Why Community is the Future of Marketing with Chanel Clark, Founder of The Marketing Club | Ep. 392

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0:25Welcome to the Marketing Millennials. The No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials. And today I have Chanel on the podcast. We are going to talk about everything community building, but I'll let Chanel introduce herself, tell her her story, how she got into marketing, and then we'll dive right into it. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for having me.

1:11I'm so excited to be here, even though it's 5 a.m. here and there's not a lot of people I get up this early for. Well, I appreciate you getting up. I know you're on the other side of the world and the time zones are crazy. The only person I would get up at 5 a.m. is for my baby, so I really appreciate that you get up. You're right up there. Well, let's get into how did you – what's your story? How did you get into marketing? Yeah, I kind of fell into it, I think, when I left high school. I either wanted to be a photojournalist or a forensic scientist. and realized very quickly I wasn't good at maths or science.

1:52So I sort of was thinking the photojournalism route and I went to university and actually started studying journalism. And I mean, this was a while ago. So marketing papers didn't even really exist. But through some of the papers I was doing in my journalism degree, there were a few marketing related papers and I was like, oh, this sounds really interesting and sort of started pursuing those. Got bored at uni very quickly, realized I wasn't really learning anything that felt tangible or relevant. in the world that I was living in at the time. So I ended up trying to look for work experience and actually landed myself a role as an intern at a social media company.

2:29And that was kind of like the deep dive headfirst straight into what marketing even looked like. You know, Facebook ads had just come out, posting on Facebook and kind of sharing content had sort of just started. So that was really how I got into it. And then once I started, I was just obsessed and wanted to find out more. and you know what was this industry what is marketing and yeah it kind of just went off from there so what was like the moment you wanted to start um the marketing club in australia like what like what is that moment you felt that there was like a need in the market for this yeah i think like i whenever i tell this story i always admit starting tmc was an accident it wasn't kind of like the big dream, the five-year plan, I was in a head of marketing role at the time, totally on my own.

3:21So marketing team of one got handed a massive budget and said, you know, go do all the things. And the company actually didn't even have a marketing function before I got hired. So I had to build the marketing function and then go and do all the marketing. And I just remember, I mean, I love building things that don't exist. So it was quite rewarding for me to be in that position. But then I remember about a year into that role, I was booking our first out-of-home campaign. I had this massive budget. I had no idea how to do media buying. I didn't even know where to start. And I thought, God, it would be really nice to be able to talk to other marketers who have been in this position before, because I was very sure that I wasn't the first marketer that had ever been feeling like this.

4:02And I remember thinking, right, if I was to build something for marketers, to meet other marketers, what would that look like? And there were a few things that existed in the industry at the time, especially in New Zealand. But I was going to those and, you know, often I was the only female in the room. We were hearing from marketers who had$20 million marketing budgets talk about how effective their campaigns were. And I was like, well, that's great for you, but I got to go back and beg for$5 ,000 to do a billboard. Like none of what you've said is really transferable. So there were just kind of enough indicators through my own marketing experience that what I was looking for and craving and that connection and even just finding other marketers going through the same troubles as I was didn't really exist.

4:45And that was sort of where the idea for the marketing club started. I mean, I did one LinkedIn post and it was so innocent. I was like, if you're a marketer and you want to connect with other marketers, like I'm starting to slack over here, like come join. And I genuinely thought it might have been a coffee meetup for marketers, you know, once a month. There might be 30 of us. I didn't even know if there were 30 marketers based in Auckland at the time. But I thought, you know, set up the thing and see what happens. And then within the first week, we had 180 marketers join the Slack. And I was like, oh, shit, this is already five times bigger than I thought it was going to be.

5:17And then it just kind of absolutely took off from there. We started doing social networking events, educational events. The community started demanding it in areas where I wasn't even living. And then Australia was kind of the happy accident because there were so many marketers in Australia that were following me on LinkedIn that were seeing what I was doing with TMC in New Zealand and were like, hey, when are you bringing this over here? And then, yeah, I ended up moving to Australia, launched TMC in Australia last year, and it's just gone like wildfire. We've got a community of over 15 ,000 now in under three years, and it's just been insane.

