From Brand Spark to Community Flame | People Magic Summit with Andrea Sullivan

Foreign.

Welcome back, everyone. Yes, that was me dancing to the hold music as we were counting down for our last session of today. Just today. But thank you all, as always, for being here and for lasting the entire day. There's been so much information. I'm looking at the chat right now. People already talking about they're getting their coffees, they're getting, they're getting their snacks. Some people are going to sleep right now because they're in different parts of the world. Thank you all so much for being here, for grabbing your food, for paying attention, taking notes, and for just, just enjoying all the information that is being given to you by all of our incredible speakers today. So much good information. That last session was phenomenal. So thank you. Thank you so much for, for being here, as always. So how's everyone feeling? How's. Can I get some, like, favorite emojis in the chat, some fires, whatever you want to choose? How's everyone doing so far? You ready for this last session? It's going to be a really good one, by the way. A lot of information we're going to give away and a lot of. Lot of fun. A lot of fun that we're going to have. Yep. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Great. I'm so glad you guys are having a great time. This is awesome. I love to see that. Thank you for being here, everyone. Thank you for grabbing your popcorn. Raylene, I saw you saying that you had popcorn, but let's, let's kick things off. Let's, let's get it going. Our final speaker for today. We've had so many amazing speakers, and this one is just as amazing. She's a top marketer, professor, board member, philanthropist, and C suite whisperer. And now the CMO of Gary Vaynerchuk's Vayner X and the president of Vive by Vayner. She serves as a proud board member of Creative Spirit Ad Council, the Miami Ad School, the United Nations association of New York, and we.org and if that wasn't enough, she's also a professor at the Master's in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts. So get all your emojis together. This is the final speaker. We're going to answer so many questions, give you some stuff to walk away with for today. Get your emojis together and give a great big welcome to Andrea Sullivan.

Dj. Can I take you everywhere with me?

Absolutely amazing.

I thought maybe I was the only one that was dancing that music, but it doesn't surprise me that. That it was. That was you that was probably having even the better dance moves.

Exactly. No, we've been dancing behind the scenes this entire time and we are super, super excited to have you here, Andrea. There's been so much information given away from, from the entire day today. We have people walking away with like, new ways to start their community, getting over the fear of starting a community. So I really wanted to like, let people understand one what is Vibe by Vayner and, and learn about the entire process. But knowing your entire story of how it came about, that's going to help people in so many ways. But we can, we can take it from the top if you're ready.

Well, first of all, dj, I just have to say that I am such a fan, not only of Mighty Networks, but of you personally. I feel like you have been an extension of the Vibe by Vayner family since day one. So that means the world. You've been dancing with us, you know, at every move as we build our community. And I'm such an honor to be a part of this and thank you for bringing together such smart, interesting, generous people because I think we're all learning as we're building our businesses. Right. And so this is the perfect forum to be able to address things that people are curious about. So, yeah, I'm happy to start kind of from the beginning.

Great.

I have, I was fortunate enough to be sort of a serial CMO and was at Omnicom for about 16 years and was my last role there was global Chief Marketing Officer at Interbrand. And so I did a lot of things around building community there. But I think it's been really interesting being a part of the Vayner verse, joining Gary Vaynerchuk almost seven years ago and being his global CMO for six of those years. And then now this year just kind of transitioning over to how do we start to bring together two communities that are really important to us and really deliver some value to them. And so we launched Vive by Vayner, which is a leadership acceleration program. It's a mastermind, if you will, where we bring together both entrepreneurs, so founders and CEOs from small to medium sized companies that are on a high growth trajectory. And then we also bring together C suites from larger Fortune 500 companies. So in general it's been, you know, chief commercial officers, chief marketing officers, you know, those kind of folks that are all business builders. And we're bringing them together in small groups of up to 12 people and we offer up a four month program and we are so thrilled to have mighty networks be sort of the backbone of that and creating a playground that allows us to do all kinds of things.

That's, that's awesome. Yeah, we're, we're super excited for this partnership. Love the Vive team. Seeing the Vibers get inside there and go through this transformation. Okay. It's for entrepreneurs, C suite folks and everyone in between that are in this transitionary period that we've talked about and we've talked about in other sessions earlier for today. How did this even come about? Like how do you serve people in C suite positions and entrepreneurs and people that have full packed schedules and businesses and how did you even start or come up with this idea?

Yeah, no, I think it's, you know, it's interesting, you know, that Gary Vaynerchuk is out there sharing a lot about his perspective on life, honestly, and he's always encouraging people to become really live their best and happiest life. And yet we didn't have a place where people could go to work on that. Really get in to the work in the weeds, looking at both how you're growing your business, but then how are you growing yourself? And at the end of last year, in conversations with a lot of different leaders, we were noticing that people were feeling a number of things. One is that they were definitely feeling burnt out, they were feeling stuck oftentimes in what should they be doing next, how should they be leading not only their teams, but how could they be filling themselves up so that they could have the energy to take on all kinds of complicated challenges out in the world. And so I had been personally. Gary always loves to have hear from people about their side hustles. Well, I had a side hustle that I had told him about, which was that coming out of COVID I myself was feeling a bit lonely. My kids were heading off to school, so I was an empty nester. I wanted to start traveling again. And I definitely had really, you know, gathered up a lot of friends and family, even in the, in the industry itself. And so I started gathering folks, inviting them into my home and doing retreats, going to other places around the world like Costa Rica. Took a group of 20 people out to Bali. And what we found is that, you know, it's exactly what happens when you build a community that's like minded, where we all started to help one another with different challenges, the good times, the bad times, all those kind of things. So I told Gary about it and other, other CMOs in particular were telling Gary about the, how their lives had started to evolve and change. And Gary said, why don't do this for our communities and see what might happen. And especially with that magic of like the founder community and then the larger, you know, big Fortune 500 community, can we bring those two together and see what kind of magic we could make?

