How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand on LinkedIn and SubStack with Leah Tharin

I've just released a book, from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike to Saster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness dot com. The digital copy is on for 99 cents.

The one thing that you have to do besides just creating content is you have to engage with the few people that are starting to engage with you. And that can be other authors, that can be people who are just commenting. Do pay attention to them even though if they don't have big followers and so forth. So like for instance, I started to have a Discord community as well, right? So like I started to open a Discord and I said, yeah, let's see how many people are showing up. I have a thousand people on my Discord even though I don't offer too much of them, right? They're just following me. And yeah, you will start to notice a couple of people who are just sticking with you all the time. And they might be on the silent side. They're not content creators or whatever I think you call them super fans. These super fans are no joke, a hundred to a thousand times more efficient than a thousand subscribers. 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 a hundred thousand 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, Twilio, Asana and many more. Hey Traction fam. Super excited for today's episode. Special episode today. A special friend who I was just chilling with on a Saturday. Her name is Leah Farang, Product leader, content creator, advisor to many startups and overall PLG badass. She has a great substack, leahn. Com and also a great podcast. She talks about everything, product led growth, audience building and much more. So we're going to dive today deep into her strategy on how she built an audience, specifically on newsletter and a substack and how to do that for yourself, how you can go about building that audience, bringing your audience together and slicing that content through multiple channels. So she's going to walk us through all her steps of being a badass content creator on substack and then LinkedIn and multiple platforms. Leah, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. This was such a good introduction. I am so pumped to be here.

We're going to go through your entire playbook on content creation, but first, let's get into your backstory. How did you get into the world of content creation? Tell us about Leia and your journey to being a creator.

I have no idea how I ended up where I am, but I think it is a funny thing because I feel like I met you, I think, about three or four weeks ago, and there's a couple of things that work out between you and me. And I think it's this kind of story, even though mine is not as dramatic, I feel like, from the outside. But it's the story of someone that knew hardship in some way or form and then tried to lift themselves out of it by, you know, with a lot of help from others, of course, but, like, mostly by their hard work and their dedication on it. And the thing that happened to me was that I was always dealing with a heavy imposter syndrome. I thought that I'm not worthy of love, I'm not worthy of being listened to, like, all the knowledge that I have and so forth. And I pretended a lot in my life, almost until my mid-30s, I would say, even a bit later. And I wouldn't say that I was good because of this, exactly because of this. I was actually not that good because I prevent. Like, I made it hard for people to give me advice. And I think most of the learnings that I had, or, like, the fastest path to learning, like, going from one point to the next one, was always because someone gave me some indication of what worked. Academia never really worked for me. I spent a lot of money in diversity. I spent a lot of money in some business schools, which I'm not naming, and some of them are in London. The amount of money and time that I spend on that particular content versus the stuff that I learned from good connections, like in sitting down with someone that just knows their shit and just explains you, everything is. It's amazing, right? Like I said, the difference is really crazy. But an important thing is that you can only learn if, first of all, you know that you need something to learn. And then the other thing is to also admit to it. Why would I teach anyone anything if they pretend to know it already? And that was extremely hard for me to get over. And this is deal with childhood and some really weird image problems that I had in the past. And essentially what I did was almost exactly a year ago I said, this is it, I'm going to put myself out there into the world. And I started with nothing on LinkedIn, I had nothing on substack, there was nothing about content. I just had my career. I was working for 22 years in tech and I worked mostly in product UX research and growth and I dedicated myself to it. And I spent every day a couple of hours on this and I said, I'm not going to stop until I have something. And here we are. So it started to work out. And I think if you think about content creation or anything in your career and you have a couple of pillars that you can move on, like the consistency that you put in, the quality of the stuff that you put out, or the scope of the stuff that you write, the one thing that I never really compromised on was the consistency, right? Every day I was posting two to three times. That's what it was. No matter how embarrassing it is. I just started to post. The only day where I actually only posted once, which is very ironic because that was my first viral post, is when I actually was wheeled into surgery in a hospital and I wrote a very short article on LinkedIn. This is a true story. So like I wrote an article about that Spotify squads are not used by Spotify, but everybody is talking about it. And I wrote this on the hospital bed while they wheeled me to surgery and then I had to give away my phone and that was the only day back then when I only posted once a day and it went viral. So when I woke up, I had 300, 400 connection requests, which was very funny. But yeah, this is how I got started and I talk about it a lot and now I've blown up and I am like this local celebrity in the tech space around product like growth, but nobody else knows me outside, which is quite funny.

That's awesome. There's a few common things that I found in my journey and as I interviewed a thousand plus people and talked to a thousand plus people for the book. One similarities with my mentor Jason Lemkin, who I had on a recent podcast. So when he left Echo Sign, he felt like he sold too early and he didn't create a legacy for his team. If Echo Sign didn't sell early, it would have gone on to be a multi billion dollar company because they were already growing faster than Docusign and everything else. And today Echo Sign unit within Adobe does almost a billion in revenue or something like that. So he started posting on Quora 2 three times a day. Just write questions and answer them. And through that name dropped the people who helped him to create a legacy for them. But he did that so consistently that he built this following that carried over to a blog eventually and now LinkedIn, he still writes two, three pieces of content a day. And now Saster has a community of maybe two fifty plus thousand people globally and they host massive events. But one of the key quotes from his book was consistency is the secret ingredient that turns small actions into big outcomes. If you're crappy at something and you don't do it, you'll always remain crappy at it. And I found similarities with a lot of people in this, right? There were three elements that makes a successful entrepreneur or a community builder or a content creator, anything. One is the ability to create. Two is the ability to communicate, and three is the ability to be consistent. If you combine communication with creativity and consistency, you will explode over time. Right? The compound interest on consistency is literally what we call overnight success. And so you've got now 37,000 plus followers on LinkedIn, a fast growing substack. And we even met through your content, right? I think you commented on mine, I commented on yours, we connected and here we are. We spent a couple of weekends just chatting with each other. So that is the power of this medium of sharing and communicating. As I look back at my journey, Leah, I was an engineer and I wanted to get into business. And I asked somebody, hey, what's the best skill I could learn? And they said, communication, like everything you do in life, is going to be communicating from convincing your spouse that you want to bring no money, to convincing investors, to convincing customers. So I thought to myself, what is the one thing I could do that will force me to communicate every single day? And I applied for jobs in sales, nobody would give me a job. And I finally end up getting a job in cold calling. I begged and fought my way and my parents were really pissed. My parents are Indian background, they're like you, graduated engineering, our friends, kids are in Microsoft and everything else. Why are you doing this? Fast forward today. That one skill, cold calling, helped me improve my communication. Because think about it, no other job forces you to communicate as much as selling. You do that for a living, you're doing it every waking moment. And that just helped me get better and better. It was forced consistency because I needed to get paid. So thanks for sharing that. I think that is a key lesson as we Go into this episode on building audiences, building communities, creating your newsletter, creating social proof and credibility and thought leadership on LinkedIn and other platforms through podcasting and whatnot. The key thing is this, what Leah said. If you are not consistent, no matter how good you are, how talented you are, you will never eventually explode. It'll never go anywhere. Right? The consistency is key. I love that you were posting two, three times a day. Even I don't have the fortitude to do that. And then the only time you posted once was from your hospital bed. And so that is dedication. No one will out consistent you.

Oh, okay. So just to be fair, right, like now I only post once a day, so I have gone down, right? But this initial phase is quite important. I just want to stay on this point maybe for one more minute. There's an important thing that people misjudge that I would say looking back, you're also someone that is just incredibly energy full, right? And you're also putting a lot of energy into the things that we do. This consistency or like the success that you have with anything. And like whether this is cold calling or whether you want to have a relationship in your life with someone significant, someone that is important to you, all of it is a numbers game. And a numbers game always comes down to two factors. The first one is how many times do you try and how good do you do it? These two multiplied are giving you the success. Now, you might try specific things that never come to fruition because the maximum quality at what you can do them with is just impossible, right? It does not lead to any success. For instance, if I want to become an astronaut, chances are very low because I'm just a little bit too old, right? Like, I could try many times to apply to NASA for this, but it's never going to get to this kind of quality, quality. So the interesting thing in this is I was mentoring about 40 people from 2021 to 2022. These were all one on one coaching about product management, product leadership, that kind of stuff. So I did it for free on Mentoring Club because I did not believe that people want to have my advice, which is quite funny now in retrospect because I had a lot of proof afterwards that they do. And everybody asks me about tactical frameworks. How do you post on LinkedIn? What is your writing process? What is this, what is that and what that is? It's the second part of this equation. It's about how to do something efficient, how to do it good. Nobody wants to waste their time. Of course not. I Understand, the problem is, out of everybody who followed through, I know maybe one person, maybe two, depending on how you look at it, that was able to be consistent with what they do. And then they also started to actually apply it. And the problem is that we think that if somebody is just teaching me how to write on LinkedIn that I'm going to be consistent. These two things are not related. You have to be willing to embarrass yourself. There's no fucking question. Because at the start, you will suck. You will suck hard. Nobody will read your stuff. You have to be able to embarrass yourself, which is also the founder's journey, right? So like when I create a new product or like a new startup, your first versions will suck, but nobody will look at it. At 2, nobody looking at it is encouraging because, yeah, nobody will look at it. But then you might ask yourself like, so why am I doing it? You have to trust the very start of any of these journeys that you do not know the way yet. You just don't. You are bad at it and that's okay. But you will figure it out with time. But at some point, you always have to write for the community that you are going to have. And this is another interesting factor about this. For instance, when I start to work on Substack, let's say you get your first 10,000 subscribers. This is a huge milestone, right? So like I started to have 10,000 people and it's fun, right? Every time I send out an article, it reaches like 4 to 5,000 people, depending on your open rate. What happens if you start to enable monetization, right? So now I have pro people who are reading my paid content the very first day. You have zero pro subscribers. Maybe you have five to 10. Are you going to write an article that is quite long, like in high quality for these pro subscribers, and it's only going to reach three or four of them because that's the open rate that you have. That feels weird, right? You're back at the start, you're just like, I'm now writing to three to four people eventually. But this is what you have to get out of your head. You're not writing for the people now, you're writing for the people in the future. Because also writing paid content and so forth is a little bit different than for others. And I don't mean paid content in the sense of like I'm sponsoring or something. Like I'm just like giving now an art article to people who are paying me a subscription money every month. So they get something special. And this was actually quite difficult, right? So now I have about 200 paid subscribers, which is quite a lot if you add everything together. And the money that they give me every month. But before that was quite difficult. I had 10 people at the start. Why should I write this much? Why should I sit down and write for three hours? But that is the valley of search that you have to go through. Just as a founder, you have to serve very few very well before they become more and more. Because these 10 people are the ones that are spreading your word to others who are also spreading your word and then and so forth. So they are the original gangsters in your community that you have to nourish. And the main mistake that you could do in this particular founder's journey is that you do not take care of your community until it is big, because then it never gets big. So you have to be giving without having something back from the community first. And I know you're doing the same. This is how I treat my network. I'm very, very giving people that I know for 10 minutes. I give them a lot of my network. I give them a lot of advice, I give them a lot of my energy. Because eventually this is the relationship that I want to have with someone like you. Even though we don't have it yet, I treat you like my best friend. If you reciprocate it at some point, then we're going to have a good time. If not, okay, I tried. And this is how I write my contents, this is how I manage my network, and this is how I advise my clients. I'm extremely giving. I'm not gatekeeping anything. Here's the first value from Leah. What do you do with it? And if you're using it, then we're going to have a good time because it's becoming a win relationship. And I think this is how you have to conceptually think about community building, at least in my head. And it has worked out very well for me. But it is a tough game.

Building community is a marathon of the mind and it's a labor of love. And if you don't have the DNA of giving, you'll never build it. Right path it goes through is visibility, credibility, and then profitability. You can't make money on day one if you're not visible and credible. And that's why communication and consistency and creation is the rails. You gotta keep doing it. Then you're visible, then you become credible. Then over time you'll make money. If you're looking to Monetize on day one, then find other ways. Direct response. Run ads, cold call people, go and shake people up, shake the tree as hard as you can to get the dollar right now. Have something that people want to buy today do direct response. Building a community is a long term sustainable strategy, right? And it's a thing that people like Mr. Beast to Harley Davidson have used to go from fairly obscure entities to becoming global icons. The one thing I want to get into here is how do you get started? Right? So let's peel back the onion all the way. What I'm finding a lot is most people creators like yourself, whether they're founders or not, they feel afraid to go out and create on their own. And sometimes what happens is companies, the companies that they work for don't let them, right? They control. They don't like their employees going out there and being thought leaders on whether it's LinkedIn or any other social platform. And historically the larger the organization, they've chastised their employees. But if you look at it, how did HubSpot became a $20 billion company? It wasn't the founders going and creating content and building their thought leadership. Everyone in the company did that. Like I said, I was an engineer that went into sales and marketing. Everything I learned about sales and marketing in those early days was from HubSpot's inbound marketing community. That's 2005, 6 and it wasn't Dharmesh and Brian Halligan. It was a lot of people doing it. And I built personal connections with them. I subscribed to their audiences, I subscribed to their blogs, I met them at community events. I had a chat with Atlassian's chief revenue officer Cameron Dish a few weeks ago and he said last year Atlassian's community self organized 5,000 events. What that means is you have 5,000 super fans that are willing to bring X number of people. So if you look at it, those 5,000 self organized events probably touched 500,000 people, right? On an average of a hundred or fifty thousand people. So if you look at that, if you try to control, you'll never build a community. One of the key things is having this ethos of giving and not only giving value, but also giving autonomy to people, giving them a purpose. And so Atlassian's community comes together to organize 5,000 events. It was a 20 year journey. He said it didn't happen on day one. They kept doing it and doing it. Every time they found superfans who wanted to host events, they didn't say, don't do it. They said do it. And not only that, we'll send you some swag, we'll send you some small budget to pay for your pizza and stuff like that's the best thing I can do is enable you. If you want to spread the word, you will build your thought leadership as a function of being an Atlassian expert and you will do it with pride if I am giving you a lift so you're not bearing the burden on your shoulders. And today it's over 20 years is compounded into 5,000 events, right? And so first let's start by maybe call to companies and education. Why this is important because I truly feel if you don't enable micro influencers within your own company, if you don't enable your team to become micro influencers tomorrow you're going to be paying for other micro influencers, right? We're in an age where people are consuming more content from people and brand content consumption is going down in your personal time. My personal time, I don't follow brands, I never follow brands. Even on LinkedIn. If you look at it, individuals are getting more engagement on their content but brands continue to not allow their people, especially B2B brands, they think somehow B2B is different than B2C which is not the case. It's we're in a human to human world. So let's start by getting your thoughts on why companies do this and what is the right way for them to encourage their team and I guess coach their team and help their team become creators, which eventually benefits the company, maybe not immediately, but over time.

So let's maybe get it first into why are companies doing this for the wrong reasons. And I think there's a very clear trend here that we can actually illustrate on another example. So let's say you like eating in restaurants. Back in the days 10 to 20 years ago, it was more about oh, I know this amazing place, like you can eat good food there and so forth, right? Like people were talking about it, maybe people in the same house, like, ah, we can go over there and we can have some food. Nowadays it's very common that you start to follow cooks. And why is that the case? Because everything starts to become commoditized. Everything starts to become extremely hyper transparent. In that sense, sometimes you can also follow the cooks, right? Especially from the higher establishments. Then it's not about the brand name anymore, right? So if that particular cook that you love eating with and let's say you know them in the, in your local community, then it doesn't matter in what kind of building they cook because you know that the food has a specific quality. And this is what's happening now as well. So when do you need brands to give you trust for anything? So like how do I as a consumer gain trust? That particular car brand is good enough, so I will spend money on it. For instance, brands are stand ins for when you do not have faces that are individually attached to it. Right. You could argue whether you like Steve Jobs or not. What was more important, Steve Jobs or Apple? Was it the brand Apple or was it Steve Jobs? You could argue the moment Steve Jobs was gone, Apple also took a nosedive and it took them quite some time to get back up again when Steve returned and so forth. So this is a very interesting kind of dynamic. And this usually happens because. Because right now we have more and more of a movement of algorithms, marketing and sales imitating very interesting messages from brands that worked in the past, which makes it harder for consumers like you and me to differentiate what is the real deal. So the only thing that we can do is now to resort to something that is even harder to fake and that is individual people like you and me again, right? So like people with faces and so forth. And what I mean with that is that it has never been easier with AI to create marketing messages that look really good. Do you remember like 10, 15 years ago it took you quite a lot of money and studios and everything like to create the perfect image of a burger, print it out and then put it on a website and call yourself McDonald's. I can do this now within two to three minutes. And it looks really good. It probably looks better than what the stuff that they had 15 years ago. And this makes it hard to gain trust from the specific quality of a message or anything in this regard that's a problem. So this is why B2B companies are starting to struggle around this. Because trust in these markets are generated now through word of mouth, which is also something that happens always in commoditized markets. Because if you have choice, If I have 20 solutions for the problem that I'm having, I could go and I can go to some kind of restaurant and there's 20 restaurants, what am I doing? I go with reviews. If I have only one restaurant in the area that I can drive to, then I'm just going to check whether it's open. But I will accept some kind of quality detriment right to the food because I just need to eat. And this is a very interesting thing. And that's what B2B companies don't understand you are getting commoditized hard. Because solutions, the stuff that you're producing is also now there's more and more coming into the market. There's more and more choice for consumers. And if you make it hard or you're just being fake or you're not being authentic, that's what it is. To all of these B2B brands that do not understand on how to enable your employees to also produce content on the web, the problem normally starts with, it's just what you said, right? You do not police them on LinkedIn. That's the first problem that I see happening. You know, like these contracts where they say, oh no, you have to run everything through legal or this kind of crap and so forth. No, just don't do it. Just tell them like, hey, if you're excited about our product, you write in your style, in your voice. And that is super important on wherever you want to. Whether it is LinkedIn, whether it is Reddit, whether it is YouTube, whatever, if you have a favorite channel, don't tell people on how to do things, just tell them like, hey, you can talk about it. If you are being creative, you can also incentivize them just like salespeople. I was incentivized in some companies, if I brought leads in, it was pretty cool. You know, I got like three to five thousand dollars just at the end of the month just because I recommended a company that was afterwards closing because I talked to someone else the other day. And it's like a cool thing. And these things happen as you start to put yourself out there because someone comes into your inbound and then they say, hey, I saw that you guys are creating this and that. Can you tell me more about it? And this is a very honest conversation. You would not believe what a software engineer that talks about their own product has in terms of trust versus a professional sales representative. They might not have the playbook, they might not have the entire conversation transcript that they have to run through, but they have immediate trust. And this is the thing that gets you started. And then you can also have an open voice about it. So I would say to answer your question, you need to encourage people to find their voice. So let them speak in the medium that they are familiar with. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is encourage them rather than police people, right? If you are too big and you have too many brand guidelines and this and that, this is not fun. It's not fun. And then you ask people to put themselves out there, and then they're embarrassed. This kind of stuff is destroyed quite fast. I would say encouraging people in their own medium. And then also make sure that you don't make them just repost a company blog, because that's not content creation, frankly. That's just like resharing of stuff that just never has any. How do you say, like, consistency in that sense? Maybe one more point to this before I shut up on this particular topic. I think you have to also give people a specific room in terms of, hey, we expect you to do this, we want you to do this. And as a form of payment, we also expect that you work on this for a couple of hours every day or every week or every month or whatever. So we give you the room. This is not expected from you on the side of your job. It's part of your job. And that's kind of also like appreciation, even if you don't pay money for it, we allow you to use your work time for this, right? So while you're also in the office and so forth, and people actually do appreciate this. But you cannot turn everybody into a content creator. You probably have usually like 1 out of 10 in the company that are really good at this.

And we started communication and consistency is really important, even if you're good at creation. Talent means nothing if you're not working hard to be consistent and communicate that. So I want to understand now, where do we get started? So before we go into the tools, everyone asks me, what tools should I use? Should I use LinkedIn? Should I use substack? Should I use Facebook group? Should I start a podcast? I say no, first, let's go all the way to the beginning. So how does one get started? Because if you just jumped right into the tool and you don't have the audience in mind, then what are you really creating? So let's back up all the way to the beginning. You decided to create on LinkedIn. You decided to create on Substack, you decided to build a podcast, but it started somewhere. What was step number one?

The step number one is the question that you have to ask yourself, what am I afraid of? Why didn't I do it so far? Because I can tell you that I'm someone that enjoys being listened to and I love teaching people things. I do. I know that. So I have all this predisposition. Why didn't I do it before? The question is essentially, is my voice that I have valuable enough, or am I afraid that what I'm saying is crap? It's like imposter syndrome, right? So, like, I would like to have the attention in some way, or like, I would like to teach people in some way, but I'm afraid of it. So that was the first question that I have to solve for myself. And whether you have ever a voice that is strong enough in the future, whether you can inspire a hundred thousands of people or whatever, is completely besides the point. You need to first deal with this voice in your head. And I did this through a relatively, I think, in hindsight, smart kind of concept. So what I did is I started to mentor people for free. That was very important. For free on specific platforms that are made for this. So I listed myself. Hey, I'm doing product here. You can also. You can just book me for free advice. And this is when I started to do this for free. Now why is it important that you're doing it for free? Because this made it easier for me to not feel bad or not as bad if I messed up something, because I thought that all these people will have questions that I cannot actually answer. And I wanted to test this out in a very free kind of setup. So this was more on the consulting side. But I wanted to know whether my voice is actually good enough, because I know that I can explain things. It's just that. Is my knowledge good enough? I expected growth product managers coming in there and just ask me questions that you need a PhD to answer. And I have no clue on how to actually answer any of it. But the reality of the fact was I started to notice how good my peers were that I was always hanging around. So I was extremely blessed with extremely good product managers and growth managers and so forth. And you know the story of when you get into a school with gifted people, you start to feel really dumb yourself because everybody seems to be smarter than you. But when I was checking my knowledge on the market, and this is like the thing that I did right, so this is like creating almost like a prototype of yourself, and you're putting it out into the market. This gave me, for the first time in my life, the confidence to say, hey, what I know is actually not only just valuable, I also don't have a problem sometimes saying, I don't know that, but I know some other things. Maybe I can actually help you. This is when it started to click, because after 30, 40 people, I started to do another thing, and that was I started to apply to public podcasts. Hey, guys, do you want to have me on the show? Now I'm talking to more people still for free. I'm going to present on a topic that is quite interesting, right? And that helped me also to get a little bit more out there. So I exposed myself slowly more. I still didn't publish on LinkedIn anything. I had to find my voice and the confidence that what I have to say is good enough. And I had to do it in a very small one on one setting with strangers. Because with colleagues, you never really know whether they're being honest with you. There's always this nagging voice in their head or they're just being nice to me. Right? This is what I struggle with also all my life. And with strangers, you really will feel because they will rate you on these platforms, right? They will write reviews and I got raving reviews. And it really helped me also to boost up my confidence because at some point, it's really hard to deny I also made mistakes, of course. But this was a very specific past that I found. And then a really weird thing happened. I started to get companies in my inbound. Hey, Leah, we would like to pay for your advice. And that was, oh, my God, this is actually working. This is crazy. I need to put this to LinkedIn and I need to step up my game. And that was the start of Leo's going to post two to three times, going to build out my network like crazy, and I'm going to give everything that I know for free. Everything. That was the defining point for me. And I highly recommend that people find their voice in some way, as little as they can. Start small and then just go up.

This path is very similar to paths of many people, right? Like, they just want to give and give value and give for free. Through that, you build an audience, and then that audience turns into a community. Now, when you said you're gonna go out there and have a voice and talk to people, first you started with offering free mentoring and coaching, and then you reached out to podcast. How did you determine two things. One, what am I gonna talk about? And two, who am I going to share this content to? Like, when you try to find people to mentor, how do you identify that niche? The niche has two aspects, right? The ideal customer profile or the idea audience profile, and then what topic am I going to talk about? So walk us through that because it serves as a lesson for others who are thinking, hey, I have so many things in my head or I have nothing to think about. How do I come up with what do I share and who I share it with?

So I think there's two things to this. One of them is in what topic do you have the most confidence speaking about? And ideally this is also the one that you're passionate about because it turns out if you're not passionate about something, you probably don't talk about it a lot either.

When passion meets profession, you become Michael Jackson, that is.

Yeah, I'm not Michael Jackson exactly, but like I'm trying to get there, you know, like in terms of the fame. But the thing is if you don't know what you are passionate about, really this sounds a bit stupid, but it's possible, right? Ask your friends and the people at work, what am I talking about all the time, not topically, what am I talking about? And it's not so much about whether I talk about product and growth because it was clear that it's going to be about that because to me it's like I'm an innovation PM by heart, right? Like I always started a lot of companies from the ground, crashed some of them into the wall, but I always built something from 0 to 1 at some point. But why? What fascinates me, what underlying mechanism fascinates me about all of this? And it is I love complexity in simple things and I like understanding complexity and I love teaching people. But I also had to admit to myself that I'm never going to be the operative expert that beats everyone else, right? I played a lot of games with my friends in the past and so forth and there's always these couple of friends that have this laser guided focus where they spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in a very specific game and they become incredibly good and I never was able to beat them, but I was always the person that knew what other games are out there. I am the recommendation machine. I am the person that connects all the different frameworks. It took me quite some time later on on how to figure out what this was about, but this is what I write about. I write about all the other details that happen in your organization. So when I talk about product like growth, I'm not just talking about a distribution framework. I tell you how to grow the company, how to hire people for it. I tell you what the deal is with marketing, with sales, try to find someone that has a profile like this. But this was through, you know, like trial and error and talking about it. The very first email that I started to send out to these shows about what I would like to talk about was a presentation that I made internally for like some kind of these knowledge sharing presentations that you have in your company sometimes, right? And I took this and I said, hey, I'm going to publicly talk about this because I know my thing. I just can have a presentation for 30 minutes. Let's see what happens. My outbound was literally that, hey, my name is Leah, I'm doing this and this at this company. This is the topic that I want to talk about. Do you feature guests? Boom. I was booked within two to three days and I was like, oh my God, I cannot imagine this in two to three months of going to be featured on a very specific podcast. And it's funny because back then it just meant so much to me. It was like, oh, like somebody's actually featuring me. Now I speak on a podcast every week, multiple times. You know also how this is, right? It becomes normal.

