Anne-Laure Le Cunff: How Great Writing Helped Build a Thriving Community Business

Hello and welcome to the Copyblogger Podcast.

My name is Tim Stoddart. Thank you so much for joining me. Today is an exciting day. After a year of hiatus, I am starting the Copyblogger Podcast back up again. We've had an eventful year with the launch of Copyblogger Pro. Our online business community is thriving and helping our members grow remarkable businesses has been our priority. In addition, we launched Digital Commerce Partners, which is an industry-leading content and SEO agency dedicated to helping entrepreneurs market their products through effective content marketing and ultimately make more money. Things are in full swing, and the time has come to bring the podcast back again.

The Coffee Blogger Podcast is returning with a familiar format. I will be interviewing the world's most successful online entrepreneurs and dissecting the tricks, habits, and processes that helped them establish profitable online businesses. Each episode of the Coffee Blogger Podcast will also be published on YouTube. It's an exciting time for online entrepreneurship, and I can't be more excited about this week's guest. My guest this week is Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She's the founder of Nest Labs, which is an online platform dedicated to helping you build a lab for your mind with neuroscience-based content and conversations. In this episode, Anne-Laure and I speak about her writing process and why she thinks Nest Labs has been so successful. We talk about her plans to grow an in-person community and why building her newsletter has been one of the best business choices she has made. Anne-Laure is intelligent and honest I had a great time speaking with her. She gives so many tips and pointers to help you become a better writer, a better marketer, and to help you grow a bigger, more profitable business. So with that, please help me welcome Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. So I like to start off my podcasts with the same concept. On the background profile of your Twitter, the background picture, there's a really interesting quote. It says, "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." And it's by Alvin Toffler. Who is Alvin Toffler? Why does that quote mean so much to you? I'm really excited to learn about the context.

Yeah, he's considered one of the most talented futurists of the last century, and when I read this quote, it really resonated with me because I am a big fan of the scientific method, but not only to conduct scientific experiments, to kind of direct your life as well. And I love the idea of learning something new, applying that knowledge, drawing some lessons, then adapting your behavior or your decisions based on this, and rinse and repeat. So So this kind of like cycle of experimentation, which is the complete opposite of what some people imagine learning looks like, like if it was a linear trajectory. It's really not. It is messy. It requires to always correct your course. And I think this quote really captures that very well. So I like it. I try to apply it in my work, in my life, in every— aspect of what I do. And this is why I thought that would be a really good one to put in my Twitter header.

I love how you said correct your course because there's something about scientists, and this is very difficult to do, granted, because we're all humans and we want to be right. But part of the scientific method is admitting— how do I say this? It's basically acknowledging that most of the time you're trying to disprove what you believe to be true rather than prove what you believe to be true. So that whole idea of doing research, putting a hypothesis together, learning something, and then having the internal emotional fortitude, I suppose, to say everything I thought was true is wrong and now I have to scratch it all and start again. I mean, I think that's almost, I would say, a brave way to live your life. It's got to be way more stressful to constantly be evaluating where you're wrong.

Yeah, that actually reminds me of another phrase that I really like, which I first read on James Clear's blog, which is fail like a scientist.

Yeah.

It's exactly what you're describing because scientists, when they design experiments, they're not designing them to succeed. They're designing them to learn something new. And if what you learn is that you were wrong, you still learn something. That's so positive. So I feel like this is such a useful mindset to have whatever goals or projects you have, whether you're an entrepreneur or an employee, a creator, whatever you're trying to achieve in life, considering that whenever you conduct an experiment, your goal is to learn something new. It's not to succeed necessarily. And in the long run, if you keep on experimenting, if you keep on learning, you are going to end up being successful. But that shouldn't be your drive in the short term.

That reminds me of a quote I remember hearing. So we're going to go on left field a little bit because I've always been kind of a physics nerd. But when they were really looking into the Higgs boson with the Large Hadron Accelerator, and I think it's in Sweden or something like that, I remember they found it and it weighed exactly what they thought it was going to weigh. And Stephen Hawking, who's always been like a real idol of mine, he made a quote that says like, "Yeah, it's kind of sad that we got the answer that we were looking for because now we don't get to have any of the questions." And I just remember thinking like, what a psychopath. This is one of the most important discoveries in particle physics in like the history of the world. And the first thing he thought of is like, "Ah, shit, we got the right answer." Like, what a letdown.

