243: Engineering Serendipity and Best Practices for Community-Building with David Spinks

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Communities at their core live in these social norms where people are helping each other, they're caring for each other, they're supporting each other. Not because there's some financial incentive, but because they're getting this social value out of it. They're building up social equity, social capital by helping other people and feeling valuable, feeling like they're useful.

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Welcome back Free Timers. I am so thrilled to be here recording in person today with one of my earliest blogosphere friends, David Spinks. David and I first connected on Twitter in 2009 if you can believe it, when he was running this little organization called Under 30 Professionals or U30Pro for short. I don't even think I should call it little because this was one of the main communities. At that time there weren't very many communities to join. There certainly wasn't software powering communities and I remember you and a co founder started U30Pro. We connected through that and through Brazen Careerist and David went on to become basically a community building guru of sorry, he writes. He has a bestselling book called the Business of Belonging. He co founded CMX, the annual conference and community of over 20,000 community building professionals. In 2019 CMX was acquired by Bevy, a platform for hosting chapter based community ecosystems where he served as VP of Community for three years and then all in one three year swirl as so many of us have had the pandemic hit. He had his first kid. He ended up going on sabbatical at some point in that window and taking time off of work completely, had a second child, has now moved back to the east coast and I don't think we've met in person until this day and having coffee before we came to the recording studio in at least 10 years. Is that right?

I think that's probably true, yeah.

So listeners, you're here with us, like catching up, talking shop talk, talking about how the Internet has changed, how community building has changed. So, David, officially welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Very honored to be here. And I think you just said a bunch of words that I haven't heard in over a decade. U30 Pro is something like most people who have been following my career for a long time still have no idea what that is. And phrase and careerist. The blogosphere. When's the last time you even heard the word the blogosphere? So it's already been really cool to catch up and feels like a blast from the past.

Back in 2010, I nervously sent you and your co founder an email saying, oh, I don't know if you'd be open to this, but I'm thinking of crowdsourcing wisdom from essentially millennials, Gen Z. I mean, I didn't call us that at the time, but I was working on Life After College. And you generously hosted a Twitter formerly known as Twitter Live session, where for two hours, your community was helping respond to prompts that I gave for every chapter of Life After College.

And so amazing.

The book is comprised of tweets, quotes, questions, et ceter for anybody facing what's next after graduating, and all of the Twitter related content. The majority of it came from that under 30 pro session.

That's really cool. I completely forgot about that.

So crazy, because we kind of reconnected because of Substack. Someone recommended your newsletter. I saw your name and I subscribed. And then you, being the gem that you are, actually wrote back to say thank you. Even though I'm a free subscriber, it's not like I did anything so special. But you're like, whoa, I haven't seen this name in a while. And I feel like Substack is reminiscent of the early blogging days because of the community, tiny community that's growing over there.

Definitely. Yeah. It's all writers. And I think in the early days of blogging, that was kind of our social media. That's where a lot of the conversations would be had. Right. People would post something and we'd have this long interaction in the comments. Remember comments and link backs? Yeah. Oh, man. Link backs. So we were talking about how, like, Notes on Substack has been really cool. It's basically just a social network of writers, and I'm discovering comedy writers and fiction writers. And it's nice to be surrounded by other people who just love writing a lot. It's like a really niche social network in that way.

There's so much I want to talk about, including getting acquired by Bevy, including your time there, but also your time where you're now in this liminal space of what you do next after being the community guy for so long. But first, you recently wrote a post on engineering serendipity.

Ah, yes.

This is one of my favorite topics. So can you just share with us what did you discover in working on that piece?