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike, Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomena. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents. You found your passion, something you had a voice on. And I found that, you know, some people, they may not be there, they may not know or, or they may not be experienced. Right? So if you can lead people because you are more experienced than them slightly, maybe they're at a level one and you're at a level three or four, you're more relatable to them versus them. Listening to a PLG expert or a CEO of a multi billion dollar company, it turns into a platitude. It's not immediately relatable to somebody at 01. So that makes sense. And if you don't feel like you have that knowledge and you can't lead people through, you can always be a curator. There are some great creators who go and interview experts on a topic and curate that content. I think having a love for the topic and having a love for the niche is really important. If you hate a certain niche and you hate a certain topic and you do it just to build influence, it's like greed in a way. And that doesn't last. Right? I'll tell you our story. Actually, it's quite funny. When we started the traction community at the same time, like years before that, we were building Boast, which is a product that provides R and D funding to tech companies. And before we landed on tech companies, actually we started cold calling Manufacturers and oil and gas companies and construction companies, and nobody wanted to talk to us. And so we started events to see, you know, maybe we can get some customers. And we found that we couldn't resonate with them at all. And so we started going to all the startup events and we felt like, oh, this is our tribe. You know, we learned from them, they learned from us. We can have conversations. It was great. And then what ended up happening was every event we went to at that time, 2012, it was all the conversations were like from CEOs of people who are so far out there that it just served as an aspirational, inspirational platitude. And it wasn't tactical, like, how do I get my first X like you talked about, right? How do you build a PLG team? How do you do UX for plg? All of those things nobody was talking about for a founder. How do I get my first customers? How do I close my first enterprise deal? How do I build a PLG product? Like all of this stuff. So we said, you know what, why don't we just start hosting meetups? That was a time where LinkedIn wasn't popular, podcasting wasn't popular. And so I did two things. One is I started writing a weekly column for the local newspaper for free. I begged them first.

I.

They gave me an online column which I, you know, through friends made it go viral in the circles on Twitter and everything. Then they turned it into print and we started hosting small meetups. If I didn't have a love for that audience and say, let's say we said, you know what, let's build a product selling to manufacturing companies. I don't think he would have gone far. I mean, I don't think Traction would have existed. So. And we didn't even call that community. Our company is called Boast AI. We didn't call it the Boast community. We called it Traction because it came out of the aspiration of all of our ideal customer profile. What do we want? We want traction. And I think if we went after manufacturing or construction or oil and gas, I think in six months I would have wrapped up that community. Never built it. So I think that is, that is key, right? You something you have a passion for either the topic. And if you don't have a passion for the topic, the audience or both. Now that was a time where I had no expertise. I was like, you know, it was a company we're starting, so I couldn't speak about any startup related topics. So we started curating other People, other experts to come to meetups and talk. This is a great insight. So now you've figured out the topic you want to talk about that you have a unique insight on, and you have the ideal customer profile. Where do you go from there? What's the next step?

I think this is really the point where you have to start to experiment with different channels. I always recommend people to just start with one particular channel and stay a bit on it, even if it doesn't really take at the start. Now, this is a very interesting one because it's not just about, oh, is Twitter good or is threads good or is LinkedIn good or is substack good or anything. One of the reasons why I went on LinkedIn is that so this was not a conscious decision where I did an analysis on should I do this? In the doing that I know for a fact that LinkedIn itself does not make me as anxious as Twitter does. Twitter makes me extremely anxious. If you say something there, there's a pretty high chance that you're getting dunked on. That's the first thing. Second thing is I have trouble saying things in a few words. It's not exactly good for, for Twitter, right? Like, you have 140 characters or whatever it was back then, and LinkedIn was still, I don't know, I think 2,000 characters or something, or just like some kind of limitation that was long enough to write something about a topic without going completely overboard. I also started to experiment with some articles and so forth, but LinkedIn seemed to be right for me. And this is more about the tone of the conversation that you also want to have, right? So, like, I speak to a B2B audience, like, to professionals. I'm not here to share my personal life. This is also quite important. And LinkedIn felt like a good match. And I was also already there, even if, because I had a lot of FOMO in some way that, oh, my God, what if I choose the wrong platform? Like, even if you mess up the platform, if you're writing for three months consistently on LinkedIn, you will have learned a lot for every other channel. 100%. I'm dyslexic. I'm not really good at writing or reading text. But the stuff that I learned actually helped me quite a lot to also put myself into these kind of media. And I learned so much about writing. And that's just where you just have to start somewhere, stick with the channel, try to start to write. Because this is very important. You need to have some kind of proof that what you're doing works, you need to experience it because then you know, okay, I can repeat this on another channel. Now, my LinkedIn has become so big that I could not afford that it just closes down. But I had a conversation also with Elena at the start of this year where we just said, hey, look, I'm so dependent on LinkedIn, I need to de risk this. So we're starting to become strategic, right? So what happens if this channel closes down? These questions you don't have to worry about at the start. You just don't prove first that you can get some consistency going, a habit. And please, for the love of it, don't throw your stuff away that you've written wherever you save it, right? I can help you quite a big deal because when I started on Substack, I had a lot of these articles already ready that I was writing on LinkedIn and I could actually rewrite some of my ideas because we're stars who tend to recycle some of the stuff. But all the scaling stuff comes afterwards and these learnings are just not lost. So I would say start with one channel, stay consistent and try it at least for, I would say, five to six months, if you can. That's a lot of days.

It's being an inch wide and a mile deep to start, right? A lot of people try to chase different channels and different bandwagons and when one fails to jump on the next, it's about being consistent. I think throughout this theme and this conversation, we're talking about being consistent because you'll just get better and better. It's like chiseling sculpture. You start heavy and then you refine and you refine if you keep doing it. And what I love about written content actually is, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, is the first two lines determines everything. If you can't hook people, they're not going to click more. If they don't hit click more, they're not going to read the whole post. And once you start seeing impressions of like a hundred thousand on a regular, that content actually ends up becoming, in a way a script for your video content as well.

Right?

Because now you know what hooks people. And so written content is everything. So I spent quite a bit of time with Nas Daily, who's a YouTuber, Nusair Yassin. He runs this YouTube channel called NAS Daily and they've got 20 plus million followers. So as a part of writing the book, I joined a lot of communities there. Like I joined tech communities, non tech communities, like some of the most Random communities. But the one I had a lot of value from was NAS Daily at a NAS creator XR Academy. You know, the first month, literally the first month was all about written content. And this is a course, this is a cohort based course and a community around video content. But he's like, for the first month, I don't want to even hear about how can I create the video, the lighting, all of that. Who are you writing for? What are you writing? How do you hook them? Write scripts. Write scripts. Wrote like I think 40 scripts, right? Or some more than that. Actually one homework was writing 24 scripts. So I think overall in that first month we wrote a hundred scripts. So that just tells you the value of writing. And if you're writing on LinkedIn and you're coming from a B2B audience, it's great because that can eventually you can turn into video content because that script is gonna be so powerful. Now how do you though figure out what to write? Right? So there's this gap here that we didn't talk about. We talked about what you're passionate about and we talked about the audience you like. And now we said get started on a medium, which is get started and go really deep there. But like I'm staring at a blank screen, it's day one. What the hell do I write about? How do I come up with content ideas? Tell me about that.