5:54What would you say is your biggest growth lever you've been using to grow it? I mean, obviously the first hundred became from a LinkedIn post that turned into a Slack channel. It usually is funny how those things, you don't realize how many people are watching or need something until you put it out in the world. But it also shows that you had a good audience of marketers who wanted to do something like this. But what has been your growth ever? I mean, getting the first hundred, that was the first part. Now, what has been like the one or two growth efforts you've been using to take it from that 100 to 5K it is now?

6:33Yeah, I think LinkedIn still remains our core channel. It's obviously where marketers are hanging out day to day, connecting with each other professionally, seeking advice, et cetera, reading industry reports. So that remains kind of our core focus. but then I would also say the minute that we started doing events I saw the momentum really build because we sort of took that online only community brought it in person started really being able to communicate with potential members in the community of what the experience was that we were building what the vibe was the kind of people we wanted to attract and I mean the minute that you make humans you know gather and feel like they belong and then get to know each other that was sort of the thing that just propelled us into the thousands of members instead of hundreds One thing that I think is hard about community too is like keeping retention and engagement up.

7:24So what are some things you do? I mean, you said events is one thing you do, but even getting people to events sometimes is a hard job. So what are some ways you keep like engagement up in the community so people actually are sharing their opinion, are talking to each other, are communicating? creating? Well, I think when I designed TMC and especially as we've grown, because I mean, a lot of it's just like the advice I give now is almost reverse engineered because obviously I didn't know what I was building as I was building it. But I think for us, it's really looking at how we use all the different channels that we're on.

7:58So we've got a Slack community, which is, you know, 24 seven access to marketers. We've obviously got our LinkedIn, we've got Instagram, then we've got our events. We've also launched a podcast. So all the different activities we do kind of suit different kind of marketers and the level of engagement that they're looking for. And we've also got our newsletter. So obviously our most engaged members are usually in our Slack, sharing opinions, tagging people, asking for help. Newsletter are kind of like the softer consumers. They're lurking, they're listening, but they're not really engaging. And then obviously we've got our events for the people who, you know, really heavily want to be involved.

8:33And for events, could you walk me through how you decided like the pricing model? Because obviously at the first it was like join a section it was their pricing before you started like join this slack channel but because i know i know now you have like a tiered pricing model so how did you come up with that and like know what to charge who will pay and also how did you were the core members like got in for free how did that work yeah the the pricing model around tmc was probably the biggest decision it felt like of my life because for so long we were a fully free community and I was trying to hold on to that as long as possible and you know like validate the thing test the outcome build community rally the tribe etc and then it got to a point where it was actually hindering being able to do what I wanted to do for the community by having it operate as free and especially for events right like when events were free it was very easy for someone to just decide not to come, which was an absolute nightmare when we were trying to book venues.

9:39You know, we were getting brands interested in getting involved and we were trying to estimate for them how many people were going to show up. So when I decided that we needed to start charging and at the time we only started charging for the events, we just community sourced it. And because we had at the time we'd like 1600 people in the Slack, I said, look, like we're going to start charging. You know, if we charge X, it means that you'll get Y. what would be a price that you think these events would be worth and we literally just put out a google form to the community and said what would you pay to have this kind of experience and then that was where and i mean this is obviously not a great commercial model but because we're built by the community i was like well i'll ask the community what they'd be willing to pay and then we use that pricing for the last two years for all of our events and then this year we've just done another price increase and again that was community voters last year well i think it i mean it's just the motto of build the audience first and then reverse engineer like what products to build yeah for them so i think that's like the more the modern i mean not modern but that's how a lot of people are doing it now they have an audience and they build a need for what the audience has instead of the opposite of build a product and then find find out if there is a need for the product yeah yeah and i mean i i bootstrapped tmc you know we're in our fourth year now I bootstrapped it completely for the first three years so if you know if we had an event and 110 people showed up I had to pay out of my own pocket catering to feed 110 people and it was a$4.50 spring roll that kind of broke me and made me realize I can't afford to keep doing this but it was interesting when we got feedback saying that we were going to transition to a fully paid community or have a pricing tier everyone sort have said chanel we would have paid for this two years ago like the value's always been there i don't know how you held out for so long and i was like oh my god that would have been so good to ask everyone earlier but i think then the community kind of rallied behind us because we'd already over and above proved the value the minute we said that like oh you need to pay for this now they were like well yeah this is the easiest decision ever i mean that's a good way to do to like when you like that's like the free trial kind of model where you show this value you you get locked in on the you get locked in hey i i met some cool people and then you yeah you have a two-year free trial which is kind of crazy but at least i mean you found that it actually helped you learn more than if it was 30 days or 60 days or you've learned what they need there's actually a need here what people will pay um what events should we do and you can keep on asking the community um what what that is i want to ask you also like what is do you look at kpis and metrics of like what success is like what are you looking at on a weekly monthly yearly basis like what are you're trying to achieve with like what metrics do you look at what is your goals for community yeah I think for the last few years I haven't because it's kind of just been holy shit this is growing into something that I didn't think it would be now that we're sort of standing up a little bit more especially in Australia as a proper business we've you know got revenue targets we want to hit this year we've got member numbers we want to grow to you know we're starting to look at you know how much money do we need paid memberships to make in order to allow us to afford the kind of events that we want to do etc so for us I think like community member growth will always matter because it's the size of the audience so for example our LinkedIn followers Instagram newsletter subscribers etc and then the only other real metric that I'm paying attention to at the moment is just our monthly recurring revenue because that's allowing me to force forecast you know if we want to do these events, what kind of support do we need from sponsors?