Wow.

Wow.

Okay.

It's super fun, I have to say.

That's, that's so cool. Yeah, it sounds incredible. So you're taking people in your own personal network. You were feeling lonely, maybe disconnected from people through Covid and decided to say, let's all get together, let's all do this thing and then decided to make it an actual community, a program to help people in their lives, professionally and personally. Do I have that correct?

Yeah, that's right. And I think the, the interesting thing about this program is it's a little bit different than a lot of other masterminds. So it's four months, four month program. We do get together in real life, as you know, you've, you've attended, you know, some of our in life, in real life activations and things like that. And it's really important that we do that right out of the gate because most of the people that are joining up, they may know one person, but in general, a lot of people are, you know, they're just meeting for the first time. And so we need to have that opportunity to get to know one another. Not only our objectives, but what made us who we are in terms of how we look back on our life, how, what are there, our dreams for the future. And then we can kind of be in the here and now and helping one another. And, and that way when we're joining on mighty networks each and every week, when we have different kinds of inspirational speakers, we've got that bond, we have that love, we have that trust. We can be vulnerable. We feel like we're in a private setting where whatever it is that we share stays there. And that's incredibly important when you try to go to work on these bigger, larger than life kinds of opportunities where people are sometimes, you know, letting go of something or really leaning into something in the future. It's not, it's not easy work.

Yeah, that's, that's so true. That's a great call out for anyone taking notes in the chat. People want to connect, people want to learn from other people. Someone also wrote about having presence. That's phenomenal. Another call out. But offering the ability for people to have their own safe space, talk about what they're talking about, especially on the level that a lot of your members are on you. You want to be able to create that, that space for them to gather, talk about their, their struggles and, and tribulations and then give them the help and support that they need. Especially coming out of COVID that's a phenomenal, phenomenal story. So I know there's probably people thinking, okay, Gary Vee, Andrea Sullivan, like you're at these certain levels where people can have a lot of visibility. The Vayner name goes a very long way. We want to boil it down for them to take away these tangible things. Right. You started with just like hosting parties or trips. Like you can start with the people you know, right. Like you don't have to have, you know, the large Vayner X media conglomerate. You can start with the people that are within your network. I really want to ask, like over here at Mighty, one of the things we talk about is starting with your people, right? And then your people's people and, and then your community's people. Do you have any tangible tactics, tips, tricks and strategies on networking? How did you meet the people you met to then have them come on trips with you, to have that close bond with you? Do you have anything that we can, you know, action in our own lives in terms of networking?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think that you know this as much as anybody dj, you're such a natural. Just the whole idea of like, you know, leading with your heart and it's all about having a couple of things I think. One is curiosity about people and, and the things that they're curious in and then really feeding that and connecting other like minded people in a way that's just, that feels, you know, organic and that's natural, honestly. And so a lot of this, you know, it does feed one of the, one of the perspectives that I always love that Gary shares that it's all about, you know, being generous. And he wrote a book that's called Jab jab jab right hook. That's all about how he essentially built his community by giving, giving, giving. It sounds violent with jab jab jab right Hook. But it's more like you give, you give, you give. And then when you have something that they might want to join, it's there for you. And then you might want to engage on a, on a business level. But I never, you know, strike up a conversation because I'm looking to do business. It's always, always because I'm curious about a person and I think that makes people feel more seen. And that's one thing that we're noticing in our community is, is most of these people are feeling, yes, they're at the top and it looks like on paper it looks like they should be the happiest, most content people in the world. And yet they are feeling lonely. They are feeling like they want to connect with other like minded people. They want to be inspired by the best. You know, I, there's that saying that my business partner James Orini always talks about iron, you know, meets iron and that's that, you know, it makes it stronger. And so, you know, I think that some of this is, it's more just a curiosity and that your point is just, just start right that just invite people around a table, break bread, encourage them, ask questions. And then I think another thing that's kind of fun is to ask. It's the whole buddy system. So I always ask friends to bring a buddy with them and that way we all continue, you know, to, to kind of have like minded people and different people so that it's not, you know, it's, we've got that sort of diverse mix of thinkers and doers and you know, all the things and it makes it super fun.

I love that. That's a great, great point. Again for anyone taking notes. Using your community to drive growth, member driven growth. You can market within your own community to, to leverage that word of mouth, encouraging other people to tell someone else and bring people into the community. Because to Andrea's point, you never know what someone's going through, right? Your friends right now might, you know, hopefully they can buy in you but maybe you have some friends in the periphery that are going through something that you're part of a community that would solve any problems that they have. They just don't know about it. So tell others about your own community, the communities you're in and then utilize that to, to bring more, more growth into your membership. That's a phenomenal, phenomenal call out Andrea. And I love that idea that start where you are. You don't have to be at some Gary Vee level. You can just start at where, wherever you are. We've had some people earlier in the the day talk about how they started their community with zero. Some people were talking about they're starting with less than 20 people on their email list and less than 10 people on their, on their following. That's where you are. You, everyone here knows someone. You all know each other now. You know we're all in the same community on, on Mighty Networks start with each other.

