then P for product. So for me, an audience is very different than a community. And I define a community using this framework that I came up with just so I can stay sane during the days. It's called the Tribe Framework. And, you know, T, you can tell I'm a framework guy. ACP framework. I love it leads to Tribe Framework. So, you know, T stands for togetherness, R stands for rituals, I stands for member identity. You need to have a member, you know, an identity, B stands for belonging, and E stands for engagement. So all those ingredients really need to exist in order for it to be a true community. So to your point, it's like, does it have to be under our paywall or, you know, not necessarily. It could be free as long as it has those things. But that, to me, helps me to, you know, when I'm creating anything new or I'm looking at buying a new business or I'm looking at investing, the way I know it's a community is via that framework.

Okay, So I like, I love this audience. So basically, just distinguishing audience versus community is really important here because I think a lot of people might have an audience, but they haven't built a community. However, having an audience can give you an advantage in building a community, right? Somebody like Justin Welsh, you know Justin Welsh, right? Like, he built a big following on social media and then decided to, with his latest product, launch a community. Much easier for him to do that. Or when I started Exit 5 as an example, I get emails from people all the time. Hey, I'm starting. I'm thinking about starting a community. Like, how did you grow this thing? And I hate answering this question because I wish I had, like, a, an answer. But the answer was Greg was Like, I had a bunch of followers on another platform and I had already basically tested all of my ideas and content on that platform based on the response it was. This was on LinkedIn specifically based on the response to the LinkedIn content. I was like, huh, there's something here. I don't want to just build an email list. I actually want to try to build a community. And so the first thing I did was on Patreon. And so the how I got initial initially, how I got members was I posted about it, I told people that it existed, and that that got me the first 100, 200, 300 members. And then from there we just kept feeding it. So can you set out to build a community without the audience or would you want someone to f. Like, should you not go and focus on building a community until you have an audience? Do you have any advice for the cold start, like zero community place?

So first of all, this ACP funnel, like, if you're listening to this, like, drill this in your brain because once you see it, you will see it everywhere and it will change the way you actually think about how you launch social, how you launch community, and how you launch products. So if I'm creating something new to me, I always start with the audience. I always start with, okay, let me go on a rented platform. Let me go and create content that's niche, that is going to get shared with that group of people. And let me get to a place where I'm very credible, that if, you know, I always have the number in the head, 10,000 followers. I need 10,000 followers. And once I have 10,000 followers, then what my next goal is, What I usually do is I say, okay, how do I get the most hardcore of those 10,000 followers? Maybe that's a hundred people, 50 people into a community. And generally the tactic I use to get them into the community is I make it wait list only and private. Could be free, by the way. And I do that because it creates scarcity. So I basically say, like, let's say I created, you know, a AI community, let's say AI for marketers or something. I would, you know, create that Twitter account, let's say, or Instagram page, wait till it gets 10,000 followers and then say, like, hey, like I would have to figure out what their pain point is, right? Because the key of success of a great community is a transition and growth period. You can't just create a community for the sake of community. They have to come in and get from point A to point B. So I have to be very clear on what that is. And then I make it invite only and I make it wait list because, you know, scarcity drives human behavior. And my favorite quote on this is an Andy Warhol quote which he says, Studio 54 is a dictatorship at the door, but a democracy on the dance floor. So.

I love that.

Yeah, that's basically like how I design all my communities to start. Like I, I make it picture like Velvet Row bouncer and I hate that. I hate being exclusionary, but it just so happens to work. And then once you get in, it's absolutely a democracy.

Well, I think like, but why you're making that exclusionary is not just, it's not like a fake marketing tactic. It does create scarcity, it does create fomo. But I also think there's something to what you said which is to really nailing it. I think it's important to have people be in there and be active before you really want to drive more people in there. And so to start with some small group of people, even if you have 10,000 followers, you niche down and you create some community. We're only going to let in 50 people right now. I think there is value to being like, I'm just going to go three months with 50 people in here to really figure that out because man, I've learned so much about what to create through the community. I mean, you've spent your whole career in this space, but it is such an incredible playbook. And I want to say like almost cheat code because it's like, hey, what should we do? Like, I'll give you an example. We're doing our first in person event for Exit 5 in the fall. We're sourcing everything from the community. Like, who do you want to speak? What do you want them to talk about? What would the ideal day look like? We're not just going to blindly go do everything. I think we have to have some intuition of our own. But they help tell you what to go and do. And so if you want to get to from 50 to 500, you're going to need to really lean on those first 50 members or 50 people in your community to get there.

