ep. 06 - building the torc community team to reach 1M devs

All right, so this first meeting we're about to jump into, it's with RGP Partners. So RGP Partners is, I believe they're basically like a recruiting company specifically for LATAM. And so one of the initiatives with Torque is that like we want to build community, we want to hire people from Latin America. So Brianna and I are looking to hire 2 2 individuals part-time to join our community team. So the first one we're looking for is a video editor to help with all podcast streaming, virtual panel streaming, and basically taking these streams that we do and chop them up into social media form, right? 30 seconds, 45 seconds. You know, one of the things I'm really passionate about is like, you know, a lot of companies go out and hire creators. We don't need to hire creators at Torque because we have so many people creating content. I'm creating content, Jason Torres is creating content, We're gonna have another individual that we're gonna bring on that's gonna create content. We don't need the content creators. I'm hiring them. What we need is like the video editing side of things, right? The biggest thing that I'm trying to get across is basically I want us to be like the Barstool Sports of like job search content. Now, not the raunchy stuff. Not the raunchy stuff. We're not gonna be doing crazy stuff. But when it comes to creating a media company with Torque, right? So like you have some of your favorite podcasts within the Barstool Sports umbrella, right? Um, and that's what I want for Torque. Like, the way Barstool Sports is the antithesis of ESPN, I want Torque and Torque content to essentially be like the antithesis of the staffing industry, right? I want us to take care of people. I want us to have meaningful content. I want us to produce engaging shows, right? Livestreams. So that's what I want. So we're hiring a video editor. And then with all of this content we're about to produce, we're gonna need somebody to help coordinate all this content. So we're gonna hop on a call with them to also talk about an email marketer/social media coordinator, kind of do both. We're starting both out at part-time, then we're gonna scale 'em up from there. I feel more comfortable from a budget perspective and, um, just from a management perspective, starting people out on a smaller budget to make sure we're intentional in building the team. And then obviously as we get more, uh, more need for them, we'll obviously scale them up full-time. So about to hop on that call right now. Uh, again, we are looking to grow our team drastically in 2025, especially on the content front, which I'm pumped about. Let's break down the first part of this role, which is kind of the email stuff, right? Brianna needs a bunch of help with that. So Brianna, what are your thoughts on, you know, what are some questions that we could ask or screen out, or what would you want to see? I'm assuming writing samples. Writing samples. Given the information that they know about us, what kind of list would they create for our— to optimize our email sends? So for example, right now we have 5 different markets that we are trying to reach once we get I think you nailed it, Taylor. You sneezed. You sneezed. Bless you. Clark's about to get here. Super pumped. Clark runs That Conference, the That Conference circuit. He's driving through town so I figured hang out with him, catch up. You know, I always love talking with Clark. I think he's got a really unique view. I think Clark understands individuals at a very human basic level. What I mean by that is he understands How people operate and, and, and how people want to connect, right? And if you've ever been to that conference, you understand, like, Clark's events, there's just this, like, really real feeling of connection, this almost this family type of vibe. And so I always love connecting with Clark, just kind of yapping it up about, um, the, you know, conferences and the future conferences and where it's headed. So pumped to hang out with Clark. Evolution in the music. Got us moving way out in the crowd. Evolution of the blueprint. Got us moving way out in the— So, Hema, you know, really excited for this call. So, Hema is an individual I met down in Guadalajara. And I'm interviewing individuals to join our team. And kind of the way I view our team is like— So again, there's the platform team which is kind of the sourcing recruiting arm. And then there's the community team and then there's a content team, right? So RGP Partners content social team over here producing meaningful content. With the community team, I want individuals. So we have Jason in the US, we have Nikita in India, she's on maternity leave right now, and then, and then Hema. Uh, fun little fact, I actually hired Hema, believe it or not, from this call. But so Hema, um, I, I'm, I'm looking at Hema to potentially be our kind of our Mexico a community lead, right? So like, you know, I'm looking for individuals in Mexico who are like very dialed into the engineering community, who know kind of where the spots are, the conferences to go to, the meetups to invest in. And so I met Hema at the conference we went to in Guadalajara, JSConf MX. So excited to talk with her and see if it's a fit because when I met her, she was just so lovely and excited to potentially bring her onto the team. Alrighty. Had some calls to hire potentially some more community evangelists to my team for 2025. Worked on some more admin stuff. Caught up with my guy Clark Sell, who runs that conference. Had a great conversation with him. And yeah, just busy, busy afternoon. I'm about to hop on a call. Here in the next few minutes, looks like we're going back down to Guadalajara. I really got to work on my Spanish. Need to download Duolingo or Duolingo, whatever it's called. I need to, I need, I need to work on my Spanish. This French ain't cutting it. So have a call about potentially sponsoring a big conference down there. Pretty pumped about. Got to book my tickets anyways. Alright, so about to catch up with my guy Jason. Hopefully. He didn't accept my invite. I had to move it. But anyways. One of the problems in the community space is that like, not even a problem, kind of misconception but ain't a problem, is that like community is like, oh, you just like talk for a living. You just kind of do stuff. And it's like, that's true, but what we're trying to do is solve the problem of like, okay, what is actually good community person look like, right? What are the requirements that need to be done? What activities need to be in place to get to our