So engineering serendipity has been a topic that a lot of people in the world of community kind of reference a lot. It sounds nice. Like engineering serendipity, it's a good oxymoron. Engineering is all about planning. Serendipity is all about things happening that are unplanned. And as community builders, we try to think about like, how do we create this magical space where serendipity happens. And so whenever I see something referenced a lot, I get curious about is there any legitimacy behind this? Is there research behind this? And so I just went digging into research studies into serendipity. Turns out there's a lot. Like I was very surprised to find there are a lot of studies on serendipity. They're not necessarily highly scientific because it's not something that you can have like cause and effect in a way that's scientifically provable, but a lot of interview based studies to understand how serendipity happened. If you look back at all these experiences that people had and it was really cool. So it turns out that there is a process that people go through for serendipity to occur. And so there are four stages. The first stage is a trigger, and so something has to happen to spark this connection, right? It could be a piece of information, it could be a conversation, it could be a learning, some interaction with a person. And by the way, serendipity can be with a person, but it could also be with an idea or an insight, or it could be any sort of experience that someone's interacting with in the world, right? There's this trigger that sparks like, okay, there's something that could happen here. You subscribing to my substack, that's a trigger. And then the second step is a connection. So the trigger happens and the person has to connect to it or connect it to some sort of potential outcome, right? There's a piece of information I have to connect that to something that's useful to me or a person I have to connect. So you subscribe to my substack. I made a connection that's like, oh, I haven't seen Jenny in a long time. We've been like passively following each other's work for a long time. And so there's some connection to value there that made me think about doing something with that trigger, right? And so that's the third step is the follow through. So you have a trigger, you connect it to something, now you have to take action on it. And so for us, it was me messaging you be like, hey, thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. It's so good to see you. If you run into someone on the street saying, hi, right? Have you ever run by someone on the street and think, like, I recognize that person. But then 20ft go by and you're like, I'm not gonna say anything. And then later you realize, like, I think that was the person. I should have said hi. So you didn't follow through. So serendipity can't occur unless there's follow through on that action. And then the fourth one is a valuable outcome. And this was interesting to me because when I think of serendipity, the way I used to think about it was it's just this like, passive interaction. But the only way we look at something as serendipitous is, is if it actually led to some sort of outcome. Otherwise it's just passing in the wind, right? There's nothing that came of it. So there's no reason for you to look back and say, wow, how serendipitous that was. And so there needs to be a valuable outcome, which could be connection, a collaboration, a learning you do something with the idea or information. So valuable outcome, us doing this podcast. Look at this. How serendipitous. I actually didn't even plan on using this as an example, but this is so perfect, right? So those are the four steps. And then the other factor is that in each of those steps, it has to be perceived as unexpected for it to be considered serendipitous. So if it was overly planned or it feels manufactured, it feels engineered, it won't feel as serendipitous as much as if it was totally unexpected. You subscribing unexpected. It's like, wow, I like, would not have expected you to subscribe to my newsletter and see your name that it feels very serendipitous. And then us both being in New York and me being like, hey, do you want to hang out. You're like, hey, I'm actually doing a podcast that day. Let's do it together. And so all this feels very serendipitous because it has what it was called a thread of unexpectedness. That's kind of the process that it goes through. And we could talk a lot more about serendipity because my research went pretty deep. But I love now thinking about both. As a community builder, how do I create spaces where serendipity is likely to occur, and then also as an individual, how do I put myself in situations where serendipity is likely to occur?

That's so fascinating. Just the thread of not expecting things and that that's part of it, but also the follow through. I've never thought about serendipity through the lens of if nothing comes of it. You don't even describe that as serendipitous. But we were catching up before coming to the recording studio. But I didn't tell you, but I met my husband walking opposite directions down the street. Total serendipity. But if we hadn't gotten married, it would have just been just another hot guy that winked at me. You know what I mean? Like, it would have been maybe a fun, light story, but not this massive story and pivotal moment of my life. And it was serendipitous. But it's so interesting in terms of engineering, serendipity, all the little things that happened just prior and now. I wish I remember where I saw that you even had a substack. It might have been recommended to me.

Right.

In terms of the unexpected action. I didn't expect you to write back to me. So it is very interesting. I love that you have shared this framework with us so succinctly. And I feel like a big part of what you have done from the earliest days of social Internet, pre social media was helping create a container out of the chaos. And that container being community. I'm wondering because a lot of us, you know, at that time, we're all experimenting. You had to have some wherewithal to learn WordPress or HTML, set up a blog, raise your hand and think you have something valuable to say online. It's a little different than now where everyone can have an account on every platform. And we were all kind of floundering, doing that in isolation. But you had the idea so early on to bring everybody together. And I'm just wondering where that impulse came from.

Yeah. So U30 Pro is interesting because if people weren't on Twitter in those early days, they Wouldn't be familiar with something called a Twitter chat or a tweet chat. Tweet chats were these communities, these synchronous communities that would come together. Twitter is asynchronous, right? People post, and they can respond anytime. It was turning it into synchronous, where everyone would gather at the same time, and the host would post questions over a course of an hour, and people would respond. And blog chat was one. PR news chat, I think, was the first one ever, and I think U30 Pro is the third one ever.

And we used hashtags. So every time you ask a question, we add a hashtag like Q1Answer or whatever that was, that we could read everybody's replies to every question.

Exactly. It was like, highly structured. Everyone uses the same hashtag, be Q1, and then you post your answer. So again, taking the chaos, like you said, and turning it into order. For me, it's something I've been doing most of my life. I became very comfortable with talking to strangers on the Internet. Before, it was normal to talk to strangers on the Internet.

AOL chat rooms.

AOL chat rooms. Even before that, irc. I was into gaming when I was in middle school, and I didn't have the best social life in middle school. I struggled to connect with people in person, and so I turned to video games. And Tony hawk's Pro Skater 4 was my game of choice in middle school. I became really obsessed with it. Like, really, really obsessed with it. I would play for hours every day. I became one of the top competitive players in the world, and we started a clan, me and a couple other friends. That clan became one of the best clans on the game. And we started a website for the clan with a forum. And the forum became one of the most popular online communities for the game. And So I was 14, I believe, at the time, and managing an online community with hundreds of members. And we'd run contests, we gave away swag and rewards, we had trolls. It was like a whole ecosystem. And so I got the experience of building online community and connecting with people online at a very early age, so that whenever MySpace would later come out in Facebook and every social tool that came out, I was always really interested and very comfortable with it. Why do I think about building community? I don't know. It's just how I'm wired. I get a lot of joy from seeing people come together. I think there's very few joys greater than creating a space that really works, that clicks, that people feel drawn to, and you see them come into that space and you see them connect with each other in a way and with people that they've never had access to before. And there's just something really magical about those moments. It's almost like seeing groups of people find flow together. It's very special. And I think I've spent a lot of my life chasing that feeling again and again.

