How Jason Lemkin Built the World’s Largest Community for Business Software with Jason Lemkin, SaaStr

Leverage community led growth to skyrocket your business. Hey, Traction fam. It's your host, Lloyd Lobo. I've just released a book that I've been working on for some time. It's called From Grassroots to greatness. Master 13 Game changing rules from some of the world's most iconic brands like Apple, Atlassian, Crossfit, Harley Davidson, HubSpot, Red Bull, and a lot more. So you can attract super fans of your own that will propel you to new heights. Your support would mean the world to me. Please grab your copy at From Grassroots to greatness. Com.

It's hard enough to build a community and then the question is, what do you do with it? I've learned a lot since then, but in the early days, the real learning is you need to do more for your community each year. If you don't add more value each year to a community, it goes into decline and it's just like a piece of software. If you don't add value to your software, eventually the competition catches you, right? Get communities decay much faster. Communities can decay in a year or two. Early communities I can think of that were not really nurtured and then they're sold or the leader steps away or something happens. Maybe startup weekend, web 2.0, the web. I'm sure there's others. So I did this of meetups because people did them. But then if you ask me, almost 10 years later, the value to doing them, it could have been something else, but they added more value to the community. So every year now at Saster, we have a rule which is we have to add one large piece of value and one small piece of value. Add one big and one small piece of bona fide value to your community each year and it'll compound. I need some traction.

You need some traction.

Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up? Innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people, just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money, and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twitter, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

Jason, why did you decide to build Saster as a community and not a media company or a product company?

I think many communities are organic and you don't even always intend to build them. They need a nucleus, right? So the nucleus of Saster was twofold. One, it was built out of Lament Lament for selling my last startup, a company called Echo Sign, to Adobe that we sold just as it did, a million a month in revenue, growing 100% with 120% retail, NRR and profitable. So we did it. It made some sense at the time, after the last global financial crisis. But before the deal closed, it was clear it was kind of a mistake, but one that was too late to fully recover from. So I needed some catharsis. In fact, the code name for Saster, not really Catharsis code name, but it was Catharsis, as dumb as it is for some catharsis for having accidentally sold my company. And I felt, hey, at least what I can do is I will write a hundred blog posts to share my mistakes. Because back then in 2011, 2012, there weren't a hundred people with an exit. David Sachs hadn't sold Yammer, and Stuart Butterfield hadn't sold Slack. And not that all of these folks contribute content, but there's a lot more content out there today than there was a decade ago. There was almost none actually on how to hire a VP of sales, how to build a sales team, how to get leads, how to do customer success. This was sort of very unique content. I sat down and I quietly wrote a hundred posts and I just started putting them out on a blog, one a day and then answering some questions on a Q and A site called Quora. And the goal was not really to build community, it was just to share some learnings with other founders that they could make maybe fewer mistakes. But I did have a secondary goal. My secondary goal. And again, I think, I suspect this is radically different than almost anyone else that's built a community. I realized that I had not done enough for my team. And I realized that by selling too early, my team did not have a chance to play the next card. They did not have a chance to get to a hundred million. And I realized once we sold, when things were calmer and there was no risk of going out of business or any of this, I realized just how good the team was to be able to burn 3 million and get to 10 or 12 million, doubling profitably with the NRR. Our competitor DocuSign wasn't that much bigger and burned five times as much money and went through five CEOs. I realized one of the reasons was just how good the team was, pound for pound. That we did all that with 50 people is fairly incredible for a sales led motion. So what I realized is I had to do something for the team because Adobe was going to Rebrand the company into something else and the name would exist and people would forget. People forget. Once you sell your company, people forget. They forget, you won't remember. It's one reason never to sell your company. There's many reasons too. But even if it has its own brand, it will be Slack for Salesforce. It's not the same as when Slack was a company. It's not the same. And so I had to do something for my team and I wanted them to have a legacy so that when they went on their next journey they wouldn't just have worked at some startup they'd never heard of, they'd worked at something iconic. So I felt if I did all of these posts and got people to read it, that when Sam Blonde went to interview at Zenefits or Brax or Founders Fund, he would have a corpus undersum. Right? Or Jameson who's now CRO at Gong or all of our other folks across our team, heads of sales at Rippling. And all these folks have spawned from this nucleus of Sasser. It's not that they literally, but it gave them this air cover, the support that they were winners, that they were heard of, that they were part of something important when it was clearly just going to be a little product. Now a product is doing hundreds of millions of dollars but just a product that Adobe no one had ever heard of. So I was driven to try to create a different legacy for my team because I had forgone a legacy by selling. So that's a very long winded answer, but I think what it meant is I had very specific goal that was very authentic. But because of that I wasn't trying to rip anybody off. I wanted to do it for the team. I wasn't trying to sell courses, I wasn't trying to build a media company, I wasn't trying to sell ads, I didn't need to make any money. In fact, I refused to take any money at all from Saster for years for a bunch of reasons. The first four years revenue was zero. And it wasn't because I don't enjoy a nickel or two or because I'd made a few nickels. It's because it wasn't the goal. The goal was to support this team. And then the community took off wildly beyond my expectations. It was interesting because I had no experience with community. I was a good writer, but no one read my blogs when I was a CEO. No one read my tweets. I had no social media engagement. Engagement before Sasser. No one read anything I ever wrote. And we had instant product market fit from the first blog post. The first blog post was everybody lies. The real revenues of the top 100 SaaS companies. The next one was want to know one thing about SaaS it compounds. And the first post, the first like was from Aaron Levy. The first retweet was there. We had all these other folks that the Stuart Butterfields were reading this stuff. It just took off in a way that probably couldn't work today because it was almost an N equals one voice. There wasn't another founder with a nine figure exit sharing their, their learnings and errors. And I did some growth hacking stuff to get it to take off, but it literally took off. You know, I got more views of my first three blog posts than I got all of everything I wrote at my Echo sign for all those years. More people read those first blog posts. And so I realized as a founder that even though it wasn't a company at the time, frankly, no one back then would have called it a community, which we can talk about in a second. But I knew I had product market fit of some sort. It wasn't SaaS product market fit, but when you had that level of engagement, when you had people across the globe talking about this, you realize as a founder, you know, if you've done it before, when you cross the line, when you have something right when it's taking off and it's a moment in time, it's not everything. It's the start of a new journey. But you know that. And we had that quickly. So we started doing events and meetups and had a co working space and all this stuff. And then we did a site redesign in 2018. So this is six years later. And I said the tagline is going to be the world's largest community for business software. And someone working on the team at the time just mocked me. They're like, there's no communities out there. That's not what this is. This is like a media company. And like all of a sudden like, no, no. I know in 2018 no one's thinking about community, but I'm a simple man for marketing. I just write what it is. Okay, so our tagline is what it is. The world's largest community. Fast forward to today. And community is seen as a very important step of marketing, of building around your product. People get all of this especially from developer focused companies which are very community focused. We've all learned this from GitLab and others. But it's funny that I got so much pushback for labeling a Community to community in 2018. So that's the passion. And I have been fortunate enough for most of the community because it was a passion and because ultimately when we can chat about it, I was able to invest out of this community accidentally, not intentionally. I've been able to essentially not have to over monetize a community, which I think vendors are lucky. If you're Twilio and you're building a community or Slack or Atlassian, you don't have to worry about over monetizing. It's never the goal. The problem with so many communities today that are built by influencers or sales professionals or others is there's so much pressure to monetize it. There's either a desire to monetize it because they don't have a job or there's simply pressure because you got to make something out of all this effort. So frankly, Sasser was lucky that frankly until 2022 or so 2021, I don't think it really made a dollar. We had employees and employees were very well paid, but it didn't really make a dollar until 10 years in.

