133. Lloyed Lobo | From Grassroots to Greatness

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, we interview one of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and live better.

In today's episode, we have the pleasure to interview Lloyd Lobo, author of From Grassroots to Greatness. Lloyd is a software engineer by education, community builder by passion. He has worked in startups, built companies worth millions, and is co-founder of Boast.ai and Traction. In this episode, you'll learn about how someone came from a rickety old bus in Kuwait during the war to helping build companies worth millions of dollars, why community is crucial to success, How money isn't the answer to life's problems, the importance of consistency, and the frameworks for how you can start to build a community today. We had such a fun time talking about Lloyd's colorful background and how he has built something worth a lot more than money can buy. If you are looking to start a business or build a community worth staying around for, listen up. Now get ready to learn and enjoy this incredible conversation with Lloyd Lobo.

Lloyd, welcome to the Book Thinkers Podcast. We are so excited to have you today to talk about you and talk about your book, From Grassroots to Greatness. Before we hit record, we were talking a little bit about the design, which I'm excited to get into, but I want to back up a little bit and talk about a time when you were 9 years old. You had a math exam and you were worried about failing it, but you ended up on a rickety old bus to Jordan. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and how that impacted your life?

Definitely. So I have this learning disability, I think, as a kid. I could never open a book and read. I just hated reading and writing is something I just dreaded. And so I would always study probably an hour or 2 before exams. So I study for a math exam, show up, it's a geography exam. So I know I'm gonna fail 4th grade. I go through the whole summer stressed out, nervous. And one morning my mom wakes me up and says, hey, I don't think you can go to school anymore. There's a war been broken out and we're just worried. We don't know what we're gonna do, what's gonna happen, but school is definitely not happening. And my first reaction was, yes, you're never gonna find out I failed 4th grade. When the reality started to sink in, I see worry on my mom and dad's face. And I go down the building with my dad. And that was the first time in my life I had experienced 2 very key things that shaped my future and my entire journey. Number one was the power of people in creating impact against a big cause inspired by a big, great purpose. You know, this was not, I mean, years ago when there was no cell phones, there's no internet. the telephone lines were cut. In 2023, when bad news hits, it belabors and belabors and festers into new monsters. Back then, they knew things have— things are uncertain here. We don't know if we're going to live or die. And immediately people in the building started saying, hey, I'll guard the building from 12 to 6. And somebody else is like, I'll guard it from 6 to 12. And somebody else is like, I'll tag along with you. And another person is I'll organize food supplies if you're short, and someone else says, if you have family members displaced, I have extra room. So what happened was every building became like this subcommunity, and word of mouth spread from building to building to building and became the largest grassroots evacuation movements probably in history that came together to communicate with governments, with embassies, and rescue people out of there. to safety. This was, like I said, no internet, no phone, word of mouth drove it. We set up like schools were turned into refugee camps and buses were organized. Now, me as an 8, 9-year-old kid, I felt so connected to that greater purpose that I felt like I was driving it. I felt like a little Rambo moving things from here to there with my dad, standing with him, guarding the building with other friends. I just felt like part of it. And I realized like great leaders cascade purpose, not goals, right? With a great purpose where even the lowest common denominator like me feels like they're driving that. I witnessed the power of community to achieve anything. And I also experienced something what we call the entrepreneurial spirit. Right? Today, entrepreneurship is about making money, but that spirit is not quite— it's about taking an obscure idea to execution and impact while dealing with extreme risk and uncertainty. So that entrepreneurial spirit, which is how do you take something that doesn't exist to impact while dealing with so much uncertainty and risk? And there's no more risk and uncertainty than going through a war. And barreling through. And then the power of people and bringing them together is what shaped my entire life till today.

At the time, I mean, 9 years old, you probably didn't realize the impact that those moments were gonna have on you. Is it just now that you're looking back at those times and saying, oh, I get it? Or was it sooner in your kind of in your journey that you realized that had an impact, a pretty large impact on you?

