The Exchanges

Q know, a big topic for startups these days. I've heard everything from a newsletter is a community, uh, you know, having an audience on Twitter is a community. Um, how do you, how do you think about audience building? Like, what, what are maybe, like, what is your playbook? What is maybe common mistakes? Um, that's like five questions all at once. I'll let you kind of pick the one

A Uh, so I'll tell you one thing, right? Like audience is different than a community. Insta influencers, they're all audiences. People have newsletters, they're audiences. That's great. The community is where members or people, uh, the audience interacts with one another without the, the sort of influence, key influencer involved, right? So like, I think audience to audience interaction is very important for community and that strengthens the community and that keeps them coming. Uh, but if you have a great audience, I think the next step is how do you drive that audience to audience interaction? So for us with both, actually, we really didn't intend to build community. What ended up happening was we were having challenges, uh, trying to get people to listen to us to buy our service. And we were scraping emails and making calls and it was just really hard. And so we're like, you know what? We have challenges. We've been failed founders. Let's start pizza nights. What is, who's our ICP? Our target market is, is a founder or CEO of a technology company. And this is like years ago, man, five, six years ago when like community wasn't even cool. And we started hosting these pizza nights on specific topics related to challenges. The first one, 10 people showed up, and then every time it hosted, more and more people showed up. And then one day the coworking space is like, guys, you have…

AI assessment note: “audience is different than a community... The community is where members or people... interacts with one another”

Q all worked out. Um, but, so, Mike Require, um, what, like, how would you build the community, or what tips would you give me, or what, um, would you share? Because I'm sure there's other listeners kind of in the same position. Like, okay, I got, you know, an audience. I have, you know, passionate customers. How should I be thinking about this from, like, step one and step two?

A Definitely. So the step one, like I talked about, right? Practice or product community. I still think, despite you have a great product, I, and the product community, there's a need for that. How do we use micro acquire? How do we, how do we find better companies, success stories on how I found a company to acquire and scale it? You need all of that. You'll have that. But I still think the long game to become like a forty billion dollar company like the HubSpot is building that community of practice. So I think it starts with identifying who your ideal buyer is. Where do they eat, breathe, drink, sleep? And, and what does success look like for them? And then start with one thing. I know you have a Facebook group and you have a fantastic following and great content on, on, on LinkedIn, but I would start with that. Would you say that meetup was successful?

AI assessment note: “it starts with identifying who your ideal buyer is. Where do they eat, breathe”

Q think that's, that's a, that's a key quote you should, you should trademark right away. Um, so you got, you got the startup, um, boast, um, you know, how did you get your first customer? Like, I probably already know the answer. You leveraged, Um, I'm assuming your community, but can you walk me through, like, what was that journey, like, from, like, zero to, like, the first, like, million?

A We just cold emailed and cold called a ton of people, and, uh, and I love it. There's, there's no, uh, you know, you see, um, I was an EI when I started the company. My co-founder was jobless, and we had to kill what we eat, and, and, and, you know, this is, this is a known unknown secret to bootstrapping. If you want to bootstrap a company and you have no, no, no money whatsoever. Right, and to build a product. Go and get 10 customers to pay you for a service that you deliver behind the scenes Wizard of Oz manually. Customers want an outcome anyway. They don't want a piece of software. Get them that outcome, then use the money to, to automate the things you did manually and push out the product, right? Like, you know, if I wanted to build a marketplace, I would facilitate 10 transactions manually, like a broker consultant, and that's what we did at Boast. We did like the first several clients manually, and then And we started saying, hey, what are the manual touch points? What am I doing right now? Oh, I'm collecting a lot of data manually. Well, can I do integrations to pull that data in? Oh, then what's next? I'm doing workflow. Can I build that? Uh, you have data and you have workflow and you have a lot of that going on with how do I automate it at scale? Well, then you can apply machine learning. So that was, that was a good way to bootstrap is manually sell. I think I'm a…

AI assessment note: “We just cold emailed and cold called a ton of people”

Q you there. Um, I guess, you know, I know we're, we're kind of coming up to time here. Um, you know, this has been like so much good advice on just community building and just, you know, first thing to do when you're, you know, getting coming off the ground. Um, what, what are some other like, you know, key principles that like you operate under when you're building companies?

A Definitely. So the first few frameworks I learned the hard way and also following great people like yourself and Jason Lemkin, Mark Robertson. And so the one thing is I'm, I hate reading. It's not that I hate reading, but I was never really good at it. And so I'm like, I'm not, I'm not against learning. So two ways for me to learn was learn by doing, take on tasks and keep doing it. And so as a founder, I have this disgusting habit of being an IC. A lot of the times I've done everything from SEO to email blast, everything myself, and then interviewing lots of smart people like yourself twice a week. But the frameworks one, I think the key frameworks when building a company are that are indispensable is one It's really important to have great alignment. Great companies have great alignment, right? Like your purpose. What is that forever? Your vision. Why do you exist? What will the world look like because of us? How do we do it? Your mission. And then how do you behave? Your key values. And I think this is really, really important because it comes back to bite you, right? When you're poor and you can't afford it, You compromise on values, but as soon as you start making money, if founders or execs are not aligned on the same values, like maybe one person is not transparent, but the other person believes in supreme transparency, it never works out. It causes like undue friction l…

AI assessment note: “the key frameworks when building a company are that are indispensable is one”

Q We're just starting from scratch and you just had to, would you start with a pizza night? It's like one thing.

A Yeah. So let's, let's walk through it. I feel like building a community is no different than building a company and all the stuff you talk about, right? Like on, on your LinkedIn is identifying your ideal customer profile, solving one thing, doing it really well, nailing it, then scaling it. But walking through it, I'll tell you my, my first experience with community, why I'm so passionate about is I was a refugee of the Gulf War in Kuwait. When that Gulf War happened, everyone in the country, all the leadership just peaced out. And so the community came together to rescue the people, to get the people out of the country. And, and for me, a community is like one person raises their hand. They have a problem. Few other people have the same problem. They come together to discuss it and then they keep doing it on a cadence and it sort of grows. And then my second big experience with community was the first startup I joined in product was a very small startup. And I was tasked with like figuring out how to grow this thing. And this is like 2006 when digital marketing wasn't a thing and it was all old school. And everything I learned about digital marketing was from HubSpot's inbound marketing community. They started doing all this digital content and courses, and I, I got better and better at it. And then I started to implement that. And I, and our company at the time was ranking n…

AI assessment note: “I'll tell you my, my first experience with community, why I'm so passionate”