13:40What can we fund ourself? What are we anticipating that we'll make in order to be able to put that money back into the events, et cetera? So a lot of it has just been, you know, all of this again is in hindsight, like none of this was the five-year plan because I thought it was going to be a coffee meetup. So a lot of it is starting to just learn as the community grows, like, oh, okay, now this is the next goal. Oh, cool. We hit that. Now this is the next goal. Okay, great. Now maybe we should have a five-year plan. How do you scale, but also keep it feeling personal, feeling niche? Because I think that's a worry when you get something big is, okay, we can get to 15 ,000, but do people have the same connection they did when there was the first 100, the first 1 ,000?

14:24So what are you doing to try to make sure people still feel the same, that first 100 still feels the same when you get 10 ,000, 15 ,000. Yeah, I think that's if I had to hang my hat on something, that's probably the thing I'm most proud of is the feedback from, you know, members that we had when we were a community of 100 to now a community of 15 ,000 have always said it never felt like we missed a beat in terms of providing the vibe that we promised or the experience that we said. And I think a lot of that for me has been really intentional I mean accidental then turned intentional but I have massively built TMC around me as a human you know a lot of businesses kind of lose that human element because it was never a human that started the thing whereas TMC was sort of an extension of me as a marketer and you know it's been a really interesting thing because obviously one human is not scalable and I'm now experiencing that you know I'm doing events across Australia and New Zealand and everyone expects me to be at everything and I'm like I can't I just physically can't but to really like get the vibe of what we want to create right I think because I it's so inbred in what I wanted to create it's been really easy to communicate then to our teams that are helping on the ground in different regions like what we stand for how we want something to run we've essentially like validated and proved that certain formats work that, you know, the kind of brands that we want to bring on board, like it's actually been really easy for me.

15:57And I mean, I know some people might be listening to this and think it sounds like the hardest thing, but because it's just been an extension of who I am, all I've kind of had to do is sell people on me and what I stand for. And then it just so happens that that's attached to the marketing club that I run. Yeah. I think, I mean, I was going to ask you that, I mean, with community eventually many to many is like how you have to thrive you can't always go off of like chanel is like you can only be like the anchor person that yeah brings people together like the tom from myspace vibes um but like everybody's friend but at the end of the day it's also hard how do you like how do you what do you think about of like scaling beyond you, making sure that like many to many people just don't only look at you as like the centerpiece of the community.

16:52Yeah. I think that's been an interesting one because I was trying to do that, you know, even last year, I was like, Hey guys, like it's, it's, it's still going to be the same experience if I'm not there. It's, you know, it's, it's still my thing, even if someone else is contacting you about it. So I think at the moment I'm kind of learning what that looks like because I'm still so attached to the thing. And obviously that's been intentional as I've grown it. And now that it's scaling, I'm like, I can't. And we're really focusing on, you know, who are sort of the members in different regions that we operate in that could kind of be, you know, like the second me, like who's really got the energy, who are, you know, potential chapter leads for each region that we operate in.

17:33Who are the people, you know, especially in regions that I don't live in, like I'm based in Brisbane. So yes, I travel to Sydney or Melbourne or Auckland, et cetera, for some of our events, but they'll start being people who always come to our events that will emerge as the regulars that only that region will recognise if I'm not always there. So when we do events, I'm always looking at, you know, who are the names that are always coming through, who are almost like the power users of the community, they love us so much, they're becoming advocates for us. And then could they kind of be the ones that we sort of attach a region to?