I think throughout my journey, I kept realizing this because I don't think I ever stopped being surrounded by community. It was my good fortune and it was my DNA. So here's the backstory behind that. My parents were born and raised in India and they moved to Kuwait for better prospects because there wasn't that much money in India. And my mom grew up in the slums with her 9 siblings. slums of Mumbai where they've made a movie on it now, Slumdog Millionaire. But there were like 4 walls that was like rawish with an aluminum roof. My parents couldn't afford to take us on summer vacations anywhere. Like we couldn't go to Europe or anything. They were making, you know, barely, they were making ends meet. And my mom decided to not focus on her career to take care of me. And it was like, hey, if I go and get a job, we still gotta get the nanny to take care of the kids. So it checks out. So may as well stay at home. And so all our summers growing up were spent in the slums of Mumbai. My fondest memories as a child were in that slum because watching TV was communal. Puddles would turn into ponds and we would swim in them. You were eating together. Like, you know, if somebody cooked something extra, you're sending it to the next house and they're sending the— no one wants to send an empty bowl. So you send something and then they send back and it's like a boomerang. Even going to the bathroom, man, was communal. So there was no toilet in their house. And so we would stand in line to go to the public bathroom that was nasty, but it was a communal thing. Like people would come together, help each other. There was great camaraderie. And every summer when it was time to go back to Kuwait after the 2 and a half month vacation, I would cry and I didn't want to leave. And so then a few years later, the Gulf War happened. A few years after that, we ended up immigrating to Canada. I studied engineering, I finished engineering and I'm like, you know what? I don't really feel like getting a job in coding or going this traditional route. I'm like craving something that is more, that is like doing something exciting, uncertain, something risky. Driven by that, you know, The risk and uncertainty of the Gulf War. But that's the journey, right? When you're an immigrant, you're always punching above your weight class and you're dealing with uncertain waters and that becomes part of your DNA. Now, a lot of people, when I look at my kids today, they have everything they can imagine. So they probably won't crave that uncertainty and risk. They crave safety. I was just craving uncertainty because that's all I knew. And so working a 9 to 5, didn't feel as exciting. So I asked somebody, what's the best job I could get if I wanna be a business person someday? And they said, one of the top skills you need to learn is communication because everything about being an entrepreneur is communicating. It's selling your vision, selling your idea. And I'm like, I'm an awkward engineer. I can't communicate. So I asked around and I'm like, the best job I can do, like what's the best job I can do that will force me to communicate day in, day out, right? We often say we suck at something, but then we don't go and do that thing. If you suck at something and want to get better at it or really good at it, put yourself in an environment that forces you to do that something over and over again. So I took my first job in cold calling and I spent 4 hours practicing for the first call and I hung up as soon as the decision maker came on the line. But then I got better and better and better and my life transitioned from sales to running sales but only working at small startups because nobody would give me a job in those early days doing sales. They're like an engineer, why would I hire you doing sales? I applied to Xerox, I applied to well-funded companies, nobody would give me a job. So I had to apply to a very small startup and they were paying me like $30,000 to dial, you know, pick up the phone and I took it. And so my journey just transitioned because I was in and around the founder. So the next job was also working at a startup and another startup. And so that fueled that being a part of a small company working alongside a founder fueled my excitement and it was inevitable that eventually I'd start my own company. But what's really interesting is early days, everything I learned about sales and marketing was from HubSpot's inbound marketing community because I would Google search, right? How do I do this, that, the other thing? And when you join a startup to do sales, you're not actually just selling, right? My first job was in cold calling, but then the next one I joined a startup where I was to sell and I quickly realized that, hey, I'm talking to customers and also figuring out what to build. And guess what? I also need to build the marketing site and all the collateral. So I had to learn and everything came from HubSpot's inbound marketing community. Then fast forward a few years, my co-founder and I who had gone to university together, he came up with the idea for Boast automating tax credits and innovation funding for businesses. And we built that business with no marketing team. We bootstrapped it to $10 million in revenue by building a big community. When we sold the company during the pandemic, we sold 52% to a growth equity firm, cashed out. Me and my co-founder transitioned to the board. I had for the first time in my life seen this much money. And for the first time in my life, I ended up depressed. I hit rock bottom and I shouldn't have, right? I cashed out millions. Either side of my family hadn't seen that kind of money. And I ended up completely depressed. I face-planted. I started traveling from city to city trying to catch up with friends. And it was a fitness community that actually brought me to good health and mental stability. And as I reflected and looked back, I realized all my life community was around me and I had no money, right? Never had enough money. My wife paid the bills for the longest time as we were, as we were building the businesses because, you know, we did Bose. But before that, we did 2 other projects that failed. And the only time where I was depressed when I was, I had everything but didn't have the community. And I realized that, man, it's not the money in your bank, it's the people around your tombstone that matter. You can have all the money in the world sipping champagne at a château in France and be around people that make you feel suffocated and you don't want to be there. Or you could be in the slums of Mumbai and cry to not want to leave.

