How to Create and Run a Thriving Community

It’s something that many B2B marketers out there are a part of: communities. Some are active members and some even think of establishing and running groups of their own. How can a thriving community become your brand’s biggest asset? What do marketers need to do to keep the momentum going?

Join us as we talk to serial B2B entrepreneur and community builder Lloyed Lobo (Co-Founder, Boast.ai) about what it takes to build a great community. Lloyd also highlights the pitfalls that marketers should avoid, how you can add value to members of your community, and how to keep members engaged so that they come back for more.

https://youtu.be/Q54BvD7qmbo

Topics discussed in episode

• Lloyed talks about why he believes that if you build a community, you won’t become a commodity. [3:19]
  
• Some mistakes and misconceptions when it comes to building and nurturing communities. [9:39]
  
• Lloyed explains what “providing value” means to him. [15:32]
  
• Lloyed talks about how to build a community from a grassroots level. [16:59]
  
• What teams can do to maintain a high level of engagement and following within a community so it doesn’t fade [29:12]
  
• Lloyed’s take on metrics to monitor when building communities [32:43]
  
• A status quo that Lloyed disagrees with and why. [35:09]
  

Companies and links mentioned

• Lloyed Lobo on LinkedIn 
  
• Lloyedlobo.com
  
• From Grassroots to Greatness
  
• Boast.ai
  
• TechCrunch 
  
• VentureBeat 
  
• Traction 
  
• SaaStra 
  
• GitLab 
  

SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Lloyed Lobo

Christian Klepp  00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp. Okay, folks, welcome everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies bring people together to create greater impact. So coming to us from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. No. Dubai is not a country, by the way, right? Lloyed Lobo, welcome to the show, sir.

Lloyed Lobo  01:14

Thank you so much for hosting me, my good friend Melissa Kwan spoke so highly of you. And thank you also for taking the time to get on a call with me prior and get to know me better. And you know, we have a lot of things in common. So I appreciate you taking that time as well.

Christian Klepp  01:29

Absolutely, absolutely. First of all, shout out to Melissa, thank you so much for this introduction. Secondly, yeah, the overlap is crazy. How much we had in common. They’re all the parallels like you know, there was a Canada connection in there somewhere. Right.

Lloyed Lobo  01:43

There was a Kuwait connection in there somewhere.

Christian Klepp  01:45

There was a Kuwait connection. I mean, it’s just all over the place. Man. We’re going global. We’re going global. That’s  what’s going on here. Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself but I hav to throw in that Dubai is not a country because so many people keep getting that one wrong. Right?

Lloyed Lobo  01:59

It’s the United Arab Emirates.

Christian Klepp  02:01

Yes.

Lloyed Lobo  02:02

And San Francisco is still home base for me. Toronto is second home base. And, you know, Vancouver is third home base, and where our head office for Boast is in Canada. And then you know, Dubai is a new home. I spent day in day out. Summer I was between bouncing between San Francisco and Toronto over the summer.

Christian Klepp  02:24

That’s incredible. That’s incredible. Well, Lloyed, man, I am really looking forward to getting into this with you. Because this is such a great topic. It’s not only a great topic, I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t entirely understand. And when I say that, I mean, they don’t understand how to optimize it. Right. So what am I talking about? I’m talking about communities. Okay. So you said something in our previous conversation, and it also appears in your bio, and I’m just gonna read it out, because it really resonated with me. Okay. So you said, I’m, in a world where traditional marketing is losing its edge, and products are struggling to stand out. A thriving community is your biggest asset. So here comes the question. Why do you believe that if you build a community, you won’t become a commodity?

