Community Led Growth: Iconic Brands & Raving Fans, with Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI

I mentioned before Lloyd Lobo. Yeah, he's the co-founder of Boast AI. He bootstrapped it, grew this business to more than 8 figures. He's a long time, as I mentioned, a top-rated mentor at FI, also mentors at Techstars. Yeah, and they raised $30 million Canadian in Series A before Boast launched a $100 million debt fund to finance R&D. And he's asked me to keep the intro brief so that he can focus focus more on the actual topic for today's session. So with that out of the way, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Lloyd, to take it away.

Definitely. So I gotta reshare those slides, right, as a PDF?

Yeah, yeah, however you wanna do it. Yeah, down there at the bottom.

Awesome. Hey folks, super excited to be here. Long-standing Techstars, or rather Founder Institute mentor. Know a lot of folks around Founder Institute, Sunil Sharma, Martine, and Austin. Lots of love for, the Founder Institute group. Awesome. So here today, I'm excited to talk about community-led growth, 12 rules for building iconic brands with raving fans. As you know, right, community in 2022 is taking center stage at organizations across all industries. Traditional marketing techniques like ads and email and whatnot eventually reaches a saturation point, right? And product features are starting to differ very little. We're in the age of SaaS and anyone, and SaaS and no-code, and anyone can literally copy a feature set and build a product. So a thriving community today can be your single greatest asset by acting as a force multiplier for your business and also enabling you to stand out in a fragmented market. But building and nurturing this community takes time, and today I'm gonna talk all about it with examples from some of the biggest iconic brands on how they built and scaled communities. So, a little about myself, my life in startups, part of a number of venture-backed failures, then bootstrapped Boast and was successful. And what I learned through that journey was businesses, you know, they're chasing the almighty dollar, right? You're chasing the, I want to raise money, I want to raise money, I want to raise money. but ultimately your customers, they don't care about software, they care about an outcome, right? And your goal as a founder, especially in the early days, is to understand your customers and deliver that outcome by any means possible. Also, what I realized is in startups, right, success really means, did the founders make money and did the employees make money? There's a lot of talk around, oh, raise VC money, this company exited. You know, an exit that's an acquihire, in my view, is not a success. It's great in terms of experience. So it's important to keep that in mind as you're going through your journey in building a company, is should you raise and should you not raise, who you should raise from, and what kind of partner you're looking for. If you have questions around fundraising and whatnot, I'm happy to share, answer those as well. So anything like bootstrapping, fundraising, not only limited to community building. Feel free to ask them at the end and we'll take those questions. Awesome, so, you know, after being a part of a few venture-backed companies and seeing them fail, like Speakeasy, we had 10,000 users, the company failed because it wasn't at product-market fit. Boast was predominantly grown by building this community. We started, you know, we sold to founders and CEOs. So what Boast does is, You know, there's hundreds of billions in government funding for R&D, but it's a cumbersome, manual, broken process, and it takes a long time to get the money. We automate that. And in the early days, we were just me and my co-founder working out of his spare bedroom, and nobody would talk to us because back in the day, it was done by the Big Four accounting firms like KPMG and whatnot. But as failed founders ourselves, we said, "Hey, you know what? The best way to build clout with these people is maybe," to start building a community, right? And share advice, share knowledge. And we're like, founders don't just want funding and R&D money, they want other things like how to get to product-market fit, how to get growth, how to validate, how to make first hires, how to get mentors. So we started hosting pizza nights, and every time we'd host these pizza nights, more and more people would show up, and eventually we had 200 people show up to the coworking space where the pizza night was being held, and they kicked us out. They said, "You can't do this anymore." And that evolved into a conference, and today over 110,000 email subscribers. We host 100 events a year. We got almost 3 million views on our YouTube, et cetera. And this community ended up giving us a flywheel to bootstrap the company to nearly 8 figures in revenue. And then when we were 8 figures in revenue is when we raised our first round of funding. So I'm gonna share some examples, not from just, not just my journey building a community-led company, but others like HubSpot and Gainsight and whatnot, right? And so over the time I've built this philosophy or developed this philosophy that, you know, if you build a community, you won't become a commodity. I started the conversation by saying it's so easy to build product today, right? What is your biggest moat then? There's no, we're in the world of no-code and SaaS. Anyone can spin together, a product, an MVP, and leverage ads or email and push it out. So what is your biggest differentiator, right? And if you look at history, yesterday's innovation always becomes today's option and tomorrow's commodity. Look at the GPS, right? The GPS was an innovation. You couldn't get your hands on it. Then it started becoming an option in