Eric Siu explains why community is your best acquisition and retention channel. In-person events create lasting relationships that ads can't match. Jason Gaignard says it best: you come for the event, but you stay for the community.
When you think about community, community is really not just a retention mechanism, but it's also an acquisition machine as well. So when you think about throwing an amazing conference, so when I think about in the past going to the TED conferences where you hang out with amazing people, great conversations, great dinners, great speakers, you come out of it with a lot of motivation. You come out of it smarter. You come out of it with life-changing relationships. Those go a long way. And then really what happens at the end of the day, my friend Jason Gaignard likes to say, You come for the event, but you stay for the community. And it's really hard to cultivate great community, which is why most people don't know how to do it. And I would venture to say that a lot of us have gotten lazy and fat by just using Facebook and Google Ads, right? And to me, that's kind of table stakes now. But when you think about how 45% of venture capital money goes towards these platforms, well, I just think there's probably a better way to do marketing for the long term. And the ones that do it well, those are the ones that are going to stand out.
