ep.10 - 36 hours in ATL planning 2025 community efforts

You think I wanna fall in love when I'm not, babe. You want a life as a wife, but that's not my thing. You be at home all alone looking at the frame. I'm just gonna tell you straight, baby, I'm—

Good morning, vlog. I'm at the airport. I'm headed to Atlanta for literally 36 hours and headed down to go meet with Brianna Holmes, my right-hand woman, all things Torque. operations. And we just got to sit in a room, um, and, and, and really figure out the next Q1, Q2, Q3, whole year planning. We're really going to focus on Q1, Q2. We have so much going on. You know, I think one of the things about remote work and one of the things I'm gonna— I've been trying to balance is like keeping my sanity with all these meetings. And I'm running too hot with these meetings. And Brianna and I meet only like 30 minutes a day and Man, I just messaged her and I was like, can I just come down? Um, and let's just get, you know, get where we're meeting at the gathering spot and just get in a room and just like crank out some of these initiatives.

So that's what we're doing.

We're here. Mom's driving me around.

Woo!

Uh, off to get coffee because, uh, I need straight to my dome. 'Cause 4 AM wake-up was early. Got vibes, got jams going.

There you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even know who this is. Sounds great though. All right, it's pretty much become a habit for me now. Pretty much wherever I'm at, we gotta grab coffee. And you look no further than So I kind of pull from, again, like the, like, run club communities, like, or like CrossFit, or like, what's like the common denominator is that everybody suffers and they are bonded by suffering.

Okay.

So what is, what is, what is the thing in our industry that everybody can be bonded over that suffers? Its common denominator is a job search. You know how to do it. But you need the accountability. And so I think, what if we could be the accountability for the job search? And so by the end of this program, you will feel confident through your job search process. And this could be for people, it could be just for people on the job search, or it could just be for anybody. You still listening, gentlemen? That last few minutes might have been a little— So basically what I want to do is like when it comes to the Discord, I want to create levels and kind of like signal to people like, hey, This badge is for like the top 1% of people who comment or the top 5%. We can figure that out. But it's like, basically, like if you have something by your name, you're in the top X amount. So you can like, we can start signaling that, right? So we create kind of these things to get people more engaged. It's just honestly, I feel like it's like low-key Girl Scout, Boy Scout type vibes. So yeah, that's kind of my thought. So what are your thoughts on that?

Obviously, we can't do first adopters because, you know, the Discord started a little while ago, but we could do early adopters. So people who were amongst some of the first 500 people.

Yeah.

People who have logged in and participated daily for 30 days, we can give them like a daily check-in badge. Um, a community builder, so we could give that badge to people who start engaging in discussions and help onboard new members. So like Jeff, for example.

Yep, shout out, shout out Jeff Jesse for For sure.

We could do a tech— what does Apple call their— the Genius Bar?

Yeah, the Genius Bar.

We could do something on that line, along that lines, with people who are answering technical questions regularly.

Yeah.

Um, we could do a meme lord.

A what?

Meme lord.

Oh, meme lord. I like memes.

So someone who keeps it like the server engaged and entertained with really quality memes. Um, Event attendee. So people who have participated in 3 community Discord events. An open source advocate. So someone who's sharing useful open source projects or resources. I think there's so many of them. A content creator. So someone who's sharing insightful blogs or videos or guides. And then a verified engineer. So someone who's proven their expertise in a specific technology.

Yeah.

So there you go.

I think the next thing to talk about is content architecture. When it comes to like, we want people to join the Tor platform, right? And I think, again, I still pull off like the Soho House model or the Gathering Spot we're at now where it's like, like I'm with you, but like I can't access all the amenities, right? So it's like we need to kind of think of, okay, all of our streams are public, all of our micro content is gonna be public, but then it's like the— like where do we house like the how-to vlogs? 'Cause like one thing we gotta talk about too is like we gotta start putting all my job search content that I've written for the last 4 years. But in my opinion, that needs to be, hey, like you need to be a part of the Torque Discord or the Torque community, AKA the platform, to get access to those. But it's like, where does that live? Like, are we, like, I don't even know if we can put written content on the platform for people to access. So that's something to think about. You know, once we start doing like, you know, what I would love to do in an ideal situation is like record, you know, a lot of these mentor-mentee sessions and have them for people to access as well. But obviously I don't want that public as well. Like, like I want people to want to join because I want people to have a sense. I think, I think when you give a lot back for free, I think it's great and we're going to do that. But I think you want people to be Be like, okay, cool merch, cool content, cool videos. Like, kind of have a suite of stuff for people to access.