Yeah, Lloyd, I love that story. There's a quote from the introduction of your book that relates to this. I'd like to read it for everybody. You even italicized it for us. It says, Quote, life's not about the destination nor the journey. It's about your companions who matter the most, the people traveling down the road with you. And that quote reminds me of BookThinkers actually, because within our business we have a lot of people who value community currency over financial currency, people who are willing to take a little bit of a pay cut but improve the type of people that they're around. Because like you're talking about, It's the people around you that matter the most. So I'm curious, when you're building community, how can you build community efficiently from behind a computer screen? Because it sounds like you value in-person community a lot more than you do from behind a computer screen. But so many of us work remote jobs, we're building remote communities. How can you improve the community of people that you work with online?

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Definitely. I'll dive into it because We had 2 shifts of community building. We did the offline community first as a function of the time we were in. And then when the pandemic hit, the community grew from 30,000 to 120,000 subscribers as a function of taking it all online. So we've seen both shifts and I'll dive into it probably as my experience building the community versus like an Apple or a Harley and all of this stuff. So it's more relatable. So Alex came to me and said, hey, I wanna start a business that automates tax credits and innovation funding for companies. He was working at a Big 4 accounting firm that was doing this manually and he's like, it's so painful. There's hundreds of billions of dollars given in funding, but these accounting firms, they come at the end of the year, they ask a company CTO, tell me what you did that qualifies. It's so much effort and then they get audited and it takes a long time to get the money. Let's automate it. So I moved to his town. I was in San Francisco. He was in Calgary, Canada at the time. So I moved to Calgary because, you know, he, it was his idea. He had the expertise to do it. And I'm like, at best, starting with a small market is always good, right? You nail it and then you scale it versus going after the biggest market like San Francisco. So we started there and the first thing I did was started reaching out to people saying, buy our stuff, buy our stuff. And We called manufacturing companies, oil and gas companies, construction companies, and everyone's like, who are you guys? Like, give us your data, R&D data, and we'll get you some money. And the people that did know about it said, why would we work with 2 random guys? We would rather just do it with our accounting firm. And so dejected, we started going to all the startup community events and we felt, wow, we found our tribe here. This is great. We're having conversations. It's like how we, right? There's just the vibe felt so good the first time I had a conversation with you, Nick. I'm like, oh, we gotta chat more often. We gotta hang out. And so that one startup event we went to turned into more and more and we started having these great conversations and then we started participating in hackathons and everything. And back then it all felt like throwing spaghetti on the wall. Now, when you look back because you've made a lot of money, it all seems like profound frameworks. So looking back, I said, what did I learn? Like, what can serve as a framework? Like, where do you start, right? So the first thing is you wanna build a community. Let's say you're starting from zero, zero, zero. You gotta start with your audience. Who are you gonna create content for? Now, how do you pick that person you create content for? There's 4 things you need to know. One is, am I passionate about this audience? Because creating a community, as you guys know, you guys have a massive following on Instagram, is a long labor of love, right? If you hate an audience, you won't be able to sustain. You genuinely won't be. There will be times where it'll get harder, especially when you turn it into a business. You'll just get irritated. So one is, do you love this audience? Do you vibe with it? Are you passionate about this audience? The second thing is, is it a small niche that will eventually grow into something bigger? It's important to start small, like nail it and then scale it. Be an inch wide and a mile deep. The third thing is, do they have a propensity to pay at some point at least? Like if you have to, you know, monetize your community, you can't make it free forever. And the last one is ease of access. Now you may be in the largest market, like we were targeting first manufacturing and construction and oil and gas, massive markets at the time. But when we started going to those events, we couldn't vibe with them. We couldn't even get anyone to talk to us. So there was no ease of access. So that was framework number 1, passion, size, propensity to pay, ease of access. Framework number 2 is honing in on your target market, like really understanding where do they eat, breathe, drink, sleep? How do they get their key jobs done? What are the problems they're facing? But beyond the problem they're facing, you want to understand their aspirations. The problems are the today, the aspiration is a forever. The aspiration of your audience will become your purpose. So when we figured out the aspiration of our audience that we loved and wanted to spend time with, we realized, hey, we're not an R&D innovation funding company. We're actually, our purpose is to enable innovators to change the world. That's the purpose.