vehicles that was very expensive, and today you got Apple and Android CarPlay, and it's a commodity. But if you build a community, you won't become a commodity. And so I'm here to talk a little bit about that, is fall in love with your customer and make them successful beyond your product or service. Now, with running Traction, being a founder, being an angel investor, I get a lot of people reaching out for advice and I feel like everyone's looking for a growth hack, right? Like Hotmail got 12 million users in 18 months by adding, "P.S., I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail." and Airbnb jumpstarted growth by cross-posting to Craigslist. So everyone's looking for a growth hack, and I feel like this is the era of community. Literally the number of searches for community-led growth is just trending upwards. The number of VC firms and incubators, accelerators asking me to come and talk about community is on the rise, right? And if you look at it, Airbnb CEO changed his title to CEO and Head of Community. You saw just now Figma was acquired, predominantly a community-led company. Salesforce, huge focus on community. Peloton, Canva, some of the fastest growing community companies not only leverage product-led growth because product-led growth, yes, you use your product to grow and sustain, but then the community that you build around it helps you create this moat because you build strong relationships with your members. So everyone's jumping on the community bandwagon, And the first thing I tell people is, you know, for all the flak that Elon gets, you know, this quote by him is great in that, "Don't reason with analogy. Don't do something because somebody else is doing it. Boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there." And so ultimately what that means is success is one or two things done consistently well over time, right? What are the three most key ingredients to driving a successful business is engagement. If you keep getting users that are not engaged with your product, that is the leading indicator of retention or anything else, right? If you get a user, a lot of people say, oh, you drive retention, but if you don't have engagement, you're not gonna get retention. So drive engagement, get them to pay for it, and grow that cycle, and you'll be successful, right? And the reason why I bring that up is because a lot of people ask me for community, and then they say, oh, when can I see the ROI? Can I see it like, "When will I be able to see an ROI? 2 months, 3 months?" And I tell them right away, if you're looking for an ROI, a quick ROI from community, don't do it. If you do not have the DNA in your founding team for giving first, do not do it. Do not build community. There's faster ways to grow. You can pick up the phone and dial for dollars. You can start swarming events. You can cold email. You can maybe run some ads for getting early validation. You can leverage your network referrals. Don't do community if you're looking for quick growth. Community is like a labor of love and it's a marathon of the mind. It takes a long time. And if you look for a quick ROI, your community members are going to think you're trying to sell them something and they're going to fall out, right? And so that's why I put that there is like ultimately, if you're looking for revenue growth, figure out the best way to get your customers come in the door, make sure they engage in your product, and grow that cycle, right? And so then, hey, when it comes to growth, what are some signs that you're not ready to grow yet? Two things I learned from the companies that I was part of that failed is one, no ideal customer. You have to have in the early days maniacal focus on your ideal customer profile. That means one kind of person coming to your product to get a specific job done. And the second thing is poor retention, meaning anytime they need to get that job done, they need to come back to your product. If you don't have an ideal customer and that ideal customer doesn't keep coming back to your product, there's no engagement, don't invest in growth. Like my company Speakeasy, it failed with 10,000 users, right? We got 10,000 users and it still failed because these users were not engaged. And so we invest more and more money in getting users, but it was empty calories of growth. They would come, it would feel good, but they were not engaged, right? But what if you don't have product-market fit or retention or engagement? You don't even have a product. Community can definitely help you get there before you even have a product. Like with Boost, right? We built this massive community before we even had a product, right? A community-led model can help you with product, with sales, with success, support, marketing. It can help you create this flywheel. And I'll give you some examples, right? So I'm not sure how many people of you have heard of Gainsight, but they defined the customer success category and it was acquired for $1 billion by Vista Equity, right? And what, and the other company is HubSpot. They create a whole category around inbound marketing. I was like just out of college and I had joined a startup in product, but it was a small startup. So I had to learn everything about digital marketing. And back in the day, there was no digital marketing. Everything was offline. And so I started Google searching, how do I do SEO? And how do I send email marketing? And everything that came up was from HubSpot. And, you know, HubSpot created this massive community around inbound marketing. And if you see today, HubSpot, you know, at peak, it was worth $40 billion, right? And HubSpot's one of the, OGs of community-led growth. They created, they leveraged community to create a category, right? Gainsight did the same thing. It's not a novel concept. What