So here's a good tactical tip that I actually enjoy and I suggest to everyone to do in some kind of form, and that is go to your phone, create a WhatsApp group, invite a friend, kick the friend out, and then you're the only person left in there. Why? If you're going to go anywhere, you go have a walk, you go to friends, you're in the car, you're in the train, wherever you go, you just do not want to lose ideas as they're coming up. So you need to give yourself also space to put create ideas. Ironically, ideas are not coming to me when I sit down and just think I need to come up with an idea right now. My ideas are coming when I'm not listening to music, or it can be some music that I know about, whatever. But like when I'm not listening to an audiobook that is not from this particular topic. But like when I'm just walking outside. This is like my method. It sounds stupid, but this is exactly what it is. Or I'm in the car starting to think, right? You need to give yourself room to think. If you're constantly busy every day like with working all the time, like you're typing something or doing you're not coming up with ideas. Sometimes I have ideas at 11 o' clock in the bed. You can bet your ass on it that you're going to Forget about this 5 minutes after if you do not have a method of just writing it down. So what I have is I have my WhatsApp group which all my ideas are in. I can actually sell you the content in there if you want. I can record voice messages in there. I could just type the stuff in there with a couple of keywords and then I can dig them up afterwards. These are not like content outlines or whatever. These are just like small ideas because I'm creative enough to then actually come up with something to write on. But this is the very, very first thing. The other thing is, and ironically, this is what I also advise most companies on, get your positioning narrowed down at some point and stick with it. So it's not just about, hey, I'm going to stick with a channel. And I read six months on it, try out the topic on a couple of different angles, but stick with it, right? So like I was talking about product, like growth back then. It was not as commoditized as it is right now. But if you start to talk about product led growth, politics and how you are a dad and then how the weather is, the problem is you start to attract people from four different topical areas and then the efficiency of what you do is starting to tank. This is almost as if you would write on four different channels at the same time. You're writing on LinkedIn, you're writing on Twitter and people don't understand this because they think, yeah, but I'm still writing on LinkedIn. This positioning stuff is extremely important and it's very rare that you are writing too narrow because most people are writing too broad. And this is quite interesting because there are people on LinkedIn that have a very specific audience and they make a living out of it. I saw as a vocal coach yesterday for international speakers, for English speaking tech, SAS speakers. This is super narrow. I love it. This is me, right? I contacted her immediately. I'm like, hey, here's the recording. Review it. Tell me what I can do better. You can bet on it. She's going to make money from this, right? So down the line. So I think this kind of positioning exercise is quite important because as you write about stuff, you will also know whether you enjoy it. I also would love to hear from you as well on this. Can you write consistently on something that you don't love. I can't. I just can't. Because the days where you are down, where you don't have energy, you can be absolutely certain that the things that you do not enjoy, you will definitely not write about either. But it might be the things that actually move you and that are important to you. Because it's like in poker, we are all competing out there for the same kind of attention, for the same kind of hands. It is not how you play the strong hands. It's not about how you ride on the good days. It is about how do you write on the bad days. Can I sit down when I don't feel like it, When I don't want to go to the gym that I do, I still go to the gym. That's the kind of mentality that you need to have. And that is what hard works means. You have to be relentless every day. So don't make it hard for yourself to talk about something that you think is popular but you do not enjoy. You know, that's what it is.

Showing up is so important. I mean, showing up is being consistent, right? If you show up for your community, your audience, consistently, they'll remember and they'll show up in that same way for you. And one of the things I saw as I was researching and talking to people is From Christianity to CrossFit, from Christ to CrossFit. Every obscure idea that eventually became a global phenomena had these four paths. People listen to you, you have an audience, you bring that audience together to interact with one another, it turns into a community. When the community comes together to create impact that's beyond your product or service against a greater purpose, it becomes a movement. And when the movement starts having unwavering faith in its purpose through rituals done over time, it becomes a religion or a cult. And that audience, community, movement, religion or cult, is a journey that only happens through consistency and showing up. It's how you show up on the bad days is what matters.

There's an interesting thing. In November, I had my first really big article. This was the kind of thing that put me on the map for a lot of people. And I blew up. And that was my product led growth guide. I've written that guide by sitting down on a Saturday that I did not feel myself at all. 10 o' clock in the morning, I sat down and I wrote it until 8 o'. Clock. Every one of my frustrations went into this. I was just like, I'm going to write this fundamental document on what product led growth is and I had about 20,000 people read it within, I don't know, like, two weeks or something, which is pretty big for a B2B audience. And this is a guide, right? This is almost like a book. This is half a book. And the interesting thing is you could take this now word by word, copy it, put it on your substack, and it would not perform at all. It wouldn't. Why wouldn't it? And this is the interesting thing because people think they see this from me, right? So, like, they associate me with this PLG guide, and now they think they have to write the kind of same stuff to get started. This is not how I got started. This was just my tipping point. You don't know what your tipping point is beforehand. You just don't know. But you have to be consistent at it because at some point it will happen. You just have to trust the process. You cannot see what it is in the future. Future you cannot see. But think of this one friend that always has the best suggestions in your life. This is the exact same process. They give you a tip for a book. Yeah, whatever. Then you read it. Maybe eventually. Oh, it's such a good fit. Hey, do you have another recommendation? Do you have a little bit more of that recommendation crack? So, like, you have a little bit more, they recommend you another book, Another book, another book. Maybe a podcast. And almost all of them hit. I have friends like this. Whenever they recommend me something, I listen more than to others. And it's not about the book. It's. They established a line of trust with me that whenever they tell me something, there's a high likelihood that I will spend my time in my life. Good. And it will bring me further. And this is what it did. I had about 50 or 60 people who just liked my stuff good enough. And that's not a lot. Put it on LinkedIn. They started to go wild. They're like, oh, my God, Leah, this is so good. And they did this right. And they gave me the social credibility because they already knew all my stuff from beforehand. Is the guide good? Yeah, it is. I think it's a good piece, but it would not have taken off at all if I did not have people trust me beforehand. I just don't think so, because they knew it is for me. They knew what to get from me. They knew that. I'm not talking bs, right? I'm very operational. And this is the thing that you need to understand when you're creating a community. What you're doing is you're laying really the foundation of trust from the very, very beginning. And it takes months. Most of my inbound that is booking me as a paid advisor. The livelihood that I have, they have been reading my stuff from five to six months ago. I go on their LinkedIn profile and I see they've been following me since I don't know, November 2022. That's crazy, that's amazing, that's beautiful. But it's takes time and you have to trust it that it's going to happen eventually.

You know, trust is the cornerstone of all relationships. And when you provide value over time, the compound interest on that is huge. And I started the conversation by saying this, right? Visibility, credibility and then profitability. So you're playing that out here is you are visible. You became credible by building trust with your audience through providing valuable content. And now it's playing out in terms of paid subscribers. And you know, you have a conference page coming up, a big one in Brazil, you're getting paid speaking gigs, all of that stuff is manifesting itself. So you gotta be patient and you gotta keep providing value and showing up. So we went through this journey of, okay, figure out your voice, what you're passionate about. Pick a channel, pick a topic, pick an audience you're really passionate about. Be very, very consistent. Show up on the bad days. Now I want to shift the focus from what you write and where you write to now. How do you expand, grow this audience? So what? One thing very interesting happened with NAS Daily or Nusair's community. NAS Daily is he built a community of 21 million people on Facebook and Facebook had an algorithm change. And after that algorithm change, from 50% of his audience seeing his content, it went to like 5% or less. And he make I think like a hundred thousand dollars a month on from that Facebook group. It went to like bupkis almost. And he said one thing which struck out. When people listen to you, you have an audience, right? Obviously it's a one way communication. When you're on these platforms, if you don't have their emails and phone numbers, you don't have a community. You don't own your audience, the platform you think you own this audience. And even if you look back like you know, I don't have as many followers as you, I have about maybe 19,000 or so, you have 37,000. But I was afraid of this and inadvertently because LinkedIn, when we started, we started with hosting events and sending people invite links and they would register for the events. And so our first community was in person, events and information about the events, the content we wrote on the newspaper sent via a newsletter. So we started with Mailchimp. And I'm lucky because I feel like I have 120,000 plus people today as a function of doing that. It wasn't a deliberate action. If LinkedIn was pumping back then, I would probably be pumping content on LinkedIn. But now what a lot of creators face and they don't realize is they're on LinkedIn, they're on Instagram, they're on Facebook, whatever channel they're on, they have influence and they have an audience and they're getting gigs and whatnot through Inbound. But if the platform changes, the algorithm, which does happen every so often because every platform first wants you to give, you said, right? You give, you give to a small bunch of audience. They get hooked and they build that trust with you and they start sharing. Once they start sharing, you start become a viral creator. But now these platforms that let you share for free want to monetize. So they start inserting ads in every feed and whatnot. And the algorithm changes where now people are seeing content from other people and brands. Like your followers are seeing more content from other people and brands than just you when they only signed up for you. And so these algorithmic changes, once they start showing your content to less and less people, it really turns into you don't really own your audience. So walk us through that journey. You had a similar realization because you call Elena Verna, who's a great product leader, she was a speaker at Traction, I think once or twice. She came to our conference in Vancouver when she was at SurveyMonkey at the time, and now she's one of the top thought leaders in PLG as well. So you had a conversation with her and he said, hey, this is freaking me out. I can't just be on LinkedIn. What if LinkedIn changes the algorithm? I need to now start owning my audience and turning into a community. Walk us through that journey because that's where we get to. You started with one platform, build an audience on LinkedIn. Now you've shifted some of that audience to substack and you're starting to build a community. So let's walk through that.

