Audience Buildings Vs Community Building: The Important Difference with Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network with great shows like Content is Profit. Today, we'll be breaking down audience building versus community building, the important difference. To drop these value bombs, I brought Pat Flynn and Matthew Gartland into EO Fire Studios. Pat is a father-husband entrepreneur, and he is based in San Diego. He's a keynote speaker, Wall Street Journal, bestselling author, tech startup advisor, YouTuber with over 150 million views, and host of the SBI podcast. Matt is an online entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience and three exits to date.

0:40Today, he serves as the CEO of SBI Media. He's also an advisor and investor in creator-focused tech startups. And today, Fire Nation will talk about staying alive for over a decade on the internet, what's different now than it used to be back in the day, how to evolve in the new market norms, and so much more. We have a lot of great stuff coming up, Fire Nation. As soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors, business made simple hosted by donald miller is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals business made simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts did you know that most leaders waste up to 70 of their time on tasks they shouldn't be doing in the first place it's time to delegate those routine tasks to a belay va learn how to make the most of your time and maximize your results today.

1:37Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to download your free guide to a productive work week. Pat, Matt, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful. And we'll start with Pat, that most people disagree with. Yeah, I would say a lot of people who start businesses would disagree that it is actually simple. Starting a successful business is actually a simple thing. It's not easy, but it's simple. Meaning we often overcomplicate things. We think it's a lot harder than it actually is. When you break things down like you do, JLD, and you've done for years for people, as do the guests that come on your show, you start to hear that it's quite simple, right?

2:25Help people, serve them, get paid for that. And for whatever reason, we always try to overcomplicate that really matt try to top that i'll try i will shoot with that reinvention is required to remain successful because it's easy enough perhaps or simple enough to pat's point to maybe be successful once right kind of have a moment but to keep that going to maintain that level of success to continue to serve and expand requires you to think critically and adapt and with those of us online my gosh like the speed of the internet is changing like so fast faster than never, arguably. So you have to think critically about your model, your approach, the value you're delivering, and be willing to adapt and reinvent yourself along the way.

3:09Good job. And you couldn't be more right. And I mean, a topical topic on that right now is just how AI just seems to be taking over everything and the speed of how that's growing and just evolving is absolutely nuts. And Fire Nation, as I mentioned in the intro, we're talking today about audience building versus community building, the important difference. And Pat, this is literally incredible to say out loud, but SBI has been in business since 2008. That's over 15 years. Dude, I'm so old. I mean, you look amazing. And I want to know how we as business owners can stay alive for well over a decade on the internet.

3:53Yeah, grow a beard because it covers all the wrinkles. That's my secret. No, I mean, it's true. And it speaks to exactly what Matt said. You got to adapt. But I think it kind of actually plays into what I had mentioned as well, which is no matter what happens with technology and how fast things change, the one thing will remain true with business and success, and that is helping people and serving them. And, you know, that's always been the case with SPI since it began in 2008. It just has changed the manner by which we've done that. And in the beginning, it was, as you know, a blog. And then I attempted a YouTube channel.

4:26It didn't work really well. It worked later really well. But what really got me started is podcasting and serving through the voice and the medium of audio. but then later through books and speaking on stage and then as social media has come in the ability to come in and serve people you know in a grand scale that way and also on an individual level through dms and then who knows what's going to happen in the next five years it's everything's going to look different but again no matter what happens out there if you can connect with people be a human being and empathize with them you can provide value and serve them in some way and that that's how you stay relevant across so many years.

5:05And it definitely speaks to Matt's answer, which was way better than mine, I think. Oh, stop. I love that for so many reasons. And Pat, as you were actually talking, I had to send you a text, which I just did with a picture because I kind of glanced up as you're talking and I just, because I forgot about this, but right above my computer, I have this print and that print, I forget who gave it to me, but somebody sent it to me years and years and years ago. It's a print of the audio, wave audio files of your and I first interview ever on Entrepreneurs on Fire back in 2012. How nuts is that? Number one, baby, I'll always be your first.