Lloyed Lobo  03:19

Definitely. So one of the key things I’ve found, right, we as humans latch on to innovation and technology a lot. What happened in 2000 .com .com. Everything was a .com company. Then came what social, we were all social companies. Then came mobile, we were all mobile companies. And then somewhere in between was the cloud. We were all cloud companies, and carries on and carries on and carries on and today now everyone is an AI company. But why just go until 2000? Why not go even farther back right. What was the innovation in the 80s it was electronics. What happened then, a key incident was the Japanese manufacturers commoditize electronics. The impact was a large brand like Harley Davidson almost went bankrupt when the Japanese manufacturers commoditize electronics and build these cool motorbikes. The Harley Davidson leadership, they stood up and said we’re going to rebuild the company on the ethos of community. Management leaders went out and started riding clubs. Employees became writers, writers became employees. They came together on the ritual of ended up shared brotherhood of riding and the joys of riding coming together on the weekends hanging out. And then they started creating impact by supporting causes that were beyond the profits of Harley Davidson. They were donating to breast cancer and autism and all these causes. That community ended up not only saving Harley Davidson, but today Harley Davidson is an iconic brand right, fast forward some 40 years right. And you can recognize a Harley fan merely by what they’re wearing. What’s really interesting is, as I’m doing the speaking tour, I go to places dressed as a Harley Davidson fan. I mean, what is dressed like a Harley Davidson fan, I wear knee high boots, and I wear a leather jacket. It’s on, it’s on my book cover in my bio. And, of course, I don’t have any Harley Davidson logos on my body. But the first thing people ask me without fail is where is your Harley Davidson. That just tells you it’s an iconic brand. And so what I truly believe, is that yesterday’s innovation, and you can think about it, namely innovation, but yesterday’s innovation, from electronics, to the GPS, to internet, to social, to mobile, and AI. Right, and now AI. Yesterday’s innovation will always become tomorrow’s commodity, but the most enduring brands over time, the most enduring companies, the most enduring cultures were built on human to human connection. If you build a community, you will not become a commodity, your first community is your family. Your second community is probably the people you hang out with the most outside of your family. Right. And those connections stay. Those connections stay with you. Those connections are what forge enduring brands and you look at it in 2023. Marketing is taking a bloodbath. CPMs are up on all these platforms. Consumers are tired, right, even with generative AI now you know if somebody’s copy pasting from AI tools. And consumers are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again of spam, of clickbait, of giving personal data to access crappy white papers. But the best most endearing brands, all along have been built on human to human connection. Like Nike wants to help people become better athletes, you can run with a Nike Running Club, no matter where you are, by downloading their Nike Running Club app and being a part of the running club community. You don’t have to wear Nike shoes. And that’s that’s what I truly, truly believe in is the most enduring brands are forged on human to human connection. So as I was researching for this book, and talk to maybe 1000 leaders, community people, looked behind the scenes of every company, went into deep research, every company that endured, and rewatched all of our traction community content over the last several years. What I found is very, very interesting. Every obscure idea that eventually went on to become a global phenomenon. From Christ to CrossFit. Every obscure idea that became a global phenomena had four stages in common. People listen to you, or buy a product, you have an audience. When you bring that audience together to interact with one another, it becomes a community. Two way communication. When that community comes together to create impact towards a greater purpose, far bigger than your product or your profit, it becomes a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a cult or religion. Audience, community, movement, religion, that’s the sequence. And so if you look at the heart of this, it’s human to human connection, every brand that went from an audience to cult-like, we’re built on human to human connection with community being this sort of jumping pad to that, right. And yes, there are going to be anomalies. But you know, you don’t build a business or a culture, or company, or any sort of relationship based on anomalies. You look at the norm, the average. And that is that is true for most of these iconic cult-like brands is they had community at its core. And that’s why I believe that.

Christian Klepp  09:02

Yeah, those are some really great insights. Thanks for sharing that. We are definitely going to dig into some of those details later on in the conversation. But something you just said is such a great segue into the next question. And you’ve probably come across this. There’s a lot of these misconceptions about communities and probably even some to a certain degree, mistakes that people make when it comes to building and nurturing these communities. So just off the top of your head, can you think of like maybe three to five of these mistakes and misconceptions, and what people should do to address them?