Exactly. So basically what happened is, so Elena is about one and a half to two years ahead of me in this entire journey. Like, she also knows how to game these systems very well. I mean, not gaming, but she knows how to play the content game. She has a very unique voice in this. And we talk about this a lot together at the start of this year we had this kind of conversation and I told her, like, look, I have this massive community on LinkedIn. I'm starting to blow up. Back then I had 10,000 people or something like 10,000 followers. And I could already build a living out of this in terms of there's enough people asking for my services, right? So like, you can start to build living out of it. Once you start to make money from a channel like this, a person like me, who is always. I had enough startups to know that you need to make sure that your stuff is secure as well. And a very typical mistake that startup founders make is that they don't check whether they have the patent, like the patent or the licensing rights for specific things. So once your stuff starts to blow up, you start to notice, like, oh, I should have trademarked this kind of stuff or this kind of stuff, right? So like, you were not made to be successful because you never really expected to be successful. And we were scared of LinkedIn back then because she also said, okay, if LinkedIn goes away, it's going to be very difficult. You could still make money through recommendations and stuff, right? Especially her. She's famous, she's huge. And it's exactly what you said. I do not own anything of my community on LinkedIn. I cannot export the email lists and then just email them. It does not work, it does not exist. A very particular decision was in January. I think it was about, or maybe even a little bit earlier than this to do two things. First of all, I started a podcast that was about in November. Podcasts are not good to generate huge email lists or whatever, but like, this is a long term play. The second thing is I went on Substack and I started to feed substack with my LinkedIn posts. So I started to write stuff on Substack, which is longer form articles, like you have more options, that kind of stuff. But the main difference from Substack and also Beehive and Goals and some other platforms is you own everything. You can import email lists and you can also export your email lists. And the way that they monetize and this, you made a very good point on this, is that the way that these platforms run is they get a share of my revenue on LinkedIn. I'm a pro subscriber that pays, I don't know, 30 bucks or something per month. And that's what they get from me. So they have to exactly finance the way that you said. They have to show every fourth message is a sponsoring message. Now they started to Roll out some stuff like thought leader ads. I am cringing just thinking about it now. I could pay money to have more of my stuff in the feeds, right? So what this will create is it will start to incentivize some really weird behaviors that I'm not a big fan of. But on Substack, they get money from my revenue. So the goal of Substack is to make me revenue. How do I make revenue? By having more subscribers with the content that I honestly put out. And how do these subscribers subscribe to me? They get consistently good value. And then they say, hey, you know what? I'm going to support Liam. So this is a win relationship that is based on honesty. There's no ads in there. There's nothing in there otherwise. People can read most of my stuff for free as well. There's no force, no nothing. Their product teams, the stuff that they structure, their stuff is exactly created in this way. And I'm so happy about it because now 50% or 60% of the stuff that I do on Substack is not even coming from LinkedIn anymore. So now I have suddenly two networks. LinkedIn will remain extremely important to me because it's easier to reach out to me. But now I have something on Substack that is going. And, you know, in one or two years, the podcast will also be pretty big for B2B if I keep to it. But the fundamental point is I can take this email list, which is the only kind of communication form that we have that everybody has safe from phone numbers that still works no matter how much you hate emails. Everybody has an email, but not Everybody has a LinkedIn account that they do check daily. Now, you still need to be relevant, right? And it's getting harder to get through spam filters. But people who sign up for you with an opt in, they have a very low chance of actually just never seeing your stuff. I don't think it's wise to just start on some platform just because you own the audience there. I don't think that's an actually a safe play. I still would think that you should go just on the platform that you think makes the most sense in terms of, I'm passionate about this, I know the audience a little bit. But at some point you have to think strategically about this. The moment where I started to have something to lose is where I went to Substack and I said, okay, that's it. And Elena and me are there now and it seems to work for us. All our friends are also there. This entire San Francisco community. We're all there and this kind of works because the community is very wholesome. So yeah, I own the emails now.

You convinced me to move to Riverside and you're probably going to convince me to move to Substack as well.

Oh, we're going to make it blow.

Up, my friend, you know, because I've.

Been heard here first.

Yeah, I've been on mailchimp for a very long time. The thing is, mailchimp is not a community of newsletters. I was going to try Beehive, so I'm going to give Substack a try. What I love about Substack and what I'm seeing out there is it. It's a combination of your LinkedIn written content and your podcast content. It's a website with a built in community in a nutshell. And Lenny is doing well with like I think 900,000 subscribers or so. So let's start with now, you know, in maybe five, six things. Everything we need to know about building on Substack. So one day zero, you go open a substack account. How do you even get a single subscriber? Like, you know, can you Import all your LinkedIn subscribers? Which I think you can, but LinkedIn, I don't know if LinkedIn lets you export properly anymore. So how do you first fill it in with like how do you see it in the beginning? Because the way I look at it, audience platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok audience, predominantly audience, one way communication, people commenting on your post and you commenting back and forth is maybe community audience 2.0. Right? It's not quite a community. Community is when people start interacting with one another. The key step to building a community is first owning that audience. And it starts with having a newsletter. You can communicate with them and you can then use that as a channel to bring them together. But how do you see this in the beginning, Leah? Like, how did you do it?

So this is very interesting. How far back do 99% of people see who you are on LinkedIn when they go to your LinkedIn profile? I would say about two weeks. That's for most people the case, right? Because what do they see? They see the last three posts that you've written and then otherwise you have to go into the history, you know, like I have to search, they see your CV, they see your description. So on LinkedIn I have in my head that people see like the last two weeks more or less. Right. And also depending on the day where you just go into. But the rest is Just ignored. If you go on holidays for two or three weeks, you're a nobody anymore on LinkedIn. That doesn't mean that you lost anything. I'm just saying, like, you just don't exist. If you don't post on Substack or any of these platforms where you have an actual history and you have the most popular posts up there automatically graded and like, you can also see the stats much, much better, it becomes almost like a content bank. So how do you get started on day one for this? It turns out you don't need a couple of subscribers first. Why don't you just take all the stuff that you put, for instance, on LinkedIn or Twitter or TikTok or whatever your favorite poison is, and you just put it on Substack? That's what I did. I just took the 20 most popular posts that I had on LinkedIn. I had a subscription to Shield, which is giving you the most successful posts. I think now you can do this just from LinkedIn Creator Analytics. And I took them, copied them over, reformatted them on Substack and saved them. That gives you already a content bank of really cool stuff. Because if you post 300 times, you have probably 10 to 20 articles that are just like, really good. And that was my initial filling. And then I started to just. Whenever I was writing something. This is another very tactical tip. You start an outline on an article in Substack. That's what I did. So I write my articles on Substack, I make a short form of it for LinkedIn, and then I say in the comments, there's the full article. The beautiful thing about this is you have a hook on LinkedIn in the first two sentences. This is this thing that you said at the very start of the podcast, you have to learn how to write hooks. The post itself on LinkedIn, if people really like it, becomes a hook for the article. And then you have to click there, and then you're coming through there. And this is how I pushed originally, people over there. I did not import a single email to Substack. I have now 14,000 subscribers within just this year, right? And I don't even push a lot on this stuff because I did not have too much time to write on it. But it's just slowly and slowly I'm starting to push people from LinkedIn to Substack. And pushing just doesn't mean that I don't happen on LinkedIn anymore. It's just that, hey, look, by the way, I also have this thing here, and it's Just so much more of an easier platform to work with because also sharing articles on Substack, like, they tend to become timeless on LinkedIn. It's very hard to bookmark stuff, to share it with people, unless it just happened in the last week. And I think this is the first thing that you have to do, just have five to 10 articles. Because if you just do it over mailchimp, the thing that you have is you're sending one email and then you don't happen anymore. And then the website is becoming like the mailbox of someone and that's not where you want to be. My substack homepage, and this is the same for Beehive, is really Leah's kind of portal. And if you start to associate, like, oh, you know what I'm learning, actually something really good on this, then people start to come back and then you start to convert 1 or 2% of this audience into paid subscribers. So now you start to suddenly make money of it. But at the very start, you just move people slowly over into articles where you should have like maybe five to 10 articles and that's already enough. One of the bigger communities that I've ever seen is called Design Buddies on Substack. It's made by Graceling. She had about 90,000 subscribers. She has 10 articles on this thing, nothing else. People are just starting to subscribe to it and then people are starting to share and so forth. This is not so much about the quality of everything. This is just about the quality of the content that you have. And then you start to figure out also through analytics, like what works best and whatnot. But it is your portal. You're not one person among many in the feed of others. This is really your portal and this is what makes it so different. So it's much more higher quality in that sense.

Fantastic. Now, you know, my worry is you get started on Substack and you have no followers, right? So what do you do in that case?

