How To Build A $20k/month Community Business (Beginner’s Guide)

Today we're talking with Greg Eisenberg, CEO of late Checkout, a business builder and community expert. And he's going to give us his framework for how you define and build communities. We're going to break down what makes a successful community, why AI might make communities more valuable and more important than ever. And if you're a founder, when and how you should think about adding communities to your business and business model. That and much more, all on today's show.

All right, welcome back, Greg. We are going to do part two. This part is all going to be around community. If you want to understand how to integrate community into your company, make community part of the company, make it part of your kind of growth engine, stick around. We're going to ask Greg how to do that. The other thing is if you want to build a community business where community is actually the business, stick around because we are going to figure out what is the business community business you should build in the future. So, Greg, welcome back. Part two, Friend of the pod free timer.

I think he's our most guest. Yeah, I mean, Greg Eisenberg, Wonderful to see you, my friend.

Good to see you. Part three, baby. And the only thing I'll add to, to the agenda is why you should, why you should care about community. You know.

Yeah, I was maybe, I was hoping maybe we could start there with like definition, caring, but part of community. Both like, how do you define community? And like, in the ways to build a business or grow a business, where would you rank community and like effective strategies for doing that?

See, the problem with when people say community led business or community based product is people are just throwing the word community like it ain't no thing. Like it ain't no thing. Totally. And for some of those businesses it actually works. And sometimes it's just marketing speak that I think is really masking it. So I think when there's a real true community based product, it is magical. And I'd love to define what that is, please. So maybe we'll start with that. So you know me, I love frameworks and I came up with a framework called the tribe framework in order to test is this a community and tribe stands for T is their togetherness. Are there rituals? I, is there member identity? B, is there belonging and E is there engagement. Now if you don't have those things, you don't have a community and you don't have a community based product. The difficult thing with saying what community is is it touches so many different areas of so many different disciplines. You know, having member Identity could mean having a brand that really just connects with people. Having engagement might mean you have to build some IRL experiences like programming or events. So, and I'm happy to unpack this as as much or as little as you want, but I think the reality is a community based product is a mix of design, brand, product, social in a way that makes people want to go on the rooftop and scream about your product.

Can you give us an example of a business that people might think is a community? Like somebody who has a community that's actually not a community and a community that is a real community by that tribe definition. Just so people could like tangibly understand what is and what is not a community.

I was talking to someone earlier today who has an Instagram account which, which is basically funny memes. And I don't give too much away because I want to like, you know, but he's got multi million followers and he makes memes directed at, I don't know, 18 to 24 year olds now. It's incredible what he's been able to create and it's incredible, you know, he has a real business. Like the guy is making about 2 1/2 million dollars of profit per year on about 3 million followers on his Instagram account. And he kept repeating the word community. Yeah, my community, my community. Now when you look at the tribe framework, it just doesn't fit the tribe framework. It's just an audience. And there is a difference between an audience and a community. If this guy stops posting on Instagram, his engagement will go basically to zero. Now if he was a real community and he was hosting a real community, that wouldn't die. That's an example of an audience versus a community.

When I think of tribe for community, I think we can get into like rituals, identity and engagement, but kind of understand those ones that the real hard thing is the together and belong. I want to kind of just dive into that a bit. The reason I selfishly want to dive into this because I want to try to bring in my own. I want to try to like use my favorite show at the time to describe what I. Where I'm going with this question. So I'm obsessed by like squid game challenge. I really love the original squid game. I think the challenge is like this really interesting game where you get to see like human psychology upfront and close. And actually when you watch the show it's like really interesting that people who feel a sense of, you see all these clicks form that people have a sense of togetherness with each other, right? They find some sort of commonality. And you over time see this group of 400 humans start to drift into all these groups where there's commonality across the groups. And that really, when I'm thinking through your tribe, it's like the togetherness and belonging, right. You start to see like how that plays out in a real environment. But if you're trying to start a community from scratch, whether you have a product and you want to build a community around it, or you just want to build community and monetize community in some way in the business, where do you even start with the togetherness and belonging? Like how, how does that, how do I, as a founder or a marketer or someone start to like, think through solving that problem?