is customer success? It is proactive customer support. And at the time, Gainsight didn't even have software. They started bringing together people and educating them on the benefits of delivering proactive customer support, how to engage your customers, how to support them so they don't churn. And today it's one of the fastest growing professions. Gainsight was acquired for $1 billion and customer success is a huge category. And then if you look at it, not only does community help you create a category, but it helps you create a movement because then it eventually becomes something bigger when even your competitors start, even your competitors start supporting the same mission, right? Like Nike, Nike doesn't sell shoes. Their mission is to support athletes, right? And Apple is helping people become better creators kind of thing, right? That's their mission. So before we jump in, what I found through my experiences studying all these communities is what are 6 traits of a great community, right? It's like, if you look at Peloton, for example, you hop on the bike, you are connected to other riders. In that community. You're autonomous, right? Because you're in charge of your own destiny. Nobody is micromanaging you. You have a shot at mastery, meaning every time you increase the speed, increase the intensity, you are getting better and better and better. The fourth thing is purpose, right? And purpose is great. Great companies, great communities are built on great purpose. And that great purpose with Peloton is better health. Energy because you've got a leader there at the front. You've got great music to pump you up. You've got the energy of people around the room energizing you. And then the last thing is recognition. Every time you get points or rewards or badges, and I call this the CAMPR framework: connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy, and recognition. And if you implement this in your community, in your company proactively, you will build a long-lasting community, long-lasting company for life because people want to feel connected, People want to have autonomy. They want to get better and better at what they do. They want to be connected to a great purpose, right? They want to feel energized and recognized proactively. So how do you get started to build a community now from scratch, right? So let's start there. So step 1 is start with one type of community. So what does that mean? There's a few types of communities. There's community of practice. Community of practice meaning you're bringing people together who share a common goal about learning about a specific field. Like Traction is a community of practice, become better entrepreneurs, or become better scaling entrepreneurs. Founder Institute is a community of practice helping entrepreneurs launch successful startups. HubSpot Inbound is a community of practice, better, become better digital marketers. Gainsight is a community of practice, become better customer success professionals. When you're starting out, I tell people start with a community of practice because you don't have a product. And even if you have a product with a few users, if you start building a community about your product and keep talking about your product, people will just think you're trying to sell to them. Then when you have product-market fit, you can eventually build a space for users to ask questions about your product, share insights with each other, and stay connected with your company. But start with a community of practice to begin with. Right? The second thing is align around purpose, great purpose, right? Great companies, great communities are built on great purpose. An example of this would be this framework that I have from MAP and FIRE here, right? So start with like your purpose is your forever. Why do we exist? Your vision is what will the world look like because of you one day? Mission is how do you do it today? And the values are how do you behave, right? So with Boast, we help companies get R&D funding, but our purpose was not that. How do you evangelize people around that? Our mission is to help innovators become successful and change the world. Every dollar spent in innovation returns more than 20 to the universe. Vaccines, robots, clean drinking water is a function of innovation. But in the last 15 years, more than 50% of the Fortune 500 evaporated. Because they weren't able to innovate fast, and 90% of the startups also die, right? And so our mission is to help innovators become successful. Our vision, as a function of what we're doing, we would have accelerated innovation in the world. How do we do it? By providing R&D funding and the resources through our Traction community to help innovators become successful. And your values is how do you behave right now, right? It's community, it's transparency, It's teamwork. And these things are important because you gotta go on the soapbox and say it day in, day out, right? Communication is one of the top skills to have as a leader. It's not a one-and-done activity, right? Clearly articulating and communicating a vision to excite, inspire, and motivate people is the most important skill. And you gotta do this day in and day out because people who are excited, inspired, and motivated can move mountains. And more so in a community, right? Because you have volunteers doing free work. For you out of the love for the purpose. And so you gotta evangelize them day in, day out. So it's very important to have this for not only your community, but for yourself as a company. Because when you have this, a framework like this on the wall, it's not lip service, by the way, because you use this to evangelize investors, early hires, customers, and then it's a framework for when you grow as a company. Like Boast went from 2 people to when we were 