You're a great guy with networking. You will have probably a couple hundred followers within a couple of days. Why? Because Leah is going to recommend your substack. If I as a creator, recommend your substack, then you're going to get some of my followers, because my followers are getting a recommendation, an email that says, hey, Leah is reading Lobo's substack. And then I can also attach a little blurb to this. And this is just how it works, right? So you have some kind of real estate on Substack where you recommend things. Now, does this deteriorate into a stupid tit for tat thing. No, it actually doesn't. Because since your trust with the community is your capital, you do not want to just shell people. You want to give good actual recommendations. And I have exchanged a lot of my followers with Elena. She is also recommending my substack. So I also got a lot from hers. And all of this kind of makes sense, right? Make sure that you have good connections with people there. And this is the thing, right? If you have some kind of community and some kind of linked, not LinkedIn, but network with people that are also on substack, you can actually cash in on this. And for me, it works really well because even if you don't have this, you start to notice some kind of authors, other authors that are writing in the same space. And they start to also notice you, like when you start to comment on their stuff. And if they are in the same kind of size, you start to grow with them. And that's so beautiful about it. So, like also reach out on people that are in the same kind of space and then you can grow with them. For me, it was not really hard to get any growth going. Like, actually this is quite surprising how consistent it was because now it also starts to. It tends to pick up. I have about 80 publications that are recommending me, whereas I only recommend five. So this is a good example of I'm producing so much and apparently at a quality that people like that more people are now recommending me than I recommend others.

So now you recognize a few people to recommend. But what if somebody is starting from scratch, right? Like, how do you build an audience? And I tell people this one hack, which you're really shy to do or most people are afraid to do, is just if you have that audience you are in love with, because it can't be that you're passionate about an audience and a topic and you even don't have 10 people. Look at your phone, look at your LinkedIn, look at your email contact list, look at your WhatsApp and find the 10 people who fit that audience that you're passionate about, that you want to write for. And just hit them up and be like, listen, I'm starting to write. Can I add you to my newsletter? I'm not going to spam you. I'm going to add you valuable content about X, Y, Z and like, just see it in the beginning, right? I found that to be valuable. Now, I love this substack thing that you said. We're going to blow you up. You said, right, you've been asking me to do this. And like, you handheld me through Riverside, I'm going to have you handheld me in a couple of weeks after the book launches to go on substack and create. Because I have a lot of content on the book and each chapter can be a long form substack post with a template for a specific action item. And that was the plan is I wrote the book because it was very hard for me to read and write growing up, and it took a lot to write. So I wrote the book in a way that I could read. And so I'm creating a notion with templates to go with each chapter. So each chapter and the associated notion template can be a substack newsletter on its own. And that gives me like maybe content for every week, probably six months or 12 months, right? So I'm going to test this out with you and I'll, you know, probably we'll do another chat and walk through the results in six months and how it worked out, because it would good to have you come back and say, hey, this is how our audiences grew. This is how the newsletter grew. What are some things you're doing outside of referrals from your friends or community members to grow you? Right? Because people follow your content, they share it. You talked about that on LinkedIn as well. You had 60 people who really loved your content. And then when you posted this detailed guide, it blew up 20,000 people. Reddit. What are you doing outside of those referrals, which is community referrals, friend referrals on substack to increase your newsletter following or audience?

Actually not too much. Right. Most of it is happening on LinkedIn. You also have some sub functions where Substack Substack is being hated by Twitter, formerly Twitter, right now, because they created something called Notes, which is like a social network, the same way that it happened on Twitter, except it's mostly authors writing on there. So, like the tone is different and so forth with everything. And this goes again for LinkedIn, for Substack and so forth. The one thing that you have to do besides just creating content is you have to engage with the few people that are starting to engage with you. And that can be other authors, that can be people who are just commenting, do pay attention to them, even though if they don't have big followers and so forth. So like, for instance, I started to have a Discord community as well, right? So like I started to open a Discord and I said, yeah, let's see how many people are showing up. I have a thousand people on my discord, even though I don't offer too much of them. Right? They're just following me. And you will start to notice a couple of people who are just sticking with you all the time. And they might be on the silent side. They're not content creators or whatever, but these super, I think you called them superfans, these super fans are no joke, a hundred to a thousand times more efficient than a thousand subscribers because they will keep referring you and they are just a little bit different than just like other high profile network connections that you have. I'm not saying that you should just like be only transactional about this in any way, but don't discount people just because they don't have that many connections. One of my, one of my most valuable connections in my life is Elena now. And it would not have happened if she did not talk to me when I was a nobody. Because she actually talked to me. She was like, hey, I noticed that you keep coming to my events. And I'm like, yeah, I love your stuff. I'm going to write about it on LinkedIn. Just watch me blow up. And now it happened, right? So it's, this is the thing just, it goes a little bit back to what you said, but in order to really drive stuff, you should also go on other formats, right? What is a thing that you can do that has a big chance of creating a super fan? I strongly believe that you also have to put yourself out there not only on your own stuff, but also in podcasts, on other people's stuff. You co write, you just offer people, hey, I can also write content for your blog and that kind of stuff. This also creates again like a win relationship and you need to learn on how to talk about it, right? So, hey, my name is Leah. I write on Leottage.com, like I have a podcast. You need to learn how to pitch your stuff in a way that is quite clever. So instead of saying that, oh, I'm a really cool pilot, you can say I was flying from there to there, which kind of already implies, okay, you're a pilot. Do you know what I mean? So like it's about you have to learn how to pitch your stuff without saying that you're doing it all the time. And that's also something that I just had to learn. Like you just the proof is in the pudding in the end. And this is what you are doing. If I make the company successful, then it already implies that I'm an advisor in some way. And then I can just spell it out. But go on different podcasts, go on different blogs, go to meetups. I love this thing that you also said, go to local events. People underestimate local events hard even though because they think, oh, it's only 50 people joining, why should I do this? If I could just go on LinkedIn and post to 10,000 people. You're strongly underestimating how physical presence really is important for some people. And if you create this one super fan in there, which you definitely do with time, they will stick with you forever. I've met great people on the platform and yeah, I think it's all about them in the end as I researched.

More and more and what that is 1990 rather. And it was a concept also written about in 2006 by Charles Arthur and I gave him credit in the book and I showed the graphic about it is in any community, 1% are your top creators, your super fans, 9% are your occasional contributors and 90% are pure consumers. And that's okay. Build it for the super fans like, I mean, treat your super fans like gold. Give them swag, give them autonomy, give them authority, give them a voice. Reward your champions, basically, and they'll be more inclined to spread the word. Now if you look at Atlassian, what happened with Atlassian's community, 5,000 people self hosted events last year, right? That means they've got 5,000 super fans and that is 1% of their community in many ways, right? Because if you look at it, atlassian has probably 200,000 customers or something like that, right? So that's it works out in that range. How do you enable these people beyond that is the key. So I'm excited now for you to take the next step. How many people? So you got 37,000 followers on LinkedIn, how many on substack right now?

So on LinkedIn I have 37,000 right now actually from today on Substack it's about I think 14 or 16,000, something like this. I don't check the numbers daily, but it's about 16,000. So by the end of the year, so another three months I think it will end up on 25,000. And then next year I'm going to try, try to scale it to a hundred thousand. That's the goal.

And the majority of adding more value through free content and your friends and community members sharing it. I love this. And what I like about Substack also is people can communicate with one another in your community. Is that true?

How does you have a Chat, which is just for your community. So you can go into the chat and then you can just. Right there you can also trigger whether the only paid people can actually interact with this. Chat did not work that well for me, but it really depends on what you want to do. But you have different tools there. But it is almost like the typical medium blog structure where you just have an article and people can also respond on the bottom of it. And yeah, it seems to just work really well. It's like it allows people to interact with each other. And if you want to have cross blog communication, which is more Twitter, then you go to the notes portion. And what I love about this is that let's say you read an article on substack that you find fascinating. Like this one quote that moves you really deeply. You mark it with your mouse, you right click and then you say restack. And then it creates this beautiful kind of snippet that it posts into the notes of like of substack notes with a quote and everything. No graphics program necessary. It's just, hey, Lloyd said this particular thing. Here's what I think about it. It's beautiful. And this also creates credibility. Like for me, oh, I found something really interesting from someone else's substack and that kind of also works really well. So this kind of thing is building on honesty quite a lot. Because if people don't reward this, then like, why should I even post about it? So you cannot automate this. You cannot run a language model over this either. It starts to become really difficult. You have to provide actual value through substack. And this is why I love it so much. It's probably the same on Beehive, but in the end, at some point, once you start to grow big enough, all you have to do is create good content. As crazy as it sounds, the first thousand subscribers are the hardest, as usual. But at some point you're so big that it's really just about the content. And this is really a dream stage to reach for me, definitely. I mean I can. This is paying for part of my rent and I think in two years it will pay my entire rent and then some.