Why?

Because the aspiration of every innovator we meet is to change the world. And so figure out what their aspiration is, what their goals are, what problems they face, and then what stands in the way of their aspiration. And so Bose went from being already tax credits to being enabling innovators to change the world. Why? Because every dollar spent in innovation returns 20 to the economy. Vaccines, robots, clean drinking water is a function of innovation. Yet in the last 15 years, more than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies have evaporated and 99% of the innovations die on the vine.

Why?

Because they don't have the money or the know-how. So then our purpose became enabling innovators to change the world. Our vision became accelerating innovation. Our mission became, we do that. How do we do that is through funding and intelligence. And then our values, which I'll dive into in a second, became all about community values because it's really important to have imbibed in your founder DNA the joy of giving. If you can't give and can't help and you wanna monetize on day one, you can't sustain a long-term community. You may as well do like direct response stuff. So having the culture and the values of giving and helping is very key. So now we talked about how do you find your ideal customer profile? How do you hone in on it? Then from there, how do you derive your purpose, which is your forever, your vision, which is the someday what the world will look like, your mission is how do you do it, and your values are today. I can dive into the values of all the community-led businesses that I talked to that were common. I talked to like 1,000 leaders, looked into the guts of hundreds of companies. that were community-led. And what I found is every business that started, every business or every global phenomenon, every obscure idea that eventually became a worldwide global phenomenon had 4 stages in common from Christianity to CrossFit. This obscure idea that became a worldwide phenomenon had these 4 stages. People listen to you. You have an audience or buy your product or service. You bring that audience together to interact with one another. You have a community. When that community comes together to create impact towards a much greater purpose that's beyond your product or process or profits, it becomes a movement. And when the movement has undying faith in its purpose, it through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a cult or a religion. So let that sink in, right? Like audience, community, movement, religion. We're in the age where there's so many influencers, so many creators, they have audiences and maybe semblances of some community. But if the influencer dies, there's no forever here. There's no community. So starting there and figuring out, hey, what is the purpose? What transcends me? What is the greater impact I'm creating? Where's the vision? What is the mission and what are the values? And so when I looked at these companies that made the journey from audience to community to movement to religion, there were 6 specific values I found. I called it CAMPR: connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy, and recognition. Autonomy is key. If you try to control a community, it'll wither away. People are giving their time. Mastery, meaning helping people getting to become better and better versions of themselves. So when they do, when you do that, when you help people grow, they'll help your community, your business grow. Connection, because without connection, there's no community at all, right? You have an empty room. You don't even have an audience without connection. Purpose, like I talked about, when you bring people together towards a purpose that's greater than your profits, people find meaning in what they're doing and want to show up. We're in 2023, man. There's a lot of layoffs, but people can still find jobs. No, people can do consulting. People can drive an Uber and save on taxes. They can do any number of things. Why should they join you if there is no greater purpose and it's just punching in, punching out? Number 5 is energy. And you've probably experienced this. I mean, you guys have great energy on your channel, but if you had no energy, the audience just dies, right? You need, you need the energy. Look at every major movement, every major cult-like phenomenon. They have great energy because if there's no energy, people just wither away. You need to hold people's attention, captivate them, energize them with your vision. When people are energized, they can move mountains. And the last one is recognition. Until the day robots are buying from robots, we're still living in a person-to-person world. And if you don't recognize people for what they do, even big or small, they just won't— will stop showing up or they'll just switch. They're like, if I'm getting paid here to do the same thing as there, why don't I just get paid more to do there? So, you gotta proactively recognize people. So, I found those common values. So now, we've gone to How do you figure out the ICP? How do you figure out your purpose, vision, your mission, your values? The next thing is you draw out the circle of influence. You have the customer that you're targeting in the center, the audience, your ideal audience profile, your ideal community profile. How do you figure out now who they follow? Who are all the influencers in the space? Who are all the other service providers they pay or they buy from? What are the tools they buy from? So that gives you people you can partner with. And lastly, where do they frequent? Meaning what platforms they hang out on, what blogs, magazines they reach out to. So once you have this framework of follow, fund, frequent, now you have a list of people that is the circle of influence around this audience that you can start dominating through like, you know, like what you guys are doing, you're inviting book influencers to interview, then you can partner with people Right? For sponsorships and whatnot because they sell to the same audience. And then you distribute on channels where your audience hangs out, whether it's Instagram or what, maybe it's LinkedIn or maybe it's certain magazines or blogs that you partner with. And then goes the journey of, hey, how do I build an audience through content creation? How do I bring that audience together by creating experiences, whether online or offline? And I'll give you 1 or 2 for each that is good. And then how do I turn it into a movement? And then how do I turn that into a ritual and cult-like phenomena eventually? But first, by starting with an audience, just create content. Consistency is the second thing, right? Like consistency is the secret ingredient that makes it all happen. And I feel like you may be the best creator and the best communicator, but if you're not consistent, You'll never blow up eventually like MrBeast.