8 figures in revenue, we were 30 people, now we're 130 people. So it's very important that everyone is aligned around this, right? Great communities have great alignment. The third thing is serve one audience exceptionally well. I talk about this a lot in the earlier part of our conversation. Focus gives your messaging clarity that lifts every conversion, right? So when we started Boast, we focused on the startup market, entrepreneurs market. Now let's say we focused on also manufacturing and agriculture, it would be very hard for us to build a community around those people. Because we focused on founders, then we were like, okay, where do these people eat, breathe, drink, sleep? What are the key outcomes they're looking for? What are the tasks they're trying to get done? And how do we help them become successful, right? And we were able to map this out. It's like our ideal customer is a founder CEO of a tech company. Who do they fund? Meaning what are all the tools they pay for? MongoDB and Salesforce and HubSpot, et cetera. Who do they frequent? Meaning what blogs they read, what magazines they read. Maybe they read TechCrunch, they read VentureBeat, Betakit. Who do they follow? All these VCs and entrepreneurs. So we create lists of these people around the ICP, and then when we started hosting events, webinars, et cetera, we started inviting all these influencers around the ICP to come to our events. And then when our ICP would attend these events, they're like, "Oh, I feel at home," right? Like, "Oh, of course I follow, you know, CEO of Twilio or, you know, Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint and, you know, TechCrunch, Frederic from TechCrunch is interviewing them and all these people, like, I know they're my tribe," right? They feel welcome. Like, you know, it's like hosting, building a community is like hosting a party at home. If you invite me, to a party at your house and I show up and I open the door, no one's there to greet me, I gotta hop through a bunch of garbage, and then I see a bunch of strangers, I'm gonna leave in like 5 minutes. But if I show up and you welcome me, you pour me a glass of wine, you introduce me to other people, then I go in and I see, oh man, there's other founders, there's influencers, there's VCs, I'm more likely to stay 'cause I feel welcome, right? And so that's why it's very important to focus on one ICP, 'cause you can map the circle of influence, and then you can build relationships with all of them, because those influencers, when you have relationships with them, and you do activity with them together, that influences your ideal customer profile and builds your brand there, right? And third thing, fourth thing is set aggressive goals, whatever it is. Like, you know, that means maybe increase in engagement in your community by 10%, week over week or increase in subscribers, whatever it is, set aggressive goals once you have product-market fit, right? Product-market fit meaning retention. Rule 5 is nail it, then scale it, meaning you can build a big company, a big community by focusing on one customer coming through one channel, consuming one offering, right? A lot of people try to do too many things and then they fail, right? If you do one customer, one channel, one offering, you can be quite, quite successful. And there's this quote by Peter Thiel, which says, "If you can get a single distribution channel to work, that's great. You have a great business. But if you try several and don't nail one, you're finished." Right? So it's really important that focus not only lifts your conversion, but also helps you scale in a big way. I do another talk on 11 ways I bootstrapped to 8 figures. And in that, I have a slide which talked about the phases of a startup, and the same thing works for a community. What are the phases? Phase 1 is validation. What is validation? Let's say you're a B2B SaaS company. Validation is you get 8 to 10 people to try it out, right? To pay you and try it out, preferably. And there, you don't have product-market fit if you get 10 people to pay you to try it out, even if they're paying you $20K. You have message-market fit. And there you're doing everything founder-led. You're reaching out to people, you're cold calling, you're cold emailing. Then the next phase is product market fit. At validation, when you have that validation, you could probably raise a seed round. Next is product market fit. You expand that from like 8 to 10 customers to maybe 50 customers in the B2B SaaS world. And at product market fit, you're optimizing for only one thing, engagement, mainly retention. The outcome is retention. But the leading indicator of retention is engagement. Are these people, are you hitting your north star metrics? Meaning, are these people using your product with the frequency that's needed for them to get value from it? So that means if they need to do certain actions in your product on a certain cadence, whether it's weekly, monthly, they're doing that, right? The next phase is product channel fit, meaning you figure out one repeatable, scalable channel to acquire customers. and that could be sales, it could be community, it could be marketing, whatever it is. Once you have that product-channel fit, then you can invest in scale, and at scale, what you're doing is you put 75% of your effort on putting fuel on fire, one channel, you know, adding more salespeople, expanding the community, whatever it is that's working, and then 25% of your time you spend on trying new things. Now, where I see a lot of startups and communities fail is when they get to scale, they immediately try new things and try to scale those new things. But you know, when you, when you get to scale and you want to try new things, you got to go through that same pattern of let's validate this channel or