That is fantastic. I mean you had a great purpose. I think you're the OG community builder. Give before you expect anything in return. Paying it forward, paying it back, building a legacy for your team. I think what a noble cause that is. Nobody does that. Very few people do that.

I would say it was more guilt than a noble cause. But maybe guilt and nobility are cousins.

They're cousins in the sense you got to be self aware that you owe somebody something. A lot of people are ungrateful. They're ungrateful to people who've done so.

Most people are ungrateful. Unfortunately most people are. Most CEOs that get somewhere I don't think are ungrateful. Here's the line. Many CEOs that have no revenue are ungrateful. In fact they're defensive. Many CEOs at 1 or 2 or 3 million are ungrateful. But I think CEOs that have crossed into the double digit millions you have to recruit such an army. You have to have relied on so many people to get there that I don't find too many of the double digit millions that up are ungrateful. I don't think the CEOs you and I have interviewed over the years for Saster attraction. I don't think the ones at 100 million, they may be edgy, some of them right, they may be careful with their time, but they're so grateful 100%. I just don't think that many folks that have gotten to eight and nine figures of revenue bother to build a community. They don't have time or interest. I don't think it's Jeff Lawson's top goal or pick your hero CEO. They don't have time to build a community. Right.

For me, Traction was a byproduct, right? I didn't need the money in the sense we did. Automatically it failed. And speakeasy, it failed. And I'm like, I need to get expert advice. And we started doing these meetups and eventually we had 200 people, our co working space. They kicked us out and they're like, listen, this is a conference. It's no longer a meetup. So we started doing meetups. And honestly, Traction funneled all the growth for both, both bootstrapped to 10 million because of traction. And then when the PE guys, they came and took over, the blessing was they let me keep traction. They're like, we can't figure out how to make this work. You're the face of it. Keep it right. But in many ways, I think the community comes together when you don't want anything from it. Like, you did it in a very noble way, unknowingly, knowingly. You said you did some growth hacks to make those posts viral back in the day.