That's why, you know, wanted to bring you on about this specific topic. Right. A lot of people can't relate to a Mr. Beast or can't relate to a NAS Daily in the sense, although they started somewhere really small and obscure and they consistent data over time. It's hard to relate to nas Daily or Mr. Beast for somebody who's just starting out because they're so polished today, right? But you are at 16,000 subscribers on Substack and 37,000 on LinkedIn. I'm at zero, let's say I can relate. It's not a platitude anymore, right? It's beyond. You've gotten very deep. And now I want to shift from, you know, we went through how you built the audience, we went through how you started building the community, how you seeded it on Substack. And I love the whole concept of Substack because it's your blog that is interactive and also lets people communicate with you, right? So now you own that audience. It's not just a passive blog, but people are subscribing and so they're getting emails. So that's the next thing. You said, the chat's not working really well. And then you talked about Discord. And Discord is now actually key phase of building a true blue community, right? So you have the audience. Substack is to me, audience plus one. Because you have a community going. People are sharing and connecting you to people. But still that audience to audience interaction is not happening with that level. Still you communicating with people, them sharing audience to audience interaction is not happening at that frequency. So you started a Discord. Tell me more about your journey to starting a Discord and how that is working out. Why did you even do it?

So my Discord community is very small yet, I mean, with a thousand people. And I did not put too much effort into it, but it also was a very good proof to me that I can actually move people around if I want to, because start to follow me, which is also really cool. So the good thing about Discord is let's imagine Discord is something like Slack without a company behind it. So this is really good, right? So for those people who have never used Discord, I have my own channels. You have your own, like, roles are easy to give, right? So that kind of stuff. And it is much more of an open space of it's much more personal. Nothing happens in there without me saying something about it. Right. I also allow people to post their own content there, promote your own stuff. So they can also use my kind of network around this. I did not have to ban anyone, I did not have to scold anyone. I did not have to delete any message or anything. This is just my little community and it's not very active. I'm going to work much more actively on it. But fundamentally, what do I use all these kind of different channels for when I create my courses on Maven for Instance where I give a product like roles course on B2BE, I post it on Discord, I post it on substack, post it on LinkedIn. And wherever people are, there is a chance that they see this and they're like, hey, you know what? Yeah, I might go now. Let me see whether I want to actually pay for this particular course. And then I learn more about product like growth in that example. And it's not so much about the V the amount of people, because a community of thousand people is not big enough for anything unless it's a community.

Of a thousand super fans.

Exactly. And it's not a community of a thousand superfans yet. But this is the same as with what are good conversion numbers. A good conversion number is 5% is not good if you are trying to convert enterprise customers, but it's a very good conversion number if you try to convert B2C consumers, for instance. Context matters a lot. I don't need to have a million followers like some really big LinkedIn stars, but it's enough that I'm talking to about 20,000 senior executives. That's crazy, right? This number is crazy that I talked to 20,000 senior executives in all kinds of tech startups that are dealing with plg. What do you think my monetary power is for anyone that builds tools for these particular ICPs? And this is the other plan, right? This is how I monetize now my podcast. I'm reaching out to people who have exactly my kind of listeners and my kind of audience, my kind of ICPs, because for them it's not oh, I pay you $5 per thousand impressions. For them it's hey, I pay you 5,000 if just like 500 of these people are listening to the message and your recommendations about us. And that's like where this all comes together. Because I don't want to give up my reputation for something that I would not recommend myself because that's my capital. That's how I got the superfans. And they don't want to be advertised by someone that does not believe in their product. So it all comes, you know, wherever you are.

What I like about this is a few things, right? A lot of people focus on building consumer communities. Ultimately I feel like we're in a people to people world, right? Generative AI has the same as now, you kind of know four, five, six months in what is being purely copy pasted from ChatGPT, right? And even if you look at there's so much hype about generative AI. Oh, AI is going to eat the world. Yesterday's innovation is always tomorrow's commodity. From the Japanese manufacturers who almost commoditized Harley Davidson and then they rebuilt the company on the ethos of community. And today Harley is an iconic brand to, you know, what was the first wave of tech as we know it?.comcompany.com company. We don't say.com company anymore. Everyone started saying cloud cloud cloud company. In fact, you know, in 2014 we called the community cloud factory. You changed it to traction. Then you know, social mobile people saying social company mobile company. People will no longer say AI company even. Right? Yesterday's innovation is always today's option and tomorrow's commodity. But if you build a community, you won't become a commodity. The connections are human to human. So I find this really funny is people, we can't do this. The consumer communities are taking off, but people in business won't consume the same way. People in business are still doom scrolling on Instagram and on TikTok.

Yeah, and this is, it's not just about that, but let's imagine the following, right? So two years ago I had to make the decision that hey, I do not understand company financials as well as I do now. So what did I want to learn? I wanted to learn about personally about, okay, how does a company work? A startup beyond, okay, here's how much funding you got and here's how much options you got. Really understand how do company financials work. And I spent $10,000 on a one week course on a very prestigious community or like school to just get a certification on an executive level. So I can have conversations with other CFOs. You can go today on Substack and subscribe to some financial blogs that are doing. I think one of them is called one on one investing for instance that just teach you everything about investing in a quality that absolutely blows your mind away with a consistency where you also know the kind of teacher for free. And that's the thing where I'm talking about this is not just about the format does not dictate like the depth of knowledge or whatever. Like it's not that on TikTok there's just girls dancing on beaches and you know like taking 10 second selfies on this? No, you have actual business topics on there. Now do I want to learn about the funding story on TikTok about a company? No, probably not. That's not me. But you can actually learn on substack how to run a company, but from one particular creator in your kind of expert feed much Much, much better than some of the stuff that I actually learned in university. There was a study coming out the other day that the requirements for certificates from universities have reduced by 90% in the last three to four years. And this is a sign of this that companies are starting to understand, okay, this is a skill based economy, another certification based economy. And this is why I think this kind of movement will still continue to going on. Because if you start to notice that someone is not telling you something good, then you're not subscribing to them anymore. How do these schools and how the university work? Like signed up for the entire three year deal and then you were in it whether it was good or not. And I'm not saying that everything about university is bad. I'm just saying this kind of system is sales led. It's not how it's supposed to be. Right? If I'm in Zurich and I live there and I go to university for three years, I kind of have to keep going. I kind of just said, yeah, you know what guys, I'm unsubscribing now and actually week I'm going to go to Berlin because I want to have my PhD at the end. That's problematic because you are incentivized to stay in there and they're not incentivized to give you good education. So they're just like spooling down their kind of material. This is why I have a strained relationship right now with this kind of stuff.

No, this is epic. And you know what I liked about this conversation is we touched on multiple things, right? How do you build your audience, find your voice? How do you now create content for that audience? How do you expand that channel to start turning that audience into a community? We identified super fans, we identified different channels, like how do you consistently stay in touch with them? So it's one way plus communication, right? Audience on LinkedIn is just one way with maybe some interaction. But now how do you take that a step further? You need to have a newsletter in 2023. As a creator, I don't care what you say, but weekly newsletter is important. If you don't have a newsletter, it's hard to say you own your audience unless you have such a big following that it doesn't matter. Especially in B2B, owning your audience is even more important. Having those emails and then you start bringing your super fans together through discord. But I'm really excited for you to take the next step because one of the things I discovered is anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you start to build stronger connections. So the journey of daily posts, weekly podcast, weekly newsletter, daily discord chats is great, but then can we do a monthly meetup and test it out? Can we do an quarterly retreat? Can we do an annual conference? I found that anytime people come together in person, you incite or you bring on or you engage more senses than sound insight. And anytime you do that, you build stronger bonds and genuine connections. Because imagine this, you and I now have been on the phone for two hours or online for two hours, right? And we've known each other for four or five weeks. Imagine we're doing this in person. We'd probably have dinner together, we'd hang out more. It'd probably be several, right? And so then when you do that on cadence, through meetups and in person experiences, community just explodes. That's kind of what Mr. Beast, that's the he's taken and that's the route, you know, like Atlassians have taken. That's the route Saster has taken. Jason Lemkin went from being a Quora writer to now one of the largest conferences for B2B software on the planet. And so I'm excited for you to take the next step in your journey. Leah, thank you so much. Tell us all about where we can follow you and find you.

If you want to hear anything about senior leadership or product led growth or how to scale your company in a no bullshit way, actionable and also tailored for B2B into the details and very honestly, then you can go to my website. I hope it's going to be in the show notes. Otherwise it's my first name and last name.com so Lea Darren dot com. And yeah, you can find my podcast there. I'm giving courses on Maven, whatever your poison is. But whatever you do, please check out my guide. It seems to be resonating with people and then you can decide whether you like me or not.

You know, I'm going to say this very cheesy thing right now. What did Pink Panther, you know Pink Panther? You're from a generation where Pink.

I do, yeah, of course, yeah.

What did Pink Panther say when he met Leia?

I don't know.

This has been great. Awesome, Leah, this has been fun. Thank you so much.

I need some traction.

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness, 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomena. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at. Boast AI that's B o a s t a I blog.