Lloyed Lobo  09:39

Definitely. So one of the first things that I think are a misconception that people have is they want to start a community and they asked me one of two questions very frequently. I want to start a community when can I make some money number one. Number two, I want to start a community, should I start a Facebook group or a WhatsApp group or a Slack group? Or whatever? And asking those questions are like saying, I want to build a church, but I’m not sure if I’m a Hindu or a Muslim, or I’m atheist or Jewish, I don’t know what I am. Right. And I want to monetize is like saying, I walk into a bar, and I’m gonna just ask the first girl I meet to marry me. Which is ridiculous, right? You got to optimize for what? The phone number, then the text? Right? Basically, what you’re saying is you’re exchanging value, and you repeatedly exchange value before the transaction happens. If you’re transactional, it’s hard to build a community, building a community is a marathon of the mind and heart. It’s a labor of love. It’s focused on understanding your customer, figuring out who they are, where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep, what are their problems and goals, but problems and goals are short lived. So what are they long term aspirations and what stands in their way, and then delivering them value in the sequence: visibility, credibility, and then profitability, right? Deliver value, deliver value, and through that you will become credible, and they’ll buy from you. But if you hope to add no value and monetize, or you hope to build a platform, and people will join, then that’s not going to happen, right? It always starts in the sequence of you’re visible people believe that you can add some value, you become credible, because you have added value, and then you become profitable. So that is, you know, I think one and two misconceptions.  The other misconception is, you know, people are jumping on this community bandwagon. Building a community that business or a community is about giving, adding value I talked about. So you got to look within yourself to understand your values, the values of your co-founders. Do you draw joy from helping others, like I believe, as a function of my DNA growing up, right, my mom was born in the slums of Mumbai, I was born in Kuwait. They weren’t educated, they weren’t wealthy. So our summers were spent in the slum of slums of Mumbai, every summer vacation were like eating food to go into the bathroom to watching TV was communal, because we didn’t have enough. There was no toilet in the house. Fast forward a few years, the Gulf War hit Kuwait. And the community came together as a big grassroots movement to rescue people and get them to safety. Right? When there was no Internet, there was no phones, every building became a sub community communicated with the next building, the next building, the next building, word of mouth spread to embassies to countries, and this whole evacuation movement started. And, you know, I’ve experienced the power and the love of community, in bringing people together, right. So I think that is, that is a huge one. And so if you don’t have the DNA of giving, you don’t want to give people and you just want to take, it’s gonna be very hard to sustain in the long haul. Number three, or number four, is do you have a passion for this audience. So we talked about understand your customer, right? Before figuring out the platform you want to be present on, before you build a home. Give value before you take value, which is given before you ask for money. Then look within yourself, make sure that you have this DNA of giving. And these misconceptions are not in any particular order. But make sure you have the DNA of giving. I think that is key. Number four is having a passion for the audience. If you don’t like this audience, you hate your customers, building a business or building a community-led business or building anything long term is a slog, man, your success doesn’t come from showing up when the conditions are perfect. Your success comes from showing up when the conditions suck, but you got to still show up, and it becomes very hard to show up when the conditions suck. And you don’t like this audience and you hate your customer. Right. And so having a love and a passion for that customer that you’re creating for that you bringing together is super, super important.

Christian Klepp  14:55

Absolutely, absolutely. No, those are some really great points and yeah, I’m sorry, you went through that. I mean, like, definitely some humble beginnings there. But I did have two follow up questions for you. Okay, I’m gonna just take them one at a time. So it doesn’t get all confusing. The first follow up question, and you kind of talked about it already. But define for us, in your own words, what value means because you know, value is one of these words that people tend to use very loosely these days. And different people have a different definition of value. So when you say you need to add value to the community, what does that actually mean?

Lloyed Lobo  15:32

It means understanding a customer’s problems and pain points, but also understanding the aspirations and connecting them and bringing them closer to their goals, their aspirations, solving their problems, it means giving them something that is immediately actionable for them, that they can walk away with, and say, Aha, I learned something, or I made a connection, I can do something with this, my life is better as a function of it. That is value, right? Like so if I make an introduction for you, and you were able to get through a hump, that is value. If I gave you a piece of content that unlocked a stuck point for you, that is value. If I invited you to an event where you met some people that opened your mind to an area that you weren’t even considering, that is value. If you learned something new, you made a new connection that were actionable for you. That has value.

Christian Klepp  16:39

Fantastic. Fantastic. Okay, great. So that was the first follow up question. This second follow up question is on the topic of grassroots, and I know you talked about this in your book as well. How important do you feel that is for community building, to start at a grassroots level?