It's like another— we're like jamming on quotes. But another one is from, I think, Richard Feynman. But it says, "I'd rather have questions that I cannot answer rather than answers I cannot question." And it's also a beautiful quote. And you just talked about Stephen Hawking. One of my biggest regrets in life was that when I was working at Google, he came for a talk organized by my former team there, and they knew I was a big fan. And so they asked me, they told me, you know, you're not supposed to be there. You're not supposed to be at that event. You're not on that team anymore, but we know you love him so we can sneak you in. And I had booked a holiday to Indonesia with friends at the time. It was 10 years ago. Didn't have a lot of money. That was a lot of money to go there. And I decided to go to Indonesia and I missed that talk. I didn't get to meet him. And obviously he's not with us anymore, but that's been one of my biggest regrets in life, not to kind of like cancel the trip and just attend that talk and get an opportunity to meet him in person.

Yeah, wow. I don't know what I would have done, especially because all your friends are going to be like, what the hell, we've had this thing planned forever. But, and then how do you explain to them? It's like, no, you don't understand, it's Stephen Hawking. Then maybe you'll show them like A Brief History in Time and they'll be like, this is just a book. I'm like, no, no, but it's, it's, it's A Brief History in Time. Um, Cool. I feel like if you and I chatted for long enough, we would probably really go down a wormhole. So for the sake of this podcast, let me reel it back in. Related to that, we were talking a little bit before we recorded, and I did some research. I don't know too much of your background, but you come from a much more academia standpoint and sort of transitioned into the web marketing, web content standpoint where most of the time, and this is a generalization, it's nerds like myself who don't really know what else to do. And so we just start creating stuff online, and then eventually it cultivates somewhere. Uh, I want to stick on this for a little bit. So there's a, there's a bunch of questions, but was your plan to create this brand and to maybe make a career out of it? Was this just a way for you to start dumping some of the thoughts and the questions that you had in your mind, and eventually it just kind of flourished? Like, how did this even come to fruition? How did Nest Labs, for those who don't know your work, come into fruition?

Yeah, so first, I don't initially come from an academic background. My career has been kind of oscillating actually between industry and academic work. I started working at Google in marketing actually. That was my first job. And then I left Google, I started a couple of startups, and they didn't work out. As I think 80% of startups do. But I found myself at a point in life where I was a bit lost. I didn't really know what I wanted to do next. I had, up to this point, I had a pretty clear idea of what the path looked like, especially in big companies as Google. You have career plans, they tell you, here's the ladder. If you do A, B, C, you're going to climb it, and this is what success looks like. Once my second startup failed, I didn't have that anymore. I didn't have a plan. I didn't know what I wanted to do next. So I decided to go back to first principles in terms of what I actually care about. And I decided to kind of explore what are things that I would love to keep on learning about and to keep on studying and exploring, even if money was not part of the equation. And I've always been fascinated by the brain, how it works, the human mind, cognition, emotions, etc. So I decided to go back to university and I applied for a master's in neuroscience at King's College in London, got accepted, did that. And once I was— while I was doing this, I learned about something called the generation effects that shows that by creating your own version of a piece of information that you're studying, you're going to both remember it better, but also understand it better at a deeper level. And I decided to apply this. And this, this is the seed that started NestLabs, my current company. It just started as a place for me to write about what I was learning and also to reinforce it, to try and figure out how can I actually apply all of these scientific concepts to practical strategies that you can use in your daily life and in your work. I thought at the time that it would be just like my small personal laboratory, which is why it's called Nest Labs, where I could just play and experiment. But to my surprise, lots of people signed up to the newsletter fairly quickly. And I did that for a few months and then decided to make it a business. But that was not really the plan at the beginning. It was really just a space for me to write and think.

A duality of, I guess, methodologies online between what the first step is. Do I create a product and try to sell it to people, or do I create awareness and find out what it is that they want and then offer it to them? So you took the latter of those. You just started writing, you started finding people that were interested in what you were interested in, kind of created your own little tribe and eventually found a way to turn it into a career?

I'm a big fan of the second approach.

Yeah, me too.

