From Grassroots To Greatness with Lloyed Lobo

Every obscure small idea that eventually became a global phenomenon, an enduring, iconic, cult like status From Christianity to CrossFit. Every obscure idea that became a global, worldwide phenomena had four stages in common. Those four stages in common were people listen to you or buy a product or service. You have an audience. You bring that audience together to connect with one another, to interact with one another, it becomes a community. When that community comes together to create impact towards a much greater purpose that transcends your product or your profits, it becomes a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a religion or a culture. Audience, community, movement, religion.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am here to help you create a business with systems that work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger. So that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy.

You know it, I know it. 2023 is almost done. It's crazy. 2024 is almost here, but we still have Q4 to rock and roll and make the most out of this time. That's why the new HubSpot sales hub is here to sync up everything inside of your operations, your team, and allow for collaboration to happen along the full customer journey. So you're not missing a beat. And I'm talking about workspace, you know, your analytics, everything's reporting across the board. So everybody's clued in and delivering as you should, bringing in more revenue. So with this whole thing, there's an AI platform, they just rolled out a conversational platform called Chat Spot. This thing is going to help you write copy using AI, generating emails, posts, so much more, all the stuff that you'd have to manually do. Well, that's different now. So tons of integrations, 1400 plus tons of ways to integrate features into your workflow. So this is something you want to definitely look into right now for Q4. So now's the time to go make a switch to HubSpot Sales Hub. Over@HubSpot.com sales. All right, Lord, we're going, man. You're hustling. You've been on show after show. So I'm excited to be chatting with you today, man. You've been, you've been, you've been busy and I want to talk about this mission you're on.

Definitely. Thanks for hosting me. I'm super pumped and you know, you always bring out the energy that you give out. So thanks for having me here and.

Thanks for the warm welcome for sure, man. And I mean, your hat speaks for it. And the Lobo hat, that big, bright red.

The Lobo is always fond in this show. My ex, our old co host and business partner, his last name is Wolf. So Lobo, it's always been an ongoing thing. So I feel right at home with you here.

Yeah, man. So you reached out. I mean, like, this is pretty cool because not a lot of we were just talking about this before is you're on this podcast tour right now. You have a book coming out here that's beautiful. And we'll show it off. Here we go. Here we go. Drop the name really fast. The full title and subtitle, definitely.

The book is called from grassroots to greatness 3013 rules to build iconic brands with community. Read growth to help you skyrocket your business, build a long term sustainable growth and also hopefully a movement. So, yeah, it's full color, it's designed well. I thought maybe, you know, as somebody who preaches community, the book should have energy. One of the key principles of community is energy. Right. And if the book doesn't have energy, then people will probably not sustain reading it to the end.

There you go, man. Well, it's a coffee table book, like we said, and something you can just open up a page, it looks like, and boom, you have something brilliant or a little nugget of wisdom, you know?

Exactly.

So I, I got to give you props because you reached out. I think it was LinkedIn that you've been going hard on, it looks like, and you're on this mission. Like a lot of people who listen here, we've talked a lot about the, the power of fans community and how it's like this small, mighty group can really do so much for a brand and become like evangelists of a brand. I've had Guy Kawasaki on here and he talked about it. You know, he used to be the evangelist of Apple and, and now for Canva, he says the same thing, you know, so you're doing it, man, and you're doing it as like a one man show.

You gotta hustle, man. Like, you know, I left the day to day of my company boast AI which we had bootstrapped to eight figures. Revenue brought in, external investors, growth equity, me and my co founder. Because we bootstrap after selling half the company, cashing out, we still own nearly 40% of the company. Then I left the day to day of the company. And you know, as an entrepreneur now for the last 10 years, working on a few companies that failed and then boasted well, and building a community, I was used to working like non stop, non stop, right? It doesn't end right, because you're building a company, you're in parallel building this community and it's a marathon. And so when I took a break to spend time with family and everything, I had huge gaps. I'm not used to not doing anything. So this book actually gave me something to do. Learn new skills, be zero to one again. I'm a pirate at heart. I'm a zero to one guy through and through. And I started to feel like out of place as the company became a navy after we brought in big company execs, as every company should graduate from going startup, or rather pirate startup mode to eventually becoming the navy, right? Because you need processes and you need to scale and it's hard to go pirate mode and get to 100 million in revenue, right?

I love that term, pirate mode too.