So I love this chat with there people coming up with acronyms. Bring your own bestie. I love that. Byob.

Coin that Jordan. That's phenomenal. Bring your own bestie. I love that. Great. Okay, so there's so much that we can talk about here and different tangents that we can go down. So you know what, there's some people that are asking some questions. Oh, we'll get to questions at the end. Don't worry, don't worry. Everyone that's asking, feel free to ask all the questions you want to. We will make sure to get to them and answer everything possible. This being the last session of the day. Okay, so you took us on this journey. You had these folks coming out of COVID You were also feeling unfulfilled in terms of loneliness and wanting to get connected with people. That's what birthed the idea for Vive by Vayner. Can you talk about like with. With. You know, people think that you have to have this gigantic audience, and we talked about that. But the tangible things that we can walk away with regard, regardless of what scale you're on, what are the core aspects to just being a good host? We've talked about, you know, networking, just being a good host on any level. What do you think goes into building your community as a host and then just even, you know, how you did IRL meetings. What are some things that we can, like maybe make a bulleted list for some of the people in the chat right now?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing is to make sure that you're really understanding what the objectives are of some of your community members and that you have, that you bring together. There should be some shared elements. And so there you could, you may be creating multiple communities. If their number one mission is, you know, in our case, we have a lot of people that join that want to build their personal brand in addition to the brand of their company. And so they join us to really get into the work there. And so we help them to understand the art of coming up with, you know, what is your point of differentiation? How can you authentically talk about things that you care about? How do you bring. Build your following across all the platforms and that kind of thing? So that's one thing that is sort of shared across all of our community in this. And for class number two, at any rate, the members all come from different industries, and so the way that they apply that is very, very different. And that's okay. That actually makes it more interesting. Originally, we weren't sure if that, you know, was something that would be better if they were, you know, more and you know, all in professional services or whatever it might be. And people came back to us and said, no, actually there isn't any other place where I can allow my brain to think differently. And so I think things, thinking a little bit about what needs to be shared and then what is the diversity of thinking that you can maybe bring to the, to the equation? I don't know what you're seeing, dj, across the communities that you're involved with, because you guys have counseled us a lot along the way, which has been also been very helpful because, you know, this is, this is a new proposition. We haven't done anything like this before. And so learning from you guys, from the best on what are the elements has been super helpful to us.

Yeah, I love that. Understand the objective of your community, the reason that you're doing this, be very, very, very clear, and then know how people show up in different ways. Because your ideal member, at least for the Vive team, are people in, you know, high level jobs or people that are entrepreneurs, people that are starting their own business or just in this place where they're trying to figure out how do I not burn out, how do I scale my community and my, my company? And they're trying to figure that out. But for people on any other transition path, you just have to figure out the people that you're serving. So that's understanding the objective of your community. And then you have to also understand how they're showing up. Some people might come to your community for one thing and leave with something else after their best year ever. But that's where we have to be intentional and figure that out. We had Roger Whitney talk about how he tells people what they need rather than what they want, because people might not know what they need and they just say what they want.

So that's, that's, I think that's a really good point. And you know, it's interesting because we have not only marketing and business, you know, sort of mavens that come in and talk to us. We have folks from Shark Tank like Damon John come and speak, but then we also have people like Deepak Chopra come and speak about meditation. We talk about, you know, sleep. And so there's a bit of this health and well being in addition to the hardcore business and going in. We're not necessarily, I mean, we, we do interview everybody and catalog things. But to your point, some of them don't think they need something only to have that become their biggest. Aha. Right and also that sometimes when you join a community, you think you're joining for one reason only, to have that change over time. And it's those big growth moments that are the things that keep people in a community. Right. That it's, you know, you're, you're going to, I hope we're going to continue to evolve and grow and to do that together with a group is even, you know, more fun and more supportive. But that requires a little bit more of the what you need and kind of testing that out and pushing people to, you know, different kinds of extremes to see what they can discover about themselves.

Yes, that's so, that's so true. Oh yeah, that's. I love that. The fact that you even had the call out that you've brought people of authority into the community with, we talked about that earlier. I think that's a great play for anyone with their own communities trying to figure out you are a person of authority for your own community. But you can also rely on other people to give more diversity of thought to give so much value to your members. And that's what the whole point is. People don't know what they need you do as the host. So that's a great call out. Andrea, can you talk about more of the like offering that you have on the platform, like what you give to your, your members?