Yeah. And I think that for anyone building a business, forget the fact that you can build a community and slap on millions of dollars of ARR a year, forget the fact that you can do that. The level of clarity that you get from having 50 people in an active community telling you what they want, even in B2B is, you know, you can't put a price on that it's priceless.

Yeah. I think in B2B, it's especially interesting because you don't have to be. I think it was you that said this to me or you were quoting somebody else, but you said, basically, if you have a hundred thousand followers in B2B, you're basically Mr. Beast.

That was me. I was quoting myself. Yeah.

No, no, no, no. You weren't quoting yourself. You're telling me you're giving an example to me, right?

Totally. Yeah. I mean, that's why I think in consumer, the idea of community is pretty well understood and the power of it's pretty well understood. But I still think that in the B2B world, it's just a word that people throw around. And there are companies like HubSpot, I know thinks about community a lot, and so there's companies that think about it a lot. But I think that there's people like you who are basically creating this new wave of niche B2B communities. And I think that a lot of people are taking notice and being like, wow, like, I didn't realize that this could actually drive my business.

Well, for me, in my case, I didn't even realize that this could be a business.

Yeah, right.

Like, I've had a little bit of an entrepreneurial itch as a marketer, but I always thought I would have to build a product or build software to then apply all these tactics. And I kind of stumbled my way in. The way I got into exit 5 was I just started a private thing on Patreon where I shared my hot marketing takes. And after a couple hundred members, early member of mine, this guy, Henry Johnson, messaged me. He's like, hey, how about, like, you let us talk to each other, moron? And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, this would be great. And so I just added a Facebook group. And basically the only way you could get into that Facebook group was you became a member on Patreon. In that email you got back, we gave you the link to our Facebook group. I had a VA or in the early days myself. Like, you would have to request access. We would check the email, make sure they were paying in Patreon, then let you in. And then over time, Facebook just became like, not the right place. And so I eventually moved on, but that's how I fell into that. And really quickly, it was a thousand members paying $10 a month. And there was a. $10,000 a month. $10,000, you know, MRR and a 99 margin business. And I'm on Twitter, like, looking at These startups and others that, like, build in public, and they're like, we got to 6K 6K ARR. And just like, sharing these silly numbers. And I'm like, wait, does anybody. This is crazy. Like, and then it wasn't. I. I talked to you, you know, months ago, and I was like, oh, there's a small number of people that are doing this thing here. And I've seen communities in the past. I think there's B2B examples, but few people have done the, like, paid community route. And that's become, you know, its own business now. The question is, like, where to go from here. That we think about a lot with Exit 5. And I think you have an interesting funnel. And this is something that I'm thinking a lot about lately. I'm not sure that I want to build a big community. I'm not sure that the way is 5,000 members, 10,000 members. I think there's multiple. I'm more thinking now about like, oh, actually there's. There could be multiple products and there's multiple plays based off of this audience. And that kind of seems like something that you've thought through, right? You even talk about in acp, it's audience, community, product. What's your reaction to me saying that?

I mean, the truth is, it's funny because you heard me just basically say, like, community is the bee's knees. And I'm about to tell you that community is not the bee's knees in a second. The real opportunity is actually to build a membership. And there's a difference between a community and a membership. A membership is when you have a niche and you've bundled a ton of value, which could be a community, but it could be a directory, it could be events, it could be software, and people pay for access to that membership, some fee. And I think this is where you're going with exit 5. You're moving towards more of a membership. And so I think the real play is, is creating memberships.

Well, let me.

Can I.