A lot of your leadership has been around best practices of how to create that, and you doing your best to engineer and unpack what facilitates that magic, even though it's probably sometimes a little hard to capture. And then also, I'm sure you've seen so many communities fail to stick and fail to form in that way and reach that communal flow state. I know. I'm tapping into your entire, like 15, 20 years of work.

Yeah.

What are three things that the best communities or community leaders do really well? And what would you say are three things? This is a complex question now, but three things that are most commonly messed up.

One thing is the easiest way to find what I call community member fit or community market fit is to start with the community that you create for yourself. I think it's a hard thing to build community that you don't personally want. You just end up. Maybe you build it because it's like a business opportunity or you see other people need it, but when it's something that you create for yourself, you don't really need a playbook. You don't need an overall strategy. You are the member, you know what you need, and you have a genuine curiosity and a poll that you want to surround yourself with those people. It just feels a lot more organic in that way. That's how communities come together. It's often the best communities are just started by someone solving their own problem. Another way, that was three good things, three mistakes.

I told you I wanted to boil the ocean. As soon as I knew you were coming in, I'm like, oh, do this in 45 minutes.

Yeah. I think another thing that great community builders do is they experiment. They look at it as an ongoing experiment. And so a lot of the time I'll get clients or companies coming to me and they're like, how do we build community? And I'm like, I don't know. I can't tell you. It's kind of like going to someone and saying, how do I build a product? It's so big, so broad, and community is just a product. It's a social product. The way you build a product and this way you build anything is by trying things and forming A hypothesis, seeing if it works, testing it. And if something works, you double down on it. If it doesn't work, you move on. I've started so many communities that have just completely flopped and, and failed and never got out the gate. And I'm not talking about those right now because no one sees it and it doesn't matter. But then once in a while, like U30 Pro is an example where Lauren Fernandez was my co founder on that. We started it and it just tapped into something. It was something we create for ourselves. We were both young professionals right out of college, in our early 20s. And I saw all these other communities or spaces where these really experienced people were shelling out advice that didn't really apply to us. And I wanted a space for us to talk about the unique challenges, questions I was trying to get answered. And that tapped into something. It was the right space on Twitter, the right time, the right format, the right amount of novelty. And it was a space that people were craving, but they didn't yet have. And it just worked. It just clicked and it worked. And the same exact thing happened with cmx. It was a conference that I wish existed for myself from the early days of my career. And we put that first event together in five weeks. We had 300 people pay hundreds of dollars, fly out from all over the world, five weeks, literally booking international flights to come to this conference. And 300 people walked into that room. And for the first time in their career, every other person in that room was another community professional. They weren't the only community professional room of marketers or developers or CEOs. It was all community people. And for the first time they felt like they belonged and they felt valued. And it just clicked. I didn't have this grand plan or strategy. We just tried something and it was an experiment. I was running a different startup, I was doing Feast at the time and it just worked so well that I was like, oh shit, like this is what I should be doing. And we ended up winding down Feast, my other startup, and I put my full time focus. Once it clicks, then you ride that wave, right? Then you lean into it. So just try things. And it might be you have the wrong people, might be the wrong time, it might be the wrong platform, it might be the wrong format. All that has to kind of come into sync at the same time. But when it hits, you can really run with it. So that's two.

Listen, I know you're a structured thinker. I believe in you.

I know you would think I would have a very like structured, organized. I've gotten to the point where, like, I've thought about this so much. There's so many things. That's why I wrote the book. So I'm like, here.

Yeah. Okay, give us an easy third, something community leaders do well.

An easy third that community builders do well. Yeah, you try to solve your own problem, you experiment, you find something that works. Once something is working, I think what you want to do is start to look for opportunities to distribute control. I think a lot of community builders will be so used to controlling and facilitating every bit of the experience and they hold onto it, especially in business, very controlling. But communities scale and they really become these organic things. When you start distributing control. So people are going to start raising their hands and wanting to host events, wanting to create content, wanting to moderate, wanting to be part of welcome committees. There's only so much you could do to be hands on. And if you hold onto that yourself, what ends up happening is you lose the intimacy that made it so powerful in the first place. And so the way that you scale intimacy is by distributing that control and letting people take that spark, that fire that you've created and run with it and make it their own thing.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I've always felt a little bad, so please show me where I'm wrong here. Where I know people have said, delegate, let people facilitate different aspects of the community or step up as leaders. I always felt bad not paying them to do that extra work and be more active. I was always hesitant. Probably still am to this day. Eight and a half years into running a private community where I feel that if they are going to be doing extra work, I would want to compensate them for it. And I'm not in a position to do that. As far as the community itself right now. I do it in other aspects of my business, try to delegate what I can.