You need a space, you know, and that space could be a digital space or it could be an in person space. An in person space. And I actually think that we always tend to create digital spaces because it's easy. But I actually think there's a huge, huge amount of alpha right now post Covid to create just events really to bring people together and have people get to know one another, to see them in the flesh. You know, we often forget we're human beings, right? And human beings are social creatures. Like, like we started off by gathering around thousands of years ago, by gathering around caves and fires and then small towns. And now all of a sudden we live in these mega cities. We're connected to the Internet where we are connected to billions of people. We're posting on broadcast social media where I can tweet and hundreds of thousands of people are gonna see my tweet. And that's more artificial than it is natural. And I think that my prediction is that the brands that are gonna actually get people to not just create customers, but create raving fans are the ones that are gonna master this tribe framework. And you're seeing it all the time. I'll give you an example. I saw an article that went viral this weekend and I think it was the Daily Mail that said that Soo House is cutting off their membership.

Yeah, I was about, I was about to bring the same thing up. It's. It's New York, Miami and la. They're accepting no more members in their. Which is ostensibly their three biggest US Markets.

I was in a. I went to sohos the other day in Miami. I had to wait in a line to get to a line to get to a line into Soho House. And not included in that is like the, the invisible line, which is you need to be a member.

Yeah.

So what can we learn from Soho House, which is a community based business? What can we learn? There's a huge pent up demand for these type of exclusive experiences that our community experiences. You know, when people join SOHOs, they're joining because it's aspirational and they want to meet interesting people, period. The problem that soas have, which is a champagne problem, but it is a real problem, is they want to charge members $5,000 a year and they've got a lot of demand and they're letting everyone in. But it's making the experience worse. It is making the experience worse. And that's a classic example. Sometimes it happens with community based products which is it's not an exponential. The more people doesn't make it better.

Yes, there's a negative network effect at a point, right?

At a point. And then you have to figure out, once you get there, you have to figure out how can I maintain if not, you know, I want to keep this magic, but I also want to grow my business and there's ways to do that.

One thing I on the together and belongin. Like I feel like that's a space but the thing that I think is really hard is like what's the thing, right? Like what's the commonality to bring people together, to feel a sense of belonging? Because creating a community is like how do I find something that is deeply like a magnet to these people but is still differentiated enough that it doesn't look like every other single community? And that's what I find most people struggle with. It's like, oh, I'm creating another community for founders. I'm creating another community community for marketers. I'm creating another community for people who want to pick stocks. Right? Like I wonder how you actually in today like just to together and belong in like the thing that you bring people together for, does that matter as much as the experience or do you try to differentiate on the experience, which is like maybe why soho has worked so well.

Let's get tactical. So if I was starting a community based business today, I wouldn't start with I'm building something for XYZ group. I'm building something for founders. I would start with a milestone for a particular group. I am building something for founders who have gotten through YC to help them raise series A and series B and series C. We are the community for those types of people. And there is an outcome. It can't just be for these people, it has to be for these people. And an outcome that is a very, very small it sounds like a small distinction, but it is so big because human beings are selfish and we want to get something out of the products that we buy. I think one of the examples I love, one of my favorite community based examples is a business called Rafa. It's basically like a high end cycling apparel company and they have this sort of yearly membership that you can join in cities like London and New York. And you show up and it basically matches you with other cyclists in your area. So if you're going to show up to a Rafa meeting in London, in Shoreditch, let's just say obviously you're going to be wearing Rafa gear, you're not wearing Nike to a Rafa meetup or else people, you're not a part of the club. So the milestone here is I want to get better at cycling. I'm going to join the Rafa membership and the product is the gear that you buy. And the more deep you get into cycling, the more product you're going to buy and that becomes beautiful. So you're getting recurring revenue, subscription based revenue from the membership. Love it. And you're getting this one time buying that makes you deeper, deeper. I think David Spinks calls the community commitment curve. You are becoming more and more committed to the community as you're buying more and more product. And that's just a beautiful flywheel.

Yeah, you're aligning your community participation to the monetization of the brand.

Exactly.

And the best part about that is not only do you make money as people engage more in community, you're also building your brand during that whole thing because you're building this army of people who is wearing your brand around, talking about your brand, riding around London with your brand on their back. And that's a really powerful thing. And Rapha is doing something that I think is very hard, which is monetizing a community directly and monetizing that community separately through the sale of goods and gear and everything else, which is pretty incredible.

And it should be noted that the cost of not wearing Rafa is massive. Right.

I think that's a very smart point.

So how do you position your product to be that? That the cost of your product is almost like the entrance to the club. You need to wear that or else you're going to be looked at. Kind of funny, I always say one of my favorite, you know, community quotes of all time is the Andy Warhol quote which says Studio 54 is a dictatorship at the door, but a democracy on the dance floor. It's my favorite quote. The reason why I like it so much is it makes. It makes sense. Right. Like the, like, if you going back to the Sohos example, if. If it wasn't a dictatorship at the door and anyone could join, then.