Let me use this as therapy for myself. And I'm just gonna be honest. And I think that's the best podcast content anyway. But there was actually. Somebody commented today, and they're like, oh, this community is not. There's not as much engagement in here now as there was when it was on Facebook. And I said, you're right, there's not. And that was intentional. Like, the way that a Facebook group is set up there is. People are on their phones. They're much more. It's much more of like, the cheap dopamine. Like, okay, I'm waiting in line at Starbucks. I quickly check my phone, I go into exit 5, I comment on somebody's thing, right? And I think that's great. But there was a couple reasons why I wanted to move it. Number one was for everybody that is now like, oh, I wish this was still on Facebook. I got dozens, hundreds probably of people who messaged me and said they didn't join ever because it was on Facebook. Number two was, I don't want community to mean discussion forum. And when you start talking about this membership model, like, What I see exit 5 as being is not just a discussion forum. Like, I think engagement is important. People have to be there. There has to be stuff going on, right? But I want it to be something that, like, you know what, maybe you haven't logged in in 60 days, but your boss just asked you to go think about, like, hey, we need to do. We need to really get smart about ABM this quarter. Like, go do some research on ABM. I want somebody to go into Exit 5, search for ABM, find a bunch of videos and templates and posts and comments, and like, make an informed opinion and then go back and tell their boss and be like, wow, that really helped me. Or somebody needs a contract designer in a pinch. And they go into Exit five and they find that the part that I struggle with, with the community piece is like playing that game where it has to be about every post has hundreds of comments and hundreds of likes like, that eventually dies. I've seen it in so many other examples. Like HubSpot had inbound.org for the longest time. There's other community called growth hackers. They all grow and grow and grow. And then eventually just the community becomes a place that's just for people to promote their own stuff and post links. And then the spam thing happens. And so this idea of a membership is more like, okay, we have a knit. We have a group of people that have a shared job function. A discussion form can be a part of that. But how can we become the go to resource for them to help do their job? That's how ultimately I think we're going to win. Not that every post ha. You know, go. Every post goes viral. Like, if I'm. You're going to get more engagement on your post if you post it on LinkedIn, because there's hundreds of millions of users there. But I want to win on the types of resources that we create. And so we're thinking much more about like creating dedicated content for the membership, not just being a discussion forum.

Yeah. So when people think of communities, they think about engagement. They think about how do I create the most engaged community. And if you're playing that game, as you add members to that community, you eventually lose. It's just, it's not a game. Like, optimizing around engagement over time is not a great game to play. The membership KPI is about access. So you're moving from engagement to access. The whole goal of a membership is it's not about daily engagement, it's about yearly, you know, access, basically. So, for example, I am a part of a. Like, I'm part of this one club in Miami and it gives me access to the beach. And I don't go often, but sometimes when I want to remind myself that I live in Miami and I live five minutes from the beach, it's worth it. So I don't need to be there every single day. And like being a part of all the different events and doing all the different engagements. No. So I think that's why membership is the future of community, because it's, it's a lot more sustainable than an Internet community.

There's something that, that we see all the time. Like somebody might say, like, oh, there's not that I posted something and there was not a lot of engagement on my posts. I got three likes and one comment. But then, Greg, at the same time, I'll get a DM from someone who's like, I just got a huge new job thanks to somebody that I met inside of Exit 5. And I'm like, that. That's the thing. Like, how do we, how do we bottle that and make that the value prop? That person who got that job and made that connection isn't like, oh, there's no. Nobody liked my post. And that's just not the game that I want to play. And so I want to. I'm trying to shift more focus into that area. The beach. Access to the beach is a great example.

Right.

You pay for it. You pay for it, you know, annually. And when you want to go to the beach, you can go. How much does the niche matter in this world? Like, I think about a lot. I'm like, oh, man, I should have just started, like the AI for B2B marketing community, because that is such a clearly defined niche. Like, right now we're focused on B2B marketing as a whole. Maybe using some of your prior examples or companies in your portfolio, is it better to go broad to niche down? Is there a happy medium?