5:48Oh, Matt, you're not gonna be at a top Pat this time. But what do you want to add to what Pat just shared? At least in terms of our relationship, even Pat and me in our partnership, like these things are yin and yang. Like there's so much that, and it's a bit of a maybe departure from the core point, but in terms of finding complimentary value in business and approach to serve people and think about, you know, a brand evolving for, again, like ours, as you mentioned, like 15 freaking years, that's nuts. And I wasn't a part of it from the beginning, but, you know, to see where it is now and really always trying to show up to where people need us to be and show up where they are and show up in the way that they want us to be serving them as their needs evolve and change.

6:29I think that's kind of the magic, especially when should you have a business partner or you have someone kind of by your side. I think that's kind of how Pat and I have figured out the way forward for SPI. And then it speaks to community building and everything else that's on the horizon, I think, for online entrepreneurship, hopefully for the next decade. Now, Matt, let's stay with you for this, because the internet's a very different place compared to 2008 when Pat started, 2012 when I started, heck, even 2016, or even a couple years ago back in 2021. Talk about what is different. People have a higher degree of skepticism, and they have, I think, a longer tolerance for decision making.

7:11So when you think about consumer behaviors and consumer patterns, they are more discerning in terms of choice because choice has exploded also, right? It's another primary factor in terms of where people can go online to get value, to get help, whether that's learning a new skill through an online course or interacting with some version of a community, whether maybe that was a Facebook group once upon a time, to try to support networking within a given marketplace. so there's just the combination of the explosion of choice and just with people's now understanding of how internet mechanics work and whatnot there's more discernment so we have to go as creators and as business owners and providers the extra mile more to really showcase how we're unique and special why we are really here rooted in service and value and there's a little more i think of just earning trust through that process i think it was maybe easier to earn trust you know in the early years of the internet.

8:11And it's harder now. Pat, add to that what Matt just shared on what you think is different and also what we need to do to evolve to these new market norms. Yeah, I mean, so much has changed for sure from how we consume content. It's changed from text to audio and now video is definitely taking over as well. The short form video wave that we're on right now with TikTok and Reels and Shorts and how much harder it is, it seems to hold a person's attention. And when you have a message to share, and it takes a lot of time to do that, it's very conflicting. The other thing that we're noticing per Matt's answer there is there's just so much, like the ability to find information is not a problem anymore.

8:58All information you ever need is available at your fingertips in your pocket right now. You could just go and grab it. So for For us course creators specifically, it's like, oh, well, just putting things together in a course, yeah, it can make it easier to consume that info. But is that even enough now? And we started to notice over the years that we started launching online courses in 2017, made millions doing that. But over time, we started to notice that course completion rates started to lower. Results started to become less and less. And people still had the drive to succeed. That did not change.

9:33In fact, that's even higher than before, I feel. But with all the choices out there and the fact that there's less time, it seems, that we all have because we're all packing every single second of our lives with stuff, getting results for people faster is the name of the game. And so for us, we really had to look internally with how we were doing business and what was working. And yes, we were still able to sell online courses, but was that the right thing for us to do based on our goals and our mission of helping our audience get closer to their goals and helping them now get results even faster?

10:07So this is when we started to really shift our focus from courses that solve a problem to communities that solve a problem. Because studies show and our results show this as well, is when you go through something with somebody, you're more likely to do it and finish it. It's just like going to the gym. It's much easier doing it with other people, holding each other accountable, having coaching, getting mentorship along the way. You're more likely to succeed versus just doing it on your own. So we've completely revamped our business model. And now we promote what we call community-powered courses.