Yeah, definitely. All founders are pirates in the early days. What are you doing? You're sticking elbows, you're poking fingers, you're trying to get customers, ship products by any means possible. That's a rush that I really, really love. And that's a rush actually that goes all the way back to my childhood. So there are two big inspirations for this book. One is my childhood, right? I was born in Kuwait. My parents are from India. My mom grew up in the slums of Mumbai. And they weren't well off. My parents, right, they moved to Kuwait from India to just make a better living because the currency extended farther. They couldn't immigrate to the US or Canada. They weren't educated enough. And so my childhood summers were spent in the slums of Mumbai where watching TV was a communal thing because one in like five, six of those slums had a TV. And my grandfather had 10 kids. My mom was one of the oldest and living abroad so she could bring a tv. And so watching TV was a communal thing. These things were like, these homes were four like, I don't know what even to call it, like cement block walls with aluminum or asbestos Roofs, and they barely had place for 10 kids. But, you know, TV watching was a communal thing. If you cook a little extra, you share it with people. During the summer, puddles were turned into ponds. We'd be swimming in there. Going to the restroom was a communal activity because there was no bathroom in the house. But those were my fondest memories as a child. And every summer when we had to go back to Kuwait, I would cry and didn't want to leave. Fast forward a few years. My mom wakes me up one morning. I was 8, and she says, you can't go to school anymore. A war had broken out, and that was my probably biggest experience. With the marvel of community and what a group of determined people can do now. I was super excited when she told me, you don't have to go back to school. I had a reading disability growing up. I could never study, and it had to be last minute. I study for a math exam because math was easier than reading for me. And it ended up being a geography exam, which I had no clue. I hadn't studied, I hadn't read anything. So I knew I was going to fail. And so when she said, you don't have to go to school, I'm like, yes, you're never gonna find out that I failed. But then when I start to see worry on their faces, I'm like, okay, something's up. As an 8 year old, right? I go down the building with my dad and I see something amazing happen. In 2023, we just belabor on problems over and over again, right? And it festers and manifests itself into monsters. Back then, they knew it was a gargantuan problem, but everyone's like, let's figure a solution. Every building became a sub community. So in our building, the conversation was something like, okay, the security had lapsed. There was a time there was no phones, there was no Internet. People were like, I'll guard the building from 12 to 6. And somebody else is like, I'll guard for the next four hours. Somebody else is like, I'll organize food supplies. If you're short, I have some connections. Another person's like, hey, I have extra room if you have relatives displaced. And somebody else is like, no, no, no, the school's empty. I have a friend who works in the school. We'll try to coordinate. So every building became a sub community that coordinated with the next one, the next one, the next one. Word of mouth spread and communicated with embassies, communicated with governments. It became the largest grassroots evacuation movements that took people to safety And I was going on this bus, this highway, this, this refugee bus on the highway of death from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan. And as an eight year old man, I felt so connected to the greater purpose, which was, you know, evacuating people to safety, that I felt like a little Rambo. I was moving things around. I never once felt right. I never once felt that I was a cog in the wheel. I felt like I was driving this thing.

Yeah, you're in it, man, you're in it, right?

I felt like an 8 year old Rambo. Like I still remember putting the bandana on my head and running around with my dad. It was hilarious. But as I went on this bus from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan on this highway of death which you can Google and see pictures of buses were bombed, etc. You weren't sure if you're going to live or die. Currencies were invalid. We weren't sure where we were going and how are we going to turn out on the other side. But all the adults in the bus were laughing and singing, playing the guitar. And I realized it's never the destination. And it's neither the journey either. It's the companions that matter the most. With great companions, a crappy journey on the way to hell becomes memorable. And with the best of experiences, like you could be sipping champagne, eating caviar in a chateau in Paris, but with like toxic people, you want to get out of there. So, you know, we always say, oh, it's the journey, it's the journey. No, it's not the journey. No, it's not the destination, it is the companions. That's why you, you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. And truly who you surround yourself with, your spouse, your coworkers, your friends, determine your well being.

It's your environment, right? It's everything around you. And yeah, you could, I guess, be in the most ritzy place and yeah, with the whatever, everything that you ever dreamt of. But yeah, the people, it's the like you said, the five people you surround yourself with and I fully believe, yeah, it's your surroundings, people and even some of the place that you choose, it makes all the difference.

It makes all the difference, right? And so like, think about it. Like, my fondest childhood memories were in the slums of Mumbai where there was nothing and I felt happy. So then fast forward a few years, we moved to Canada, we immigrated to Canada. I finished engineering and I was craving the two things that I experienced in that Gulf War. Number one was the Entrepreneurial spirit. We talk about entrepreneurship like it's all about making money. It's not. The entrepreneurial spirit is about taking an obscure idea to execution and impact while dealing with extreme risk and uncertainty and ambiguity. And there was no riskier, ambiguous, uncertain situation than being in the middle of the war and being a small cog. But feeling like you're driving a big impact, no leader there, made me feel like I was insignificant. And that drove me. That was entrepreneurial spirit. To me. You don't know what's going to happen, but let's do it. Let's create the impact. Let's come together. And the second thing was the power of people and creating that impact, bringing people together. So I graduated university. I didn't want to go and do a typical job. And I'm like, you know what? I don't have the desire to sit in code. I can't do this. I'm craving this excitement, this energy, this, this pirate. Like we were all pirates.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

So I asked a few family members who are businessmen. The word entrepreneur wasn't widely used back then. In 2004 or 5, the word startup wasn't used widely back then. And they said, hey, the best skill you can learn if you want to do this someday is learn to communicate. And your communication sucks. You're an awkward engineer.

And I asked them like, hey, what's the best way to learn to communicate? And sales, the word sales kept coming over and over again. Sales is everything. Sales fixes everything. And as I reflect back, I realize one of the key things in life is consistency. If you suck at something.

The only way to get better at it is to put yourself in an environment or a situation that forces you to do that something over and over and over again. Because motivation is, is not for everyone. I'm not self motivated at all. But taking a job in sales helped me develop the skills, develop the consistency. So I started applying to jobs as an account executive, as a salesperson. I applied to Xerox, I applied, you name it, I applied to big companies and small. Nobody would give me a job. They would first find it awkward or weird that like a engineer is applying for this job. He can't really speak well, it's not normal. It's not normal. And so I applied, started applying to like really small companies. And a desperate startup gave me a job in cold calling. So start cold calling. I didn't have the experience. I was nervous. I'll never forget that first cold call I made. I practiced for four hours. And literally when the Decision maker answered the phone, I hung up and everyone started laughing. But it's my ego, right? Why can't I cut it in sales as an engineer? I'm a pirate. I kept going. I am, I can. I kept going and going and going and it just got better and better. And then my next job progressed into sales. My girlfriend then, now wife, was in medical school in New Jersey. So I started applying to jobs in New Jersey. I wanted to be next to her. We've been dating since our teens. She also grew up in Kuwait, was also a refugee of the Gulf War. What are the odds you meet somebody like that and I'm everything I am because she believed in me and she paid the bills as a physician for so long.