What's Your perspective, I mean, going back to the beach example, it's like if I'm in club, I'm trying to market to people within who live within five miles of this beach. You know, those are the people that are going to want access to this beach as much as possible. Now, as soon as I go to 10 miles, the people between 5 and 10 miles want access to that beach a lot less. If I go 10 to 20 miles, they want it even less. And there's a really good. David Spinks actually has a book. It's called the Business of Belonging. And it's a great read for anyone interested in like here, what do I need to know about community and community management? And he has this concentric circle which he uses to define what a community is. So think about his point that he's trying to make is that a community has different shades. So for example, like the middle of the concentric circle would be, I'm a co founder of Fortnite and that's a community. And then around that would be like, I'm the top 100 employees, or I'm the first 100 employees of Fortnite. And around that is like, I'm a top esports Fortnite player. Around that is like I watch streaming on Fortnite all the time. And around that. So you just. And the complete outside is I've played Fortnite once or I've never even heard of Fortnite. So the niche matters because it's the level of attraction that you have, right? Like, there's an obvious need for what you're doing in B2B marketing and it just makes your life easier that it exists. That being said, if you want nicher, like AI b2b marketing, like, it would probably. Your job would probably be 3x as easy. But that being said, with AI as an example, like, there's cycles in a space like that. So you have to, if you're going to pick a niche, you have to look at in Miami beach, for example, like, the beach might sink. I don't know what's going on here, you know, so it's a very similar thing where it's like, if you're going to pick a niche, like, you want to know where's it going to be in 12, 18, 24 months? Because I've seen that before, where people pick a niche and realize, like, there's a lot of people coming to us and trying to sell. They're trying to sell their, like, AI communities and AI newsletters because they're just.

Like Let me get out now.

Get out now. Yeah, yeah. Like one of the biggest AI creators. We had a conversation and the other day and he was like, I was on stage and at this AI conference and I just had like a come to Jesus moment. Like I don't care at all about AI and, and I'm running this community. It's like, don't be that guy.

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Yeah, that's just the ultimate. I mean, or be that guy and realize that you should get out.

Yeah, totally.

The other thing that I'm trying to do with the community piece is it was built largely off of my personal brand. And then two years ago, I decided to rename it for this reason. Have you seen this before where people try to pivot away? Like, I don't want to be Gary Vee. I don't want it to be like the Dave, the Dave Gerhart marketing community. Like, stay for my hot takes in marketing. And so that's why I hired a team. It's why I rebranded. Somebody messaged me today and they're like, hey, like, how come you don't post as much as you used to? And I'm like, honestly, like, it's intentional. I want this thing to survive without me. What's the right way to play that game? Given that a lot of times, you know, when you go back to the ACP funnel, if my handwriting was as good as yours, I would turn this into like one of your nice little LinkedIn graphics, which I'm going to ask you about later. But it's not, how do you play that game then? Like a lot of times the audience is going to be built with a personal brand. We know that people are more likely to buy from people than businesses. It's much easier to build an audience online as a person versus a company. The person starts the community, but then you want to pivot into something bigger. I think that this idea for a business and community could last well beyond me. And I don't have to be the. Doesn't have to be my hot take. But there are some of those people who are like, well, I signed up specifically to hear what you have to say. And I'm like, well, no, that's not what we're doing anymore.

One of the most important piece of any membership or community is onboarding. So, for example, like when you sign up to, you know, we have a paid community called Community Empire Code. When you sign up to it, you have a call with the community manager and we understand your goals and what you're trying to get to when you were mentioning about how you have people who are complaining about engagement on Exit 5, my thinking is now that you've rebranded as a membership, if you let people know what the expectations is, this is access, not engagement, then my prediction is that the Exit 5 members that sign up in 2024 and 2025 are actually going to behave a lot differently than the 2022s and the 2023s, no doubt because they're coming into it knowing what this is. Therefore their expectations is completely different. So with that onboarding call or with that onboarding process that you are going to do, I just think, hey, I'm Dave. People buy from people. Like, you're here because of acp, right? Audience. You came in through the audience. Maybe it was a LinkedIn post. Who knows? You're here now. This is the experience you should expect and that's what's going to happen. Like, I just see that happening for you. But yeah, you're right. Like, I think you were smart by disconnecting yourself from the community because otherwise the truth is you would have been burnt out. Like every community leader, you know, responding to every single reply and it would be unsustainable at a certain point.

Yeah, yeah, I think you said something wise there, which is like, it's like any business, right? You gotta make a hard decision to. We're gonna lose people for this reason. But this is also like, I really believe in this. And so like, as an example, just about a year ago is when I moved off of Facebook, I lost like 18k in MRR by doing that, but did it on per. Did intentionally was like, okay, I gotta take, we gotta take this hit because we want to move off of this platform. We want to go to this new place. And yeah, there's hundreds of members that left or churned. But I think we want to build for the future and to be in a better place and I think building much more towards this membership piece. Now, do you think Community has a tough time at a company? Like, you've sold your communities to companies, so maybe it was like a haha, your problem now. I'm just kidding. But you know, I've been at companies where what happens is if you build a community inside of the company, all of a sudden it's like, oh, how do we. Well now how do we sell to this community? And wait a Second, you got 500 people in there. The head of sales ones. I want those, I want those as leads. But it's oftentimes like the things that make the community great is because you didn't sell to them. And it wasn't about the product. What makes a community great inside of a company is it's like, tangential to the product. How do you keep a community going inside of a company? What makes it success? Like, how do you make sure it's successful as part of a broader company that has an interest in selling product?