I think in terms of emergence as well, there are two parts here that are important. There's what does your audience care about, but also what do you enjoy creating. It's almost like a Venn diagram, and I think you can't figure it out just by creating a product in a vacuum, right? And for me, it's been really helpful. At the beginning, I was just writing about anything that I found interesting, but then little by little, I would see that there was definitely an overlap in some areas between the articles that I was enjoying the most writing and the engagement and the positive reactions that I was getting from my audience. And once you found— once you find that intersection, between what you enjoy doing and what your audience enjoys consuming, this is gold. This is perfect. It means that you can build a sustainable business while having fun doing it.

Yeah, and that's a difficult journey sometimes because, speaking from my experience, I don't want to speak for you, I've had experiences where I just come up with this ridiculous fluff bullshit, maybe like '11 great cat pictures,' you know, and you're like, 'No problem, slam dunk, this is gonna go crazy, everybody's gonna love me, and then I'm gonna get all of these dopamine hits about how entertaining I have been.' And then I'll go completely like the other side and be overly informative, maybe like really, really take a research approach and cite all of my work and really, really care. I'm having a hard time articulating it because it's not that the middle ground doesn't mean that you don't care. It's just that you go above and beyond in like formalizing your content, right? And it's this constant push-pull on like, how do I be myself? How do I write like I talk? How do I be entertaining while at the same time producing information that will have like a positive impact on people's lives? You know, tell me about that struggle, which I know just by reading your work that you've had to— that you've had.

Well, I guess there's something that helps a lot in my case is that I'm not a native English speaker. So by default, the way I write is pretty simple. I can't really do fancy, overly complicated writing because I simply don't have the vocabulary. So that's very helpful. That really allows me to keep the content simple without having to force it. That's just the way I naturally write in English. Another question I try to ask myself all the time is, would I actually read this? Would I actually enjoy reading this? This is actually a really good filter.

Yeah.

And it is weirdly a filter that lots of creators don't apply to their own work. They're so focused on the business metrics, on the marketing strategy, that they don't even think about the product itself. Would you actually buy this? Would you get your wallet out to buy this thing? Would you spend 5 minutes of your life reading this article or listening to this podcast or scrolling through this Twitter thread? And this is something I try to do every time, just asking myself, would I read this? Would I actually consume this? Would I pay for this? That's been super helpful for me to kind of find that balance. Between being informative but also being enjoyable enough to consume in terms of content, so people want to come back for more.

I think that's excellent advice, especially for writers. I like to talk about all different types of online businesses just because of the impact it had on my life, but I always gravitate towards the writers. And I think that's for a couple reasons. One, because I think writers, just by nature of the fact that they have to think so much, are always the most like process-oriented, and they understand why it is that they're doing what they're doing, as opposed to just make as much content as possible, you know, hit record, selfie, selfie, selfie. Like, you really have to work your way through a good article. Um, and I, I say that as a little bit of context where I thought it was fascinating where you said that you have the advantage of having to simplify your writing. I speak German, um, although not natively. I lived in Germany for a while and I took a bunch of German in school. And, uh, like, I'm sure you can relate, although you've lived in London for a while, so you can get by without any real hassles. But when you can almost speak a language, you know, and you have to interact with people that can speak it totally fluently, uh, you just find the most straightforward, direct path to say, like, what the fuck it is that you're trying to say, you know what I mean? It's like, no, I just— I need that sandwich. When you're writing online, I— again, it's that balance. Like, you don't— you want to respect your audience to the point where, like, I will work hard to make this enjoyable, but also take out as much as possible so that you can get through it as quickly as you can. I thought that was really fascinating how you said, like, you have the advantage of English being your second language.

And I think it also makes you a little bit more thoughtful in the way you write. I think compared to many native writers, native English-speaking writers, I will tend to check the dictionary a lot more, to check for grammatical rules a lot more. And I've had—

especially with English because it breaks all of its own rules all the time.

Totally.

And it's so infuriating.

Exactly. And I've had like a few British friends and American friends telling me that my English was probably, when I'm writing, more correct than lots of native speakers.

Sure.

Because you don't have the confidence, so you always triple-check everything. If something feels a little bit new to me, a turn of phrase I've never used before, a word that I've read somewhere but never really heard being used in the conversation, I would always double, triple check, which is not necessarily something that I would do in French because I feel comfortable in French. So this little discomfort can actually be a good driver to produce good creative work.

Yeah. I'm thinking of some of my own examples.