It.

Becomes a lot less interesting for people to join.

Well, yeah. So like, building on that, like, I was talking to somebody, a friend last week who has a house in Malibu. And the sohouse in Malibu only exists if you are a homeowner in Malibu. So it's like the best version of this business model where you have to be a homeowner. So it's a very small, select group. It is the ultimate dictatorship. You have to belong to this and you have to own land in this little tiny, super expensive place before you could ever even like walk through the door in that. But the experience is ten times better there than like the sohouse of Miami where Greg was, you know, in three different lines to get in during art basel and it being like a crazy, crazy week.

Yeah. And I think, you know, the power of community is probably so big that there are people in the world who are actually looking at buying a $5 million property in Malibu.

$10 million property, easily. Yes.

A $20 million property, because they want access to that SoHo house 100%.

And I think you're kind of here making an argument that community equity is, if not as important, maybe more important than brand equity because of the togetherness. Right. I think, Kieran, you did the right call out here because you were like, look, a lot of different businesses have aspects of that tribe framework. The biggest disconnect is the togetherness. Because a lot of those things, to Greg's point, it's an audience. I'm talking directly to you about this thing that people are not talking to each other. And once you have people talking to each other about your brand, about the problem you're solving, like, it goes back to like a Dharmesh Shaw quote, which is like, your success is directly dependent on how many people want you to be successful. Right. The more people who love your brand, the more successful your brand's gonna be. And I think that like the ultimate community flywheel, once it gets going, I.

Also al I'll say a hot take because I know, or spicy take because I know, you know, you guys are the type of people that would appreciate this. But I think that AI is going to ex is basically going to kill so many different brands and it's going to level up so many different community based brands. And I'll unpack that a little it in a world where you have all these incredible tools, powerful tools, companies like, you know, OpenAI have spent billions of dollars in creating software that anyone can create content. You're going to see a flood, an absolute flood of content for brands all over. And what's going to happen is a lot of these brands are all going to look and feel the same. It's going to feel like you're walking into a McDonald's. And the ones that are, every brand's a hamburger. Every brand, every brand. And it's because a lot of CMOs are saying, hey, you need to be on ChatGPT, you need to be using Runway ML, you need to be using all these tools, Blaze AI for copy, Jasper, all these different, you know, tools, and it's all going to start to look the same. But it's the ones that, the ones that are going to stand out are going to be the ones that are going to master. My prediction is going to be the ones that are going to master this tribe framework. Understand, I need to build something different. And as Seth Godin says, like purple cow, right? Like, I think that we're entering this age where this like, community age where the brands that are going to stick out are going to be like, you might look weird wearing Rafa out there, but to someone else who is into Rafa, you're like, you're cool.

So I think Kip and I agree that all brands start to look the same. I still think that even in your tribe framework, one of the things that still is key and still key to building brands is storytelling. So anyone who can tell somewhat of a differentiated story is going to have some semblance of a tribe, right? That's like standing out. You're going to have people. If you can be like, much more polarizing, I guess you don't have to be much more polarizing, but you have to be much more differentiated. So you have people who can see themselves in you. Right? And. And maybe that's a large number of people or a small number of people, but doesn't it don't. If you follow through that narrative and like, all brands start to see the same and we start to see diminishing returns on these channels and everyone. Light bulb goes off and wow, like, the thing we really need to do is invest in the community aspect of our business, then you just get many more companies vying for the same attention. That's kind of what I was trying to get at is like, let's say I really like what you said, Greg, which is it's not Just like the person. It's a person plus outcome. But what happens, like, what really does differentiate one community from another? If everyone is going after the founder who's qualified from YC and you're trying to get them to raise their next grant, and there's like, there used to be five communities vying for that business, and now because of AI and everything is getting saturated, people realize the value of community. Now there's a thousand, right? Like the same, the same thing that happened on Search happens to community if everyone realizes, like, that's the place I should invest. And I'm wondering, like, what does differentiate a great community versus an okay community if they're vying for the same attention?

I completely disagree with this. Take Karen.

What? What? Yeah, what part?

Go for it.

Like, because communities are not commoditized, right?

No, but they're not commoditized yet.

My point, I would argue they're not commoditizable.

Oh, that's okay. You make your argument and then I will argue back because I think that's completely false.