Till the outcome. So I go there, take this job in another startup small company in New Jersey, and next thing I know, actually it's not quite a sales job. I applied for a sales job, I got a sales job. But there was no repeatable scalable product process. So I needed to talk to customers to figure out what to build. Then I needed to translate that into product requirements and oh, guess what, by the way, you also need to launch the marketing side and the collateral. Now most people would say, I didn't sign up for this. Actually I meet a lot of kids these days and they're like, I didn't sign up for this. And they. And they just quit. Yeah, I, even if I wanted to, I didn't have the option because I was on a visa.

And you needed that job. Yeah, that's right.

Necessity is a mother of all inventions. So I start studying about. I'm like, I know cold calling so I can talk to customers at least. I started walking the sites of these big companies, Tiffany, Armani, Simon and Schuster. Like I know UX and like wireframing and product requirements from what I learned as a software engineer in university. So let's put these two together. And then it was just a repeatability of doing it. Now the thing I didn't know was advanced sales techniques beyond the cold calling. Right. Marketing, like building a website and all of that. And back then everything I started Google searching was coming out from HubSpot. HubSpot's inbound marketing community, Inbound marketing certification, Inbound marketing program. And so that became my next community. I started reading everything from HubSpot and the books they recommended on my drives because I don't enjoy reading. It's hard for me to finish. That's why this book was so hard. But I drive and listen to audio books, watch The HubSpot videos and man, that became my next community. Graduated from there, my wife got into residency, moved to another state and I started working for another founder. And then we were eventually going to move to San Francisco. And my college buddy, who we were partners in every project, called me and said, hey, I want to do a startup in automating, innovation, funding and tax credits for businesses. He was working for a big four accounting firm. I just jumped at the opportunity to work with him. I mean like gonna work for crazy hours for another founder, you know, why not work with your friend and start something new. We were moving to San Francisco anyway. The hard thing was now I'm like on unemployment.

Well, yeah, and yeah, you've had this structure, but yeah, I was gonna say the job like now you have this opportunity to scale with your own thing and have ownership, but yeah, exactly.

So reflecting back, right, I think if you have to look at all success comes down to three things. Your ability to communicate, your ability to create, and your ability to be consistent. Creation, communication and consistency. You can be the best communicator or the best creator, but if you're not consistent, you'll get nowhere. And so that experience taught me to communication, it taught me creation. And I was forced to be consistent. And so the next thing just gradually made sense, logically made sense because my best friend from university, we were partners in every project. Just his faith because I know he was a very calm, calculated, decisive individual. And I'm like bouncing off the walls, high energy. So I'm like, okay, you know what? Yin yang, it works really well. And went on this path to do the business with him. Now the business we bootstrapped by building a community because you know, the cold calling didn't work in the early days. And I'll dive into the story, but we bootstrapped to 8 figures ARR. By building a community. And when we sold a majority in the company, the acquiring firm, the growth equity firm that bought us also we met through the community. They came to a community event. And then that's the thing, honestly, they came to a community event and within weeks the term sheet was signed. And within three months the due diligence was wrapped up. And so then over time, you know, transition out of the day to day, we brought a new CEO, brought a new leadership. Me and my co founder left the day to day. My co founder was CEO, president, my co founder was CEO, founder and I was president, founder. He was everything else. And I was the face of the company, product, gtm, et cetera. And so When I left the company company now for the first time, I came in a millions of dollars in money, money that I had never seen because you remember all my life it was like immigrant parents, they didn't do well, they gave us everything. My mom stayed at home to take care of us and she gave us everything. Right. And, and working through this journey, relying on my wife to pay the bills and telling her, you know, did a, did a AI chatbot in 2013 or Harvard Science, failed and joined the founding team of another venture backed company building an AI sales assistant that failed. Did an events company to bring in dollars and the co founder ran away with a quarter million in profits and so had to sue him. By the time he paid us, it was like 50 grand in installments after lawyer fees. It didn't even feel like it hit your bank kind of thing. And so this outcome felt great. And technically I should have been at the top of the world. But what ended up happening after this was I ended up depressed and I felt lost and I felt like I didn't have any purpose. I ended up depressed, I became insufferable, I got out of weight, overweight, all kinds of things. And then when I came back to sanity and good health was also because of a community. It was a fitness community, the peloton community, a bunch of fit friends.

And as I reflected with others, the.

The connection with others. Right. And there's this research now on blue zones, which are five places in the world where people live functionally. Functionally is important. Live functionally to 104 or five out of their nine traits are all communal things like eating together, socializing, being a part of a religious group, etc. Right. Community is huge. It impacts your mental health. I mean loneliness is the number one killer in America, right?

That's right, Yep. And now with virtual like there's a lot of lack of community and separation.

Exactly. So as I reflected back, I'm like, all my life I had nothing and I was happy. The one time in my life where I became a multimillionaire is when I ended up depressed. And it was because I felt like I lost my tribe and money didn't mean anything.