Yeah.

But it's actually a sort of guilt holding me back.

That's not uncommon amongst community builders. You're not forcing anybody to do something that they're not organically interested in doing. And the reason they're organically interested in doing it is because there's value there for them. For some people, it might be the value of feeling useful and feeling important. For some, they might be trying to grow their business, and it's like a great networking opportunity. Some got so much value from the community and everything that you've created already that they feel like they want to give back. They want it to exist. Helping the community actually helps them because it's something that continues to drive a lot of value for them. So there's a lot of intrinsic value that people get out of contributing to these things. Actually, the research is interesting in that if you start introducing financial compensation, it actually changes the entire dynamic of why they're contributing. Right. And so there's, like, Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. There's a really good study that he shares where they ran this test where they asked a number of lawyers if they would take on a case pro bono, completely free, unpaid, and they tracked how many of them said, yes, I'll take on this case, and then did the same exact case. But they offered a rate that was much lower than what their standard rate is. And even though they were compensated now, as opposed to being asked to do it for free, a much lower amount of the lawyers said, yes, I'll do it. Because what happens is it switches the interaction from a social norm into a market norm. It's like the same thing as if I were to ask you to come help me move as a friend, and I said, I'll get some really good coffee, we'll have some pizza, we'll play some good music. It'll be fun. You're thinking about it as like helping a friend move. You might say, yeah, of course I'll come help you. But if I said, hey, can you come help me move? I'll give you $20. You'd be like, the fuck, right? My time's worth a lot more than $20. They just pay a mover. So it just immediately, even that little amount, that little change, switched it from a social norm to a market norm. And frankly, this is where my book's called the business of belonging. It is this tension, this clash in the world of business, which is very transactional, money driven with community that lives in these social norms. And it's a tension for sure. But communities at their core live in these social norms where people are helping each other, they're caring for each other, they're supporting each other, not because there's some financial incentive, but because they're getting this social value out of it. They're building up social equity, social capital, by helping other people and feeling valuable, feeling like they're useful.

Super interesting. Thank you. So we have holding onto too much control, maybe even introducing money as exchange where it's not appropriate. I'll give you an easy pass on one of the third big mistakes through my next question, which is, especially in 2020, a lot of people that I knew who had been running communities for a long time, myself included, by the end of the year, got completely burnt out and overwhelmed. And I think it was not just the functional aspects of running a community, but the mental, emotional space holding that happens when you are. Now, maybe this is still maintaining too much control, but for me, if I'm leading a community, even if aspects of it are distributed, I still feel responsible for kind of holding the space where, if it is in a business context, making sure that 70 or 100 people are happy and getting their value every month. And sometimes when I've had moments where I need to take a step back in my business, it's overwhelming. These people are paying to be there and I just let it be. I sort of go in ebbs and flows and that just is what it is as far as the community. But I'm curious if you could just speak to community builder burnout. Where does it come from? Have you experienced it?

Oh, yeah.

Or like, tell us. Can you maybe even take us to a moment where you felt that very acutely because you had so many people that were in your care?

Yeah. I mean, there's many levels to the forms of burnout I've felt over the years. Building community, one of it is like social burnout. So one is you're putting yourself out there every day and you're in front of a community. You're in like a servant leadership position. So you're just constantly helping and giving and giving and giving. If people have problems, you have to listen. If people are having conflict, you have to help facilitate and try to repair that conflict. Sometimes members are angry at you. I think some of the points where I felt building community was most difficult was when There was like a backlash from the community because I made a mistake. We did something like, wrong that upset them. And it steamrolls, right? You'll get the person who. It's not enough for them to just like criticize you. They want to get everyone else on board. They want to form a mob to like a mutiny. It's like micro cancel culture, right? It's not in the broad public, but they're trying to get it within the community. They're back channeling, they're trying to get other people to talk about it, to leave. And it can really steamroll. I mean, you see this happen with Reddit on a large scale, but this happens in every small community as well. Eventually. Those moments are really hard. And constantly putting yourself out there socially is really hard. Another reason why it's good to distribute control and ownership so that it's not always all on you to handle every single situation. Then there's a financial aspect of it. We've been kind of trained to think that community should be free. And the Internet, since its early days have always had these free open forums, and then you have Facebook groups that they're monetizing through ads. But now we have millions of these communities that people just expect to be done for free. But on the other side are these people who are spending hours every day building and managing and facilitating these communities. Then for CMX too, we were a small bootstrap team trying to develop a whole industry, and it constantly felt like we were just keeping our heads above water. So figuring out how to monetize, how to make this thing financially sustainable is a huge source of burnout. How to manage that? If I'm starting a community today, either it's so small and just informal that I can create constraints around it. And I'm not going to let it balloon to a point where it's taking up so much of my time that I need it to be financially sustainable. For example, I started like a very small chat group right now with three other creators. And there's like no maintenance. We're all on the same page. It's four people, right? And like, there have been points where I'm like, oh, I could grow this and like add another circle and add another circle, and then it becomes a larger community and it's like, okay, if I want to do that, if I want to build community at scale, then the other constraint is I have to know what the financial model is going in. I'm not just going to build free community and then later figure out how to monetize I'm probably going to charge upfront for membership. I'm going to make sure that I'm compensated in a way that allows me to invest my whole self into the community without having to worry about how that's going to become financially sustainable for me as a community leader.