So can I, can I just share one thing on that point for the audience? A couple of months ago, I recognized that I started to become a little inconsistent on Instagram, which is our biggest community. And I actually hired somebody to come in and hold me accountable. That was their only role. Make sure that I always have at least 14 pieces of content, 2 weeks worth in the queue that's already been created. And then you post it on a daily basis every single day at the same time. Because when I'm traveling, sometimes I miss that. And just to, just so the audience understands the impact of consistency, within 1 month of consistently posting every single day again, we doubled our monthly impressions. Within 2 months, we quadrupled our monthly impressions on Instagram again, just from filling in the little gap where I would miss a day here and miss a day there. So I just wanted to pause real quick and highlight the importance of what you just said for people going from audience to community, community to movement. Consistency is the through line there, I think.

Consistency. Amen, man. Consistency. Because think about it, in those early days when I was cold calling, if I just stopped after the first cold call because I was nervous and hung up, I wouldn't be here today. My parents lost it because they're like, our son's an engineer. Our friends' kids work at Microsoft. What are you doing cold calling? I'm everything I am because of that skill. So looking back, actually, the 3 main skills that changed my life and that'll change everyone's life. Communication. Communication is the rails of communities. It's how we connect. If you can't communicate, you can't connect. If you can't connect, you have an empty room, let alone an audience. The ability to create and what brings it all together is your drive to be consistent. Creation, communication, and consistency is key. So you start creating content with consistency on a channel that delivers value. And the best way to figure out is you've identified a niche, a small niche. It doesn't have to be a massive one and identify a white space that they're not getting. So in the example of Boast, to bring it home, early days we had not a single paying customer and we started going to these startup events in Calgary. And we found that one thing was very common. All these founders were early stage, but all the event organizers that were hosting events and talks, they were discussing high-level CEO platitudes from companies that were $50, $100 million. And I'm like, this is good inspiration, but I've already started a company. I've already decided to start a company. It doesn't help me get my first customers or figure out how do I launch my product or get my first angel investment or hire my first person. And we kept seeing this. Another thing we spot that was a white space for that niche was no local media would cover them. Nobody would give them attention. So the one-two combo we did was we started hosting our own meetups and inviting relevant people now who are like maybe $5-10 million in revenue, who are more relatable to somebody at $0 to $1. And the conversations became Hey, rather than buy my stuff, it's like, hey Nick, I'm bringing a speaker who's the CEO of a $5 million company to talk about how they got to their first $100,000 or first million in revenue with tactical steps. I got 10 spots at the coworking space. Are you in? There's gonna be free pizza. Now, the first time 10 people showed up, if we stopped, I don't think it would've grown to 120,000 subscribers. We kept doing those events so regularly that eventually 200 people show up at a coworking space and we had to buy a, put a makeshift projector from some cheap source we found for $50. The guys running the coworking space are like, listen, man, this is not a pizza meetup anymore. You've hijacked the aisles in the coworking space. You're disturbing people. You can't, this has become a mini conference that evolved into bigger conferences that we did. Now we've had like the CEO of Uber, CEO of Twilio, The second thing what we did was we hit up the local newspaper and said, hey, can you give us a column? We wanna cover startups. And the first thing they said was, no man, not interested. It's not a community we wanna, it's not in our purview. So I wrote for a second-tier blog in the region and through friends made it get a lot of retweets and reshares and it kind of went viral. And this is 2012, right? A time where like Insta wasn't popping for business. Twitter was kind of it. LinkedIn wasn't, nobody was sharing content on LinkedIn as much. And we shared the blog with the editor and he's like, wow, you're getting good traction. So we'll give you a blog. He gave us a blog. We call that blog Startup of the Week. Now we covered in an area where startups were not getting any coverage. We create a Startup of the Week. As soon as the first founder, you cover what they do, they share it with everyone. It goes viral. The editor calls me in 2 days, says, Man, if you commit to writing this every week, we'll make it a print column. Now that boomerang effect between, I think even in 2023, a print column has a lot of value. But in 2012, as soon as that went on print, it legitimized us. So 3 things happened. Number one, we got the social proof of being legit. These 2 guys are legit. The local newspaper gave them a print column. The second thing, we got a backlink to our website from the highest domain authority website. If we try to do that column on our website, it'd take 2 years to get the SEO. Our website got SEO juice like in a few months, we were ranking number 1 for our keywords. And the third thing, it created this kind of like viral loop in many ways because what was happening now every morning, a local entrepreneur would go to the newsstand at 6, 7 AM, buy copies of the newspaper, take clippings and send it all over. And we had a link in there that if you want to be featured in the column, just fill out this form. So now what happened was my list started growing and anyone who applied to the list, there was a long queue, but then we'd invite them to our events. And so that one-two effect compounded. Now fast forward a few years, of course, the community grew. This is during the pandemic and we're about 30-some-odd thousand subscribers. We've done a lot of successful events, big successful events, in-person conferences. And the pandemic hits and we gotta cancel a conference. And I'm like, holy smokes, all our BD relies on the social proof of these community events.