What were those? I didn't need to do that much. But this was before people thought about growth hacks. Google used to have a social network called Google, and Google had a security hole in it. If you could add Aaron Levy or Stuart Butterfield and they were in Google circle, forget about whether you knew their contact information. You could add them to a circle and then it would automatically add them to an email list and you could email them. So the first 30 or 40 saster posts went to hundreds of SaaS leaders. I just went into Google, I just added all the folks that I knew that were SaaS leaders. I didn't need to know their permission or their email address. Google was so desperate to build a social network that it made it excessively easy. You didn't even have to opt into some email list. It was like being in a substack without even opting in. And so it was a small list because it was capped. You could only do 100 at a time, right? So you couldn't spam everyone that had used a Google part, but you could assemble essentially a circle of 100. So I put together 100 SaaS lead. Once I saw Aaron Levy, like, my first post, I'm like, whoa, I'll just pick 100 Aaron Levy's and send it out. And it did sort of work. It created a community, but that was a growth hack. I don't know that those early folks would have read Saster if I didn't use this lightly. Spam capability in Google.

Put them in a circle and spam in some ways works, right? A lot of early ticket sales, probably. This is one of the early versions of being your own sdr. You put people in a circle and send them the post.

It was. It was. It would look like Google sent it to you, but it was an interesting hole. And then Google did realize this was messed up and shut it down. Yeah.

How do you think the community came together? Because the way I look at it, right, when people listen to you, you have an audience. When you bring that audience together to congregate over and over, they become a community. So you had an audience, you had the blog post, you had the Quora, you seeded. A lot of questions too, I saw on Quora. But what was that tipping point? You knew you had instant product market fit because people kept reading your stuff over and over again. That was engagement.

Well, when they grab you on the street, you know, you have product market fit 100% for software too. I remember the first time it happened at Dreamforce with Echo Sign when one of our customers, I was walking into my first Dreamforce, this big sales guy, like six four, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck because I had an Echo Sign T shirt on. He's like, do you know Joe Coletti? I'm like, yeah, he's our 1 salesperson. He's like, I love Joe and I love Echo Sign.

I love Joe.

That passion, when you feel that you need to have that, I think actually to win with a product, not everybody, but you need that. Saster had that and Echo Sign. That's why it was a mistake to sell. Echo Sign had that. In the early days, our product didn't do everything, but people would grab me by the neck and say how much they loved it in our sales rep. Like, that's special when that moment happens. Right. Didn't totally appreciate it at the time, but looking back, I'm like, should have raised $100 million. This is picking you up at Dreamforce. I love you. I love you.

Okay, that's the best. So now you have this audience. What made you bring them together? Because you couldn't have had the legacy that Saster does right now if you didn't bring them together.

But yes, I think if you fast forward to Community Today, I think most folks do not invest as much in events and in person as certainly we have. We could talk about it forever, that would never occur to them. And in fact I see a lot of folks reach out to me and they have a community, they want to monetize the community again. So they have an event and they sell tickets and they sell sponsorships and you can make a little bit of money doing that. But the problem with it is you quickly go into a no man's land. If you can get 100 folks together and charge them money and you can get a free venue and a couple of low end sponsors, you could make 20 grand, 50 grand, maybe 100 grand. Right? That's real money. The problem is as soon as you get a step bigger, you lose money, cross into larger events, unions, hotels, you end into a death spiral of money losing activities. So why would you do this stuff again? 10 years ago is very early to community, right? I didn't know anything about social media, but I knew this was just very resonant with people and I knew it was resonant with new founders and I knew actually it was interesting. It was resonant with the prior generation, the new generation of founders. When Josh reused some gusto and Parker Conrad at Zenefits and all these folks kept coming by the office to say hi, I knew that was great. But also the Aaron Levy's like this content then it's special because I had the old timers and the Dharmesh Shaws and the new timers all passionate, but I didn't know what to do with it. They didn't know what to do with a community. Community. All I knew is that on the Internet it seemed like people did meetups. And I been to a meetup in my life ever. I didn't even know what a meetup was. I'm not really good at cocktail conversation, but I said, let's try it. And the first one had no content. It was literally a meetup and it sold out. We didn't really charge for it, but it was 500 people all jammed into one terrace in the Bay Area. And I was like, that's a lot of people coming out of the woodwork with a couple weeks of notice. So we did a couple of these meetups. The second one I had content with my VP of sales and VP of marketing. And now this content is the kind of stuff you and I do all the time. But back then in 2014, no one had ever put a successful VP of Sales up telling you how to sell and a VP of marketing tell you how to get leads. And people's jaws really did drop. So I said, heck it, let's just do this big event in February 2015, the Saster annual, you know, had been the first one. So annual was maybe a little presumptuous. But yeah, we maxed out the venue for a thousand people for that first one and it was great. It's hard enough to build a community and then the question is, what do you do with it? I've learned a lot since then, but in the early days, the real learning is you need to do more for your community each year. If you don't add more value each year to a community, it goes into decline and it's just like a piece of software. If you don't add value to your software, eventually the competition catches you, right? Communities decay much faster. Communities can decay in a year or two. Early communities I can think of that were not really nurtured and then they're sold or the leader steps away or something happens. Maybe Startup Weekend Web 2.0, the web. I'm sure there's others. So I did this meetups because people did them. But then if you ask me, almost 10 years later, the value to doing them, it could have been something else, but they added more value to the community. So every year now at Saster we have a rule which is we have to add one large piece of value and one small piece of value. Right? It's actually harder at scale than it thinks because then you have this corpus of stuff you have to do. Like we already have 20,000 people that come a year to our global events. Just doing that is hard enough work. So we have to add these two core initiatives a year, but once we get them right, they work, right. I think that's the key. And that'd be my recommendation at one big and one small piece of bona fide value to your community each year. And it'll compound.