That's so interesting. And in a way, what you create is like a mini mastermind group, a small handful of people. It's interesting to hear you say you have to pull back from scaling it, because I know that's something that you would have the skills to do. But it's a question of what's coming for this next phase. You're working on a piece that will probably be public by the time this episode goes live around selling a community. Yeah, and that's really interesting because I feel like there's been phases where community building was totally grassroots and organic. And then whenever online marketers figure something out, then it becomes this whole genre of running an online business, paid communities. There's software to support it. And I mean, that's for the for good too. I'm so happy with all the software. These WordPress plugins that I always hated. Yeah, happy things like Mighty Networks and Circle exist and even Substack has a lot of community community elements that they're building in. But I don't think I've ever really heard people talk about selling a community as a valuable business entity in and of itself. I've heard of people transitioning their community when they no longer wanted to run it. And I'll link to the great episode I did with Tara McMullen in the show Notes, but talk to us a little bit like, is this a thing? Are people doing this now? What does that look like?

Yeah, well, I like how you just gave me my deadline for getting this article out now. Don't worry, it's far away now. I got to get it out. Yeah, it's super interesting to research communities that were acquired. So CMX was acquired and I had my own experience, but I was very curious what the experience of others were like. And I've had other people who have founded community businesses ask me what should I be thinking about? How do I even find someone to acquire it? And so it was interesting. I found 11 communities that have been acquired. So not a ton. I wouldn't say it's like a big broad trend. There's some really interesting consistencies in most of them as well. Almost all of them were bootstrapped. Almost all of them were professional communities. So around some sort of like Professional identity. Almost all of them spoke about doing the acquisition in large part because they were struggling to drive revenue or they didn't have enough resources to do all the things they wanted to do. So getting acquired would give them more of that support and resources. Almost all of them were bought by software companies or SaaS companies. So there's like a specific kind of community that seems to lend itself well to being acquired.

This reminds me of sending a rocket ship to space. Like it has to survive. Exiting those. Only you know of this transition, do you see them still continue to thrive on the other side?

Very mixed results. Very mixed results. I would think that, yeah, don't quote me on these numbers. You'll have to read the article to confirm it. But three or four of them have shut down. A few of them are still going and actually, interestingly, a few of them have spun back out as independent companies again. And one really clear dynamic that all of them are navigating and what seems to be kind of gets at the crux of what it's like to sell community is the extent to which the acquirer, the company that buys the community, inserts their own brand and goals into the community, versus on the other end of the spectrum, the acquirer being totally hands off and saying, just continue doing what you're doing. People won't even see our brand on it. And that's a spectrum, right? Some went all the way to the extent of rebranding the entire community to integrate IT into the SaaS's ecosystem and others completely. Completely. Hands off to like Indie Hackers was acquired by Stripe entirely. Hands off. A sales hacker was acquired by Outreach. Kind of in the middle. They were like hands off with a brand, but there was like expectation of value. CMX was similar with Bevy. They're pretty hands off. It'll be like, quote unquote, powered by Bevy, but we're still running it. We wanted to keep that objectivity. That non bias. CMO Club was bought by Salesforce. Really highly integrated now. It's actually been like sold off. It's like it doesn't exist anymore. And so there's varied degrees of success. And one thing that I think is pretty safe to say is if the company is really aggressive at integrating it into their brand and making it about them, it just doesn't work because you lose that objectivity, that non bias that made the community so valuable to the ecosystem in the first place. But on the other end of the spectrum, at least one of the people I interviewed said that they wish they were more integrated with the business because they were so detached that they didn't really get to tap into a lot of the resources. They didn't get other people involved to support because they're basically living in this silo where it's like, yeah, we're just continuing to run it completely independently. And that's not why we did the acquisition. It's really interesting to see the different outcomes and see the different impacts that the acquisitions had on these different communities.

When you sold cmx, had that been on your mind to sell or did you just get approached by Bevy or other companies?