We're screwed.

Paranoid, trying to think of things and everyone's like, do a 2-day virtual summit. I'm like, bro, I can't sit through a 2-day virtual summit. How am I gonna subject other people to it? And my nerves would be so wrecked trying to put together a 2-day virtual summit with multiple rooms and 60-some-odd speakers. So what I did again back then felt like throwing spaghetti on the wall.

Yeah.

But like when I look back now, it was a great lesson in being consistent and doing something small and getting compound interest for it rather than killing the golden goose at once, right? So rather than doing a virtual summit, reach out to every single speaker and said, hey, would you be interested to come on a 1-hour AMA on Zoom with our audience? And they're like, yeah, in no time we confirmed speakers for a whole year. And now it went from no conference to every Tuesday, Thursday at 11 AM, we did a virtual webinar like this, but rather than making it recorded, we made it live. So people were joining, they could raise hands, they could talk. And so we started seeing our community now at a time where the pandemic is on, right? People are like, they can't go out. And not only they're getting to communicate face-to-face with a high-profile speaker and we've had like folks from Shopify and Atlassian, all the big names. Now they can interact with one another. They're like, the chat is blowing up. They're messaging each other. They're getting stage time. And now every Tuesday, Thursday at 11:00 AM, the Traction Show is on. Now that content, one piece of content turned into content for YouTube. See, where your audience hangs out is very important as well. We never had put any effort on Insta or anything but LinkedIn, YouTube, and the email newsletter. So the live webinars gave us a lot of leads. The YouTube channel started getting good traction in terms of each of our videos for a very niche B2B gets 8,000 to 10,000 views per video. My LinkedIn profile started growing. The newsletter started growing. So word of mouth started spreading basically the same way like we were doing meetups. And I kid you not, man, in 2 years of the pandemic from like 35,000, 36,000 subscribers, our newsletter went to over 120,000 subscribers. And so long story short, you have an audience when people listen to you, it's one way. Now you wanna turn it to two-way communication and a community. What I feel fortunate about is in 2012 when we started building the community, These platforms weren't prevalent. So, I had to get people's email addresses and hosting events and writing a blog where to feature people was the perfect way to get their email addresses. Today, you have audiences, but if the algo changes, you don't own that audience, right? It's gone, right? Nas Daily, perfect example, big YouTuber, had a 21 million follower Facebook group. Facebook changed the algo because this is what all the social platforms do. First, they show all your content 100% of the time to your audience. Over time, they start splicing in like ads and sponsored content and content for other people from your, to your audience. And then your mindshare in front of your audience keeps going down. And Nas Daily said, Nasir said his audience mindshare went from 50% on his Facebook group to 5% because the algorithm changed and his revenue went from like $10,000, $100,000 a month to $3K or so a month. And so, Nas Daily even pivoted to doing virtual webinars, which are interactive, chat group, WhatsApp group, Discord group, and then a lot of in-person meetups to explode his community. So, still using the audience and all the content. I mean, like, it's, he's one of the greatest as far as they come, right? 21 million followers. So, you still create the content, but then drive people from that content to a community via Meetups, online interactive webinars where people, where it's many to many or like community members are interacting with one another, WhatsApp groups or Discord groups, and then a regular newsletter. So, you own your audience. So, I'll pause there in terms of going from an in-person or rather just going from an audience to an in-person combined with digital community.

We are getting an absolute masterclass in how to build a community. You're giving so much value. So I really appreciate that, Lloyd. Thank you, man. I want to pivot just a little bit into the writing of your book. So before we hit record, you shared a little bit about some reasons that you decided to write your book, and I would love for you to kind of share that with our audience listening today.

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, All my life I've been surrounded by community, right? Like from the slums to Gulf War to coming into sales, marketing and startups, being from the HubSpot community to the Traction community. Then we sold half the company, came into a lot of money and I ended up depressed. And I realized that, man, the only time I have been depressed is when the community wasn't there because the thing that got me over the slump of depression and bad health was a fitness community, Peloton, combined with a few friends in fitness. And I said, you know, the world needs to know that in an age of generative AI where we have created the sea of sameness and we're hyping up generative AI so much, a story from a founder who actually built a successful AI company by leveraging the power of community needs to resonate because yesterday's innovation always becomes tomorrow's commodity, right? But if you build a community, you won't become a commodity. Giving you that example, We used to say internet company, dot-com company. We don't say that anymore. Then we started saying cloud company and then we started saying mobile company and social company and blockchain company. We don't say that anymore. We will stop saying AI company because every company will have built-in intelligence. What matters in creating enduring brands as I looked into all these companies is the power of human-to-human connections. And, you know, I want to go all the way back, not You know, in the last few years, last 10, 20 years. Let's go all the way back. What is one of the most enduring brands of all times? It's Harley-Davidson. In the '80s, this company almost went bankrupt when the Japanese manufacturers commoditized electronics. Now, the leaderships were faced with like a conundrum. What do we do? They decided to capitalize on their people, on their community members and said, let's Rebuild the company on the ethos of community. It wasn't a marketing strategy, it was a company strategy. The president of Harley went out there and he said, we're gonna create rider clubs. Employees became riders, riders became employees. Over time, they found, formed rituals. Those people started to come together like weekend warriors, the camaraderie and the brotherhood of riding together. And then they started creating impact. They not only created the movement to save Harley, but they donated to autism and breast cancer and so many other causes. Today, you can recognize a Harley fan just by what they're wearing. It's a generational brand. People tattoo that thing on their body. And that just tells you that innovation will come and go. But until the day robots are buying from robots, it is the power of people connecting with one another that will take you into being an enduring brand. There's no better example than look at the macro trends driving the future of marketing. Google is gonna kill third-party data, right? So, it's gonna get harder and harder to just rent audiences. The second thing is brand content consumption is going down and person-to-person content consumption is going up. In their personal time, people are doom scrolling, By following other people. They're not following brands in the same way. Even in businesses, if you look at LinkedIn content consumption, people are following other humans, not brands. Short-form video creation has more and short-form text content has more engagement than any other form of content. And this micro influencer category of 10,000 to 100,000 followers is the fastest growing category, right? And all of that tells you that you can splice in whatever AI you want. Human tendencies won't change. We like to connect with other humans and AI will expedite it. Technology will expedite it. But ultimately, technology is an enabler. It's not the driver. People drive it. And through that book, I wanted to tell that story. Because the only time I ended up depressed was when I had millions but no community. And there was another really strong inspiration to do that because sometimes you have the idea but you don't have like what really drives you to do it. So I started this by saying, you know, I married my high school sweetheart, Indian families. We went to India, right, to get married. My company had that I was working at tanked in 2008. So, 2 days before the wedding, their parents call off the wedding with 400 people. I spent my honeymoon in Thailand with my best friend, pretty much, who's my brother. And the message that was relayed to my mom is my daughter is a doctor and my kid, my sons are doctors too. And they're ambitious, they're driven, they're educated. Your son doesn't have a job. He's bumbling from startup to startup. He's always joking around, fooling around. He doesn't have a serious bone. We're concerned that he's just gonna live off like a mooch off our daughter and he'll amount to nothing. And my mom asked me this question that day in tears, and she said, I sacrificed my career to raise you. I never— I could have worked. I could have done any number of things. I put my career on hold to raise you. Is she right when she said this, that you don't have a master's degree, that you're not educated enough, that you know, you're not serious, you'll never amount to anything. That one comment was the fuel, right? That rejection became my fuel, right? Don't let rejection rule you, let it fuel you. But those words from my mom, without them, I think none of this journey would have been complete. It drove me, did one company after the other that failed, did an events company because we were good at hosting community events and the co-founder, third co-founder ran away with the quarter million in profits, locked us out of our accounts. After suing him and paying lawyer fees, he paid us $50,000 in installments, still kept going. Then Bose became successful, cashed out, still didn't feel like a win, man. And today when this book, my goal is to make it a bestseller. Copy one of the hardcover bestseller edition is from my mom. to tell her that you didn't sacrifice your life, your career for no reason. You didn't raise me wrong. I may not have a master's degree or an MBA. I bumbled my way through school. But the world, the most, some of the most educated people in the world are reading my book. So that's the personal motivation.