What is an example of a recent big one you added on a small one?

Well, we're behind on our big ones. We have three small ones that are in flight and that's more than one. One was just going to APAC. We had 1100 people at our Saster APAC. It was very impactful for the entrepreneurs in APAC. It was a lot of work to have 1100 people. That's small, but it's not minor, right? Or it's minor, but it's not small. Maybe that's the right term. So we did Sastor apac, but we now Have a workshop Wednesday, which is collaborative with top speakers. It's not an interview. We've gotten pretty good at it. We get three to 400 people attending these things and engaging. And it was a way to kind of do what we do at Saster, but do it every week. And that's now been productized.

It's like a mastermind almost. It's like a live AMA with this.

It is. We're pretty good at it and we structure the content in certain ways and we use the same vehicles and guidelines and speaker teams that we use for our main event. So if you squint, it's like going to a tiny little bit of Saster annual for free each week at home. And people say they want to do that, but basically all the stuff's boring. All these webinars and virtual events kind of suck, but ours is pretty good now and it's free. Right? So if every week three or four hundred people can get some value out of this, there's overlap, but that adds some material value each week. And then the third thing that we've been doing for eight years that we're finally going to productize next month is we're going to turn our Me to VC program into a perpetual every week program. Because funding's changed and funding is never as easy as it looks on social media. But it got insane in like 2021. As you know, everything got overheated. Now it's hard again. We're back to hard again. So in a way, our Meet A VC program was anchored around our big events in the Bay Area and Europe. But now it will happen constantly, every single week. Since we've been doing this for so many years, I think we can actually connect founders and VCs better than anybody else can because we've been doing it for so long. Those are pretty big minors, but maybe they're making up for our lack of a major.

What was the last major one you did?

For us, building 4,000 people at SAS Europa was a major undertaking. I think major for us was going from a handful of pieces of content a week to 30. But in some ways it's a good criticism. We got a little bit off during COVID because we were the first major event to be taken down by Covid. We had to cancel the night before. We lost 10 million. And as a team, it really took us 18 months to claw out of that hole and maybe a little longer all in. So we got a little bit off on our cadence and people talked about digital events. We had hundreds of Thousands of people come to our digital events and we did them, but we changed what we did. But some of that stuff we're not going forward. For example, all that energy into these digital events we just repurposed into our workshop Wednesday. It's better, it's simpler, it's less drama, it's more accessible to busy people that don't want to sit in front of Zoom all day. But yeah, we are doing a handful of bigger small rather than one big. But we're behind. We need to add one more. I have a list that is so long. I may not be on this earth until we get to it. But we do need to add a few more big, right? And some of the bigs were big mistakes. Like running our coworking space in San Francisco for three years was a big one. It was a mistake. It was a huge mistake. With hindsight, it was great. We had many unicorns there. We had tons of events. People loved it. They loved working in this space. But it was so distracting, it was so expensive, it was so time consuming. Learning from the coworking space is that you have to be very careful if you have products that only serve a subset of the community. This was the problem with the coworking space. It made 30 or 40 or 50 companies really happy, and they're good ones. The ChargeBees and the Bimaries are worth a billion, and Miro was there for a little bit. Lots of unicorns came out of this thing and I wish I'd invested in more. But putting that aside, how big is the SaaS community? Who knows? But let's say it's 200,000 active human beings. If only 50 benefited from the coworking space, or even 500, that's why it wasn't worth it. That was the obvious error. Like, be careful for community when you build niche products, because even if they're wonderful, you may not get the benefits you think. For niche products, that's the learning. And that one was very expensive. From a soft cost. We lost a lot of money, but the amount of time it took to run a 35,000 square foot coworking space was just too distracting. It was elegant, but too few people served.

Yeah, don't build niche products for a large enough community.

Or if you do, be super intentional as to why. One thing we don't do at Saster that just about everybody else does is we don't have an elite segment. We don't have a true VIP segment. We don't have a subgroup just for unicorn CEOs or just for the best of the best. But almost everyone that has something community like quietly or loudly has a VIP element, an elite element. Sometimes it's because it's how they monetize it, sometimes it's because their community is too broad. That's one good reason to have niche products, but otherwise it's distracting. It's.

Do you plan to do a VIP sub community?

No, it's elitist. Also, there's a million of them. For example. Saster is not really compatible with a lot of VC firms. And you might ask why? Because as you know from your own experience and have seen, like, we get so many VCs come to our events, like 600, 800. They're all there, right? All the top firms are there. But why are we not actually compatible with them? Well, what VCs are really, really good at are elite VIP curated dinners events like, have you ever been to these events? They want you to rub elbows with Eric Wan and Stuart Butterfield and Michael Cannon, Brooks and Melanie from Canva and all this. And that's a wonderful thing for a VC firm that's hoping to do between one and 10 investments a year. This elitist thing is good for their business model, but it's not good for Saster to again have some niche thing that 50 people out of 200,000 or 500,000 can access. It's dilutive to our goals. Every week we'll have some discussion, we have a little sales team and they'll be like, you know, whatever, whoever. What big fun wants to do a elite thing and they have this budget. I'm like, don't even try it. Like, we're out.

Leverage community led growth to skyrocket your business. Hey, traction fam. It's your host, Lloyd Lobo. I've just released a book that I've been working on for some time. It's called from grassroots to greatness master 13 game changing rules from some of the world's most iconic brands like Apple, Atlassian, Crossfit, Harley Davidson, HubSpot, Red Bull and a lot more. So you can attract super fans of your own that will propel you to new heights. Your support would mean the world to me. Please grab your copy@fromgrassrootstogreatness.com you've done events.

Small and big, but one thing I took away is add one big piece of value. One small piece of value. But one thing you didn't talk about is every year you're getting more and more people just attending your events and the bigger the community gets the more value those people add to each other. And that is a big thing on its own, right?

You have to ask yourself, what is the community? What is the point of what you're doing? And yes, Saster gets bigger each year, but I don't know that the bigness alone makes it better. I used to think that in the early days. I don't think I think that today. I think I learned that IRL when we did our Saster Europa events. 4000 in Barcelona last year. Like 2500 in Paris the second year, 1800 the first. You know, 4000 in Barcelona on the beach with shorts founders helping each other. Vc, CEO, it's enough. Wasn't that big enough to meet good people?

It was massive. But what I was getting at more from a perspective of if more people are engaged in the community, then they also add value to the community. Not as a function.

They do, they do. But you have to harness that side. If you have a community, you need to constantly be injecting new blood and new perspectives or these communities get stale. On the sales and marketing side, you and I both see so many sales and marketing communities are the same 22 people that have been doing this for 10 years. Once again, the same speakers, the same content. For example, for our speakers at our events, we have firm rules on how many speakers need to be new. All the content has to be new. We used to not allow repeats for speakers. Now we have a group of masterminds that we do allow to come back with new content. But we make sure that is less than 15% of the total content. So you do need to refresh your community. But if your community gets too large, it may be meaningless.

That's true. Because when the world goes Buffet, you want to go Michelin star.

This does confuse people. We want to be the largest community for B2B only. We don't want non B2B stuff and we really want it to be for founders and executives over 1 to 2 million in revenue. We don't want the super long tail. We don't want the folks that go to Web Summit or Collision, which are great to learn. Hey, what's a startup like? That's not us, okay? People find Saster through SEO. They find it frankly through the same search for 10 years. How do I hire a great VP of sales? Well, you don't need a great VP of sales at zero in revenue. It's time for a customer and then it's time for founder led sales. So we do want the biggest community or. But only up to A certain line and then we don't want the super long tail and we will wait until you break that million in revenue and then we want to provide as much help as humanly possible.

So the great purpose, the great vision as a function of Saster existing is more founders will go from 1 to 10 million faster.

Yes, that's really the original inspiration. Although since we've started, we spend much more time on the 10 to 100 million journey because so many more of us are on that journey. But yeah, the initial journey was to help people see how to get from 1 to 10. From the very beginning, the Saster sub tagline or whatever was 0 to 1 impossible, 1 to 10 unlikely, 10 to 100 inevitable. And that's why the book that we did was impossible to inevitable from that impossible stage, the inevitable phase. And that's still true, but it's just SaaS is so much more mature that it's shocking how many startups are on the 10 to 100 million journey. We actually now have the majority of our big featured content, 10 to 100 content. But when you add in mentorships and smaller sessions, there's plenty from 1 to 10 because that's our core. But you can actually learn just as much from the 10 to 100 people as you can 1 to 10.

Bessemer had this number. I think 80% of the unicorns weren't even at 100 million and I don't know what they called it. Centaur. So I guess that is helping more founders go from 1 to 100 million, training more inevitable.

Yeah, I don't think there's such thing as 1 to 100, but I do think there's such thing as 1 to 10 and such thing as 10 to 100. You do have to link those up into two groups or it just becomes platitudes from CEOs of multibillion dollar companies.

It doesn't help a founder, it doesn't help a founder. It's very high level in many ways. Are you guys doing anything to break Those groups up? 1 to 10 and then 10 to 100? Do you see those?