Yeah, it wasn't really something I was seeking out. It came about how. Actually, most of these acquisitions came about. Almost all of them came from an existing partner. And that's what it was for us with Bevy. Bevy CEO Derek had spoken at CMX Summit. He's also the founder of Startup Grind, which is one of the largest startup communities in the world. So he's a community builder that actually Bevy is a product that was spun out of Startup Grind, where they built their own software to manage all their local chapters and they have hundreds all over the world. And then they're like, well, this tool seems like it might be useful. Let's see if people will buy it as a SaaS product. And turned out it was very successful and turned into its own business. And so he came and spoke. He was like, holy shit, this thing you're building is amazing. We want to be a partner, a sponsor. So he started sponsoring our events and they were just like, far and beyond our best partner, to the extent. There was one day that, like, he and I would just start talking regularly because he was kind of giving me feedback on building a community business like he did with Startup Grind. I was giving him insight and feedback on the community industry as they're building Bevy. And there was a point where, like, we were having a down month. We were very seasonal CMX because of the conference. We'd make a lot of our money in, like, September and then not a lot the rest of the year. And so we were like, a little tight on revenue. And he was just like, hey, we're going to give you $10,000, no strings attached, not for a sponsorship, just here you go. And it was that kind of shit. I was like, oh, my God. Why? Why? Is because he understands social capital, right? He understands the value of supporting a community like us. And so we just continued to develop a relationship like that to the point where there was a day where I was like, Continuing to complain about not having enough resources. And he was just like, well, look, we need to build a community around the industry. You've already built the best one. What if we combine forces and so we can make sure that you have the resources you need to do what you want to do, and we get to have the best community for the community industry in the world as part of our ecosystem. So he just pitched it. And there was another company that we talked to because actually, you know, this person, but it's not public, so I'll tell you in secret afterward, they were like, if you ever are considering an acquisition, let us know. So I spoke to them. That ended up not being a good fit. So we pretty much only spoke with Bevy. But we, like, went through the wringer of looking at every scenario. Like, the most important part, and this came up consistently in the research, is just making sure the company that acquires a community has to be very aligned on the vision for the community. You have to set very clear expectations around where that separation of church and state is. And it has to be a brand that the community is going to trust inherently. When they see the announcement, they're going to feel like, oh, that's someone I know. It's someone I believe in. It's not holding company. That's like, cold and heartless, right? And we went through all different scenarios, like, what happens if Bevy gets acquired and then that company wants to shut it down? What happens if Bevy pivots and there's a different product direction that it wants to go that is no longer a fit for the community? What happens if Bevy needs to cut costs? Right, and there's a down market? Which, surprise, here we are, like, what do we do in those situations? And we just mapped it out to understand, like, what will this mean for the community? And how will the community survive and thrive through those experiences? And ultimately, we checked all the boxes and it felt really good, and we decided to move forward.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Now. You don't have to answer this because it may not be public. I know you have equity and you worked with Bevy for three years to help that transition happen and you were planning to stay on but life intervened, pandemic intervened. At some point was the amount of money that you would take away. I'm sure you had business partners and employees and things. Was it like life changing money? Is it enough to fund a year sabbatical money? Like did it change your life kind of amount in terms of everything you have been building or like just, I don't know, whatever. Vague.

Just curious. Money factor.

Oh, is that navigate these Interestingly in the research, 0 of the companies are public about the number. And the reason why that I learned from everybody is the company that acquired the community. They don't want that number to be used in a negotiation in the future with other companies they might acquire as like a benchmark or something like that. That's why I can't share the details of what the numbers are. It wasn't like life changing for me.

You're retired forever. Never have to work again.

I'll say that if Bevy has a nice exit one day then it should be nice for me. But in the immediate term, no, it didn't like immediately change my life.

There must have still something really satisfying about not having ever planned to sell it. But any kind of exit, I mean if it's done well like yours was, it's such an accomplishment for a business.

Owner to yeah, yeah, you want to land the plane, right? Like you want to see it through the finish line. And that's something I heard from the other founders who sold too. For some of them they're just like this was a great experience for me. It was a learning experience. It was like a point of pride to be able to see it through to a finish line for the business and try to get an outcome for the people involved. I was really proud of that. I knew that I wouldn't stay on forever and I was in a point of pretty burned out and I wasn't fully burned out but like it was clearly heading in a direction where if the acquisition didn't happen, I don't know that CMX would still exist today. And to find it A landing place where I knew it can exist. It has a potential to exist for the long run. Made me really happy.

And how did you give yourself permission to take a sabbatical after you left Bevy? Because a lot of people, I think out of discomfort would just try to find the next thing and overlap the two. But you made a very deliberate choice to say I'm going to take at least a year off. Which we're catching you a year and a half out, right?