goal of bringing people onto the platform? And so Jason and I are gonna hop on this call to solve that problem— not to solve it, but to put more emphasis around this problem and put some guidelines. So he did make the call, which is good. So we're gonna go ahead and— I'm here. Go ahead and jump on it now. What's up? Come on, handsome little bastard. Don't, don't say anything weird. Let's jump right into— I want to talk about this community job description. If this is like specific JD for the role, you want to narrow it down to like saying those numbers, whereas if it's community as a department, then you would say like, yeah, we want to have A stream of some kind every day. We gotta get— we gotta get a twerky. That, that's ridiculous. That is absolutely absurd. That is a wild twerky. I didn't make that. Somebody in the community did. And what's cool about that is, again, the community is having fun. Like, they're excited, they're making jokes. Like, this is the place that people want to hang out and do that. And it worked. So that was cool. So right now, while someone's just re-architecting the Discord, shout out Katie Hall. for helping us. Um, Kelly Vaughn's sister, um, uh, you know, she's helping us put a lot more framework around, um, who's coming in. Because again, like, I mean, we have over 100,000 people on our platform, you know. I'd love to at least get 10% of that onto the Discord, right? It— yeah, I mean, 10 minimum. And the thing is, it's like more than that 10% is going to be interested in what we're doing in the community. But then I guess really, if you think about it, you got— you have social media up here, and then like, like, like, this is the funnel, right? Social media then goes to torque.dev, right? Social media awareness, top of the funnel, then to torque.dev, and then you spit out to Discord. Right? And then again, so social media, like let's just say this gets a, you know, a million impressions plus, right? And let's say the conversion of that is whatever to here to sign up. Once you're going to sign up, you have your email community, right? How many people actually respond to the email? Then you push them down to the Discord here. But even with the email, then you also have the blogs as well. That we're eventually gonna do. So yeah, I would say that's it. All right, so great call with Jason just now, kind of talking about, you know, again, what's going on, um, from a community perspective. About to hop on a call with Ken, Ken Collins. He's the VP of Product here at Torque. He's Mr. AI. He knows so much. He's passionate about product development. He's very technical. And what I've realized is like community really touches both product, talent, and sales, which again, which is why I think like finding somebody— I mean, I'm not tooting my own horn, but like finding a head of community, especially in the talent space, is a unicorn role because you need somebody who's held, who has held a head of sales title, who knows social media really well, who knows how to drive conversions from social media and who knows the actual business of talent matching. So again, very grateful to be here. But pumped to hang out with Ken. We have weekly meetings now, talk about the product, how to get better. You know, we were talking recently from the Mexico conference, like watching people try to sign up, it took them forever. So like we're iterating on stuff like that. So trying to make the product easier to use for the user. On camera, we're gonna be filming some. Anything we can do to help you, at least right now, help build in public would be great. That call with Ken, a lot of information. You know, it's— so both Ken and I— so Ken's VP of Product, he and I are both under the community umbrella. And so, I mean, Ken, it's really cool to like work alongside Ken. He's got a ton of product knowledge, but also a ton of community knowledge. And so, you know, we— one of the things we were just talking about is like the messaging of emails. And so I was literally about to message Brianna So that's one of the main reasons why I hired Brianna. So need to get us all in a room to try to figure out tone, phrasing, right? Because you got to think about it for us, and this is what Ken and I talked about. There's like the tone from like the Torque side, which in my perspective is like strictly towards like, you know, engineers and tech folk, which in my opinion is like a little sarcastic. Think like, like shit— Shit's Creek. Yeah, it could be Shit's Creek. Or new girl, kind of sarcastic, kind of fun. But then you have like more of the professional vibe from Ronstadt. You know, they're a big gazillion-dollar company. There's gonna be a different tone with that, right? So we talked about that. So, you know, we have started to set up email campaigns, but not a ton. So I gotta message Brianna so she and I can get in a room with Ken to start hashing that out. So. A lot of stuff. Crazy day in the office. 4 meetings like back to back to back to back. My brain is mush. Great conversation to start out with Jason, who helps head up the kind of US community side of things. Talk about top of the funnel, the leverage of, of content into the Torque platform, into Discord, kind of where does Discord sit in the process. I talked to the head of product, just everything going on, voicing when it comes to emails, who's sending the emails and when. Then obviously talked to head of sales around leveraging content for social media to bring in leads. Talked about just having meaningful conversations and kind of separating ourselves in the market. And yeah, so next week, Thanksgiving this week, and then next week we are off again. We are back on the road. We are going to Commit Your Code conference. It is a charity conference. All proceeds go to charity, which is awesome. That is run by the great Danny Thompson. So excited to go there to Dallas. First time in Dallas speaking. And then we are back down in Guadalajara for 48 hours to Posadev, which is really the meetup of all meetups. So they do it every year. We found out, you know, again, talk about building community. Just start somewhere. So excited to get to that meetup. It's all the meetup members and communities from in Guadalajara kind of converge and they hang out. So it's gonna be a 1-day conference. I think there's like 70 talks. I'm not even speaking. We're just down there. To break bread. I think we're going to host the, uh, happy hour Friday night for the speakers, the speaker dinner. Um, so super pumped about that, super pumped to be back down in Guadalajara, and, uh, excited ramping up for 2025. Let's get it!