And so then I started to see, maybe as an homage I should write a book about community because now I'm in such a happy state, I don't have the next startup idea. I'm still a board member, active board member at Boast and you know, own a significant portion of the company. So evangelizing that. So I'm like, I Don't have another idea. And the worst thing is to start a company for the sake of it when you don't have the itch or the passion. But I did have passion for community and I wanted to educate the world on the power of community. But I'm like, who's going to listen to my story? I'm not some billionaire, right? I'm not some famous person. So I started researching, watching every single of our traction conf, which is our community videos over the last seven years, like 400 plus videos. And then talking to a lot of community members, community leaders. The count hit 1,000 almost. And I found a very common theme. Every obscure small idea that eventually became a global phenomenon, an enduring iconic cult like status From Christianity to CrossFit. Every obscure idea that became a global worldwide phenomena had four stages in common. And I distilled those learnings into 13 rules to build an enduring long standing brand. But those four stages in common were people listen to you or buy a product or service. You have an audience, you bring that audience together to connect with one another, to interact with one another, it becomes a community. When that community comes together to create impact towards a much greater purpose that transcends your product or your profits, it becomes a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a religion or a cult audience. Community, movement, religion. And hopefully I've done justice to the stories I talk about in the book because again it's hard for me to read or write an academic book so I had to write it with stories. I have an accompanying notion workbook where each chapter will have academic like templates. But this book is all about stories to inspire and also give you direction on how to get started A to Z. Going from audience to hopefully a cult like brand someday. But I distilled those four phases into, into 13 chapters.

I like it man. And that's. It seems like, like you mentioned, it's. Every movement has these components and we can, we can look at, yeah, cults all the way to, you know, that, that people, I mean there's, there's power in, in these types of movements no matter what they are. You know, it could be nefarious or amazing, you know and it could be in a war like zone like you said where it's like everybody connects around a purpose and there's, there's this focus, this drive that everybody gets bonded to and it becomes this like a flywheel. I always imagine like okay, you get the right people on board on the bus that believe on all these points. It's going to keep that momentum going, I guess speak to that because you've grown obviously a large business in boast and also with your own communities and now with this book, it really doesn't take a lot to like spark that flame, right?

You, a small group of people driven by an unquenching passion for the purpose can move mountains. They can change the direction of the world. I've seen at the Gulf war and I've seen it over and over again, again. And you know, I don't like to bring religion into this, but there's some truth to it because it's all human psychology. It's how what drives people, right? People drive people. Ultimately. Yesterday's innovation always becomes tomorrow's commodity. We latch onto the tech because it creates the buzz so much. But look at this. I'll walk through the journey of tech progression. First it was all these electronics manufacturers, right? When electronics were commoditized by the Japanese manufacturers, what happened? Harley Davidson almost went bankrupt in the 80s. The leadership came out and said, we're gonna rebuild the company on the ethos of community employees. Leaders went out there and started writer clubs. Employees became writers, writers became employees as a result of that. They created rituals where people came together as weekend warriors. Then they came together to create impact over time. They not only saved Harley, they also created movements and campaigns to donate to breast cancer and autism. They're always doing good. Today there are very few bands you can say that have sustained and endured to the level of Harley. From going almost bankrupt to where you can recognize a fan just by what they're wearing. Right? Like you. You wear a leather jacket and shoes and you immediately boots and you immediately associate that person with a Harley if they have a specific bike that is not the typical aerodynamic sport bikes, but you have a Harley like looking bike, no matter what brand it is, you immediately think of Harley. That kind of brand association.

Dark kind of. Yeah.

You see any heavy metal guys you immediately associate with Harley. That happens over time through audience community movements and sustained rituals that create cult like energy. And, and so then you look at that progression. Then you know, let's, let's go back to 2000, right? Everyone was saying.comcompany we don't say.com company anymore. Then we started saying cloud company and social company and mobile company. We don't say those things anymore. Now the latest fad is AI. We saying AI AI AI. How do you think OpenAI built? OpenAI with the power of community. This is open source. We were all giving our data boast. AI was part of the open source or the OpenAI community. In 2019, they have everyone's data. Without the community, your ChatGPT wouldn't be here.

It's a neural network. It's everything combined.

Yeah, exactly like people are. Without people giving and contributing, it wouldn't be here. And so for this, I wanted to also convey that, hey, we built a successful AI company by leveraging the power of community. Ultimately, yesterday's innovation, it will always become tomorrow's commodity. But if you build a community, you will not become a commodity. Look at every brand that has sustained over time, become enduring. It's the human to human connection that drives it. But people don't see it. Right?

I love it, man. And because this is a common theme that comes up with AI, you know, because we talk a lot of marketers, a lot of creators listening and entrepreneurs that are looking to scale time and always testing the newest thing, the newest tool. And it's easy to get lost in all that stuff and then think that, oh, it's all gonna automate everything. You know, these tools, they're so smart. They're gonna keep learning. Know my, you know how I write. But we can't lose touch of the human side. Big announcement here. The Hustle and Flowchart podcast is now the newest podcast on the HubSpot Podcast Network. They're the audio destination for business professionals. It's exactly why I joined the network, to expand what we've been doing here. Making business the fuel for your life, not the stressor or the burnout. We want to build fun and make business a big part of who we are and our expression out to others. So you're gonna expect a lot more, more curated guests that sync up with this mission. Also more topics and episodes from me. And I want you to keep listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Go check out other shows on the HubSpot Podcast Network network@HubSpot.com podcast network. I'm curious of your thoughts. As technology keeps speeding up, the power community seems like it's getting even more valuable. If you focus there.