Yeah. So I stepped down in March. I was with Bevy for three years running. CMX wasn't planning on leaving at the end of my vesting, but that was always going to be a decision point. And like you mentioned before, a few things kind of aligned where we got pregnant with our second kid. We decided to move back to New York. My wife decided she was going to take a year off because she's a teacher. So I always had it in my mind I wanted to do a sabbatical. I mean, you and I have been grinding. We've been just grinding for 20 years. He said, for you, probably something like that for me. And I felt really curious what it would be like if I just stopped. I've just been jumping from early stage startup to early stage startup, starting companies, joining companies, acquisitions. Like I've just been constantly building and building and building and doing and doing and doing. And there was a level of burnout. I could have kept going. I was managing it. I learned tools for how to do it. It's also one of those things that like, you don't realize how burned out you are sometimes until you stop and you're like, holy shit. Like, I am exhausted. I don't know, my brain just felt tired. I could remember how I felt at various points in my career before. Energized, motivated and flow creative. And I just like, I couldn't remember the last time I felt that way. I felt like I was executing but not thriving. I knew that I could get back there. I didn't know how, but I knew that the first step would be to just stop. I just had to stop. And I mean, the idea of joining another company just sounded insane to me. I'm completely unhirable at that point.

Oh my, Me too.

You know, I'm so unhirable. I think I learned how to be a good manager. I think I was an awful manager early in my career. I think I finally kind of figured it out while at Bevy and I think I was a really good manager there. And I learned how to execute. I Learned how to be a good operator, which is something I never would have said about myself before. I was always like a zero to one guy and the creator. I was good at this stuff. I could be a good employee, but I just was not in the mental place. I could not drink anyone else's Kool Aid if I tried.

Well, one of the things you said to me now that you are a year and a half ounce from first, just the pause. And I heard you say on another podcast too, now, once a quarter you want to pause, just stop, stop what you're doing and reflect and really think, is it still on track? And I'll link to that episode in the show notes, because you also said that one of the very first things that became clear was what was draining you, that what you stopped. Part of what you stopped was zoom meetings and endless emails. One of the things you said to me in the coffee shop across the street was, I feel so free.

Yeah.

So what happened from the time that you just had to kind of like sputter the engines to a stop when starting the sabbatical to now? What do you think that sense of freedom is that's returning?

There's this misconception that if you're a CEO, you're free to do what you want. You work for your employees, not just in terms of having to show up and be there and do the work, but you represent them. Like everything you say online is a representation of the company and the people in it. And it's self imposed. We see some CEOs today, probably not in a good way, that are very free with what they say and how they present themselves. But in some ways I was self censoring in a way. And then after the acquisition, I had a boss, I had a company that I was accountable to. And if there were like issues I wanted to scratch with content and different directions I wanted to go. I always had to ask this question of is this what's best for the company? Is this what's best for the community and for the team? There was even a couple times where I got negative feedback from team members because I would tweet something that didn't align with how they wanted the product to be. It wasn't even about the product, but it was like a general concept that they're like, well, this isn't good for us, so you shouldn't say it. That kind of stuff just killed me. I need to be able to speak openly and speak freely. I stopped everything. I didn't post on social media. I didn't do any work, I stopped all of it. I would journal a lot. I made it a point to not have any goals, no outcomes, even, like a goal of, like a hobby or finding answers. No, it was just completely open. And I just let that stay until I felt bored enough, drawn enough, that I, like, needed to do something. And that is where I started feeling free again. Because I was truly only doing things because I was craving it, because I wanted to explore it, because I wanted to go down that road. Not because it was an expectation that others are putting on me or that I put it myself through the lens of what I thought other people expected of me. That's where I'm at now, is being a solopreneur helps as well, in that I only have to answer to myself. I'm getting to tinker and explore and write what I want to write, when I want to write it. I don't have anyone else to answer to. For the first time in probably a decade, I feel free again. It feels like the early days of blogging that we used to have, where I was very free in those early days. And that's how I got my start. And it kind of feels like we've come full circle.

That's amazing. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Meetings.

Specifically, what would you say? How are we going to do less meetings? What if other people are as drained as you were?

For me, one of the things Covid was killing me mostly because of Zoom meetings. I love this. I love sitting in person with you and being able to look you in the eye. On Zoom, you literally can't make eye contact. There's actual science behind this, how Zoom is draining people because it's like empty calories. You think you're eating something, but you're getting no nutrition. It's like you think you're getting social interaction. There are things that eye contact releases in your body chemicals that you're not getting. Because it looks like you're looking at each other's neck.

Yeah. Or you're looking at a pinhole at.

The top of the computer.

You're not actually even looking at their eyes.

Exactly.

In order for them to think you're looking at them, you have to look at the pinhole.

Yes, exactly. And you can't pick up on body language. You can't see what's around in the room. You can't smell the room. You can't feel the same temperature. There's so many little subtle triggers that you don't get. And my day was just filled. And I would wake up and my whole calendar was set for me of just like meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, one on one, one on one, one on one interview. It was just the whole day. And that was another thing that was making me feel very unfree is I just didn't control how I spent my time. I had no room physically or mentally to be creative. I went through this process where when I started working in and coming back, I wrote this article about how I reduce meetings by 90%, where I basically have three layers. So if someone asks me for my time, I will first default to text. I'll say like, hey, I'm not taking meetings right now. Or I'm trying to limit readings right now so I can focus on writing. Can I answer any questions you have over dm? Most people accept that if it's someone I actually do want to talk to. If you ask me like, hey, I'm struggling on this thing. If it's a friend or I would someone that want to meet, I'd be.