10:39And we just launched something which is, I would say, pretty revolutionary. And it is for us and especially for my business and me and Matt's business compared to where it was. But this kind of group teaching style with community as a part of it, we still have our courses. People can go through our courses, but they no longer have to go through them alone. They're going with other people. They're doing it in phases along with other people so they can all come across the same problems and get all the same answers at the same time. so really again what this comes down to and why we've moved it this way which was hard especially because we're making less up front but longer over a period of time um it's it's for the benefit of the audience again it goes back to well what's working right now to help people get a goal and achieve their results they want it's it's community and and you know this with the podcasters paradise i mean all this all successful successful podcasters who were successful not just because they got your information, but because they were there alongside others doing it with them.

11:40And that's why the community you have has been so great. And that can do nothing but increase the loyalty you have for the brand owner as well, as well as just the enjoyment of going through that process versus doing it alone. Fire Nation, get results for your audience. Focus on the results and the results you can provide them within a community field. And we have a lot to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. I remember back in 2013 when Entrepreneurs on Fire was scaling fast. And in those early days of our business, we sometimes found ourselves struggling to keep up because we couldn't find software solutions that were easy to use and that would grow with us.

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13:02Get started for free at HubSpot.com. That's HubSpot.com. Did you know that most leaders waste up to 70 % of their time on tasks they shouldn't be doing in the first place? You know, like managing routine details, scheduling meetings, replying to emails, and processing reports. If this sounds familiar, then I have the solution for you. It's time to delegate those routine tasks to a Belay VA. It's time to take back your time and spend your days casting vision, growing revenue, and scaling your business instead. Belay has been helping entrepreneurs scale and succeed for over a decade through fractional, highly vetted, US-based virtual assistants, bookkeepers, and social media managers.

13:41It's time to give away the administrative tasks so you can start accomplishing more and juggling less with Belay. And to help you get started, Belay is offering Fire Nation, their resource, your personal guide to a productive work week for free. Learn how to make the most of your time and maximize your results today. Just text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E-2-5-5-1-2-3 to download your free guide to a productive work week. Pat, Matt, we are back. And Matt, I want to start with you because community is in vogue right now. I mean, it's so hot and for a good reason, but way too many entrepreneurs, they're confusing audience building with community building.

14:26Talk about this confusion. Yeah. And it picks up even from what Pat was mentioning there before the break, which is that it's not about information and having sort of a broadcaster distribution sort of channel, right? Like yes, email building is still really, really important building your list, Right. That's audience building is getting someone to pay attention to you, to subscribe to something and receive information right through some sort of push and pull sort of effect. But community building, it's not really about us as the creators as much. And it's not so much about the information. It's about the connective tissue that binds the people together.

15:01And that's the really important shift. And it's a major shift. It might seem small, but it's profound in terms of how we deliver value and how we are consistently showing up and cultivating progress towards, again, what Pat was saying before the break, around results. It's not us trying to wave magic wands ourselves anymore and trying to, I guess, just manifest results for people in that way or teach them ourselves. It's about getting people to help each other go through a shared learning experience. We are there as the guides. certainly we have expertise to bring to bear, but it's that connective tissue, not the nodes themselves within the network, but the connections between the nodes in the network.

15:43That's the real magic. I love how Matt shared, cultivate progress around results. And I specifically have always loved that word progress because there's a quote that I've always gone back to whenever I've kind of been thinking about what I should be focusing on. And that is success is the gradual realization of a worthy ideal. It's the progress. It's not just the realization. It's the gradual realization. It's the progress. It's the process. And it's not just any ideal. It's the worthy ideal. The ideal must be worthy. So think about that and cultivate progress around results. So Pat, most people don't know how to actually build and run a community model.

16:28You do. You're a pro. You've been doing it for so long. Tell us more. Yeah. And I've done it even more recently with something that I knew nothing about two years ago. And today I now have a YouTube channel about Pokemon. Yes, this is true story. with not only 600 ,000 subscribers on YouTube, but with a community of people who will go out of their way to support this brand, to protect this brand, to a point where I'm actually hosting an event this summer in Anaheim for the Pokemon community. We've done one in the past for the entrepreneurial community, which I've been a part of for a while. So it made sense that people would fly to San Diego to come hang out and be a part of that.