Yeah, absolutely. So after this, the in real life kickoff that we typically host in in New York, which is, you know, kind of a two day experience, then every week we invite people onto our mighty network platform. We call it the Vive Hive. And it is there that each Friday we invite an A speaker to come and talk about anything, including, you know, what is my founder story. So that could be from Bobby Brown or we have Dr. Jason from Therabody 2. It could be, you know, experts around nutrition. So we have a wellness instructor, Chef Pollock, who just dropped a cookbook called Food is Love and she beat Bobby Flay in a big competition. So she's a great one to teach you how can you be nutritious on the go and all that kind of thing. So we have weekly sessions where we bring in these big blockbuster speakers. We also have a lot of folks that come in and talk from Vayner that provide again, real in the weeds kind of master classes. So this isn't just inspiration. We actually do the doing. So, you know, what does your TikTok look like? How can we help you in optimizing your stage presence, all those kind of things, finding your voice, whether you're a Leader or you are a paid speaker, how can you build a business of paid speaking? How can you find package yourself up to join a board? So we have authorities that come in and talk about those things, but then we also have mastermind sessions where each of the 12 people that are a part of the Vive class then are sharing different challenges, sharing different secret superpowers that they have. And I think that's the most beautiful thing that's come out of these programs is all of these community members start to help one another and they're cheerleaders for one another and they send ideas and they connect people and then it's almost like your job is done. Not really, but. But, you know, that's when it's starting to work and gel that, you know, it's. We almost act like a family. We are a family. And, you know, everybody wants to support one another and it gives you a lot of joy. It's not work. That said, I think that the, you know, Mighty Networks helps us a great deal because we are dealing with, you know, very, very busy people. So not everyone can join everything. So we do record. All of our sessions are. They're live content things, but they are virtual each Friday across the four months. So we do record them. We also have give get sessions throughout the week where somebody, you know, offers up something of value to the community, but then they learn to ask for help and ask questions and ask for, you know, debates on things. And that's in part because also there's a lot of people that find it hard to ask for things, particularly female founders. It seems to be a trend. And so we want to start to break down different behaviors and get people into different habits and, you know, learn ways of. Of really growing themselves and getting the most out of their. Their life and out of their business. And so we try to encourage those more habitual things on Mighty Networks itself.

Oh, that's amazing. Okay, so many points from there. Be specific on the things that you're giving away to people. Don't just give them like, oh, here's a general idea of how to fix your sleep. Here's a general idea of how to, like, I don't know, grow your network. Any of the things that you're offering within your community. Give them the specifics. That's what they're there for. Give it all away behind the door once they get into your community. That's phenomenal. Number one, two, you said how people come into the community as strangers and then leave as a family. I think that's what the goal of every community should be. But you can pull these different levers or try to give enough value within your community to make that happen. Vive has a smaller cohort. Obviously some people have talked about, oh my Gosh, I have 20 people. I can't imagine having 200 people. But if you are giving away enough specific value and then allowing people to meet each other, the people magic that we have at Mighty and making sure that they are getting to interact with each other and, and the familial feeling will naturally occur. And that's what I've seen with my own two eyes. With, with.

Yeah. And dj, you helped in even creating it. You joined us at VCon which was absolutely fabulous. We had not only all of our viers but many of them brought their spouses or business partners or in some case they're the same thing to VCon. And you helped in you know, just kind of watering and nurturing everybody. But I think the other thing is you can't find force community. Right. So it's got to be something that where like the, the, you know, our first class, the founding class, they really love each other and you know it is a four month program. We tried to design it so that it would have tremendous amount of value in the. Over the course of those four months. Now many of our first fivers want to continue on but we're giving them the option of you know, you can continue on or you know, you don't have to stay obviously.

Yeah.

And having that flexibility. And now like what we just try to be in service of them. Right. It's their community. We are just in service of what their needs are and their needs are shifting and so we needed to calibrate, you know, what it, what's right for that first group and you know, for our second class it might, we might be creating something that's completely different but they'll likely then want to spill into this. You know, it'll be a growing community over time. Is our, is our hope.

Anyway, that's, that's such a good point. We tend to think of us as the host. Like this is our community for us and it's their community, it's the members community. You are just providing this place for them to gather. That's a, that's a phenomenal reframing that I even had to think about. That's, that's so, so good. And then, and then, yeah like people being able to talk to each other. We talk about this all the time here at Mighty is that the more that people can speak to each other and connect with each other, the more you will have that family feeling when it comes to. Yep, that's what hosting means.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think we try to make everyone continue to feel very seen. So, you know, on Mighty, we're always featuring the members of our community and people that are maybe outside and continuing to show what they're doing and how they're putting things into practice and how their hard work is paying off. I love the fact also that Mighty is not in a WhatsApp or in your text thread. It's a separate playground that allows me to feel like, okay, I can go off here. And it's my safe place. And it does feel like my, you know, like my little. My. My club with my friends and. And yet it's still connected to everything else that's in my life from a technological standpoint. But it's. It's something that allows people to feel, I think, comforted in some ways.

Yes. That's so true. I love that. That's a great call out for everyone in the chat as well. It is their community. You give them the value and then they can. They can connect. That's phenomenal. This is great. Okay. I see a lot of questions asking for, like, specifics around Vive, and we'll promise we'll get to there, don't worry. Giving some more tangible tactics that I think we can have people walk away with. Let me think, you know, for. For the Vive by Vayner team. You do a lot of events, you do a lot of, like, giveaways in terms of, like, knowledge sharing, the Give get sessions. Is there anything else that you've seen in your community that's been, like, the most beneficial that you've heard the most feedback from, that members say? This is something I didn't expect, but now I. This is like the most amazing thing that we got.

Yeah, I think some of it, we. Before we have someone that comes in, an authority that an expert that comes and talks on a specific topic will ask folks not to do a whole lot of homework, but to maybe answer a poll or two or something that gives data to the speaker so that they can come in and provide relevant information right out of the gate. The other thing we do is that we try not to have people just, you know, regurgitating information that's out in the world already. So, for example, Bobby Brown, there's a lot of podcast content, that kind of thing. So we try to provide links to those things ahead of time and then host Ask me anything sessions because then they can come in and ask questions that are specific to their business and that way they're really wringing out a ton of value. And it's ended up being even more interesting for our presenters as well. They don't have to do any homework. They don't have to, you know, come on and just do like the show, the wind up show. We make sure that there' you know, if there's anything that they don't want to talk about, we'll make sure that that's, you know, kind of been communicated to the community. But we find that having more that ask me anything thing is, is, is something that our vibers really, really love. And we get really interesting conversations that benefit everybody as a result.