No, I don't think so. There's a lot of things you could do and curation is a really interesting topic for community, but for us, we do have a lot of scale in a small team. We just find that creating areas of content, pockets of content, pockets of time for people to meet that are naturally around both size and functional area. While we could do more, we should do more. We found it's sufficient. Yeah.

Based on the content you're writing, people self select. You'll get the odd people who show up. If I go to a cocktail party and it's not my tribe, I beat a bunch of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, I'm leaving. It's the same thing.

We could do better, I guess. If you ask about big projects we're behind on, we would like to do hyper curation. Lots of folks try to do this and we want to do our own version. But what we've learned over the years is a mediocre job of curating sub communities is worse than a great job of self curation. There's nothing worse as a founder being dropped into a group that's worse than you. This is the problem. You can curate other functional areas easier. Like a VP of sales at 15 million can have a lot to chat about with the VP of sales of 2 or 3 million. Actually they have a lot in common. But a CEO, a founder whose time is so precious, does not want to hang out with folks that aren't growing. This is the problem that are growing too slowly. Folks that are at 10 million struggling to get to a hundred million don't want to deal with the bitching and whining from the folks at 2 million who think they're VCs or idiots or whatever the issues are. It's much harder to curate founders than it is functional areas and we've done some of it and we do want to do more. But to build this sort of next generation YPO or cured that so many people want to do, I think they underestimate how difficult it is to create long tail curated communities of founders. It's very hard to create niche.

I couldn't agree more because not impossible.

It just requires a huge amount of work, 100%.

Because when boast was at 10, I joined a bunch of these groups. I don't want to name their names and call anyone out. And I spend a lot of money on two or three groups. And what I realized is I was probably one of two people who was at that stage in these groups. And after spending money, I'm like dealing with the whining of the people who are at half a million, a million, 2 million. And I'm like, this is not my problem. I want to get to like 20 million the next year.

This can be solved. But the problem you're describing means it's a huge amount of work. I've never was part of like a YPO myself, but a founder I like. She invited me to Come to her group and she had been the scrappy kid in this group of CEOs in San Francisco. And then I went and she was the only one breaking out. Couple things had changed over the years. They're all like, oh, I can't afford to hire one salesperson, Jason, what do I do? And she's like, I got to hire 30. That's I'm growing 4% this year at a half a million revenue. What should I do? And she's crossing 10. Right. But I do think this is valuable and there are a lot of groups I want to learn more from. It's just so many people come to Saster read their content speaks to it. But the slightly non obvious thing is who's your icp? The other question for Community if you're right now is who's your icp? Because the thing about Community is you can access a lot more than your icp. I'm a founder, you're a founder. You and I both know how to produce a certain type of content that non founders cannot produce. It's just a fact. Non founders cannot do what you and I do. They can do other things better. They can really dive into. Exactly how many SDRs do you hire each week? So everything we do, 1, 2 and 3 is about this. As the ICP founders, how do you.

Help founders easier to build a community if you are actually that ICP at some point, also if you live that journey of that icp.

But this curation thing, it's an inexorable challenge. There's software that tries to do it, there's Grip and Brella, and there's online communities that try to do it. But I haven't seen any of this stuff. There's certainly things that can work for other type. We both know Plato that has a big engineering community. There's lots of sales emergency, but CEOs is tough. You want it, there's demand. You wanted to be part of these CEO groups when you hit 10 million, but it's gotta be awesome or it's total waste of your time. But they do exist, you know. My second VC was Emergence Capital back in the day when SaaS was taking off. And Emergence quietly had an incredible portfolio. So in my group of CEOs, my batch, so to speak, wasn't like weissing. My batch was Renee from Bill, David from Yammer at the time, Peter Gassner from Viva. I mean these are epic folks and I truly got to know them through Emergence in a way that isn't possible today. Just even at the Best VC room because everything's so big. I mean, Jesus Christ. That was my peer group. CEOs of Viva Bill and Yammer Me and then a few others that were still awfully good. Those are all based on the same two year window. If you could collect that in a community and do it for your entire life, that would be amazing, wouldn't it?

A hundred percent. And you know, one thing that comes through entirely is people look at Saster as this huge success over the last few years. What they don't see is the compound interest on writing content couple times a day, every day for years before this thing blew up. Even prior to that, you said you wrote so much at Echosign and the first two posts you wrote at Saster has more traction than any of that. And so you still write every day. I think these days you're writing three or four times a day, aren't you?

Well, I don't. But you do see that people that do anything vaguely similar, they all kind of say the some version of the same thing, right? Since 2012, I've produced two pieces of content a day, essentially every day. In the old days it was one blog post and one Quora answer. I would calmly write a blog post after lunch and then I would pick a random Quora answer. I did that every day for a couple years. As time goes on, the types of content need to evolve. I can't put that much effort into Quora since no one reads it. Social media has changed pieces three and four. I don't have to write anymore. So I write the minority of content on Saster, but not the minority of content that performs. Not the minority of the top content. Right. I still produce a lot of the top content, but it's important that I don't have do all of it. But I still do create two pieces of content a day. Going on 11 years, that's 700, 800 pieces of content a year. That's 10,000 pieces of content I produced. So yeah, you got to make it up in volume sometimes. You got to do it every day. Right? It's true of a lot of things. I can write something that is really good being Objective now in 10 minutes. If you're a creator, you have to align on what you're good at and can add value in. I've been doing this long enough that I have 20 years of content already want to write. That's already been written in my brain. And by the time I go want to go to blog post, my brain has already written it every once In a while someone asks, why don't you do guest posts on Zaster? I'm like, dude, I try. You know, it takes the average person like three months to write one post and it's terrible and they need an editor and it's rambly or it's boring or it's trite. Like, I'll take all the guest posts in the world. Dustin Moskovitz wants to write a guest post, or Stuart Butterfield or Mark Benioff, by all means. Most people, they can't write and they don't write and they're not practiced in writing. I know it's annoying when every single SDR in the world is writing a LinkedIn post every day. I know it's annoying. But it doesn't mean that the idea is wrong. It's just maybe it's being exercised by too many people in the wrong direction.

I think in the beginning you need the volume, especially as a new creator. Over time, based on the audience reaction you pull. And I think sometimes you got to do more in the beginning to figure out the direction and to get better of it. If you don't try, you're not going to get better. And that consistency leads to mastery. Like if you're a shitty writer and you never write, then you always be a shitty writer.

It's true. It's another like hyper niche topic. But for folks in this community, there's a huge hole, Valley Canyon Cliff between content marketing and community creation. So yeah, you can outsource stuff, you can write crappy stuff every day, you can hire somebody. So it's not enough to just do it every day. The hard part is how can you do something great every day? You probably need to do it every day to do a certain type of thing. We can see it on things like substack. Maybe you can't really build a community like faster, but you can build something with one great piece of content a week today. If you have enough social media, one one a week could be plenty. But it's just needs to be great.

It needs to be great because then people will keep coming back. What's the one piece of advice you have for community leaders? Everyone is jumping on this community bandwagon. I presented now at a number of VC off sites and the first question I asked is should I start Facebook group or a discord group? And I'm like, you starting off wrong. I need to start a community to sell my product. Should I put the group on Facebook or LinkedIn?

Yeah, everyone's doing it wrong. It's funny. There is a SaaS company famous for community. We'll go nameless. That's at nine figures in revenue. And we have a product that's modestly successful called SAS University. It is lessons in SaaS. It has about 17,000 people on it. It's good, but not great. Some people love it because it's structured learning. People like structured learning, really love it. But it's good but not great. And we hired this head of community and he comes in and he quit on us too. And I'm like, I mean, it's terrible. Why did he quit? He's like, well, SAS University is not that good. I'm like, but that's your job. I know it's not great. I know it's merely good. He's like, well, the engagement numbers aren't high enough. I'm like, yes, that's what we're paying you six figures for. So that's the mistake that so many community folks do. They're looking for discord or lessons or a Facebook group. No, that's all wrong. If you want to build community, and especially if you're a vendor, if you're a B2B company, start with a first principle. Where can I add the most value for my customers? What can I do that will add value? Examples of podcasts first of all, podcasts have no discovery or SEO to speak of, so it's very hard to get a podcast off the ground compared to almost anything else. But make the best podcast in your industry. What if you created something for R D credits or community building or something that is so important and you interview the world's best, best people in R and D credits, not just random people, but literally the best content in the world. You could start to build a community around that podcast, even though the world doesn't need another podcast. So that's where I think 98% of community builders get it wrong. They come out of marketing, it's under invested, and they start from the wrong first principle. Where can I add value? And then pick the tool that matches the vehicle you want to do. Is it video? Is it written content? Is it audio? Is it a demo? What can you do to add value? And we think we want community, but what we really want to do is just make our customers much happier so they spread the word. Everything in B2B at the end of the day is about creating more word of mouth. This is the only way to scale, is to have tons and tons of word of mouth. We want viral products, of course, but most products aren't viral. Even Slack isn't viral. Zoom's viral. Slack isn't viral because it's internal. But Slack exploded. I just reposted on Saster one of the first interviews with Saster with Stuart Butterfield when they were at 30 million and all the growth came out of a viral loop on Twitter, up to 30 million. It was all about people on Twitter saying how much I love Slack because Slack itself, you think it's viral, but it's not viral. Right. It's viral within an organization, but it's not viral across our so you gotta instant word of mouth. So you want to add so much value to your community that they tweet about you and email your friends and talk about you and standing up a for a set of forums probably isn't the way to do that. But it might be for some people. Forums never worked for Sasser. I've tried different types of forums over the years. Forums are really interesting way for your community to share learnings. They're an interesting way to upvote, have the top content float to the top. And I keep trying it and I see it and I'd answer it and it just never worked. But for your community it might work. Maybe that's the best way to add value. If you have the type of people that will sit on forum boards all day, they do work. It just never worked for us.