Like, can I ask you on box?

Well, yeah, like, we could meet in person, but let's say we lived across the country. I would get on a phone call with you, but what I started doing is saying, I'm generally free in the afternoons. Here's my phone number. Give me a call. So now I'm not waking up and seeing a calendar full of meetings. People can just call me spontaneously. In times when I'm generally free, I'm usually on a walk where I'm just. There's my open time. Great. Can you call sometime in those blocks? And it feels so much more personal to get a real phone call. There's no video, so you're not having to be stuck to your computer. I walk in the woods for most of my calls now. That's the second layer. The third layer is, okay, this needs to be scheduled. Maybe it's a podcast or if I'm asking someone else's time, I'm more likely to book it on the calendar. So once in a while, I'll book it on the calendar only if it's absolutely necessary. And if it's like a team project, then there has all the things that you need in a meeting to make it productive. It has to be very specific. We have to have an agenda agenda. We have to know what the outcome is that we're trying to get to. So I do consulting. Like, that's how I run my calls. Like, we always have a clear agenda. We always have Specific outcomes. We're like very practical in using that time. Both because I'm trying to get my client the most value, but also I don't want to spend another minute on this call than I have to on this video call. I'm able to do a lot of this because I'm a solopreneur, but I think every single manager, every single business owner I've ever met could 100% reduce their meetings by at least 50% by kind of going through this process of what can I default to text? What can I make spontaneous and not have to add to my calendar? And then if I have to add it to my calendar, what are the expectations and the boundaries I'm going to hold and set for myself and for everyone I work with when we actually do that meeting.

And I'll add a fourth, which is that the most common questions. I end up writing an article or creating a podcast episode.

Yes.

Because I've had so many people say, oh, I'd love to pick your brain on book publishing. Great. Here's the Spotify playlist. 30 episodes. It was joy. And sometimes I'll say, depending who it is, but. And if you still have questions after that, let's definitely connect around that, even asynchronously through voxer, Marco Polo or voice memos or anything. But I've tried the call me in the afternoon technique as well and some just never do.

Yeah, exactly. Which is great too. Turns out it wasn't that important.

And then with the creating content around it, it's actually more helpful for them. I'm not trying to be rude. It's like I've probably answered the questions you think you have. And then some. And then some.

Yeah.

So it's a better use of our combined time if you actually listen to all that first and then you can ask me what's not there, which I'm happy to share, which might lead to my next episode.

100.

But like, that is actually such a helpful solution.

So many of those conversations, those ads turn into articles and so many people reach out. Like, I'm new to community management. What advice do you have? Here's a full guide to community management. There's 13 books, 14 courses, all the articles. Here's the full guide. And people love it when that happens because they're like, holy shit. Yeah. Yeah, this is incredible. Right now. I started doing that too, where I charge for one off calls. So people are like, hey, I'm launching a community. I'd love your feedback. A great way to default to text is to say, hey, I'm happy to jump on a call. If you'd like to book a call you can do so here. You can book one off paid calls with me. Totally cool. If you don't have budget for that right now I'm very happy to answer questions for free over dm.

I love it. And now tools like Calendly even allow you to build in them.

I do it through calendar. Yes, that's right in there.

Had to do that in the past where I've had to say right now I'm only booking calls for paying clients. Here's order book if you're interested in.

Yep.

And if not, feel free to submit as a podcast question or. Yeah, because I don't even like answering questions that are going to only live and die in a one on one setting.

Right.

It's like if you have a question, I'm happy to answer it out loud is what I call it, you know, I mean, unless it's super specific to what they're doing, I don't mind weighing in. And again, I'm not trying to be rude, but it's just pointless to me to answer something in a format that doesn't go anywhere when I know so many other people could benefit.

Yeah, sometimes I'll answer the question and just turn it into an article right away like, hey, you inspired me to just like go deep on this. So I ended up writing a draft and actually that's a great person to give you feedback on the draft. So I'll write the full draft and be like, if you have any feedback on it or follow up questions, let me know because that'll help me make the article better. So you almost like recruit them into like helping you create content. Totally.

And then. Yeah, and then I'll say if there's anything I missed, let me know. I'll happily write a section just for you. So it's all there. Well, this has been the most robust permission slip that came with all these road tested practices. Thank you so much, David. It's such a joy to be reading every day.

It's a pleasure.

You're still experimenting and everything is a work in progress. But for now, where can people find you if they want to learn more and keep in touch?

Yeah, just go to davidspinks.com, subscribe to my newsletter. I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the newsletter right now writing about serendipity and loneliness and building community businesses and I'm having a lot of fun writing and maybe that will be my next thing just writing, but that's probably the best place to continue to connect and learn from me.

Amazing. Thank you so much Stephen.

Thank you.

Big thanks everybody for listening.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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