Lloyed Lobo  16:59

You know, I think, you know, my, my book is called from grassroots to greatness, because it’s cover stories of companies that were seemingly obscure, or ideas that were seemingly obscure, that made the journey through audience, community, movement and cult right, they made that leap. And that’s why it’s called from grassroots like starting at the bottom. And I think when you’re starting at the bottom, you got to start by one, understanding your customer. So let’s say you want to start something. And it’s brand new, you don’t know where to start. So how do you figure out? Who do you even target because everything starts with the person you’re targeting, you’re adding value to, you want to help? And so it’s like, do I have the passion for this audience? Because if you want to last long, you got to love your audience. Two, is it a small but growing niche? Right? Three, is there a propensity pay? Maybe? Will they pay me someday? And four, is there an ease of access? Even if there’s a propensity to pay and you’ll love the audience. It’s a massive market, but if you can’t access it, then you can’t do anything there? So I think starting there is is a number one. Number two is understanding your customer, where do they eat, breathe, drink, sleep? What are the problems? What are the goals? What are the aspirations, which is the long term and what stands in their way? Number three is understanding the circle of influence around your audience. Who are the people they follow? Like, this podcast right? You have an audience, you bring people of influence that could add value to that audience and create some social proof in front of them. But then, what do they frequent? Meaning what platforms are they prevalent on? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on Insta? Or do they read TechCrunch? Do they read VentureBeat? So you can one maybe invite those journalists to your events? Or you can distribute your content on those platforms, like on LinkedIn on Insta on podcast? And then three is Who do they fund? Meaning what other tools or services do they pay for? Those are the people who can co-host things with? They can be your sponsors, you can partner with them to do things. Right. So then it’s about understanding that circle of influence. Then after that, you figure out what kind of community I want to build. I understand the audience. I have the passion for it. I understand the circle of influence. What kind of community do I want to build? There’s three kinds of communities you can build. One is a community of practice, where you bring people together to learn about a specific field. Just learn get better at a specific field like the inbound marketing community, or Traction is a community for innovators or SaaStra as a community for B2B SaaS founders when people learn to become better SaaS founders, right, CrossFit is the fitness community people come and learn to, you know, become a better version of themselves get fit. Two is a community of product, where people come to learn about your product, to build on top of your product, to leverage your product to further their business, can be a Microsoft community or a GitLab community or the Atlassian community. It’s all about the product, turning your customers into evangelists. And the last one is a community of play, where people come together to have fun, like the Nike Running Club, or the Red Bull community, or the Harley Davidson community where people come together and have fun, right camaraderie and shared brotherhood around the bike. So then it’s like picking that, right the kind of community you want to build. What I tell people is, if you don’t have a product that’s used frequently, or you don’t have product-market fit, or you don’t have any customers, don’t build a community on a product. People are gonna think you’re gonna sell to them. It’s like a timeshare thing. Build a community or practice or build a community of play, bring people together to have fun around the ideas, or bring people together to learn about the field you’re serving. And as a function of getting better and better at the field, and you helping them become masters at the field. If you have software that enables that field, then they’ll naturally progress to becoming your customers, like Boast our community was traction, was helping innovators get traction on their products. And as a function of helping them get traction on their products. Eventually, they started to become customers of Boast, right, because we follow this path of surrounding ourselves by the circle of influence of the ideal customers. We would invite people to speak who are people that our ideal customers followed, we will invite reporters like TechCrunch and VentureBeat to moderate those sessions. I don’t hog the sessions at our events, I only do on the podcast. And we will invite the people who they paid for other service providers, other tools, as sponsors, or co-hosts for our events. And so that’s it right like how do you dominate that, that circle of influence? And then what do you do is, then you go through the series, like, how do I build an audience? Create content around a white space? For both in the early days, when LinkedIn wasn’t very prevalent, and podcasting wasn’t huge. We did two things. One, we wrote for a local newspaper, a column called Startup of the Week regularly. And we got that column of honestly, through hustle, I reached out to the local newspaper, ask them if they’d give me a column. And they said, No, it’s not of interest. Startups weren’t very hot back then. So I blogged for another regional sort of tech blog. And we drove so much traffic to it through friends through retweets and whatnot, that when I, I leveraged that social proof to follow up with the editor. And he said, Fine, I’ll give you a blog. He give me a blog. I didn’t ask for permission. I said, I’ll beg for forgiveness, because I know it was giving you one blog post, unless you’re doing something illegal. As entrepreneurs, don’t ask for permission, beg for forgiveness, they call the blog startup of the week. Now what happens when the newspaper like post media puts out a blog like startup of the week, it gives the impression that it’s like a weekly award. So that post went viral, I covered a founder, the editor called me a couple of days and said, Hey, if you commit to writing this every week, I’ll turn it into a print column. Now that blog, did three or four things. One, I put a form on there, a Wufu form, where if you wanted to be featured, you’d apply. Number one. Number two, it gave me a backlink for our new website from the highest Domain Authority website in the country. Number three, it gave me social proof that two unknown guys who we you know, have no clue what they do, are now like legitimized by being columnist on the newspaper, and four it was a print column. And I don’t know what it is, but they’re still in 2023. When you’re in the print column, people want to take copies of it and share it right. It’s, it’s ultimate social proof, especially with so many more blogs and the print being a scarce resource. So every Monday at 6 or 7am, the founder is going to the newsstand picking up papers, taking photos sharing with friends. So we did that. But nonetheless, that form would build our list. And we’d invite everyone from that list to then host meetups, small meetups. 10 people on a cadence regularly around specific topics the whitespace was at the time all the events being held were very high level inspirational talks. But a founder has decided to quit their job and start to innovate. They don’t need inspiration, they’ve quit their job, they need tactics. And nobody was talking tactics. So we started inviting, like, founders who got to 5 million or 10 million in revenue. And, you know, could talk about how I got my first 100 customers, how I got my first half a million in revenue, how I got my first angel investment, what’s the right way to hire first employee, when you have no money? Do you do contractors versus like agencies versus like finding interns, all these topics that matter to a founder of zero, or a founder of one, trying to get to the next level, which is five, but they can’t relate to somebody who’s at 50, right? 50 million, because they have a different set of problems. So doing that one, two punch of small events frequently, combined with being a weekly column in the newspaper, had this boomerang effect off each other, our list kept building, we kept inviting those people to the events. And then we were also seated by scraping emails of people who fit that profile. Because once you know that profile, you can just find out their email addresses and email them. And now your email is nothing buy my stuff, but you’re sending an invite to an event kind of thing.