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18:52What would your advice be if someone wanted to take this model and do it for a company? They wanted to run, I wouldn't say the paid version, but they want to run their own community. What advice would you give to someone if they wanted to build a community to say like a plumbing company trying to do a plumbing community or something like that? I think my biggest piece of advice, like I'm such an advocate for community being attached to a person, a reason, a story. I think, you know, especially, you know, community is essentially a marketing angle, but it's all around creating experience and bringing people together and then almost like subset being able to market to people in a way that feels very organic.

19:33So I think having a reason as to, well, why didn't this community exist and why does it need to exist now? What is the value we get out of being a part of it? Is it going to infinitely make my life better, solve a problem, or are you just trying to bring like-minded people together? And this is interesting because I actually teach people now how to build community. And I always say to them, if people don't immediately resonate with the reason of why your community exists, because, you know, no one's building community and we think like, oh God, I would die without that thing. It's just a nicer to have.

20:04It's like a 1 % addition to our life. But I think being really clear on like, what is the purpose of your community existing? What is the value that it potentially provides people? and then what would people's lives look like if your community went back to not existing and that's what I almost use as like the north star metric with TMC is you know no marketer dies if TMC doesn't exist tomorrow but they lose connection they lose the ability to go and network with each other they lose being able to connect with marketers at different ages and stages of their career that they often wouldn't even be put in the same room as they lose that sense of you know an industry coming together to kind of push things forward rather than everyone sort of doing things in silos so i think being able to recognize you know this is what we're building for and if we stop building the thing then everyone would go back to it not existing but that would be you know a depreciation how do you reverse engineer that framework of like saying this is like the value we're trying to create for the people like this is like our mission statement man, like this is what we're trying to, where we are as a community.

21:08How did you, like looking back, like how would you reverse engineer and tell people to do that if they were building a community? Yeah, I think I would start, I mean, yeah, like you said, it was reverse engineered because it wasn't the plan. But I think as much as it wasn't the plan, because I was the marketer, you know, everyone says like you are not your customer. But for me, I was 100 % the customer in this instance. So I think being able to identify what am I struggling with, being able to then talk to other marketers and being like oh wow like you're going through the same shit maybe we should talk about it and then just kind of taking a gamble of you know well if me and my 20 friends that I know in the marketing industry are feeling like this the problem is probably way bigger than we think it is and then once we kind of validated that you know with the first few catch-ups like for the first six months of TMC's existence all we did was social networking events and that was as simple as you know meeting your mates at a bar for a drink and that was literally just to provide the space for marketers to start talking and I mean one of the sessions I remember I went along with a notepad and a pen and I was like what are you struggling with you know if we were if we were to if this was to be the best marketing club for you like what would you get out of it and I was just furiously taking notes like bopping around the room telling everyone you know like what do you want from this what do you need how can I help and then and obviously that was psychotic because we were never going to address everyone's problems but what it did was validated for me instantly that those problems were there and they needed to be solved at some point and then how do you kind of use the power of community to help solve that and really leverage bringing people together um because even if it wasn't if it wasn't necessarily even marketing i think the power of the community that we've built is it's just like-minded people coming together trying to save say solve the same problem yeah another thing too i wanted to know is like i mean you have all these events like what does it look like to build like obviously meetups make sense you want to like you go let's meet up and get coffee or beers or whatever at this bar but now you're doing like bigger scale events like what is the process of planning an event for a community like ticketed or not ticketed sponsored or not sponsored um how do you plan those type of things and figure out which one is the most valuable for the community also most valuable to keep the club generating, like sustaining?

23:25Yeah, well, now that we charge for our events, it's a lot easier of a question to answer when we didn't. It was kind of just gather the masses and then see what happens. But for the social networking events and even anyone looking at building community, I'm such a firm believer in MVP for launch, right? Like perfection will always be the death of you. So what is the smallest thing that you could do to test if people will show up? So for us, it was social networking events because I thought, well, there's basically no lift for me. All I have to do is pick a bar or a restaurant, tell people to meet me there at a certain time.