One of the best things I've found, and there's a common thread here from Harley Davidson almost went bankrupt in the 80s. They deliberately rebuilt the company around the hogs that writer clubs. Right now you can recognize a Harley person from what they were to HubSpot to Saster and beyond is events. Anytime you incorporate more than two senses, there's signs to it. You start to build stronger connections and you'll probably see around your in person Sasser events. That's when the most social buzz gets generated right around people sharing and sharing and word of mouth and explodes maybe weeks before and days and weeks after and on the day off more than any online activity probably, you know.

Yeah, but just like the forum example, I would caution people to not do events unless they're committed to being good at them.

Exactly 100%.

There's all different types of social media out there and yes events are great but most of the folks that read Saster content as big as our events are, they still never gone to one of our events. So it's not enough. And in tech the biggest, biggest event of all is web summit. I have a ton of admiration for stuff But I don't think they have a community. They say they have a community, but I would argue they don't. I would argue they have a platform in platforms, a different thing. And it's super powerful, but it's not a community. Events on their own do not build community and community does not require events. I think it's a two by two. So don't do it if you can't commit to it. But when you do do it, it's like anything, it's magical. It's bringing your customers together, bringing your prospects together, bringing your community together. It's always magical if you commit to it, if you do it real. And there's lots of different ways to do it. Like I think the way we do it at Sasser is the worst way to do it. I really think it's much better to have small informal events that cost you almost nothing. It's much better to do city tours. It's much better to just allow your community to self organize. Right? A lot of things like the all in podcast has like 50 meetups coming in and they're not doing anything. If that works for you, that's a lot better than spending $10 million to produce the Saster annual. And it takes us about 16 months to do it in a 12 month year. That's not a good idea for most people to produce a $10 million event. It's not a good idea. Not only will they lose a lot of money, they don't have the time or the resources and it's overwhelming. So I do think bringing your community together is great, but do it in the way that's the highest value for them, that you're good at, that you're.

Passionate about and sustainable. Like here last year, Traction is largely volunteer run. That's why we never went over a thousand people. I'm taking a sabbatical. I've been hosting 20, 30, 50% organic events.

Maybe it's just what you're passionate about is that size type thing. If you don't leverage your superpower, it's too hard. All this stuff's too hard.

If you do things you don't love, it is too hard. I just love bringing people together and I get joy from hanging out with a small group of people that I can meet over and over again. And I think there's some scale to it. Traction. A thousand people max and run by 60 volunteers. I knew your journey and I was always afraid I didn't have the balls to make it bigger because I know.

That and I can't it's not a question of can't. It's just that a lot of this community stuff does require a lot of time and resources to scale. Here's the weird thing, not to be overly binary. Let's call it two types of communities created communities like solopreneurs and individuals creating it. Right. And then things that are really created to support a vendor. Yours is sort of a hybrid. But the thing about the creator driven community is there's a lot with tools in software day, there's a lot one person can do, but then it's a ceiling and you want to cross that ceiling. On the B2B side, there's a lot that you can do with a certain amount of budget in marketing, yeah, we could afford a thousand people, but do we want to blow our entire budget on going bigger? So there are certain limits and it's pretty crazy. What teams can build today. Mr. Beast team is vast. But I didn't really understand barstool sports until really a couple months ago. I never looked at it. That's also a weird community. There's like 400 people that work there. And so what's weird in that you can do so much, especially if you have a special background or a special affinity and you're passionate about it. You can build up this solopreneur business that is reasonably sized. You can make a good amount of money, but then getting it bigger, it's not clear. I've used this term many times. On the event side, you hit diseconomies of scale. Our first aster apacket for 1100 people was great. We lost a hundred thousand dollars. For most solopreneurs that wouldn't be fun. And it took us months to plan it and you know, we lost 100 grand. That's not a big deal for us. Like our first year of Sasser. I would have been bummed. Your average solo creator doesn't want to lose $100,000 and four months of their life on an event.

And I lost anywhere close to that and any of the tractions. There were years we made no money, but we've always made some money because part of it is like, hey, we give back to the community. We fund a nonprofit incubator through that. But I'm like, if I lost any money or out of pocket, I'd probably be crushed. The great thing was Startup Weekend. They build a a great international community. But it was a nonprofit and people were actively volunteering to come together to curate a group of entrepreneurs who would create an MVP over a weekend, but they sold to techstars and then nobody wanted to volunteer anymore because it was a for profit.

There's another, like if you analyze everyone that's volunteer based, it doesn't scale.

Does it scale?

Everyone starts off with a lot of volunteers and with the only exception I know of is slush. I don't know of anyone else that doesn't abandon them. I mean, we'll have a hundred volunteers at Sasser annual and stuff, but it's just like anything you got, you end up having to pay experts to scale. You can't rely on volunteers. It's another thing that just breaks. Maybe Grace Hopper is all volunteer, but that has.

They still have paid people. Yeah, they still. They still have people.

A lot of paid people there. Yeah. Awesome.

This has been a master class on community building. I need some traction.

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