I mean, you keep the community people as far away as salespeople as you can, you know, as long as you can. I've seen it so many times where you have this community. It's doing really well. The enterprise, like, the value of this community is millions of dollars a year. But as soon as you start promoting heavily, like, the je ne sais quoi is gone from the community. Right. Like, the magic is gone. And then the thing with community is that you can have a few of those events happen in a short amount of time, and it completely destroys the community. Like, you will lose the community. And, you know, these sales types of people, and sometimes it's actually CEOs as well, they'll come in and they'll be like, to your point, yeah, we've got thousands of leads. What are we doing with them? We want to hit next quarter's revenue targets. Happens a lot in publicly traded companies, too. But I think the trick here is you just. You need to set the expectations for what this is, why this exists, and what does success look like. But I do believe one of the ways to fight this encroachment of sales and executives into communities is. Is charging for it, doing, like, being, like, creating a paid MRR piece to it. Because in that way they're like, okay, at least this is driving revenue and the margins are high. And the way they think about it, quote unquote from, you know, I was talking to a CEO of a Fortune 500 business, and he's like, it's like SaaS, like MRRS without building the SaaS.

Yeah, well, and I think having it be paid just gives a certain level of commitment. And especially this is why, like, B2B as a broader niche is interesting because you can charge money, and a lot of times in B2B, the math makes sense. Or you're selling it to somebody who can most likely expense it. Like, I see this more and more as people who are not paying for this on their personal account. They're, you know, what's $500 a year to the learning and development budget or whatever at their company.

Absolutely. And I think another tailwind of this has Just been people working more and more remote. And it's like if you're working remote and you're not going into the office as much or even at all, like of course I want you to have access to resources, like to do your job the best possible way. And that's why I think that there's going to be exit 5 for X because remote isn't going anywhere. And then people are going to be able to say like, oh I hired this Designer from Exit 5 or you know, whatever. And that that value is, I mean that's a question for you also is like how do you think about pricing I guess for exit 5? And are you charging too much or are you charging too little?

Yeah, both. There's a segment of, I think right now it's in the middle and there's a segment of people that we. There's a segment of people that say it's too expensive and then there's a segment of people who say that I would be paying you much more. And so actually we're working on launching. It's very clear that there's like 20% of people who would be paying us much more for more access. And to your point about membership and being accessed and so, you know, there's 3,000 paying members today. I think there's 200 or 300 of those people that would be paying, let's call it $100 a month or something like that. And I think one of our strategic objectives is thinking about like what could we create for them, you know, classic like business. Oh yeah, like sell more to your best customers. There's something there. I think, if I'm being completely candid, I think that I messed up by raising the price a little bit because I think there should have been a lower. It's like a little bit in between at $30 a month where if it was like, if there was like a lower when it was $10 a month, it was flying. But I, there's also a lot of like crud that you get with that price tier. Also ideally it would have been. It'd be like $10 a month or a hundred dollars a month. I'm just making up extremes, right? There's no rewinding that now because I, it just would create too much confusion and chaos. So we're not going to do that. But I just, there's so much. Even just having like a low end paid tier is very smart. Free scares me to death. Like I've just seen so many free community. I know somebody who's like, dude, I managed a 20,000 person like marketing community that was free. It was just complete insanity. Like, yeah, you don't want that.