23:59And then that's the thing. And then I just stand there with my, you know, I used to print out a little TMC sign and sit at a table so people knew to come find me. And that was as much event planning as went into that. And then we did that enough that that almost became like the quirky homegrown kind of like bootstrapped thing that we were known for. And then we're like, great, now we can lean on that as part of our personality and our community never expense these, you know, like overpriced venues because they're happy to be, you know, at the neighborhood pub with all their marketing friends. The educational events was obviously a lot harder to do because, you know, we had to pick event topics, which we community sourced.

24:35We said, you know, we're looking at doing our first educational event. What are you guys struggling with? What do you want to learn? We even had the community vote, you know, great. once we solidified the topic who do you look up to that you think would talk to this topic really really well and it was really good for us back when we started because the first educational event we ever did um we actually got James Herman to talk before he became big and shiny and beautiful and he'd just written his future demand book so he was like handing them out for free and he was like oh you know like hopefully this goes well obviously we all know how that ended up um but it was really around we almost I almost put the pressure on the community of like well you guys asked for this event now tell me what you want it to be you know I'm not going to sit here and dictate and build the thing that I think you need I want you guys to be there with me every step of the process and I think that was at the time I probably didn't realize how powerful that was now I can look back and be like damn that was that was a really good idea but it essentially meant that community built that first event with us so then when they got into the room they were like I have been asking for this event and now I've seen it they've executed on it so I'm being listened to.

25:42I'm a valued member in this community. I've showed up, I've met people. And then that was very much how we ended up doing our first full day conference. Like people were screaming at us probably from year two for a full day conference. And I mean, at that point, we weren't even charging. And I was like, we can't do a conference for free. Like we've got no money. And I absolutely cannot afford to, you know, fill a venue with 150 marketers. But again, we leaned on the community. We said, okay, if we're going to do a full day, You tell us what that looks like. You tell us the brands you want to be in the room.

26:13You tell us the speakers you want to hear from. You tell us the type of experience you want to get. And obviously in the background, I had my assumptions and ideas and what I would want, a TMC branded full day conference to look like. But for so much of starting, we have just leaned on the community so hard because they're the ones that have also, similar to my experience, we're going to the events, we're having the experiences they didn't want. we're thinking god there's got to be something better oh this is so frustrating why is a ticket so expensive why did these people not you know why am i paying all this money to hear from a cmo that doesn't feel like they know what the social media manager's doing um so we collated all that data and said you help us build the experience that you think you're missing out on and then that's exactly what we did so that's sort of what i'd recommend anyone getting into that event space like if you're doing it for community then lean on your community because they're the ones you want in the room.

27:07I think this is also a validator for why to start a community because if you have just a general product or anything you're doing, the best approach is lean on those power users, lean on the community to ask, what next feature do you want to see? What are we missing that you could do? If we did an event, would you attend? What would it look like? Would you want us to connect you with people i think we we always talk about talking to marketer or like talking to your audience but i think community brings it up to the next level where you can lean on the people who are actually raving fans or lean on the people who are actually engaged in everyday things of your brand or what you're doing so i think that's a super important insight from this because everything you said from pricing model to events to building out in other places it all came from user feedback it's not coming from hey chanel says we should go to sydney and build our next thing it came from like hey people in sydney want to want this as well let's let's build it yeah i mean i i think the only thing that the community hasn't been in charge of in the last three years of building is the food that we put on at our social networking events.

28:30That's probably the only thing we haven't asked them for their opinion on. That's probably the biggest crime you said right now. I mean, marketers love cheese, wine, and crackers. So it was kind of just an inherent assumption that then no one complained about. Especially, I mean, Aussies love their wine. They love their coffee. They love their Aussie. I mean, Australia has, I would say, top coffee in the world. Have you been to New Zealand, though? I've been to New Zealand, but I didn't. Is New Zealand better with coffee? New Zealand coffee is better. So there's a lot. So Melbourne is obviously like the coffee snob place in Australia.

29:06And then there's like Melbourne-based people who actually admit that the coffee in New Zealand is better. They hate to admit it, but they admit it. Like Auckland or where? Auckland, Wellington. Yeah, like pretty much anywhere. It's just the brains of coffee. I got to do like a comparison now because when I went to, I was 20, like mid twenties. And now I wasn't like surviving on coffee as a marketer. I was surviving on coffee, but cheap coffee. Now I can be more of a connoisseur. Yeah. No, this is like the home slow roasted, all the, all the, yeah. Bespoke little backyard kind of, kind of stuff.