Christian Klepp  26:17

Man, that was a great list. Just give me a second here, because I think you’ve pretty much already answered the question about what B2B marketers who are listening to this conversation can do in terms of building a community the right way. Right. So I think you started out with and people should be doing this if they’re not doing this already, like drafting or writing good content. And when I say good content, that’s content that’s relevant to the target audience. Right?

Lloyed Lobo  26:42

Exactly.

Christian Klepp  26:43

Number two, doing that outreach, whether it’s to media, whether it’s to potential partners, finding that social proof. Number three, and I think you really hit the nail on the head there, hosting small meetups, you know, like starting small, because I think a lot of people when they think of communities, it’s like, Oh, my God, it’s gotta be like a TED talk with like, 5000 people, right? I mean, start small. I mean, like, You guys didn’t start with like, 5000, right? Like, you guys.

Lloyed Lobo  27:08

We still…. still the bulk of our meetups are small 15, 20, 30 person events done on a cadence. And then we do a big massive conference once a year. But you know, think about it, the production value of doing something big, is gonna take a lot of time and energy, right. And what happens is for the whole year, if you do that one event, you’re just promoting that one thing. But that’s like, slaying a golden goose, isn’t it? It’s literally slaying a global goose. And you’re just saying, buy this stuff, buy this stuff. You’re seeing the same message around? What if you said, Come on Tuesday, and meet Christian, and he’s going to talk about how to be a great podcast host and get your first 100 leads through a podcast, and what if you come on Thursday at 11. And Lloyed is going to talk about how you raise your first $100,000. And next Tuesday, Melissa is going to talk about how she leveraged contractors to get to 1 million in revenue, then every week, it’s new content, and it’s fresh, right? It’s a new dopamine hit. It’s a variable reward versus like, the same thing. And then people unsubscribe.

Christian Klepp  28:28

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. On that note, I’m gonna move us on to the next question, which I’m sure you will have no problem answering. Because, man, you know, we’re all part of different communities. And, you know, we’ve all seen this happen, right? If you don’t engage with members of the community, if you don’t keep things fresh, and I think you wrote this in your in your bio as well, these communities will then fade into oblivion. All right, if you don’t keep that momentum going. So just based on your own experience, Lloyed like, what can you do like in give us examples, if you can, give us examples of what teams can do out there to maintain a high level of engagement and following within a community so it doesn’t fade?

Lloyed Lobo  29:12

Definitely. So think of a community firstly, as not this large thing, right? Think of it as People to People connection. And if you can bring small groups of people to understand their pain points and understand what they need, and connect them with that need, and do it regularly on a cadence. That is a good start, right? I can give you 100 things you can do and I can give you fancy things, but you know the best things are rooted in simplicity. And the key there is can you identify a burning need or a pain point? And can you make that connection? So you walk away and you realize like somebody needs investor intros, you understand their pitch, maybe you refine it a bit, and reach out to investors and make one or two connections. So you realize, like, somebody has lost their job during the pandemic, but is a really good candidate. Can you reach out and make some connections? If you find like somebody stuck with this specific sort of business challenge, can you make a connection? Or can you share some advice? Now, we look at community as this massive thing, but it starts with that like understanding the common pain points, and adding value, so they get over that hump. And that’s how you drive engagement, you drive engagement, through conversations, through connections, through content, right? And just doing that on a regular cadence. It’s not about doing one big massive conference a year, but it’s doing things consistently showing up week in week out consistently.

Christian Klepp  30:55

Absolutely, absolutely. And I did love what you brought up earlier about these, like, I guess you can call it whatever you want, but like laser focused micro events, right. So I don’t know if because I’m not in this space. But I guess there are still like the huge events that are going on. I’m not gonna say that they’re entirely archaic. But I think your point was, that’s not the only way. Right?

Lloyed Lobo  31:19

Exactly. I mean, a good cadence would be, let’s say, you do a podcast, can you make that live? Can you invite people to join, so they interact with one another than the host. But then you take the recording, and you put it to YouTube, and you cut it into shorts. And then you take the audio and you post it to podcast, you take the top learnings you create a LinkedIn post, that’s a good way to build your audience, then, you know, you start sending a weekly newsletter to update people, then maybe monthly, you do a meet up in different wherever you are. And this doesn’t have to be big production stuff, you can find out who your superfans are, the most engaged audience members. And give them the soapbox and say hey, do you want to host this, co-host this and you get to invite people, and I’ll invite some people, and you just host it, I’ll pay for the pizza or whatever, right? Or find sponsors, just doing small things on a cadence leads to big outcomes. Consistency is the secret weapon. You know, and so when you are consistent on small actions over time, it leads to huge things.

Christian Klepp  32:31

Absolutely, absolutely. So on the topic of communities over data metrics, right? Are there any metrics out there that B2B marketers can look at if they’re building communities?

Lloyed Lobo  32:43

You know, we have all these metrics, which caused a lot of confusion. And it’s hard with community because somebody comes to an event, then they forward your company name to another person in their company, their colleague, goes to your website, reads the blog, download the white paper, forwards it to somebody else, and that somebody else reads it, requests a demo, and then it goes to sales. Community attribution is really hard because it involves a lot of offline stuff, right. And I think one of the key things, key key key things is to understand the answers to questions, rather than, you know, these buzzword metrics, right, so it’s very simple with any business. Do your customers love you? Do your employees love you? And do you have money in the bank? Right? And so how do you break that down? When it comes to community? Do people show up? Do they pay? Do they stay? Do they bring their friends? And lastly, does it make money? I can give you a whole bunch of like, you know MRR, ARR, churn rate, NRR, are all these things, right? But let’s keep it simple, because we’re community. Human to human is what? Are they showing up? Are they staying? Are they paying? Are they bringing their friends? And are you making money? That’s it. And so, if nobody’s showing up, then why are you focused on making money? Get people to show up? If nobody’s staying, then why are you focused on driving people in because the more people you drive in, and if they don’t like to be there, then you’re going to leave. So make sure you create an environment where people want to stay. Right. That’s how you would follow that, like, solve one thing at a time.

Christian Klepp  34:45

Absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, don’t worry, I wasn’t expecting you to give us a list of like 50 attributes to measure. But um, so I’m going to call this one the soap box question. So basically, What is it in your area of expertise, so that being communities, what is the status quo in this area that you passionately disagree with? And why?

Lloyed Lobo  35:09

I think you know, I don’t know, like community is my passion, it’s my DNA. I think the status quo and community is doing virtual events, building online audiences, everything is online. That is the status quo, right? There’s the million podcast is about to come out. The million webinars are about to come out. The million like, you know, social media influencers about to come out. If you don’t have people’s contact information, you cannot create an environment where you can meet with them one on one, you cannot reach out to them, right? Unless they see your post and decide to register, which is a very low conversion rate, versus like emailing someone or messaging someone. So the status quo is a lot of people want to do virtual stuff. And they don’t think about can I do something in person? Some of the most iconic brands have had in person human to human connection, I truly believe that you need to augment online with offline. Because anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you build stronger connections or sound insight. But have you ever met one of the people you’ve talked to online for ages, and then eventually met in person and it became a bond? I’ll give you an example. I met my wife on IRC. I met my wife in IRC, IRC, and we chatted for months. And then when we met in person were we been dating since our teen, late teens will marry right now. And that’s like 25 years later, like 14 years of being married and 24 years of being together. But had we not met in person you think we’d be married? Probably not. Right? Anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you build stronger connections. So the status quo is do virtual. Everything that’s great is on the other side of risk, uncertainty and difficulty. Doing in-person things are difficult. But love it or hate it. They build genuine bonds and stronger connections. Absolutely, absolutely. That’s such a great answer. And just for the benefit of the audience who’s a little bit younger. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat? Right.

Christian Klepp  37:30

Yeah.  And if I remember correctly, the screen was black. So you can’t even see who it is you’re chatting with. You just see that you just see the text popping up, and then you up something and you press enter. And then you respond. I mean, that was virtual chatting for you like, way back, right.

Lloyed Lobo  37:53

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That was like, basically, Slack was built on the IRC UX in many ways.

Christian Klepp  38:01

Yeah. It does have some similarities. Right. I mean, clearly, it’s it’s an evolved version. Fantastic. Exactly. Well, Lloyed. I mean, we could have been going on and on for another a couple hours, man. But you know, I appreciate the time, you know, but you’ve taken to share your expertise and experience with our audience. So thank you, once again, quick introduction for yourself, and how folks out there can get in touch with you. And please talk about your book.

Lloyed Lobo  38:30

Definitely. So I’m on Lloyedlobo.com, or fromgrassrootstogreatness.com. I write business content on LinkedIn, but more on the personal side of business. So bootstrapping, community building, mental health, founder fitness, Lloyed Lobo on LinkedIn, Double LLOYED on LinkedIn, and my book’s on fromgrassrootstogreatness.com. 13 rules to build iconic brands by leveraging the power of human to human connection. That’s the book and I’ll have an accompanying notion doc on fromgrassrootstogreatness.com/bonus with things I didn’t include in the book, like email templates to reach out and score speakers, or email templates to get sponsors or email templates. You know, for, you know, you name it, or like Excel templates to organize things, things like that, right, like, templates that will give you ideas to action, from audience building, to community building, to creating movements and cults. And with backstories, and behind the scenes, interviews and whatnot. All included there.

Christian Klepp  39:43

Fantastic. Fantastic. I’ll be sure to like drop all the links in the in this episode. So once again, Lloyed, it was a pleasure to have you on the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Lloyed Lobo  39:55

Thank you so much, man. Talk to you soon. Appreciate you doing this for me.

Christian Klepp  39:58

Alright, thanks, man. Take care.