My general recommendation for any membership is to have low ticket, high ticket. So low ticket is the smallest amount that is like a legitimate no brainer. And it sounds like that 10ish dollars was that for you? And high ticket, you know, we see communities that charge a couple thousand dollars a month. So I'm just saying it can go all the way up there. And the way I always think about it is like first class and coach. Like your coach experience is your low ticket. Corsic gets you to the destination. You're still going from New York to, let's say Maui. So you're stoked to be in Hawaii. But it's pretty nice to be in a flat bed, you know, drinking champagne, 40,000ft in the air. So I think, yeah, it's a good exercise and prompt for you and your team to be like, okay, start with the price. It's like, how much do we want to charge? And then based on that, what are the things? Okay, we want to charge $200 a month. If we want to charge $200 a month, what are the things that we need in terms of access for that to be a stupid no brainer?

Okay, I want to shift off a community and ask you some other things. Just because people generally are interested in content social. You have 376,000 followers on Twitter, aka X.

Where did they all come from?

I had been tweeting about all this sort of stuff that we have been talking about for the last half hour, community and memberships and stuff like that. And I had like 10,000 hardcore fans. You know, I started on Twitter in 2008, but I had been tweeting. I got like, I had the same 10,000 fans from like 2009 to 2020, March 2020 hits. And all of a sudden something changed in the sense that this whole idea of Internet communities and this idea around building audiences, products for these communities, like just really struck a chord. People really understood it. And it wasn't like the type of content I created was very different. It just the way it was perceived was different. That's where they came from from 2020 to now.

So did you focus more on talking about community or just like the wins? This thing that you had always kind of been in the mix of just became very relevant. Like companies who were talking about webinars and virtual events all of a sudden exploded a lot of interest around community. And not just community, but There's a lot of overlapping circles with, like, the creator economy, probably. Right?

Okay, yes. And also just like distilling things from community and building products for those communities was. Yeah. Was of interest. So I didn't really change anything. But I went from being 100 miles from Miami beach to being on Miami beach just because of how the world changed.

And then for your process of how you write on Twitter. Okay, so you. I think the lesson, though, isn't just. Just like, get lucky and have a world shift happen. I think you have intentionally been talking about community. Right. And I think channels like Twitter and LinkedIn work when you focus on a specific topic. Right.

Pick a lane.

Yeah, you got to pick a lane. No doubt.

You got to pick a lane. You know, pick a lane. And even if it's an unpopular lane, that feels. I felt like garbage for many years writing content and getting 1 like or 2 likes or 3 likes. But I wrote content for years and years and years and years and years. And I knew in my heart of hearts that this was valuable. This is a valuable niche to be in. And you don't need to be right that many times in a career to live a good life is another sort of lesson.

But do you use Twitter? I guess. And LinkedIn. And so basically then you were more active on Twitter and now I see you're going harder on LinkedIn, taking what you've learned from Twitter and replicating it there, which is smart. Two follow up questions. Number one, let me ask this one first. Are you still seeing growth? I've heard from people, some people say, oh, it was so much easier to grow on Twitter, pre Elon buying Twitter. Is that true? Any truth to that? Have you seen anything related to that? Has your growth slowed at all?

My growth hasn't slowed, but it has. It's not as consistent. So, you know, in the last three months, I've had a tweet, for example, that got 30 million impressions. I think like 50,000 likes or something. Last week or the week before, I had like, I don't know, 15,000 likes or something on a tweet. So there's tons of. But then I'll tweet and I'll get like 150 likes. You know what I mean? So what has Elon done? Elon has made Twitter X to be more like TikTok. It's more like the. For your page. So when you go viral on Twitter, it blasts into the stratosphere and you have to be really smart about how to get followers from those posts. So, for example, you might have a post that goes viral, goes mega viral, stratosphere. And then what a lot of people do is in the second tweet, they'll be like, if you like this tweet, go and follow me. Like, yeah, that's not gonna work anymore.

Does that work? Everybody does that. I'm like, there's no way. I've tried it a couple times. I don't write very. I'm not very good at Twitter. But, like, I'm like, that can't be the hack.

Like, if you.

Oh, yeah, just write a viral tweet and then tell people to follow you, because they. They're not gonna know how to do that unless you tell them.

No, not even close. And by the way, just to add to that, like, if you like this tweet, subscribe to my weekly newsletter on X, Y, Z. No one is subscribing. Just, no, not happening. People are, too. They're focused on themselves. They don't care about you. So what you got to do is. I'm a big believer in Twitter long posts, which are the posts that are more than 240 characters, and then you click show more. And the approach I like to take if I'm trying to get followers, because sometimes I don't want to get followers. I'm just there to, like, get buzz or get feedback on an idea.