I write a daily blog that's more for myself, there's about 1,000 people that subscribe to it, but nobody knows about it. I never tell anybody what the domain is. It's basically just for me because I enjoy thinking in the morning and like figuring my life out, you know. But I noticed that I will breeze through the term like I wanna, W-A-N-N-A, every— and like I hardly ever even think about it. And if you're reading it, unless you're really stringent on the grammar police, which some people are, by the way. The reason why I knew about this is because of all the fucking replies I got. You know what I mean?

But I wouldn't even think twice about that.

I would just say it and hit publish. It's really funny. All right.

I want to talk about your process a little bit.

You— I'm always fascinated by this as well. There's some people that just look at a blank page and they say, I don't quite know what it is yet. I'm just going to write. And it's going to come out of me. I would probably consider myself more along that line. There's some people where like the outlining is 90% of the work and then the writing is like the other 10% of the work. Those are probably two extremes.

Um, but in my experience, I know when I talk to a lot of writers, I think they usually fall on like more one extreme or the other.

Uh, which, which side of that, that metric do you think you fall under?

It depends on the type of content. If it's a research-based article, I can't really start with an outline because very often I start writing about something and I definitely don't have enough knowledge to write the whole thing. So I need to do research while I'm writing. So it's a back and forth between researching, writing, and the outline emerges from what I find. I'm not going to make it up before I have the actual data and the information and I've read a few papers. So for research-based articles, definitely don't start with an outline. I start with a question, then I go and try and find answers, and I try to find patterns, and then after a while working on it, I start seeing something interesting, a skeleton of an outline, and then I fill the blanks if I feel like something is missing. And then there are other articles that are a bit more personal where I talk a little bit more about my own personal experience, which could be with my creative process, my productivity systems, with Managing my mental health, etc. These, I will sometimes have an outline, but it's because I've probably been thinking about the topic for a while. It's very, very rare that I write a personal article on Nest Labs. If I do write a personal one, it means that it's been on my mind for a month or so, and I'm like, I need to get it out of my system. So it means that I already have some ideas in my mind of what I'm going to write about, and so I have a skeleton in my mind. That being said, with the personal ones, and I'm sure you've had this experience before, you start the article thinking you know where you're going, and it's just the process of writing unlocks more thoughts and more insights, and I very often end up with something that looks nothing like what I had in my mind when I started writing. So I think I'm probably on the spectrum, as you say, there are extremes, but on the spectrum, I'm probably not much of an outline person. I love using writing as a thinking tool. And to me, writing the outline before I have the content kind of defeats the purpose of using this space as a sandbox, a playground where you can just kind of like follow your thoughts and follow your research and see where it brings you.

That surprises me so much because you're like a Roam—

you're a Roam research nerd, right?

Yeah, that's why I love it. It's so unstructured. So I dump stuff in there and then I explore it and I find patterns and connections. But it's very different from using Evernote, for example, where I'm supposed to have this note that is about this idea and that's it. And every time I want to add to it, I have to add to this outline, whereas in Roam There's no outline, it's just a bunch of notes. It's literally a graph. So actually it works really well with the way my mind works.

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because as soon as I said that to myself, I thought, yeah, well, at the same time, the whole point of Roam is that it is uncategorizable in a way. Like, it's relationships between thoughts rather than it's categorizing thoughts by what box they fall under. So I couldn't— Okay, when you were talking though, I started thinking to myself, how— this is a personal question more than anything. When I'm sitting down to write, I have a really, really hard time saying like, I'm not there, I need to step away. Sometimes if I do that, even if I'm, you know, 800 words into an article, I never come back to it and finish. There's like this thing that I have in my head was like, I'm in the zone right now. I need to stay in the zone. And I'm working on it because I want to like continue to grow as a professional, whatever. But, but for my own personal interests, did you ever struggle with that? Like, are you able to step away and process and come back and clear your thoughts? Or do you have to get the whole thing out right away while it's fresh in your brain?