Well, no, because let's take our running example of communities. For somebody, a founder who's graduated yc, right? It's very commoditizable to start an online community for founders who graduated yc. It's very hard to commoditize a true community where, hey, you know what? We have physical spaces in Boston, New York, San Francisco for these YC founders. We have VCs who go through these spaces five days a week. We have special partnerships with Ramp and Brex and all of these people who then give you special preference and terms for your technology, all of those things that is not commoditizable.

Yeah, but you've just, you've just literally made my point for me. Because the thing I, the thing I was asking is if X number of communities now go after the same business, how do you differentiate? You just actually given an example of how you would differentiate, there is not an infinite supply of founders who qualify from YC and are looking to raise their next seed that is somewhat capped. And so if you have 10 companies that are trying to vie for that attention versus in a post AI world, a thousand. Like any other channel where we have tried to garner attention, it becomes much more competitive and you have to do much better to get that attraction.

Let's what you chime in before I. Yeah, that.

Greg, chime in before we go back and forth forever here.

So, I mean, so what are we saying here? We're saying that in a world where it's so easy to create a community in a world where it's so easy to create software, right? Like I saw a video the other day of someone literally drawing on a piece of paper what the interface of Twitter is and using AI to build Twitter, literally. So if you can build a $40 billion company in four minutes in terms of building the software, there needs to be a moat, right? There's going to be way more competition for everyone who cares about standing out in the new economy. Sounds like you need to get your community and marketing skills pretty high and you need to be able to be the person that's being copied, not the person copying other people. Because I think what is that, Greg?

Like what, what, what is the. I could tell you in paid search content, I can tell you what is the thing that would differentiate a great strategy versus a mediocre strategy. So if someone's copying that great person, what is that great person doing?

Well, using the sohos example, like if so House starts by having a ritual where at 3 o' clock there's a T service where they match you up with other people in the room and it becomes really popular and it's a big reason why people sign up to sohos. Then I'm sure other organizations are going to copy it. So I think, you know what you have to be. If you want to build a community based product that's going to be the one that's copied, then you need to be constantly throwing out really crazy ideas that you think will resonate with your audience and build a culture of experimentation so that you're constantly building new ideas faster than other people. I think that's what you have to do or else what's the alternative? The alternative is you're playing a commodities game and you're, you're just trying to breathe and keep your head about above water and that's no way to a, build a business. And as a founder, like that's a really tough place to be.

It sounds like what Greg has said, like trying to find a ritual that really resonates and gets a ton of traction. Like and, or an experience, like a unique or differentiated experience is one of them. I was like curious about if I'm there, hey, I'm going to have like 500 more competitors. How can I make sure that I am at the, you know, bleeding edge of the things that I can do?

Well, I think, I think it's rituals, I think it's spaces. I think it's also like both the members and the leaders, right? Like if somebody started a marketing community and you and I were a part of it. It would have a lot more credibility than if like five junior marketers two years out of school were in that. Right. Like that's just, I think those are the ways you differentiate. And the challenge with any of those is like how do you get the business model to work? And I think that's why a lot of people have challenged with community businesses is because I think there's no one perfect business model.

Right.

There's a lot of different business models that could be successful depending on how you need to invest in those things.

Yeah. I also think to that point, I think in 2024 we're going to see a lot more paid membership.

For sure.

You're already starting to see it. It's SaaS, like revenue without building any SaaS. So if you want to create a paid membership, you basically need to come up with who am I building this for? What is the milestone? And then how do I bring those people in here to get them from point A to point B? So for example, like I did this just for fun, just to like, you know, to prove to that this could happen. You know, I, I recently launched paid community for people who want to build community based products.

It's like super, a meta, a meta.

Topic and it's like a private community and it comes with like a free school membership which is. So basically the cost of it is $99 a month. The school school, if you want to build your own, is $99 a month. So it's like literally free if you think about it. And I started to think about what are some like crazy rituals that we can start offering people. And like one of them is like what I call like a punch you in the face meeting, which is basically.

Tell us more about these punch getting punched in you like the face, Greg.

This is my favorite.

Well, I don't know. Okay, I'll get into it. It originated basically many years ago one of my close friends, Julian Smith, he's a New York Times best selling author, we lived in Montreal, Canada and we set up a meeting at 7am every single Monday where he would ask me, did you complete what you know, did you complete what you did last week? And he would hold me accountable and I would do the same for him. And we called it the punch you in the face meeting. Because Montreal gets like more snow than I think any major. Yeah, it's trial. It's wild. It's not fun to get up, you know, at six in the morning and walk through Two feet of snow to get to this coffee shop. But we did it for that accountability. And I think one of the reasons why a lot of founders fail is just accountability. So, like, our paid membership, there's no other punch you in the face meetings and other, you know, like, these are the ideas that not only create a moat, but also create a culture. And people get very connected to these meetings. So going back to, like, why I, like paid membership is, like, built it didn't do much marketing for it. You know, I think it brings in like $20,000 a month of revenue. It's like quarter of a million dollars. Right. If you think about that, if you value that as a SaaS company at like, eight times, basically out of thin air, I created seven figures of enterprise value from a. From a paid membership. I think you're gonna see a lot of people do this.

Yeah. There was one Christmas season or one holiday season where there was a game and you could load a foam on.

A whipped cream or shaving cream pie. Right.

And you could, like, play roulette or something. And someone got the pie face.

Yeah.

The story of that business is pretty fascinating. Someone set that up and, like, earned millions of dollars. Instead of punching the face, you could have, like, remote control pie face. You know, pie face each other. There's three things just to reiterate for our listeners. Three things that are, like, I've really resonated with me in this talk so far, which is, number one, I really like the kind of pairing the Persona with the outcome, or just like the category of people with the outcome. The ritual seems to matter. Like, that's the thing I was really trying to get at. Right. It's like I'm trying to, like, figure out what truly matters. And it sounds like these rituals truly, truly matter. And then the other thing I'm thinking through is we're talking about. It feels like the more friction you can. Maybe this isn't for all communities, but like a lot of successful communities, the more friction you can have in the application process, the better. Like, one of the things that Web3 companies were truly really great at was community building, because it's actually how they built a lot of their businesses as communities around tokens. And I joined a couple of communities, and, boy, they had so much friction in actually getting into the community that when I got the notification to say, I. They've accepted my money, like, literally paying for this stuff to pay to be in this community. And now I've actually managed to join, I was, like, ecstatic. I was like, wow. I'm in here like I was texting like other crew who all love crypto and I'm curious about that. How you think like inserting friction in the application process or who can join what role that has. Greg, do you think in making these.

Successful communities, if you want someone to want something, tell them they can't have it.

Right?

Scarcity. There's two plays in marketing. Make it free or make it scarce.

Right.

And free communities aren't interesting. Scarce are is what I think.

Greg, you're saying that's how I summarize it. I think scarcity is a hell of a drug, man.

I think it's one of the world's great drugs.

Yeah, yeah. And I think with these community based businesses, playing with that lever is.

A.

Huge, huge lever that is at your advantage.

You have to be a great salesperson because you have to somewhat know what makes that person truly tick. Like to have to have that amount of friction and have them want to go through that. Like for a software product, like it's because you, you're a lot of B2B companies, your job is telling you to like pick a piece of software. So you have to sometimes overcome that friction. But for a community business, there's, I think, easier to like fall out of that funnel. So you have to have like real ability to sell that person on, on that value. Like why your community is valuable enough for them to kind of jump through all those hoops.

I think the other thing that really good communities that I've seen or been a part of done is that they recruit the right seed membership.

Yes.

Right. Where it's not like, oh, hey, I'm just me and I'm gonna start this community and you're all gonna go through this high friction process. It's like, no, I went out and I've gotten 50amazing people and if just the 51 of us just hung out, we would have the best, most valuable time. And because of that, because of there's this, you know, center of gravity here, you're going to want to be a part of it. It's not, it's a very scarce thing to get to be able to spend time with everybody. And I think that is what really makes it go. I don't know, Greg, like, do you see the best community start that way too? Where it's kind of like seeded with a membership? Yeah.

You know, at the end of the day, a community based product is culture. You know, like there's a culture that's created. So going back to the rafa example, if I showed up to that London meetup and the people were mean to me and, you know, weren't that interesting or they were experts and I'm a beginner, like, there's all, you know, there's a million reasons why I would leave that experience and be like, that wasn't for me. And what you're trying to do, if you're building a community based product is you're actually trying to do the opposite. The outcome you want is for me to go to that experience and be like, that was for me. And if you could do that, you've succeeded. And the way to do that is by seeding properly in the beginning, but also to maintain and grow your community thoughtfully. And that's why a lot of venture backed community based products fall into this trap of they want to grow at all costs. And I don't blame them. I've been there, you know, I've raised millions of dollars. I was a part of the wework story. We raised billions of dollars. So I know that pressure very well and intimately.

And.

You can't do that to a community based business. It just, you can't be throwing gasoline on a community based business without, you know, you have to, you should be sprinkling gasoline, not throwing it.

Yeah. I feel like we need the right metaphor there where it's like you need a different type of accelerate in a community based business.

Right?

Yeah, like it's, I think it's not a, it's not a. You know, the analogy that people use for venture backed startups is a fire. Literally. Right. And putting gasoline on a fire. But a community based business isn't a fire. It's a plant that you water daily and you love your plant and you smell your plant and you look at your plant and you look at the ground of it and you put fertilizer in it and you name it something and you tell your friends about it. It's a plant.

Kips always tell me about his plant. It's really tiresome. The thing with communities, actually the interesting thing about communities is like in a software product you want hockey stick growth. Hockey stick growth will likely kill a community because you grow so f fast, the quality of the community diminishing. Like there's probably a pretty interesting chart you can draw out that you have to get the perfect balance between growth and quality of the community. And those two things can sometimes be an opposite, you know, forces against each other. And so you have to have this like, it's more like growing a marketplace. Right. If you actually have to grow like an Airbnb or something. There's like this perfect balance between the hosts and the hostees to get the quality bar at the right, you know, it's like a seesaw, right? Like if you go one up to the end, the quality bar is continually change into good to bad. And so it feels like the community is like some, you have to grow it in a different way, you have to grow it in a more kind of organic. Have I got the right balance between the quality and the amount of new members join in?

Yeah, and it's tough as a founder because as founders we have a bias for action and we want to see numbers go up. So. But the best community based founders understand that it's okay to grow linearly for a while. And in fact you maybe you should grow linearly for a while. And I don't want people to listen to this and be like, oh, I'm not going to start a community based business because, you know, it's not a big opportunity, I can't create a lot of value. And no, that's not the case at all. There's plenty of examples of, including ones that we've mentioned today that are billion dollar businesses, community at its core. But you have to, the reality is you have to grow linearly for a while.

Well, what's interesting about it is that your tribe framework is not just a framework for defining community. You would also say that same framework is you want a health metric for each of the aspects of that tribe framework and you can actually grow as fast as you can as long as the metrics around togetherness, rituals, belonging are okay. It's when they start to get out of whack that you need to slow down to make sure you don't lose the core tribe of the community. Right. That's what I'm hearing. There might be times where you have hockey stick growth, but you might have to then slow down to rebalance like the core foundational elements of the community.

That's right. And you can also have hockey stick growth in other products that are adjacent. So you could, if you're a Rafa, I don't care if you spend, you know, $10 million on a super bowl ad and go and try to sell $150 million of cycling gear over the next 12 months. That's okay if it doesn't hurt the core cycling experience. Right. So it's just, it's a different, the membership experience I was talking about before. So I think it's okay to have some products that you create that you know might not dilute the brand. You could spend money on ads, you can spend money on SEO, no worries. But there are portions of your business that, for example, like the psyching group or the so house tea time, that needs to see linear growth, not hockey stick growth.

I love that. All right, we are out of time. Kieran, did you have anything you wanted to cover before we closed out today?

I can. I will wrap on one question because I know we will get dinged if we don't ask this to Greg. So you're all those AI companies or all those companies that are disrupted by AI in B2B in particular, if you're a founder, one of the most common questions I get asked is like, when, when, if at all, should I add a community to my business and not, not a customer support, like community. Right. What. What do you tell founders who come to you in the B2B space in terms of like, when is a good time to create that community for your business?

We are entering an era where if you're a B2B business and you don't and you're not thinking about things like the tribe framework, that it's going to be way more difficult for you to find new customers, maintain your current customers, and have your customers talk about you to other customers. So I think it's really important that if you're a CMO of a business or you're a founder of a business that's selling to other businesses that you're thinking to yourself, how can I apply this framework to what I'm doing? How can I stand out? How can I create an identity around what I'm doing? How can I create a roadmap for becoming one of these businesses? Because there's a lot of upside in doing it and the downside of not doing it is pretty high. So to and to go like, specifically like when to build the community, like the space, well, that could be on your roadmap. You don't need to do it tomorrow, but it certainly should be something that you're planning asap.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think we are entering a new era of marketing. When AI really becomes more ubiquitous, we start to lose a bunch of our search traffic. I think most brands need to be customer centric, really care about the together and belong in and figure out how to like treat their customers in that way. So that to me is like a good way to end the show.

Cool. I love it.

Awesome as always, Greg. Thanks for being on the show. I'm sure we'll have you on again very soon. Thanks for breaking down all things community. And we'll see everybody next time on Market against the Community.

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