this new market or new product. Let's get it to product-market fit. Let's figure out a repeatable, scalable way to grow it. Then let's put fuel on fire. Right? Awesome. Anyway, I want a sidebar. So, you know, so going back to the Peter Thiel comment of nail it and then scale it was the rule, one customer, one channel, one offering, right? And so then here, start with one and do exceptionally well. So let's say you have your community. Now you can do any number of things. And a lot of people come and ask me, oh, you know what, should I start a Facebook group? Should I start a Slack group? The world doesn't need the 10,000th Slack group or Facebook group. Figure out one white space for your community and deliver one piece of value to them consistently well. We started with in-person events. We would host pizza nights, and every time we'd host pizza nights, more and more people would show up. They'd bring their friends, and we did events for a long time. And then we would take those recordings from those events and post it to our YouTube. Now our YouTube has 2.5 million views, and then we turn turned a podcast, but for the longest time we just did events really well and that helped us grow to 110,000 subscribers. Those events eventually became 2 live webinars a week in addition to in-person meetups. So start with one thing and do well. So how do you prioritize then what to do, right? There's a number of things. There's this framework in product called RICE, which is reach, impact, confidence, and effort. And what that really means is anything you try, map out how many people it's going to reach and how it's going to reach them. If you don't know how many people it's gonna reach and how it's gonna reach them, don't do it, right? And so like, if you look at it, hey, what do I prioritize? Do I prioritize community versus hiring SDRs versus SEO? Figure out like, what is the overall reach here? What is the impact to your business? What is your confidence in it? And then what is the effort involved? Now the community, maybe you're an early-stage startup and building a community to generate any ROI for you, maybe a 1, 1.5-year effort versus hiring one SDR may generate results or picking up the phone and calling or sending cold emails may generate early-stage results. In like 30 days. So then you want to put your sales development efforts as priority one and your community as maybe priority two. You still do it on the side, but know that it's a long-term game. Many times as founders, you need to have an instant gratification. What do I need to do to keep the lights on? This is what we did at Bose. And what is the long-term play that if done consistently well over time, the compound interest will make it massive? Awesome. So rule 6 is get users to an aha moment right away, value from the first interaction. You know, Clubhouse is more or less dead, but what I liked about Clubhouse when they first started, and maybe I shouldn't give this example, but I wanted to talk about their onboarding, is they had great onboarding. When I joined Clubhouse, I was instantly clubbed together in a room with friends of mine from Saudi Arabia and Dubai and the US, and they didn't even know each other and we got in this engaging conversation and midway through I'm like, do you guys even know each other? They're like, no, but Clubhouse somehow knew we were friends and put us in a room together. And so I think it's very important to think about that onboarding experience. I talked about it a few slides earlier that think about it like an in-person event. If I invite you to my house and you got to jump through a bunch of garbage, no one's there to greet you and you meet a bunch of strangers, you're gonna leave, If I invite you to my house, I pour you a drink, I introduce you to people, there's other people like you, you have great conversations, you're more likely to come back and bring your friends as well. So it's really, really important to get your community members to their aha moment right away. Everyone's looking for that, what's that wow thing? How do you wow people, whether you, with your product or with your community, whatever it is, and community is a product in many ways. Rule 7 is incorporate multiple senses to delight. So right now we're sound and sight, right? Science says anytime you incorporate more than 2 senses, you'll start building stronger connections. So that means taste, touch, smell, in addition to sound and sight. That's why we did in-person events. And I find that anytime— we just did a big conference in August. There were like 1,100 people. We capped it at 1,100 people. But like just the fact that there were people eating together, breaking bread together, hanging out, drinking together, built stronger relationships. People stayed long. Now here we are on for an hour, but let's say this was an in-person event. I'd probably stay 2-3 hours. We'd probably hang out, have a lot more conversations, right? And so it's really important as you build your community thing and the activities you do in your community to think, what can I do to incorporate multiple senses? To delight my audience so they keep staying engaged and bringing their friends. Rule 8 is involve your people. That means, you know, everyone wants a soapbox. Everyone wants to feel like a leader. And Founder Institute has done a great job of it. They have ambassadors and community leaders in different parts, and they give them the opportunity to host their own chapters, give them the soapbox to host events like this. So involve your people. Everyone wants to help and they want to create value for the community as well. So enable, be the matchmaker to enable your community members to create value for each other, right? And that will help your community scale. 