I feel like the York Pass content, how-to videos, Minty mentorship stuff should all be behind the profile, and then ambassador content, vlogs should be public.

Yeah.

And blogs are public.

And blogs in general, blogs. Yeah, like, like basically when we write We transcribe stuff from Guidance Counselor 2.0 or Blank Spaces, whatever.

Yeah.

Back in the hotel room, 7:30, it's early. I'm tired. I haven't slept well the last few nights, but that's neither here nor there. Great dinner tonight with Brianna. Great day with Brianna. Covered a lot of things. Very happy with where we got to today, just about the future of what the Torque Community team looks like for the rest of this year, going over some pretty key metrics and kind of some, some numbers and getting a little mathy tomorrow, which I like in a way, even though I took pre-algebra in college. But yeah, great, great day. Great dinner tonight. It was good catching up with her. Just really excited for what's ahead. So early night tonight, up tomorrow morning. Got coffee with Kelly Vaughn, so it'll be good to see her. Going to my favorite coffee shop in Atlanta, Rev Coffee. And then back in the office. Got a busy day tomorrow. Another sales call. Had another sales call today. Then we have the Unghosted series is back with my guy Alicia Novin where we review resumes and LinkedIn live. And then back to the airport and back at home to see the fam. So it's time for bed. See y'all tomorrow. Good morning. I got a great day planned. We are heading to coffee with Kelly and then up in Smyrna and then Ubering back into town. I'm heading downtown to go work with Brianna for the rest of the day. Gonna be a great day. Excited. Let's go have some coffee. It's gonna be great. Hi, how are you? All right, we are back at the gathering spot waiting on Brianna to get here. Fantastic conversation with Kelly Vaughn this morning around career stuff, where she's going, where I'm going, where we're taking the team. I got Siri talking to me in my ears. Um, you know, just exciting stuff. Great cold brew. Gonna get some work done this morning. Got a lot of work to do this morning, um, to finish out some Q1, Q2 planning, and, uh, excited for this. Excited. Like, you know, tip top of the funnel, you've got, you know, the general public.

Yeah.

Then you kind of one layer in, which is like the Discord Um, you know, maybe not a Torque member. And then you have like Torque member Discord, um, go to— goes to events, um, where's— wants the swag, where's the swag. And then there's the professional community, which is even lower on the pipe, which we probably need to eventually start building out like things for them specifically, whether it's like an in-person activation that we're only doing for like toward professional community members, or we develop some sort of like, you know, you know. I get what you're saying. Yes, again, kind of like working that way.

So yeah, so basically professional members. So once you've accepted an offer—

Like, what do they get from us? The, the people who are on billing for us are the people— I mean, at the end of the day, are the people who make us money. So it's like Realistically, they should have the most perks in a way, right? So it's like, but again, for, for us and where we're at in our journey building a community, top of the funnel brand awareness was like, is, is, and is gonna be the priority. But just so we can start mulling stuff over, I think, you know, what does that look like? And then Jason had this idea, is like, I think, and, and the more I'm learning about LLMs, it's interesting because People are building some like really cool stuff with it. And I think one of the things that we can do in the Tor community, especially since we're trying to really be the leader when it comes to staffing AI initiatives, is literally just bringing people into our Discord and just having them share what they're doing with LLMs. Because like I was talking to Kelly Vaughn this morning about it, it's like, you know, I heard about this example from a podcast I listened to. Like, it's Group Chat. And this one guy, Dee Murphy, he has 2 kids in LA. And like, this is a great example and I confirmed it with Kelly, so this is correct. But basically he's like, I want someone to write an LLM who scrapes everything and for like on, on the web or whatever, or builds something to where I know all of the kids' summer programs in LA when it opens, when registration opens and it signs up for me. So like, do it, like if, if we can start showcasing that stuff in our Discord, Like I think that'll be a great way to build community AI because I think everyone's just. I mean, I think like AI is like a wonderful opportunity to like really show off what you're building. And so if we can foster that type of environment within our community, I think it'll be special. All right, Thai food. Thai food acquired at Comfort Thai. And we got. Bree, where are we going? Atlanta Tech Village.

Village.

So I'm finally here at the airport early enough, and there's actually a lounge in the area that I can take advantage of. So we're at the Delta Lounge. I don't know if you can see, like, place is nice.

Nice.

Anyways, eating some food, catching up on some work for about 2 and a half hours. Again, Brianna, you're wonderful. I had an amazing last 36 hours. My head is spinning with ideas. Pumped for the future of where we're going. And excited for 2025 with Torque. Let's get it.