For almost everything, I have to get it out straight away.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, yeah. I'm definitely— yeah, this is also why when I was younger, I used to love writing novels. I think I'd still love it. It's just that it's not something I've been doing recently, but I wrote a few ones. I was even talking with some editors at the time and The problem I had is that I really enjoyed the first draft process, but then going back to it and editing it, that was such a pain. And I'm good at editing, actually, because I am very detail-oriented and I usually notice when something's wrong, but I didn't like it. I didn't enjoy it. So I think I really like that phase where you're literally taking your thoughts out of your mind, putting them on paper, connecting them together, finding those patterns, finding interesting ways to communicate your ideas. But then when it comes to stepping away and coming back, I very often lose my drive if I do this. And I will still like for longer articles, obviously I do it. Some of them take several sessions to write, but the spark, the joy I have during the first session, I never have it in the second or third session. The second and third session or first session for the longest articles, they feel like work. They absolutely feel like work. And I'm still happy about the result in the end, but the, yeah, the joy of just following your thoughts and putting them on paper and not thinking about editing. This is— I absolutely love that feeling.

Yeah, that is so refreshing to hear because I feel the same way when I'm coming back for the second or third. I'm thinking to myself like, I need to just get this done, right? As opposed to like, this is what I do, you know, this is what I enjoy doing. So, um, so thank you for that insight. Uh, let me transition a little bit because as much as I love writing and as much as I love content, I'm actually Sometimes I feel like a bit of an oddball where in this whole creative economy buzz, I think the creation isn't as exciting to me as the actual creating a business out of it. Maybe I'm just like a capitalist. You know, I'm not really sure. Well, actually, that's not true. The reason why I like it is because I really enjoy building like systems and processes. And when you have more than one person on a team, the way to make it efficient is by just completely getting your systems and processes down. And when I saw that you were hiring people and you were very transparent about it, by the way, like, oh shit, I sent out some requests, like, I hope they accept, you know, I got a laugh out of that. I was excited for you because It's a whole nother thing. There's creating a website, creating an audience, creating some products, whatever. But now you got other people on the team. It's a whole, whole new thing that you're doing. So this is just a really open-ended question. I'm just looking for what that was like. Like, what was that experience like for you? Like, was it scary?

Are you still scared?

Do you have any idea what you're doing? Like, talk to me about building a team now.

I've loved the process so far. It's very interesting because I did manage some people when I was at Google, but it's so different when you're managing a team and you have all of these processes that have been created for you before, you know, when you're in a big corporation like this, don't really have to— obviously you can worry about your own personal management style, communication style. There are still lots of things where you have lots of freedom, right? But in terms of management processes, performance reviews, goal setting, et cetera. There are literally templates for everything at Google and you just take them, use them, apply them, and you are supposed to apply them because it is just part of how the internal system was designed. So you're not supposed to necessarily ask that many questions, just apply them. Whereas in this case, I had this blank slate where I could do anything I wanted to. And it was exciting, but also a bit frightening at the beginning, because it's not the same as like, I'm very into, you know, we discussed that at the beginning of this conversation, experimenting and failing, but these are people. So you don't want to, you don't want for them to have a bad experience. You want them to have the best experience possible. So yes, it was a little bit frightening and exciting at the beginning. It's been a few weeks now, 3 weeks, almost a month now. So we're starting to get the hang of it. This is great. We have our processes. I am making them fill every week, a weekly review using my Plus/Minus/Next template. So first column, they say everything that— they write everything that went great that week. Second column, everything that didn't go so well. And last column, what they want to focus on next week., and they share it with me in their one-to-one, and then we share again in our team meeting. Um, and, uh, they also have study time booked together so they can, they can study different skills that are helpful for their jobs. But no, it's, it's, it's great. And they're very, I'm very lucky that they're very proactive as well. So in terms of processes, Some of them that we have in place now, they suggested. So it's great. It's, yeah, the first week was frightening, but now it's actually okay. I think being transparent with them helps a lot as well. I've been very open with them, telling them, you know, this is the first time that I'm starting from scratch. And so I'm going to try and do my best, but I really want your feedback. And this is kind of a co-creation process rather than just me imposing whatever I have in mind. Um, open-ended question, open-ended answer, but, uh, yeah, great.