9, reward your champions. We talked about this in that CAMPR framework. Recognition and reward is really important. Otherwise, people just feel like, hey, I'm doing a bunch of free work. Thank people. Send them swag. We have these t-shirts that I'm wearing right now. It says, "I love it when you talk data to me," and we give that out to community members. So, you know, figure out something that will enable others to feel connected to your brand and create a ritual around it, be a part of your community. I get stopped all the time on the road. It's like, "I love you when— I love it when you talk dirty to me." No, it says data, and then it sparks a conversation. So create something that people love wearing and sporting, right? Rule 10, make your community sticky. And what that means is the more I engage, the better it gets, or the more I engage, the more I were to lose if I were to leave. An example of that is Instagram, right? Your new followers plus your investment in your identity makes it sticky. So what that means is the more followers you have, the more engagement you have, it is sticky and you likely won't leave. Or like Evernote back in the day, the more moats you add, the more value you get, and it's hard for you to leave because now you got to take all of this stuff and migrate it somewhere. So think about it like, how do I make it sticky? Rule 11 is show up consistently. Doing things with cadence builds depth and trust. And what that means is, you know, probably at the start of the pandemic, we had maybe like, I don't know, maybe 30,000 subscribers or something like that. And we decided, I had a conversation with Noah Kagan and he challenged me to grow it to 100,000 subscribers. And one of the things I did was started hosting 2 live webinars a week and rain or shine, or I had COVID and was hospitalized during that time and we got some community members to host it, but rain or shine, during the 2 years of the pandemic, we did 2 live webinars every week. And every week we would add thousands of people because now the speakers would share it, other, Audience members would share it and more and more people would join. And, you know, in the 2 years we grew from like, I think, 30,000, 40,000 or whatever it was to over 100,000 subscribers. So showing up consistently, ultimately success is 1 or 2 things done consistently well over time. And to do that, consistency is the key, right? And the last thing is measure and monetize. We talked a lot, probably early on, focus on user growth, focus on engagement, focus on retention, or in reverse, focus on engagement, retention, and user growth, and ultimately engagement is the leading indicator of retention, and if you don't have retention, you can't invest in growth, right? And this is from Dave McClure, it's this sort of pirate metrics he calls acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral, but what that really means is how do you find people, How do you get them to try it? How do you get them to stay? How do you get them to keep coming back? How do you get them to pay? And how do you get them to bring their friends? That's the way to think about it. Break it down one by one, right? And if you can't even find people to try it out, then you can't even say that you have a critical mass enough for engagement, right? So there's no point in tracking engagement or onboarding. Then just focus your energies on finding people to try it out. You got enough people to try it out, but they keep leaving, then figure out, hey, what can I do to activate them, to get them to stay by delivering a wow experience? If you've delivered a wow experience, but they still don't come back, then think about, hey, how do I get them to keep coming back? Once you've hit those things, then you can think about, hey, how do I get them to pay now? How do I get them to bring their friends? So you got to be very deliberate by breaking down your analytics versus like, just thinking about it as a one blob. Oh, somebody signs up, somebody leaves, right? Just break it down and then you can focus on the problem at hand. You, you're basically breaking the problem down to the most fundamental truths and reasoning up from there. This is a problem of I can't find enough people, or this is a problem of I'm finding people but they're not having a good experience when they even try it, or They come, but there's something that's, they don't become a repeat attendee or user, or you know what, they keep coming and they're enjoying, but for some reason they're not inviting their friends. So then you can break that down and think about, hey, how do you enable some of those things to drive success? Awesome, and this is a quick takeaways, right? Start with one kind of community, Have great alignment. Serve one audience well. Pick an aggressive goal. One kind of customer, one channel, one offering. Get people to an aha moment right away. We talked about incorporating multiple senses to delight people, involving your community, rewarding your champions, making, adding things that make your community sticky, right? The more, basically mounting loss, meaning the more you were to lose if you were to leave, The more you use it, or accruing benefits, the more the community gets better, the more they use it. Showing up consistently, doing one or two things with cadence consistently, one over time, and then being maniacal about measuring and improving. But ultimately, don't forget, right? It's all about your customer and fall in love with them and make them successful beyond your product or service. That's what we did at Boost, right? We were offering R&D tax credits, to fund R&D of companies, but we really focused on helping these people become better entrepreneurs through content and connections and resources, because if you build a community, you won't become a commodity, right? Awesome.