You know what's happening in 2023. Marketing is taking a bloodbath, right? People are spending less and less on marketing. CPMs are up, right? TikTok, Facebook. Now Google's gonna sunset this cookieing thing. So you gotta own your audiences, people, consumers. I'm actually happy about all of this because consumers are tired of spam, of clickbait, of seeing the same thing over and over again. Of giving their personal data to access crappy white papers. And now with every time new technology comes out or a new growth strategy comes out, right. A growth tactic comes out, it gets copied and it get turns into spam. Like sending cold emails or now copying from chat GPT people are blatantly copying and you can tell, right? We have the sea of sameness. Your community is your biggest brand differentiator. Especially in a time where no two products.

Like are different anymore. We used to say no two products are the same, but no two products are different anymore. Right? You can go, there are websites, there are marketplaces where you can buy the skins of other platforms and then just run small dollars on it and you can launch another product. Right? No code, low code has made it so easy to build product. What's hard is creating an audience, creating a community. But that's your biggest moat. And the biggest brands know this, right? Shopify know this, Nike knows this, Apple knows this. Tesla knows this. If you follow any of their journeys, what did Elon Musk do? Create an audience. Why do you think he went out there and started evangelizing this?

Yeah.

And then through that audience he brought people together and created a community. And then through that community he drove people to invest in electric vehicles and.

Energy efficiency purpose behind it.

Exactly. And it became a movement and now these rituals started to form around Tesla and over time it has become a cult. Whether you love him or you hate him. And there is very little difference between his strategy or some of the biggest religious leaders to some of the biggest movements. How they went from audience to community to movement to cult or religion.

Yeah. And there's no question why he got Twitter or X, why he got this massive community, this social network and now has the ability to enhance that. Obviously he has his own mission to get rid of the bots and all that, but he's, he's focused on people, on community, but obviously backed with the best and latest technology.

People create companies, people create technologies, people create movements, people create impact, technologies don't. Until we live in a world where robots are buying from robots, the people to people connection will only increase. Let me give you another example. With all the ChatGPT and all the generative AI and all these talks around the world, what do you engage with in your personal time? When you're doom scrolling, let's say on the pot in the toilet or at late night at bed, when you're doom scrolling, do you engage with brands more or do you engage with people more?

I would say people you're Scrolling through people's content.

Right?

Yeah, get those ads. But come on, it's people that you're.

Looking for on LinkedIn. Look at brand engagement, look at individual engagement. You're commenting, you're engaging, you're interacting with brands more or people more. This is what people don't understand is like until we live in a world where robots are buying from robots, the people to people connection is going to be irreplaceable. Especially after Covid. Right. And you know, I'll walk through the journey of how actually we landed on it at Boast.

Let's do that. Yeah, that'd be cool. Case study.

Yeah, so because I mean I can talk about Tesla and Apple and all these people that are in the book. The issue is it might not be relatable to a lot of people because they're like if Tesla or Apple or Nike were all starting out right now, it'd be more relatable. But those stories may be like, man, it's such a high platitude even if I break it down that it's like the immediate goal should be attainable sometimes. Right. So I can talk about us because we leverage the power of community to bootstrap with no investor money to 10 million. ARR. We had no marketing team when we got there and we had.

Did you have an existing audience at all?

No, nothing. 30, 35 people. So I'll take it from scratch. I'll take it from scratch. We had, we had no audience. So I moved to Calgary, Alberta, Canada from San Francisco where my co founder Alex Popa was there. His wife was articling so he had to be there. So you know, I said I quit my job. My wife moved to San Francisco. She was now doing a fellowship, working long hours anyway. So I went and camped out in his house. I was on ei, I go there. We decided to do this thing, get people's data in exchange give them R D money from the government. Big four accounting firms were our competitors. They were doing it. So the first thing you do is how do you figure out who you're going to target? The only way we knew was pick up the phone and dial for dollars. We started calling manufacturing and construction. Oil and gas was huge. Nobody would talk to us, man. Imagine two guys you've never heard of saying, hey, give me your data, I'll get you money from the government that you won't pay interest on and you won't give up equity on the most non dilutive form of capital ever. They're like, wow, this doesn't sound real, number one. And the people that did know about it, because the Canadian government gives over 3 billion a year in these R and D tax credits and innovation funding programs, they were already working with big four accounting firms. So they're like, why should we trust you? So we're like, okay, what's the next phase here? Let's go and start storming the events of oil and gas, construction, manufacturing. We started going to all these events. The problem was we didn't resonate with them, man. Didn't feel like our tribe. It was. The conversations felt forced. And I still remember we felt like, you know, two guys forcibly putting a suit on top of hoodies while these guys were all like, you know, at a certain place where it was the old boys club.

Yeah, you weren't in that club, man.

We couldn't fit in. It didn't feel like our tribe. So dejected, we started going to the local startup events and instant resonation. We're like, wow, it feels like we found our tribe. People were so welcoming. We were having the same kind of conversations. Everyone was at the same level, more or less like zero or a little beyond zero. And it was great. We started, you know, those, those initial hangouts at the startup events turned into them becoming our friends because, you know, our spouses. His wife was articling lawyer, my wife was a doctor. She wasn't there. The business was our life and this community became our friends, our second family. So we started hanging out with them, partying together on the weekends, participating in hackathons and wow, it felt like, man, you know, that one year just went by, it felt like our tribe and it also didn't feel like work. And so, you know, I'll stop by and share a few frameworks as we go along because when we were in that journey, it always felt like I'm throwing spaghetti on the wall. Now when you reflect back when you've made some money, it all seems like, oh, it's a profound framework. But in reality, everyone's throwing spaghetti in the wall.