Got you. Okay. So sometimes your members can be authority figures in certain ways. That's how you can position. I know some people are asking about the, the give and get sessions and you can position them as sharing the knowledge that they have. You have members joining in this specific niche or the specific transition that they're in, but whatever industry that your community is in, then you can have the members speak as authorities within it and then they can share and then that's how you kind of get people sharing. I love that.

That's right. And then also just, you know, warming up the, the room and making the speaker knowledgeable about their audience, I think is super, is super key. I see some questions in there about the give and get. We have a give and get Monday where we try to, you know, step into the week with lots of endorphins. So, you know, someone offered to donate to charities that are important to folks and then they'll, they'll make a request. And I'm trying to launch this new thing. Anyone run into, you know, a challenge like this, that kind of thing. We have wellness Wednesdays. We try to theme our different days when we drop information in. And that way also people know that they kind of know different categories that we're going to tick off. We do a lot around growth mindset. So how can you become a better leader? So we'll drop different things in. We offer up a summary at the end of the week, which I think is also really important because people are so busy they might want to pass along information to their teams. And that way we've got the highlights and if you're interested in more, then we have links to everything else that's, you know, kind of stored safely. But that way people can, it's not too onerous for them to Go through things.

Got it. Okay. So replays is a big thing. Bundling up the information that is shared for people that possibly have, like, busy lives. I think a lot of people struggle with that, with how do they make sure all of their members are participating. And with your members being with such packed schedules and very, very busy lives, have you found things that work for you in terms of, like, solutions to make sure they are still consuming the content that they might have missed live or they're still participating in the community, or do you have any, like, sharing around that?

So there's something new that we've just done with this second class, which is to. To create buddies so that each person. Now we have 12 people in the second class. Each of them has a buddy. And so some of this is to make sure that we're. They've got accountability in the program. And so, you know, if they're working on something. We had someone who hadn't joined a couple sessions, and we had done assessments and all kinds of things, and their, you know, their buddy was able to say, hey, go check this out. Do the, you know. You know, and we also have, like, an executive coach who is a part of the program. And so I think just continuing to reinforce the relevant content is really important. But I think that the whole idea of, like, how are you keeping people, almost reminding them at every turn that they are making progress, that there is, but that they've got to do the work in order to make the progress.

Got it, Got it. Now that's. So that's a great, great call out. And I'm seeing people in the chat say that also, if sometimes you see people. We talked about lurkers in previous sessions. Some people will come and just get the content and not be part of the community. Having a buddy accountability partner is like a way to make sure that everyone's participating, everyone's getting the experience that they want from the community. And you're just making sure that everyone is participating in some type of way. And maybe having a person to pull you and say, hey, ask that question instead of saying it, send it to me directly in our private messages, post it on the feed so that everyone can see, because that information, that answer can be value to everybody else. I love that. That's such a great one. If anyone is taking notes, that's another one. Buddy system. All right, so I know we had.

A couple questions about the buddy system. Real quick. They're asking if we do it manually or if, you know, how we come up with the buddies when we Set out in the program we have everyone take something called the print assessment which is a personality assessment. We learn a little bit more about where you perhaps are leaning into your shadow behaviors versus being your best self and what can be triggers like if you're teamed up with, you know, different kinds of makeups in terms of leadership or team dynamics where, or even family dynamics. I just had a session yesterday with my, my husband and my two kids and learned a little bit more about our differences using this print assessment. At any rate, we learn a lot about people there. And then we do have an executive coach that's on staff, Dr. Natasha, who's exceptional. She scores 12 out of 10 which is pretty phenomenal and she's really good. Even in when we first meet our vibers and you know, get them into the program and decide that These are the 12 that we're selecting. She's quite good at figuring out, oh, I think, you know, this one is working on this, this one's working on that and their, their personalities. So she helps in adding a little bit of magic. We don't just do the, you know, kind of random pairing. That said, when we do master classes which we have four master classes throughout the four month program where we invite people to join mighty and then we'll, we'll do, you know, we'll have different breakout sessions. Those oftentimes we will do randomly just because we want to have, you know, we want to have a little bit of that magic and not have everything be overly pre prescribed if you will.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think putting too many parameters on your community can be harmful. You just want to make sure the parameters are enough to like allow people to interact, not to keep them from interacting. So that's a, that's a great call out. We had some people ask about the name. It was called the Print survey or the print form.

It's print P R I N T all caps. But we can send things out if you want. You have to get credentialed and in order to be able to be someone that. So our executive coach has actually been schooled and is credentialed to be able to deliver the report outs and to, to use this as a methodology that we then use with a lot of teams on enhancing collaboration and outcomes and all that kind of thing.

Wow. Wow, I love that. So yeah, for anyone that doesn't have this. Oh Julie in the, in the chat, thank you so much. If anyone's not familiar with this, you can always look at your mighty insights and you can see like These are my top people, posting all the time, always asking questions. That could be a buddy system right there. Right? Those two folks, you can always look at your members and see, like, who's speaking the most versus speaking the least. And maybe pair the most talkative to the least talkative and see if they'd be interested in that. Or run an activity where you allow people to choose their own partners that potentially will have people that are the most talkative join with each other. But you can always, like, help facilitate people getting to know each other. We had a question within our Mighty Pro community about how do we get people to start talking more? There's like two different ways that I just mentioned and Andre just mentioned of how to do so, so I love that. That's phenomenal. Okay, we can get into specifics now. I know people are asking, they want to know more about the Vive Hive and specifically what you all do on platform. First, we had a question that was asking about the biggest challenges that you see for entrepreneurs, what they're facing today. A lot of people in the chat right now are entrepreneurs. They are potential hosts on Mighty, but they're starting their own business. They're starting their own. May be what are the top things that you see for entrepreneurs, the problems or blocks that they're facing today?