Awesome.

That's all I had. I'm gonna stop.

That was an awesome presentation. Yes, super, super information dense. Yeah, so I know Lloyd has a hard stop. He's got another webinar or event he has to jump to. We're at the top of the hour here. So we have a little over 10 minutes hopefully to do some audience Q&A. And yeah, we wanna try to actually invite you on stage. Now you don't have to come on stage if you don't want to, but yeah, we wanna try to make these as interactive as possible. So specifically, this was a talk about community. So we're gonna prioritize questions that are about community. So I'm gonna invite this first community-related question. And Mare, if you don't wanna come on stage, you don't have to, but we are just showing like the questions live here. And if you want to, yeah, you can activate your camera and mic and sort of ask your question directly to Lloyd if you're able to.

How's it going, man? Good, good, thanks for asking. I don't know if you can see me. I think the camera is on, but something's up.

Not just yet, but we can hear you.

How about now?

Now I see you. How's it going?

Good, good.

Thanks for asking. So my question was about building a community that is also compensated. So I mean either referral bonuses or some sort of profit sharing. Do the rules still apply and is the behavior different in this case?

So define that for me, building a community that is compensated. How do you mean by that?

Uh, let's say that you want to increase the user base by referrals.

Right?

So there's gonna be a referral bonus there, or you want to sell, uh, through a third party, and you might allow other people to sell for you for profit share, but you still want to keep them inside your boundaries and will act as they are a community.

Does that work? Yeah, I mean, there's no harm in it, right? But the thing is, at the end of the day, before you try to heavily Monetize, focus on adding value to them, right? Because the monetization will always follow. If you jump to monetize in the beginning, from my experience, what I found is people just think like you're trying to sell to them. Because there are so many such communities, right? There are so many, so many communities where they're like, oh, you know, people are going to think— basically, people don't want to be sold to. So just be careful of that. But if it's a win-win relationship, like maybe it's a community around partnerships where it's like you're helping them become successful and achieving some goal and they're getting compensated. I don't see anything harm in it, but like maybe if you can, we can take this offline, you can email me or something and we can define the use case and dive into it deeper, would be better. I was just in Romania, by the way. I spoke at, uh, at Techsylvania in Romania in June.

Great.

How did you like it? I like— I loved it. And my co-founder at Boast is also Romanian, so good to hear that. I was in—

hey, thanks so much. Yeah, thank you, Mare, for, for, yeah, coming on stage and asking your questions. Um, yeah, others in the chat who have, uh, questions related to community, please, uh, drop them in there and we will, um, ask away. One question that I sort of have, I think it could be maybe somewhat related to the question that was just asked, is sort of how you're thinking about tech and community, Lloyd. Yeah, your camera also turned off here just a second ago. I know it did that earlier, but yeah, you mentioned like we obviously, I think a lot of founders are sympathetic to what you said, like we don't really need more Slack channels or Facebook groups. Those are, you know, everybody has so many of them, but what I was thinking maybe, Mero, was kind of alluding to is, yeah, there's a lot of talk, especially in the Web3 world of sort of compensating, I guess, community or building economic, I guess, incentives around community building. And just what do you think is coming down the pike in the next decade and maybe the ways that founders will build community or the kinds of platforms that they might use to do it? Do you think it's gonna change a lot?

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a lot of cool things coming, but one of the most important things is, I shared the fundamentals of community. Right? Community is nothing new. It's age-old, right? I was a refugee of the Gulf War. The security from the whole country had lapsed and the people of the country came together to evacuate the country, right? I was probably 8 or 9 and every building became a sub-community. What is community? Somebody has a problem or has an aspiration, they raise their hand, they look around, others say, yes, we have the same thing. They come together to solve this problem, right? Or if you look at Harley-Davidson in the '80s, Harley almost went bankrupt. and they rebuilt the company around the ethos of community. They started creating rider clubs, and now if you look at it today, the company is worth $10 billion, and it's one of the top iconic brands. And if you compare, you know, there were no NFTs back then, there were no like ways to compensate. So how do people compensate in that community? They wear gear, right? They give away gear, right? Like when I say gear, meaning, How do they create identity around the community? You know, it's funny, you'll go to places and you'll see diehard Harley fans wearing their leather jackets and their bandanas and riding the Harley bikes. That was ways that they would create a ritual or affinity with the brand, right? And so what are these things like Web3 and NFT are gonna enable is they're gonna give brands a way to create rituals and compensation And online.

Digital ways.

Just better ways.

Yeah.

Right, what is baseball cards? Like all of these things, right? So I think, you know, anytime you have a solution looking for a problem, it's a problem. First focus on who is my ideal customer profile? What are the value they're looking for? How can I enable them to become successful by connecting and bringing people together? Over a sustained period of time, then you layer on technology for scale, right? Oh, this thing is breaking. I can't host like 1,000 in-person meetups. I gotta take it online. What is the best online tech? Okay, maybe we do this Airmeet or 2 Zoom webinars a week. Um, you know, uh, I want the community to come together to create something. Okay, how do I compensate them? Maybe we put it on the blockchain and we leverage NFT, or right, just so they can create their identity and it'll be unique to them, so they feel part of the community, and we give them crypto as a way to compensate for what they're doing, and how do we get them to manage like all the sort of, what do you call it, the rules and rituals around the community that's constantly living and breathing, is you have leaders that maybe manage a Notion doc that they edit and so on, right? So the tooling comes after when you're looking to scale something. If you start with tooling, then you lose the essence of building a community, right? If you look at it in the oldest sense, it starts with an audience, right? When the audience comes together, Right? It becomes a community when they—

especially around that identity.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And when the community comes together for a world-changing cause, it becomes a movement. And then eventually, if that cause is unwavering and it turns into fanaticism, then it becomes a religion, right? So audience, community, movement, religion. Right. And today crypto is a religion, right?