It's a mess.

And then when you reflect back and you can only reflect back positively, if you made some money and it was successful, then you're like, oh, it was a framework. Right. If it fails, it's not a framework, it's a lesson. But nonetheless. So you're starting out, you have no customers, you have no idea what you're going to do. You know what to build, you don't know what to build, etc. Where do you start? The first step is to figure out who do I even target now? How do you figure out who to target? What I found, what I realized is one, do you love that audience? Do you have a passion for that audience? Building a company and building a community is a long term sustainable thing. It's a multi year thing. It's a marathon of the heart and mind. It's a labor of love, especially community, when volunteers are involved and all of that. If you don't love the audience you're serving, if you hate the audience you're serving, how are you going to go on for long? Money will only, money will only be a motivating factor for so long until you start like frictioning with your customers, with the audience. So what is passion? Do I love this audience? Because you gotta create consistently. If you hate the audience, you can't create. It's the reason why I love this audience so much that on my 59th podcast, I still have this level of energy, right? It's passion. The second thing is, is it a sizable niche or is it a small niche that's growing? That is very key because when you have small underserved niches, you can find white space and create easily for them. The third is, is there a propensity to pay? Because if people don't pay you, you can love the community all you want and you can love the audience all you want, but, and you know, it can be the largest ICP in the, on the planet, but if there's no propensity to pay, you're gonna fail, right? You're gonna burn out. It's not a business. And the fourth one is ease of access. Now you can have all of the three above, but if there's no ease of access, you're done. So look at that back, back there. We wanted to target oil and gas or manufacturing, stable businesses, large markets and propensity to pay. No passion for it and no ease of access gravitated towards startups. Now the second thing that followed was we started spending so much time with these startups and with these founders, they became friends of ours. We understood where the eight how they breathe, eat, drink, sleep, where they hung out, who their friends were. We understood what their problems were. But problems are very short term most of the time, what their goals were and beyond goals, what their aspirations were. Because the aspiration is a forever right. Your aspiration will last beyond you as a company.

And so we found two big white spaces there, there. This is 2012, number one. All of the events we went to while great, they were high level CEO platitudes, somebody talking 50,000 foot. Now, if I've decided to start a business, I don't need inspiration, I need tactics. How do I get my first 10 customers, how I launch a product, et cetera, et cetera.

Pirate mode.

Pirate mode. None of the content there we were getting from the events. And I suspected it was because the events were organized not by founders, but by event organizers. And so they brought the highest social proof speaker who was like, if somebody's at 50 million, if I bring Elon Musk to talk to a bunch of founders, he will inspire them for sure. But how will he give them specific tactics when he's not in it anymore? Like, and even the, even the founders on the floor will be, will find it so hard to resonate in the sense like, dude, he's saying this, he's saying XYZ advice because he's Elon Musk. Like, step in our shoes, we're zero. How do we get to like one or how do we get to five? Only somebody who's at immediately at five. Like, if you're at a level, if you're at a level one, you need help from a level three or four, not from a level 10 or a level 50. Right.

It's too far off. Yeah. You want just a little bit more.

Exactly. So that was, that was one thing we noticed. And the other thing was the media wasn't covering startups. No service provider would service them. In fact, we got made fun of a lot by competitors who said, ah, you guys are going to go bankrupt. These guys never will pay. Now, that bet we made played out because startups end up being one of the fastest growing segments. And it boomed our business because they grew. They invested in innovation, we invested in them with our time and love. They grew, our business grew. And now today, when you look back, you know these guys who used to say, oh, you're silly for going after them. We're like, you don't want to service them. Your customers don't want to work with us. So we can only serve our community, our kind.

Yeah.

Now Fast forward to 2023. All these accounting firms, etc, they all have startup programs and one startup rates. And I'm like, whatever, right? But back then, there wasn't the help. Yeah, the second gap, right, was that there was no help, there was no voice for them. So we said, how do we address these two gaps? Gap number one, we started hosting our own meetups. We started inviting people who are like, you know, immediate, like two, three levels above the level our audience was at and started bringing tactical content. How do I get my first customers? How do I land my first enterprise deal? Those kinds of things. Our messages went from buying my stuff to like, now. We knew people in the community would be like, hey, we're hosting this meetup with Joe. He's going to talk about how do you do your launch campaign for your product or how do you get into TechCrunch first PR.

And we got 10 spots. It's at our co working space. There's going to be free pizza. Pizza. Then like 20 bucks would feed like 10 people, right?

Enough.

A lot of people. Enough, right? And 10 people would show up. Now the one thing I talked about earlier is like creation, communication and consistency. We never stopped. We kept doing Those meetups despite 10 people show up and more and more people would show up. 15, 20 more and more people would show up. One day we had 200 people show up at a co working space for an event. We did. We hijacked all the aisles. And the guys at the co working space are like, listen, this is not a pizza meetup anymore. You can't do this. You can't like hustle your way into paying no venue fees and all of.

This stuff take over the whole place.

Yeah, you got to go now, full blown, right? Like, you got to get out of here and find a venue if you want to do this size. Eventually that gave us great validation that we had this community growing. Now in parallel, we reached out to the local newspaper and we said, hey, why don't you give us a column? We'll cover startups. And they're like, man, it's not even a priority, whatever. So again, in hustle mode, leverage our network to guest blog for a couple of other highly trafficked websites. There was a local Canadian blog called Tech Vibes at the time, and I didn't have any experience, so I couldn't talk about my experience doing startups like a Neil Patel or like a Jason Fried or Jason Lemkin. So I started covering other startups. And when you cover other startups that haven't been covered, what do they do? They share it. So that first post I did of covering other startups got socialized so much that I used the social proof of that saying, hey, look at how many retweets it's gotten. I can get it for your newspaper. You tap it to a whole new audience. They're like, fine, we'll give you a column. Now strategically, I call that first column startup of the week. It created this thing where you had to apply and it was in the newspaper. Now the newspaper never committed to give me beyond that first write up.

Okay, you're forcing it to happen. I can see it already.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm fortunate it happened. But I wrote startup of the week, put it out there. They just gave a blog and I put, if you're interested in being featured, apply here. Put a WUFOO forum, I think it was. And when I shared it with the startup I'd covered, he was so excited because it's in the local newspaper, in the national, like one of the biggest newspapers. And it's love for startups, which never happened before there in the media in that way. And it was startup of the week, so it meant something, right? Like you're something of something, like you're the best of this, you're the best startup of the week and there's so many. So he shared it and that sort of went mini viral. The editor, I'll never forget that day, called me and said, listen, man, if you commit to writing this every week, I will make it a print column.

All right?

And now this created a boomerang effect for our community because one, I could not write any type of content in a short period of time to drive SEO juice to my website, right? Like it's an obscure new domain. What can I, what could I have done to drive like the domain authority other than getting a backlink every week from the highest domain authority website in all of Canada? That was the newspaper website. The second thing is instant credibility. Went from being two obscure guys to the local newspaper believes that they're good guys, so they write a column. Number three was our email database started building because people started submitting that WUFU form to be featured. Number four, in a weird way, we found like these entrepreneurs waking up early in the morning on Mondays, every Monday to go and buy physical newspapers. Physical newspaper is a credibility factor, right?

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Because everyone has a blog, but now you're in the newspaper. That's incredible. They'd buy these newspapers, give it to their family members that take pictures that, that share it. And so that boomerang effect of people started applying, we'd get the opportunity, invite more people to our events, people started applying, etc. And that grew our community. Over time, it evolved into a conference and a community. We called it traction because it was tied to the aspiration of our ideal customers. Our customers want money for what? To innovate faster. For what? To create impact. And our purpose became enabling innovators to change the world. Every dollar spent in innovation returns 20 to the universe. Vaccines, robots, clean drinking water is a function of innovation. Yet 99% of the innovations die on the vine. So that became our purpose. That's why we're doing it. The mission became enabling them through content and capital. Right through the know how the funding and the know how the vision became accelerating innovation. And then the values were all community centric around building connection, giving people the autonomy, driving energy, recognition, having a great purpose, those kinds of things. And that took us, you know, just the consistent.

Effort there. Right. Like everyone says, you know, I agree. I'm the first one to say luck is a huge part of everything. The fact that our investors came during an event we did during the pandemic and end up making us rich is luck.

Yeah.

Now luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. You know what the difference is? Most people do not flip enough. If you keep flipping the damn coin over and over and over again, even the broken clock is right twice a day, you might get lucky someday. We just never stopped flipping. We kept doing those events. And when the pandemic hit, we took all our events online. And rather than doing a one and done two day virtual summit, we launched, we launched like workshops, we learned, launched AMAs. Every Tuesday, Thursday at 11am we'd do the same. We were there, we would do that same meetup that we do in person. We'd now do it online. And now hundreds of people started tuning in. I could have done a two day virtual summit and called it a day. But imagine now you got to do twice a week, so you're top of mind twice a week for people rather than once a year. Right. During virtual Summit, our audience that was entirely formed through meetups and conferences in person, now became digital. Our subscriber base grew from 30,000 some odd subscribers to over a hundred thousand subscribers. The first window of the pandemic when something opened, we hosted an event. These investors came, decided to buy a majority stake in the company. So that was, that was the epic journey, driven entirely by the power of community and doing two simple things. Yeah, consistency. If you're consistent for people, they'll show up in the same way. You want to get lucky, keep flipping the coin. Risk is on the other side. Just make sure, just keep taking that risk. Keep taking that risk. Keep taking that risk. You will get lucky. I truly believe luck is the 10% that flips everything in your favor. But to get to that 10%, you gotta keep going. You gotta keep going. It's consistency.

Yeah, man, and that's the thing. It's like those win. It's like a vc, right? Like it's, that's why they invest in let's say 10 companies and then one of them can make everything, you know, make everything in the black and scale to the moon, you know, and same thing with what you just said. You keep showing up and what do you know, the right people show up right at the right time. But the right time was you built that, you made that happen. It wasn't just pure luck. Out of nowhere you actually showed up and created that space for that to happen.

Exactly. Because you know one of the other key frameworks here is.

When you understand your customer really well, you also understand a few more things about them, right? You understand who do they follow, who are the influencers they respect, who are, who do they fund, Meaning who are the other tools they buy from and where do they frequent, what events they go to, what platforms they hang out on, what magazines they read. When you have a list of all those around your icp, when you understand the circle of influence around your icp, then when you do events, you know, who I should invite as speakers, where I should distribute it, who are the service providers, other people they buy tools from that I can co host from or invite as sponsors. And so when you go to, when your ICP comes to an event, it feels like it's their tribe. Yeah man, it's the same reason why we didn't felt that tribe like feeling at a manufacturing event, but we felt it going to startup events. But like you can deliberately engineer this by understanding who do they fund, who do they follow, who do they frequent, what do they frequent and you can create this circle of influence. And then it's all about you understand the customer, you know a hundred burning questions about them. If you had to write an encyclopedia or the ultimate guide to XYZ aspiration, what are we the chapters, subchapters and key topics. Start building that audience through content. Maybe a One video can turn into tweets, short form video, podcast, LinkedIn description, summaries, all of that. Start building that audience, then open it up. Open up these chats to more like AMA style where people can interact with one another. Start bringing them together, start doing meetups. There's a great value in, in person, right? Anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you start to build stronger connections where sound and sight would be, taste, touch, smell. So you start bringing these people together, then offer up a greater purpose that they can come together. Because I truly believe everyone wants to do good in the world. It's just life happens, the system happens, taxes, mortgage.