Man, that gets, that's such a powerful story. Wow. It, it, it's Extremely inspiring. And, um, man, I appreciate you sharing that because I think too, like, so many people feel like there's this, you know, there's this, this way that you have to go through life, A to Z. And people like you and others, like, show that you can kind of create your own path. And that is such a cool thing that we can, that we have the ability to do. And we're in such a blessed time to be able to do that. Um, Nick, we We're at an hour already, which is just hard to believe. I just looked up at the time. Do you have any other questions? I know we had a ton of questions written out, but do you have any other questions that you want to ask?

Yeah, I agree with what Luke said earlier, Lloyd, in that this has been a masterclass. And I think it's unique for our audience because we have so many people who have written books and they want to go from audience to community, community to movement. And maybe even to cult. So I think it's going to be a really good fit for a lot of people today. And how about this? We'll do a part 2. We'll do a part 2 because there's so much more to explore. I know Luke probably got to one of his 15 questions. Same with me. So, um, yeah, man, excited for the next conversation. Luke always wraps up our show with one final question, so we have 3 minutes. So let's hit it with that.

All right, Lloyd, here is the last question. This question is set up like this: you pass away and everything that you've written down, everything that you've taught, everything that you've put out into the world disappears, but you can leave the world with one single piece of advice. What would it be?

It's neither the destination nor the journey. It's the companions that matter the most. It's never the money, in your bank, but it's the people who stand around your tombstone. And I'll end with this story. As I was going on this rickety bus from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan, currencies were invalid. You're going on this highway of death. So, you see all these buses bombed and you're not sure you're going to live or die. And I look at the adults on the bus and everyone is laughing and singing and playing the guitar. And I lost my mind and I couldn't connect the dots why that was happening. Years later, When I cashed out and I had come into money and then immediately after that, a couple of weeks after that, I got bilateral COVID pneumonia and I was hospitalized and I was like, what have I done? I haven't spent any time with my family and all of this. And then I started to connect the dots that, man, who cares about all this money? Like if I don't have the life to spend it with the people I care about, And that's what formulated, you could be on a shitty journey on the way to hell. Great companions make it memorable. It's neither the destination nor the journey, but the companions that matter the most.

Well, that is, that's absolutely beautiful and absolutely true. Appreciate your time so much. For those of our listeners and audience that would like to find you, where can they go and what can they do?

Definitely. I'm active on LinkedIn, Lloyd, L-O-Y-E-D Lobo. And on Instagram, very recently, my cousin sis who's an influencer and a radio host forced me to create an Insta account early this year. So it's Lloyd Lobo as well. And the book is gonna be on fromgrassrootstogreatness.com. Right now it's just showing the book, but I will have a Notion doc in there that you can sign up for and we'll have templates for every chapter where you can just use it A to Z and implement and build your own community and hopefully movement and hopefully cult-like phenomenon.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. We appreciate you. This has been a blast.

That is a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. It would mean the world to us if you could write a review and share this episode with a few of your friends. I mean, these books truly have the power to change people's lives, and by reviewing or sharing our podcast, you're helping us make an impact. If you have any recommendations for future guests or any constructive feedback for us on how we can improve our show, please feel free to submit a form on our website, www.bookthinkers.com, or send us a direct message on Instagram @bookthinkers. With that, I am signing off, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Don't forget, Go read something.