Well, I think you do both. Like, you definitely know how to play the game. But I do think I see you using. I've thought more about using Twitter this way. Like, instead of having a blog, you could write 1500 words, you could write 3000 words as a tweet. Right. And format it and use it that way. And I think that is a smart way to use it.

So in my long post, sometimes what I'll do is not at the end of the post, but mid post, I'll be like, you know, let's say I'm telling a story about how I sold my company to WeWork, and I was talking about the M and A process. You know, midway through, I might be like, you know, next week, I'm going to tell the story of how Adam Newman was, like, didn't show up to the first meeting, and then I went on his private jet and, like, it'll be on my Twitter feed at Gregisenberg from that. Like, you get followers. You don't get it for them at the end of the thing being like, follow me, or as a secondary tweet. So the lesson there is don't swim against the algorithm. Swim, like, with the Algorithm. And if you see everyone is doing the same thing, AKA follow me or sign up to my newsletter, think about, how do you do it differently so that it's scroll stopping.

I love the tease. Like, hey, yeah, next week I'm going to write about X. I think you do a good job. And then now that you have a big audience, are you being more intentional about trying to move people to your email list? Is that how you're using your newsletter?

Yeah, I actually, I posted on LinkedIn the other day and on Twitter, I was like, how the hell do I get people onto my newsletter?

Because, like, you just got to ask them. I bet you got hundreds of signups from that, from those posts. I saw them.

Yeah, I posted. I'm just pulling up exactly what I said. Okay. I'm always sharing this because I think it'll get people thinking around how do I do things differently? I could have been like, sign up to my newsletter. It's amazing. And you're going to get insights. No one cares. No one. No one cares. So what I did is this is a kind of uncomfortable ask, but I'll do it anyways. Boom. People's ears perk just from that. And that's your goal.

I know. I saw that headline. I was like, oh, this should be good. And it's like, join my newsletter. I was like, oh, come on, man.

Damn it, Greg. Damn it. You can see yourself moving from the A to the C to the P. If this tweet gets.

I just got funneled. Damn it.

Yeah, exactly. If this tweet gets lots of love, I'll know to keep creating content for you. So I'm just like, this is for you, right? I'm not doing it for you. Have you ever liked one of my tweets? I tweet about Internet communities, cash flowing, Internet companies, holding companies. Join my weekly newsletter@gregisenberg.com and then in brackets. Because I always love doing a bonus thing. And come see my new website because it's like, oh, and I get to see his new website. You know, it's like, do things differently.

It seems like you're just open to trying. You're just. You're interested in doing it your way. You seem to be a note taker, a drawer. Like, I like how you're incorporating these little graphics that you make in a world where everybody's using kind of like these terrible. And I do them too sometimes, like AI generated images. I love how your stuff cuts through the noise with, like, the handwritten stuff. So go check out Greg on Twitter. And this is more of a LinkedIn crowd, Greg. So, you know, we'll go follow you on LinkedIn.

I just got an email today saying that, congratulating me that I'm going to be a top voice on LinkedIn.

Oh, that's huge. They come to your house, you got to do like a cribs walk through. They see what's in your fridge. You show them the Dr. Browns.

Totally. They're not going to believe how many Dr. Browns I have.

All right, Greg, it's good hanging out with you. We got to wrap. I learned a bunch today. I got the ACP funnel, I got the tribe funnel. I got so many new frameworks and everything. Interesting to kind of just hear how you think about community. And selfishly, I got to pick your brain a little bit. But I wanted to do it to give people a lens. Most of the people that listeners are going to be working at companies in B2B marketing just to give you how do you think about community when it's not part of a company? And I think there's a clear set of guardrails that you have. So if you want to hear more from Greg, go find him on LinkedIn. Greg Eisenberg. We'll link to all his stuff. Go follow him on Twitter. Go do the best thing you can do, which is send him a message. Be like, hey, I heard you on the Exit 5 podcast. That was awesome. That's my favorite type of feedback. That's what the call to action is. This episode will be out in a couple weeks, but I'm hanging out in your community tomorrow and I'm excited to do that. So, Greg, good to see you. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for dealing with our technical difficulties here in the beginning. And I'll talk to you later.

It was an honor. Thank you, man. Thank you.

Exit.

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