Focus is all over the place.

Focus is all over the place. I get busy, so I can't donate everything. But if you align them with a greater purpose that's far greater than profits, everyone will want to give time. As long as they even the lowest common denominator fields in a small way, they're contributing to something large. It's like the President Kennedy example. He was walking the floors of NASA and he sees a janitor sweeping at midnight and he's like, what are you doing at this hour? And he says, sir, I'm putting a man on the moon. That is purpose, man. That's, that's why, that's, that's the purpose. With why an 8 year old felt like Rambo throwing a red bandana over his head during the Gulf War, I felt like I was driving it. Great leaders cascade purpose, not financial goals. And that's right, man.

And that's it. Yeah, it's. The finances are finite, you know, but it's. That purpose can live on forever, as with the people you know and the missions behind us all. So, Lloyd, dude, you've dropped a lot of knowledge and thank you for being so open to a case study. And I know this is the message that I've been putting out there on the podcast side. And I love that you basically, I mean, this is how to build a business and one that lasts and that attracts the right people all the way from not only the people that are following, but to the people investing in your company as well, making you rich. So I mean, like, how much better is that? You know, it's like the full spectrum. I can't wait to dive into your book. To the 13 rules to build iconic brands for Community Led Growth. It's beautiful.

Send me, send me your address. You know, this book is. This book is for my mom in many ways. So I gave the inspiration of why I picked Community to write about, because it's my DNA. I'm everything I am because of the community. The only time where I felt I had everything and I got depressed was when the community left me. So I went on this quest. But this book actually I wrote for my mom. You know, I had great difficulty reading and writing and my mom was told many times by people that her son would amount to nothing. My wife's a bright doctor. Like she got into med school in second year of undergrad without MCATs and bright as hell. I was unemployed when we were getting married and she was Told that, you know, effectively, my mom took it as she didn't raise me well. And my mom asked me this one question, Did I give up my career to stay at home to raise you? To hear that I didn't raise you well, that you'll not amount to anything. And one startup after the second, after doing an events company that also went bust, I never stopped that woman's question. That raised me, that gave me everything. Growing up was what drove me. But when the money came, it didn't really feel like I. I did justice to that question. Did I not raise you right? I mean, I don't have a master's degree. I didn't finish high school. I finagled myself into engineering school, which was luck again.

But writing this book with the goal of making it a bestseller. The first print of the hard copy with bestsellers. For mom to say that, hey, I may not have that master's degree. I may have just finagled myself into engineering, but you didn't stay at home for nothing to raise me.

Nice.

Some of the smartest people in the world, who are some of the most educated people in the world, are reading your son's book and this is because of you.

Mmm. Dude, from grassroots to greatness for your mom, that's like the perfect way to end it too. And it's the best purpose to even put this out there and share it. I know there's a lot of people feeling that way. And hey, man, pirate mode got you here. And, you know, there's that flow state, but that pirate mode keeps the engine cooking, you know, so thanks for sharing that, Lloyd. Appreciate it.

It's a great way for me to get into pirate mode. I mean, like me, a couple of contractors, but me doing the outreaches, me hitting up the press, hitting up podcasters like you.

You're still doing it. Yeah.

Never stop, man. Never stop. You know, it's always important to understand what your zone of genius is and bring in help for things that are not your zone of genius and then just never stop. If you never stop, something will work out someday. And I got a lot of love. It's bound to happen. I mean, in the pre sale, it hit top. New release in the business, in the marketing, in a bunch of categories. So hope is up. But I made it 99 cents. I could have made it free. The Digital copy is $0.99. I could made it free. The issue with free is I have to spread it. When it's 99 cents, the reviews become verified and Amazon spreads it. And all the Other content Podcast interviews the Notion workbook with templates for each chapter is going to be free behind a sign up whether you buy the book or not. So I want people to understand that brands of yesterday were built on what they told the world about themselves. And brands of the future will be built on what the people, the community, the world says about them. If you build a community, you will not become a commodity. Check out the book on from grassroots to greatness.com and watch. I'm on LinkedIn. Lloyd Lobo. My DMs are open. I am active there.

Yeah, you are. I appreciate you my friend. And I can't wait to read this. Everybody go check it out. And yeah, we'll be chatting soon. Go follow them on LinkedIn. You won't miss them. And you'll have fun doing the whole thing too. So Lord, have a good one, man. Thank you. All right, all right. That's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all about living to work. It's all about working to live if you need to do the work. But you know, work can be fun and it should be fueling for your life. So if you enjoyed what you just heard, if you got some nuggets of wisdom that you want to share or you're just noodling on right now, please go tell others. The way that people find this show and how you can help others get their aha moments is through word of mouth. So if it is telling your friend, telling your family, send an email to your list writing a review or whatever it might be. Everything helps. So thank you so much for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast and I will see you next time.