Yeah, yeah, it definitely, in a sense, it is. Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's what really interesting. And I love the Harley example because I, I don't know if I knew about them being close to bankruptcy, but in terms of, yeah, an in-person, uh, that created an identity sort of around the brand, yeah, it would be hard to think of one where, you know, you can tell a Harley person by, by looking at them. So, um, anyway, yeah, really, really good example for taking it back to the basics. Yeah, the platform, the tech kind of follows from having those principles.

Process, engagement, then technology, right? Technology is always used to scale things and give you efficiency, right? It's not a replacement for a process, right? If you have no pro— if you don't have a process and you don't have fundamentals, no amount of— every day there's 10 different Slack groups being stood up. Do they have engagement? No, right? Engagement is the leading indicator of building something big. Have engagement, then think about how do I scale it. Then you would like use, okay, I'll bring them on a Slack group or WhatsApp or Discord, or you know what, I'm gonna plan events, so I need Notion because we're going to come together as a community and we need these best practices and they need to be changed and updated and all this stuff. And then, oh, I want to compensate them, so you know, we're gonna put this all on the blockchain and we're going to give everyone identities and all this stuff, right? So start with the process and drive engagement, and then technology will follow, because technology evolves, fundamentals don't, right? The fundamentals of human-to-human connection will never change, right? That connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy, recognition— what brings people together and drives them will never change. The technology to enable that will change, and new things will come. Like, for For sort of before Slack, there were 100 other tools, and before Notion, there was Google Docs. But technology keeps changing and evolving, but the fundamentals of connecting people, the connection, what the emotion, what drives people, never changes. So if you focus on that, technology is like flavor of the month. Awesome. I gotta drop though. Thank you. Thank you so much for hosting me.

Thank you.

This was valuable.

Yeah. People are asking for the replay already, so yeah, we're going to send everybody a replay in a couple days when we have a version up that we can distribute. But yeah, thank you so much, Lloyd. That was really information-dense. I think everybody got something out of the talk, and we'll review the 12 steps again because we went through it really fast. So yeah, thank you so much for your time and for joining us today.

I'm going to drop the SlideShare link to this. I'm trying to find it. I think I have it on SlideShare somewhere. Okay, give me a sec.

Yeah, if you can find it, definitely do drop it. The—

for the— for the presentation, right? Yeah. I don't know.

I—

you know what, if I— if I find it— here, here, I have it. Okay, cool. So I am gonna drop it in the Airmeet so you can at least look at the slides. All right, have a good one. All right, love and peace, folks. Thank you.

All right, thank you, Lloyd. Take care.

Bye.

Bye. Yeah, Elisha, maybe we can pin that Lloyd's message there to the top or something so that everybody can— yeah, go ahead and grab that slide share. All right, so now we're gonna move to open networking in just a second here, everyone, for those who are still with us, which I think is most of you who joined us. So yeah, probably most of you have been here on Airmeet before. Basically best practices practices for using this platform are if you're joining, it's really not all the networking functions will necessarily work if you're not on a laptop or a desktop computer. Chrome is the preferred browser. If you have to join, you're on a mobile device right now, yeah, you probably have to be using the actual Airmeet mobile app. We do have this sort of like little worksheet you can download with sort of best practices for networking, but we'll try to drop that link into the chat too. And yeah, my— I sort of had some prompt questions. I mean, this Lloyd talked about these things in the presentation, but just to kind of get your minds thinking about community as we go into the networking session here. Two sort of context questions you could ask yourself or others you're speaking with is like, where's one place you could look for your company right now in order to find a community, right? There's already people, no matter what kind of community you're trying to curate or build, there's people out there, you know, they're, they're on the internet somehow, or they're in in-person events. Like, where can you look to find those people? And then to go on to the, the question that we were just sort of talking about, the, the sort of tech side, the platform, What is a place that you could use to build your own community, perhaps? And that answer is also different for each and every one of us and the kinds of communities that we're trying to build. So yeah, with that out of the way, two questions to think about. Let's go over to the open networking session and we will see you over there.