29:49um one thing i was going to ask you too is besides asking for pricing earlier or giving any people to pay earlier what is some like if you would go back in time and say i said chanel you starting this marketing club knowing you're going to start a marketing club what are some pieces of things that you would have done at the beginning that caused a little pain at the beginning, but now would have been really helpful. Yeah. I mean, some of this stuff still causes pain now just because the scale of how we're growing. Organic growth is beautiful and it's free, but you can't control it. So there's always a catch-22 there.

30:31But I think knowing what I know now, if I was intentionally setting out to build a community of this size, I think having a plan of actually what I was trying to do and almost like mapping out the stages at which I wanted to do things. It was great to kind of be the voice of the community and say like, what do you guys want? I'll do it next. But then it kind of meant that I had no boundaries of what we do when we do it and why we do it. I was just so into like pleasing the community and being like, oh, you asked for this event. Absolutely, we'll do it. We'll spin it around in two weeks. No problem.

31:01Oh, now you want this one. And I kind of lost, I didn't lose myself in that process, but I was just so focused on giving everyone the best possible experience right from the start that then it kind of set a rod for my own back because then everyone was like, oh, well, if we vote on it, we get it. And that's, you know, great for all the members. But, you know, when I'm the one, when I was team of one having to build this thing, I was like, God, there's a lot of demands coming through and they're very strong. And, you know, I felt like I was almost going to be exiled or cancelled by the community if I didn't pull through.

31:34So that's probably one thing is just having a really clear roadmap of what we were doing. I think to give myself grace on that as well, though, because I didn't know how quickly it was going to move. I hadn't really set up, you know, do we just do social networking events for a while? Do we kind of figure out what the cadence of doing those and educational events look like? You know, what is the purpose of the different formats? when brands start to want to be involved, what makes more sense, you know, in terms of those formats for brands to get involved. And then I think another one would probably be getting help a lot earlier, like New Zealand, or even Australia now, we're a fully full volunteer committee.

32:16So all of the team that I have that helps me build each of TMC and the regions that we operate are 100 % volunteer. They only put in two hours a week. And obviously, that's great for the help because we can't afford to pay anyone because up until May last year, we weren't even making money. But the other side of that coin is that because it is a volunteer thing, if people get life busy, then the first thing they drop is doing the thing that they needed to do for TMC. So there's a lot of times where I'm still picking up all the things. I'm based in Brisbane and I'm planning an event in Melbourne.

32:50I'm reaching out to potential sponsors in Auckland. I'm, you know, trying to have coffee meetups with someone in a totally different area. So I think trying to get help earlier and maybe part of that, you know, if we'd launched it as a paid community, then we would have always had money to get that help or at least, you know, like one part-time person that could have done a lot of the heavy lifting on that. But again, I don't regret it because I think the way that we did it has worked. And yes, it's kind of harder now that we're scaling, but at the same time it allowed us to build so much of the foundations now that you know the og members from 10 to now still being here three years later with 15 000 have said the experience hasn't changed so i always kind of hate this question because i like there's things that i say i would like to have improved on but then i know that they're the things that probably got us to where we are now um i think you did it the right way because just like learning from my experience with the events We, when we first did our first event, we just launched a huge conference, which was great, but we didn't, we barely, we didn't, like, we went under, like, for the, like, we didn't, we barely broke even.

33:56We didn't even break even on that event. So if I would have done it over, I would have done, like, smaller meetup type things. would have done more like cheaper ways to before it went to this big event style because i thought i mean we still got sold all the tickets and stuff like that but there's so many things when you're building a big event that you probably know that okay this you need this so this cost goes up and you need this and food you need extra food and you need this and you need it becomes like all these expenses you didn't think about after well you actually did it the right way in a natural away which is good because I did the complete opposite way you're supposed to do it yeah I mean I like for us though you know obviously the doing the first full day conference was absolutely terrifying because then suddenly everyone's like oh well if I got this experience in a three-hour event imagine what you're going to promise me in an eight-hour event and I was like oh my god but we just stuck to what we know we essentially used a format that we've been using forever so educational events we kind of just had essentially three educational events back to back so panels different topics using the speakers to kind of you know focus on different areas of the topic that we were addressing but similar to what you just said like no one then really thinks about the small things like everyone wanted a lanyard with their name tag and of course we had to launch with merch and all those little things that for the community they were like oh well of course you guys are going to do that because you're the fun marketing community you know you're bringing the vibes back of the industry.