Yeah, so I think one of the biggest issues that people are confronting is many of these founders, you know, they've created a business that is their baby and yet they want to scale it. And so we help them in trying to look at. There are multiple ways that you can scale a company. Many people think they just want to, you know, create the hockey stick performance and then flip the company, only to find, you know, we had someone join us in our last class who had, had sold her company. But, you know, she was trying to figure out what's next after that. Right. And so we try to help them explore a wide variety of different ways of figuring out the right kind of growth for people. And I, you know, many of the people that joined our, our class, both our first class and now our second class, are building communities themselves. I mean, there isn't any business where you're not building a community, but many of them were building educational businesses, professional services of some kind. Some of them even masterminds themselves. Many of them are public speakers, and they're trying to build, you know, following groups of following and residual ways of bringing in revenue and things like that. And so, you know, we didn't realize how relevant Mighty was actually going to be to, you Know all of these folks, Honestly.

Yeah. That's so nice. I love hearing that. I love that we help solve any of the issues that you might have had. And that's what the platform is for. The problem for who was asking that question, I think was Tito was asking about what entrepreneurs are facing. It's scaling. How do you solve for scaling? Start where you are. Start with the people that are within your periphery. You can say, hey, I'm building a community for xyz, would you be interested or do you know someone that would be. And then you start to tap into their network, to their network. And Andre gave a bunch of ideas around networking and bringing people together over a shared objective. That's how you start to solve one of these problems. I'll say start where you are. In our.

Yeah, and I think dj, you, you know, you met some of our, you know, some of our amazing founding vibers, including Jasmine Star, who has a tremendous podcast called the Jasmine Star show. And she's, you know, she follows all the principles that you're talking about where she gives a lot of free information away to founders and entrepreneurs about how to build a business, how to give things away for free, maybe to get that lead gen flowing and then what are you doing to, you know, to kind of couple up? She talks a lot about collaboration that even, you know, kind of joining arms with someone that might look like a competitor. She doesn't believe in competitors. So the whole idea of that we live in the collaboration economy and, you know, how can we just keep doing more? Because there's a lot of work to do out there. Right. And if you believe in abundance and you live your life that way, that, you know, what you manifest can be quite incredible on the other side.

I love that. I love that. Yeah. Giving away things for free, whatever community you are building, whatever specific passion or interest that you have that you're building your community around, give away the problems or give away the answers to the problems to anyone that you know, it will slowly start the word of mouth. And yes, Jim, you can definitely use a new affiliate program on Mighty to scale as well. Definitely utilize from within and use that member driven growth going forward. I love that. And then we also had a question around, see if I can get it on on stage. They wanted to know about the alumni membership for Vive, if you can talk more about that.

Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting because originally, you know, we were talking to Gary about what, you know, should we be thinking about something for 2025 and he said, you know, I Just want to really pay attention to what the community needs in 2024. And let's, you know, let's run two programs and two four month programs and we'll see what comes out of it. So the, you know, our program as you know, concludes with a summit, an in real life summit that we hosted in New Mexico. And the, our entire group of ivers were all like so excited but so sad at the same time because they knew the program was going to be ending. And we said, look, we're in service again of you guys. I mean they could go off and do their own thing or we could help in supporting them. And because we offer things like a concierge service where they can share any idea and we'll help them bring it to life. And you know, this ongoing coaching and mastermind sessions and things like that. They wanted to, they still wanted us to be a part of the, the ongoing, you know, we're not calling it alumni because we don't want them to think they're ever, you know, we're family now. So we're calling it Elevate. So Vive Elevate is continuing on and we're just getting into that now, honestly. So yeah, it is. I mean our first program is four months. It is 50 grand. Some people have commented in the chat that, you know, that's a healthy, healthy price. But if you look at all that you get, including the executive coaching, the in real life, you know, kind of summits and retreats and things like that, in addition to getting one on one time with Gary and you know, all the mastermind sessions in addition to the master classes, it ends up being something that has helped a lot of our Vibers really accelerate their businesses. So we're fortunate enough to have even some of our Vibers saying that they got 10x the value on their investment even only two months into the program. So we're not promising that for everyone, but our aim is to deliver tremendous value so that everybody wants to continue to live on. And we've got, you know, it's about 75% of our people are continuing with the alumni program. That's at a lower run rate, honestly afterwards. But we feel fortunate. I mean, we do tap into Gary's network, but honestly, we had a lot of female founders that joined our first class. And so we had an interesting group of folks that some didn't even weren't familiar with Gary. Of course they were once they looked into it. But, but it's, it's been good because we have a diverse group that we're leaning into. So it's, you know, we, we really try to tap into a lot of different communities to try to bring in the types of people that will be the most generous in, in our vibe community.

I love that. That's such a good, good, great call out that you're not using the term alumni because that sounds like it's ending and you want them to stay within the family. So we talked about language earlier and building the culture of your community. So the language you choose and the words you choose to, to name people, the nomenclature, as it's called, is important. So I love that. Not calling alumni because it doesn't end. You can come and go as you please within this community. Just be part of it and maybe add value and give back to people that have gone to people that are going through the cohort that you already went through. So I love that. That's a great, great call out. And then that also goes to a question that I saw from Arielle around. Maybe we can talk about the free resources versus low entry price offers because in her experience, low entry attracts quality, low entry attract quality buyers because they have skin in the game. Exactly. To your point, Andrea, about the large price point. Obviously you're serving people at a certain price point, but for anyone in their own community, you can start where you are. But we talk about people pay attention to what you pay for. Having this free open door where people can come and go whenever they want to, tends to lead to less engagement and lower retentiveness overall. Would you agree with that, Andrea?

Yeah, I think it's really important. You know, we're. We at Vayner are constantly giving away our content and our perspective and our intelligence for free in the form of like, I had started up a program called Marketing for the now where, you know, we have really fantastic authorities not only on marketing, but also celebrities. And the whole idea of underpriced attention, which is what Gary stands for, all that is free. And you can just, you know, check it out on YouTube, you know, if you want to look at something that's maybe even more in depth, reading Gary's books, like his, you know, his, his latest, it's all about underpriced attention. That can be something that's, you know, you're not paying 50 grand and he's got the full playbook. He's given it all away on, you know, how do you, how do you really architect? It's all about community building, right? And building your reputation and everything else. And so you can get and all, you know, all of the, those that join five, they read it once, if not twice and they put it to work. So I think, you know, there are those kind of opportunities. We do have something that's a one day session or it's like a day and a half session that's all about how do you supercharge your marketing. But again, that's not, it's not like how are you becoming a leader? And all of the, you know, not only the professional, but the personal and health and well being, we don't touch on that quite as much. This is more of a strictly a marketing program that is at a lower price point. But we try to have something for everybody and we're, and we're, you know, continue to innovate around that we don't have because we're in service of these different types of communities. I think we'll learn as we go.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. I think that you've, you've figured out your ideal member, what they are needing. You talked about need in their life and then the value that you can provide to them based upon the, the resources like you said to happen to Gary's network, but also what Vayner brings to the table, what you bring to the table and you're professional and personal network. Anyone can do that. You can put it at a, at a different scale obviously if you need to. But everything that Andrea is saying for everyone in the chat that's watching, everything she's saying is something doable that you can do on your end. You don't have to feel that you have to have this large following. You have to have the Gary Vee Andrea talked about. Some people came and didn't even know Gary was. You can come in where you are, start where you are, use your network and then grow your community that way. So all the things you're giving away are such great, great tidbits that people can tactically use in their own community. So I wanted to ask you, like, what is 2025 looking like for the Vibers? Like, do you have that planned out yet? We're talking about getting to January 2025 and having people start their community on a good, good start.

It's coming, isn't it? 2025, it's almost here. Well, it's funny because I have a meeting with Gary tomorrow morning so I can tell you it.

Sure, sure, yeah. If you.

Yeah, yeah. So I think the interesting thing about 2025 is we're continuing to look at leaning in both to Our, you know, our platform on Mighty Networks, in addition to our in real life experiences and marrying those up. And I think that's one thing that we're finding is that people, you know, they want to be out there, they want to be experiencing things. They also want to be on stages and they want to be sharing more. So any one of our vibers that has asked us with help on getting on podcasts or getting on stages or paid engagements, we've gotten every single one of them opportunities to go out and we help them in capturing that content and photographing them, also learning how to style them, how to help them with their talk tracks, all that kind of thing. And that wasn't originally, you know, part of the plan, but we, you know, we're listening a lot and which I think is the most important thing in a community is to listen and then, and then make things happen very quickly. Listen and make things happen. Make people feel seen, give them value right away and then work with them on it. So we had a, a CEO in our, our last class who is remarkable. She's been growing her company a ton. She wants to be out there talking more, she wants to be the thought leader more and hand over those operational reins to some other folks. So we helped her and getting that, you know, some speaking engagements and, and really holding her hand and helping her with every single step. And so she's one of our most enthusiastic now because she's broken through. She was, you know, she had some nerves and all of us have imposter syndrome on some front or another. And so if we can have those breakthrough moments with people one on one and then have the community, the community celebrated her and some of the others that joined stages, it was such a beautiful, you know, kind of celebration of what people were able to do that it felt, you know, it, it, it felt again like a family reunion and something really that made everybody feel proud.

I love that. That's such a great, great call out. You are giving opportunities to your members. That's a huge value. Add that I think some people don't necessarily recognize. You have people within your own network that could help them on their career and you give that person in your network to your community, you can open doors for people. So opportunities is great. And then celebrating the wins, celebrating where people are, celebrating where they want to be, turning the spotlight inward rather than trying to think, how can I get more members to my community? Celebrate the people that are already there and what they're doing and what they're working on. That's Such a phenomenal, phenomenal call out. I love that. I'm so glad you said that, Andrea. That's, that's so cool. And it's so cool that you're using the resources that you have and extending it to everybody within the community. That's the whole point of community, to share and share alike. And then we have another question around messaging. Arielle had asked again. Messaging is super hard to nail to attract ideal community members. Would you say it's just consistent testing? They feel that brand marketers try to pitch, that there is a magic formula, but it's just iterating and testing until you nail it. What's your experience as a marketing guru? I feel like you have a lot to say around this.

Yeah, no, I think, you know, and you guys talked about it earlier, the whole idea of having a vocabulary and, you know, listening and learning, because there are, you know, in, in this particular field, there are a lot of terms that are used, you know, be it, you know, mastermind sessions and that means something to one group but not to our other. You know, entrepreneurs tend to use that, but the CMOs don't tend to use that. There can be, you know, different reasons that people want to join a community. So I think doing a lot of testing and that can be in many forms. It can be, you know, not only putting out, you know, emails on social and seeing, you know, where you're getting the most lead flow, but I think also just conversationally hearing, hearing people's stories, you know, kind of running through different ways of, of delivering your own pitch. We've learned that, you know, sometimes you, the way you pitch things to one person after you listen to their, you know, what it is that they're looking to get out of it, you might need to have a, you know, a certain word selection and messaging that's maybe a bit different than another, which sounds very one off. But I would say that, you know, we're still, you know, six months into it, so, so we're still, we're still learning about what our messaging should be.

Yeah, yeah, but I feel like you, you nailed it in terms of finding those folks in this transition. They're stuck in their careers, they're stuck in their businesses, they're stuck personally, how do they figure these things out? And sometimes it takes another person, a host of a community to get them together and then to talk about that transition, to help them pull the wool over their eyes. Whatever analogy you want to use, but reveal the layers so that they can see it from a different perspective. Perspective Like, I didn't know I needed this. I was in this transition. I didn't even recognize it. And it took me joining your community to figure that out.

So I think that, I mean, I think there's, there's some pretty remarkable statistics out there about, about the loneliness. There's a Harvard study that was just done among founders and CEOs that's suggesting that 50% of the CEOs are saying that they're so stressed out and they're almost experiencing even some, you know, mental health issues that is making them not make smart business decisions. And I think that's when you need to, you know, kind of recognize the fact that you've got to water yourself and really take the time out to make sure that you've got the right rituals in place, that you're seeking help from other like minded people, perhaps other CEOs and founders and things like that. And so we've, you know, found that to be some, you know, big reason that people join. The other thing is that, you know, we do have a lot of negativity that continues to play in our head and on our shoulder there's some really startling statistics about how 80% of our thoughts are negative. And that can be as many as 57,000 thoughts a day that are negative. So learning how you can retrain and reprogram your brain, we work with just an amazing expert named Mona Patel who wrote a book called Reframe and she does sessions with us with a, with all of our vibers that help people build a muscle around reframing things so that they can really go to work and overcome some of the challenges that they're facing.

I love that. I love that. Yeah, being mindful of what your members are facing, giving them again what they need to help them reframe. A lot of times people join communities thinking like, I'll try this and maybe I'll see. And they have that negative thought process. Even people coming to these sessions probably thought like, I'll see what Mighty is going to talk about. But I don't think it's going to work for me. And hopefully they've seen everything that we've given them something tangible they can use within their own community. I love that last. Oh, sorry. We're coming up to the time right now. We had a question from Lisa that asked why did you choose Mighty over other community platforms? This might be a great question to end on.

Yeah, no, I mean, we joined it because it not only had the depth and breadth of the different components that we needed but it's also easy to use. I always say if I can use it, anyone can use it. Because I'm not particularly tech forward. But I think the other thing, D.J. and you've been, you know, just such a great partner to us is you've helped us in ways that are not just about the tech platform. You've helped us in, you know, sharing what best practices that you've learned from other communities. So you've worked with some of the best. Right. And so that kind of support, I think is, you know, it's something you just, it's, it's incredibly valuable. You can't attach a monetary value to that. And so we've, we've, we've greatly, you know, appreciated that. And also, just like you're, you just like there's nothing you won't do. DJs there. Like, you know, if, like, I needed to hand out waters to my people at Vcon, he was there doing it, you know, and so I feel like it's that you've built your own community. Right. And you make us feel like a family.

Oh, thank you so much, Andre. Yes. And that's what Mighty's all about. We share all the information. Like this summit today, tomorrow and Thursday, we're going to give away everything, anything that you could think of. We're here to answer your questions. Have people like Andrea, like Ryder, like Roger, like Martinez, answer anything that you might have a question about to let you know that you can start your community right now, today. You can start in January also. You can, you know, take the time to figure it out. That's what this whole summit's for. But you don't have to be fearful about this. Andrea started from the people she knew. She started with people that she was just getting together, realized that this could be something. This could be something big. And it became Vibe by Vayner. The Roger and Ryder and Martinez before them, they all started where they were and then they worked on their community to then have this transformational point that they saw people wanted to come together for my specific purpose. And that's what Mighty's all about. So that's a great, great note. Thank you so much for all the kind words, Andre. We're so, so happy again to have the Vibe by Vayner team on Mighty to have you share all of your insights, your information that you have. I know a lot of people are in the chat right now talking about just how much information they got. Yes. Some people are asking about replays. Yes. Thank you for sharing. Awesome. This is so good. Thank you for everyone that shared and asked questions. Feel free to take and share notes. Also, you are all now part of this community of the people magic community. So make sure to feel free to connect with each other. And there's. Yes, that's right, Gene. A lot of things to think about. And yeah, definitely. Thanks for day one. Of course. Thank you so much, Andrea, for being here. Really, really appreciate it. Such a great session. You gave us so much to work with and we couldn't be more thankful. So really, really appreciate it.

Anything I can do, I'm always here. And if there if people have questions, you can feel free to point them my way if it's if it's of help. But thank you so much.