17:13But this is a brand new community. Setting up the space for the creators who are also other YouTube Pokemon people or Poketubers, as we are called, to come together and fans. Without spending a dime on marketing, we already have over a thousand tickets sold for this event. And again, it's not because of me. it's because of the space that I've created to bring all the people who on the outside are often looked down upon are often made fun of because they're the ones that have the nerdy cards and they're old guys now who used to play Pokemon when they were kids and they're getting into it and then you know when they were kids they were bullied because of how nerdy they were no no this is for all of us super nerds to come together just like a comic con right and enjoy this common language that we have.

18:03So there's a lot of things I want to pick apart from what I just said, right? This idea of people finding each other. Actually, quick story. You might have even been at this event. FinCon in 2013. You may have been there. I'm not exactly sure. But I remember, and I know you do this as well, when you speak at events or go to different places, you will often rent a restaurant or a bar or something and just invite your people over. And that is something that I did. And we had 50 or 60 people come by for pizza and beer one night for people who were fans of SPI. And the night was awesome, went around, shook hands, took pictures, talked business with a lot of people.

18:38And by the end of the night, I thought I had gone around and said hello to everybody because I wanted to make sure everybody had some time with me. And there was one woman at the end of the night who I had seen just for the first time and I felt really bad. I was like, oh, no, like I didn't get to spend time with her. So on our way back to the hotel, walking as a group, I go up to her and I say, hey, Jenny was her name on her name tag. I say, Jenny, I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to meet you earlier. Like we could chat on the walk here. I can chat with you tomorrow at the event. And she goes, we like stop.

19:04The whole group keeps going. She looks at me and she goes, Pat, you know, I don't want you to take offense to this, but I didn't come to this event to see you. And I was like, whoa, okay. You said that right to me. And she was like, no, no, no. Like I love your podcast. I listen to it all the time, But I never, I never get a chance to meet other people like me who speak the same language all in the same spot. So I just wanted to take advantage of that tonight. And I met new potential business partners. I'm going to be working with that person as an affiliate for their product tomorrow. Like, thank you, Pat.

19:37This was incredible. And that's when it clicked for me. Community, like Matt was saying, it's not even about you at all. You just happen to be the person who has the foresight, the ability, the resources even, to create a safe space for these people with a common interest to come together. These are the principles that can guide how you build your community online. And no, it doesn't have to be in person at a restaurant or a coffee shop or even a big giant event. In the back of my book, Superfans, I talk about the idea of just bring people together online. Give them a space in a YouTube live or in a Facebook group or in a circle community to come together to just be long.

20:15And that's really the key word there. They feel like they belong to something. And when they feel like they belong to something, they feel like they now want to invest in making sure that thing is great. They protect it, right? You can immediately start connecting with people there. There's so much value in that connection. And it happens automatically if those spaces for community exist. Just like when you go to a ball game and your team hits the winning grand slam, you're high-fiving, hugging, maybe even kissing people that you don't even know because you're wearing the same color ball cap, right?

20:47That's what community is really all about. And so many amazing things can happen as a result of that. Not to mention, oh, now you have a group of people who are sharing openly their success stories that now you can pull to bring on your podcast to tell the stories to everybody and make people feel like they're missing out on this community that you have. And then boom, they're gonna wanna get in and wanna pay to get access to people just like them because they can't find that anywhere else. I'm done. Oh man, just two weeks ago, I went to New York City to watch the Big East Basketball Championship in Madison Square Garden, the mecca of college basketball.

21:17and my team was having a great year. So we're at the game. I'm at a random seat because you just could assign a random seat by your school. So I'm next to another Providence College. I never met this guy. He's just another Providence College graduate. Not even my year. I never knew him before. By the end of that one game, we were like best friends. Like we went out for drinks afterwards. We hung out. We have videos together. Like it was a crazy moment because the community of Providence College, even though I'm 20 years removed from that school, brought us together. And Matt, what do you want to add to what we're talking about right now?