I love it. And one of the analogies that I always like to use, and this relates more to some people than others, but I grew up, uh, building houses basically. It wasn't until I stumbled— I was always a writer, and so I was just writing on a blog much like you, and One day I realized people were reading it and I thought to myself like, how the hell are people finding this website? And that's when I learned about SEO and that's when I got totally hooked on it. I've been doing it ever since, but I grew up thinking that I was going to build houses my whole life. And so, uh, when I think of processes, I, I can see it like quite literally as a, as a visual because there's a rule in carpentry or any kind of contracting where the weakest point of any structure is always at the joint. And so when I see systems or workflow, let's call it, going from like this structure and then passing over to this structure, that's the joint, right? And that's always where just the fucking— like, you didn't send me this email, I don't know what this is, you didn't fill out this onboarding form, like, I don't know what's going on. And so half of my job at this point is just constantly evaluating where those joints are and figuring out how to make it so that nobody is ever unsure of what it is that they're doing. Um, and so a little bit of a long-winded intro, but for the most part, you've been able to run this whole ship by yourself. And from the outside looking in, although this could be a completely like ignorant statement, it doesn't appear to me like there's a whole giant web of things that you need to do. So like, what are those joints that you're seeing that you're trying to solve for?

I'd say like 90% of the business is running very smoothly and I don't really worry about it. You know, there's the articles I'm writing every week. I'm publishing videos on YouTube. I'm publishing on Instagram every week. You're still writing? Yeah. Yeah. I'm publishing 2 articles a week now.

Yeah. That is so silly. How do you keep that up?

I used to be at 5 a week. So 2 a week.

That's like so silly.

So yeah, 2 articles every week, a YouTube video every week. I send the newsletter and there's the community. And yeah, it's really fine. I actually don't, work that hard. People think that I'm working nonstop. I'm actually very protective of my time. So the one thing, the one joint that is completely broken and that I'm working on right now is my inbox. It's so bad. I have even— so I had an interview with a virtual assistant yesterday. We're going to do a trial for the next few weeks. It's amazing because she's also a member of the NestLabs community. So it's really Yeah, even her, I did a screen share, showed her my inbox and she audibly gasped, like with her hands on her mouth. She's like, wow. I was like, yep, if you want to work together, that's what you're getting into. And I told her I wanted to do a screen share and show you my inbox. So it's a two-way choice to work together. I want you to know where you're getting into. So yeah, my inbox is so, so bad. I feel bad about it because there are people who send me emails that I know I should reply to, but it's just absolutely overflowing. And I think it is due to a very stupid mistake I made, which is hard to fix now, but I sent my newsletter from the same email address I use for business.

So— Oh boy, yeah.

30,000 people have my email address right now. And of course they email me, which it's like, you know, which I completely understand. And I actually want to connect with them. It's just that I need processes. I need a way to— that's the problem is that out of 10 emails, there are probably only 3 or 4 I actually want to reply to. But because there's so much volume, I miss emails that I would actually really like to reply to. So hopefully, yeah, that is going to get sorted in the next few months. But that's a big priority for me. And that's the— you talked about joins and connections and what works and what doesn't. Everything else is completely fine. That's the one big thing that I really need to fix.

Yeah, that's tough too, because it's always the same trap. Like, I shouldn't say trap. It's the same snag that you can fall into where in the beginning, what a joy it is to get emails from your readers and you reply to them. And so you think like, you know, yes, I'm going to take the Gary Vee approach. And everybody totally forgets to mention that he's got like 30 people that constantly monitor his personal brand, right? Like, I'm going to respond to everybody and I'm going to do things that don't scale, right? That's the shit that everybody loves to say. But then all of a sudden there's 30,000 people telling you about what they would love to hear from you or about, I mean, I don't know the, so for Copyblogger, I just sent it out and I made this same mistake on a webinar that we did and couldn't even tell you. I'd say probably 70 people instantly are like, oh, I really love this. Like, where's the replay to the webinar? I just thought to myself, like, what an idiot, you know, I just completely booked my entire inbox. So there's that journey of like, uh, I love the personal, I love the one-on-one till you get to the point where it's like, I'm sad that I'm going to lose that, but it's just not feasible because I can't write and do YouTube videos and manage community and talk to everybody at the same exact time.

Yeah, exactly. And, and again, it's, it's really more about finding a system that allows you to— because I do get a lot of joy when I receive a really nice email and I have the time to reply. So it's more about finding a filtering system. What is, you know, in your case with the webinar, for example, obviously you didn't need 70 emails saying, "That's great, where's the recording?" That's not something that's going to bring you a lot of joy. The "that's great" part, yes, but there's probably, there would probably have been a way to handle that that was more manageable. In my case, I still want to see the emails that I care about and I still want to reply to these. But I'm finally getting help to filter out everything else that— and it's not that these emails don't matter, it's more that they don't need my personal attention and they don't need my mental energy and my time.

That's it. It's mental energy.

Yeah.

It's exhausting. I'm not saying that so that people think it's like, oh, your life must be so hard. It's you need to reserve it or else you run out and then you can't do your best work. So, uh, So I want to finish up on your community because I think this is fascinating. But beforehand though, just real quick little insight. I reached out to you through Twitter and the first thing you did was, "Hey, my Twitter inbox is a mess. Can you send my email?" And I sent you an email and then we got kind of crossed and you were like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. My email inbox is a mess." And I'm like, I've been there before.

Um, yeah, so bad.

Well, it's all good.

So, okay.

When you build an audience, there's a lot and not a lot of different ways to build a business out of it. Right. And they all have their pros and cons. We love this idea of community because it scales and because it has the monthly recurring revenue behind it. And also because it's really fun. Uh, With that being said, it's a lot more difficult to manage than you really— than I realized when I first built one. You know, you think to yourself, okay, I'm going to do a masterclass every 2 weeks. I'm going to do something every week. And 2 weeks later, you're thinking to yourself, I just did one of these. Like, where did this 2 weeks go? Um, so your community is thriving. You guys are doing great. It's all going well. I'm very, very happy for you. What was the decision where you decided this is the route I'm going to take? I love this idea of a community and this is what I think my people want.

Um, lockdown. That's basically, that was the trigger. Uh, it was in March 2020. Oh wow. Yeah. Uh, all of a sudden we found ourselves lonely, isolated at home. People were struggling with their mental health, with their productivity, with their creativity. I got so many emails from subscribers who were telling me, I'm really struggling. Do you have any information? Have you written any article about how to handle that specific situation? And I did write a couple of articles, but I never felt like— I always try and write the most useful article possible. And I, deep down, I felt like that wasn't really helping. Just a list of research-based tips for something this terrible and hard and new and disorientating. They— it just wasn't cutting it, right? So this is when I had the idea for the community because I felt like we could probably impact each other's lives in a way more positive way if we were actually interacting together and creating our own tips and strategies rather than relying on research that was not necessarily adapted to what was going on at the time because this was so new. And yeah, that's how I got the idea. From idea to launch, there was about a week. Thanks to— I'm using Circle and it took a few clicks to set up the community. So it was great. Announced it, got a few hundred members pretty quickly. And yeah, that was the birth of the NestLabs community.

I had a very similar experience. I run a— it's a pretty big blog and email list for people that are in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. And same exact thing happened. A lot of people get help with their mental through meetings and online counseling and stuff like that, or not online counseling, mostly meetings and like in-person counseling. And so when all of that went away, just floods of emails saying like, I need someone to talk to, I lost my whole community, I lost my vibe, I lost my people that I talked to when something's on my mind, you know. And so we did something similar and we only charge like $9 a month just because that felt fair. You know, like we got to pay our bills, but $9 a month isn't really a lot of money. And, uh, put it up and we've got a couple hundred members. And now I think, um, where I'm going with this is I think it's here to stay though. There are a lot of advantages to online meetings and online community. And I don't think we're in this new, this brave new world where like everything is digital. Like I think that's a lot of hype. I'm like still going to get coffee with my friends, you know? But there's just a lot of instances where I think it's very pragmatic to jump in front of a computer screen. I mean, the technology we're using is only going to get better, right? Like, how much longer until you can do these meetings with, you know, like that shit in Star Wars where they're all sitting around with like holograms? It's not going to be that much longer. So I'm excited about it. Like, I'm excited about the business of creative content linked with the community. I think it's going to continue to grow and get better and better.

Oh, and don't get me wrong, as soon as we can, I want to do face-to-face meetups with Nest Labs. That was— yeah, actually we had one meetup last year just before the pandemic because that was the plan initially. I really wanted people to— yeah, yeah, I had one meetup that was really fun actually because there was no Nest Labs community at the time, there was nothing, but I just felt like I wanted to shift the relationship from just broadcasting content to actually have those multi-way conversations together and connecting readers together. I didn't have, as often with the way I work and I create, I didn't have a plan or anything. I was just like, I really feel like meeting people who read the newsletter. So at the time, can't remember how many subscribers I had, I had, but like probably like 9,000 or something like this, which when I think about it was still a little bit crazy. But in a newsletter, I was like, at the end of the introduction, I was like, by the way, who wants to come and hang out in my living room? And a few people joined. I had to close the signup form after an hour, actually, because my living room was not that big. And someone flew from Seattle To London? Yes.

Wow.

And I asked him 10 times, did you fly from Seattle just for this? He was like, yeah. He's like, did you know it was just going to be in my living room? This is not like a conference or anything. He was like, yeah. I was like, wow, okay. Um, he was really, really nice. We had such a good time. So in the end, we were about 10 people at my place and we were just having drinks and chatting. Uh, the topic I picked for that meetup was metacognition. So everyone was sharing their metacognition self-reflection tips. People had journals, people brought their notebooks with them and their pens and took notes what we were chatting together. It was absolutely lovely. And then I think 2 weeks after that, we were in lockdown.

For the people that aren't watching the video, when you're talking about this, like, your face is really, really lighting up, and it's very clear that Obviously, you love the online community. I'm sure you've worked very hard on it, but it's very clear that the idea originally was to do face-to-face meetups, conferences, whatever you want to call them. If we had more time, I would love to dig in about where you plan on going with this, but give me like the elevator pitch on what you're— when When you're sitting in your living room and you're staring at the ceiling envisioning on where you want to take Nest Labs, like how do these face-to-face conferences fit in?

I think I'll probably just create a space in the community where people can announce their own face-to-face meetups and that's it. I'm not really—

So you're going to like curate them basically. You're not going to host them all, you're just going to curate them?

Well, I can't be everywhere physically at once. So I'm not— I've always— one of my biggest principles with the Nest Labs community is that I never want to be a bottleneck. That's why I let I let already like 90% of events in the online community are organized by members, not by me. So I just want to give them a platform to connect together. And I think I'll just create like another space for face-to-face meetups and people can be like, let's meet in this park in London, or let's meet in Dolores Park in San Francisco, whatever. And they can meet there, not really planning on. That's also what I really like about the model I have, where it's that you pay for your membership, but then once you're in, you're in. I'm not going to take a cut, charge tickets for, charge for tickets or anything. You're in the community, you get full access to everything and you use it to connect with other people. So yeah, that's just the plan. Again, just giving them a platform to connect together and hopefully make new friends.

I love that. And I think that's very smart. The first brand I ever really built was the sobriety one that I told you about. And I think to myself, like, with no experience or anything, what did I do to make that so big? And the more and more I thought about it, the more I realized is I basically just stayed out of the way. And like, I highlighted other people as much as I can. If somebody had like a sobriety date, I would always say like, this person is celebrating this milestone. Like, everybody say congratulations. If this other person had— I mean, these are like specific examples, but in the community, they mean a lot. Like, if you went to a wedding or something like that, and you got through it without like freaking out over the toasts or anything, you know, like those are big milestones and celebrations. And so, and I reflect on that. And I think, yeah, that's cool, because it makes me feel good. But also from like a practical standpoint, almost like a tactic, it's very, very effective. We just stay out of the way, like this shit ain't about me. I write this, you know where I fit into this, if you want more, it's about everybody else. And so I think that, that, that tactic on like, scaling a community is definitely the best way to do it.

Absolutely.

Just be a connector. That's it.

Very cool. Well, Anne-Laure, thank you so much for your time. You were very gracious. You are going to kill it for sure. Like, you're building something really, really special. And I mean that. I've talked to a lot of people on my podcast. I've talked to a lot of talented people. And I would definitely bet on you and what you're doing. So congratulations on all your success. Like, I'm really excited to follow on the journey to see, see where you take it.

Thank you so much. This was a great chat. Thanks for having me.

Likewise. OK, so Nestlabs.com. And then you're one of the strange people that your Twitter isn't your actual name. So, oh my God, you know, why don't I just put this in the show notes?

Nestlabs.com. I created that handle when I was a teenager. So just NestLabs.com is fine, /newsletter for the newsletter.

All right. Yeah. And then everything else we'll put on the show notes at TimStiles.com.

All right.

Anne-Laure, thank you so much for your time. Have fun getting out of lockdown. Go hang out with your friends. We'll do this again.

Thank you.

You're welcome. See ya.