21:52Massive plus one to everything Pat said. We should probably just stop there. What I would append to it for folks that are hopefully motivated by the conversation here and to explore it is that our strong opinion, even a spicy opinion, if I may, is that this is a very good competitive advantage for the future of the internet. To be an online entrepreneur, to think about building community is a competitive advantage because it's hard. To do it well, to maintain community, this is not easy. It's maybe simple, again, back to some of the original themes that Pat had mentioned, but it's not easy. It's not passive even, quite frankly.

22:33We have an entire team, a full-time team, in-house employees that invest their entire day and their entire week into helping community members to do programming around our curriculum to guide them through our pathways in our all-access path specifically for our educational journeys to be indeed supporting them through that progress towards results. And if you can do that well, if you can sustain that level of engagement and that success, you're going to be so far above and beyond what maybe someone else is able to do. And in this, again, ecosystem over this era of the Internet where, again, I see more discernment.

23:14There's greater choice and people have more finite resources, time, energy, dollars. They're going to choose you over another choice. And that's, again, a great, from a business standpoint, a pure business standpoint, a great competitive advantage. Pat, bring us home with a final thought and a call to action for Fire Nation. If you're not building community, you will be left behind, straight up. And the community doesn't have to be big. You can start simple. Matt and I both actually consult other businesses on creating their communities at this point now. And it's been an incredible ride to see just the magic that happens when you bring people together.

23:51So I want to offer a question that Tim Ferriss actually taught me to use as a filter every time you try something new, perhaps in this case, like building a community. And that question is as follows. I'm talking just like you right now, JLD. I find that I'm mimicking you in the way that I talk. Your tonality, your diction, it is spot on right now. Fire Nation. The question is, if this were simple, what would it look like? and so no it doesn't mean you set up all the things about a community and then you finally let people in it means you have a text chat with three people and that is your community to start and then you just connect with each other when you need help and then you can invite more people in maybe it then becomes a facebook group and then maybe from that point it becomes a circle community with a little bit more customization and control and and automation involved etc so So if this were simple, what would it look like?

24:47Call to action one would be to ingrain that into your own filter process for whatever it is that you're deciding to do. And number two, get those results faster. Small quick wins for your audience go a very long way. So audit your brand. If you don't have a small quick win that you're offering your audience, something that when they visit your website, they go to your webinar, they listen to your podcast. They're not getting something they can take home with them within five to 15 minutes. They're going to move on in this short attention span world that we live in right now. Get them a result that fires up the reptilian part of their brain to want to continue to come back for more rewards from you.

25:24And that's how you make bigger changes by starting out small. And where can Fire Nation learn more directly from you? Yeah, I mean, probably the best place to learn from us right now is smartpassiveincome.com slash all access. even just as an exercise to see like how are we rearranging the education that we have for our audience in a way that not only yes generates more revenue but uh more importantly gets probably the best kind of feedback that i've ever gotten from anything i've ever created and of course it's not just me it's matt and it's not just matt as well it's jillian our community director and ashley and david and everybody else involved in that to make sure the community is in a good spot so i appreciate you allowing us to share this, John.

26:05It's been a pleasure to be back here on the show. Do you know what number episode this is, by the way? I know what number episode. So this is actually your fourth appearance on Entrepreneurs on Fire. And this is episode 3 ,700. 3 ,000? Oh my gosh, you're wild. 763. Amazing. Congrats to you, man. Thanks. 10 and a half years. Just keep on cranking. And Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with PFMG and JLD today. So keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about here today, go to eofire.com. Just type Pat in the search bar.

26:45This show notes page will pop right up as well as the other episodes. He's been on Entrepreneurs on Fire. If you go back to episode one, you will hear two very different individuals, much younger and not as wise individuals. But we were still doing our best back then, just making things happen. And Pat and Matt, I want to say thank you for sharing your truth with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Cheers, man. Fire Nation, what can 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment?