1688 – The Four Stages of Community with Traction Conf’s Lloyed Lobo

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million dollars in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now lloyd lobo lloyd you are the author of the new book from grassroots to greatness and you're also the co-founder of boast.ai and traction traction is found on the web at tractionconf.io lloyd thank you so much for joining us thank you love the energy josh and you're going to drag the energy out of me. I can just feel it. You attract what you give out. I completely, completely agree. And I know you're such an advocate for this because again, and I, you know, I read a book, I don't know if you've ever heard of this book, but was it called the business of belonging, right? And it talked about the community.

1:42And I bet that you've kind of taken that message and really built upon that about the, just how critical it is for leaders today to embrace the idea of community. Can you maybe just share a little bit about your impact? I mean, of course, we can talk about both, we could talk about traction and how that kind of fits within here. But give us just a quick 101 on your work today. Definitely. So, you know, my journey to this book is entirely shaped by community. My DNA is community. So I was born in Kuwait to Indian parents who weren't educated. And their only option was to go to the Middle East and work.

2:20So the currency would work for them, right? Taking the money, sending money back to India. So my childhood summers, as a result, we couldn't afford to go to Europe or to the States or anywhere else. My dad would get two free tickets a year from his company in Kuwait to go back to India. So growing up, every childhood summer was spent in the slums of Mumbai, where watching TV was communal. There was no bathroom in the house. So going to the bathroom was communal. Puddles would turn into ponds. It would rain. We'd be swimming in it. And my mom had nine siblings and parents. They all live in this house, which barely had any place.

2:57My fondest memories were those because every time we'd want to go back to Kuwait, I'd cry at the end of the summer. Last word, a few years, I got to experience a marvel. I got to experience the Gulf War. And I saw how the power of people combined with a strong, powerful purpose can move mountains. The community came together to evacuate the people to safety when the security had lapsed and when there was no phones and there was no internet. Fast forward a few more years, we immigrated to Canada. I got into sales and marketing after I finished in engineering because I wanted to go into entrepreneurship.

3:33And somebody told me sales is the best skill you can learn if you want to go into entrepreneurship. Everything I learned about sales and marketing in that time was through HubSpot's inbound marketing community. Fast forward a few years, started just working for startups, rubbing shoulders alongside startup founders. You become the average of the five people you surround yourself with. One day, my best friend from university called me, says he wants to do a startup. He came up with the idea for Boast, joined him. In college, he was always doing the programming. I was always doing the communication.

4:03So we had a good rapport to that. When we started the company, cold calling didn't work. We tried to will our way into existence by dialing for dollars, then it didn't work. And so we were, necessity is the mother of all inventions. We were forced to build a community to grow the business. That community over time grew to 120 ,000 subscribers, became traction. Not only we got customers and partners through it, we got social proof from it, but we also got our investors through it. One fine day in the middle of the pandemic, a growth equity firm showed up to one of our events and decided to buy half the company, made us founders who've been grinding piss poor for years, rich, dearest in the short term, and then had a lot of equity own almost 40 % of the company to play the long game.

4:49When I left the day-to-day of the company, I should have been happy. I should have been excited. I came into money. I got a board seat. We have a CEO who used to be the CTO of Sage Intact,$10 billion company running it. I should have been excited. I actually ended up depressed and face planted. And I couldn't figure out why. And everyone would tell me like, why, why is it that you got depressed? And I went on the soul searching travel, went crazy. And then what brought me to sanity was surrounding myself with the community of fitness people, fitness enthusiasts. And as I reflected, I realized all my life, I didn't have money, but I was happy because I was surrounded by the community.

5:29The only time in my life when I came into money, I felt my tribe left me when I left the day-to-day at Boast and I got depressed. And so I felt I needed to write something about it, share my thoughts about community and fueled by the thousands of people I had talked to, fueled by all the content we had done through the Traction Conf and just started to research every single enduring brand over time. And I found something interesting through all these conversations, I realized and recognized that every obscure idea that eventually became a worldwide global phenomena from Christianity to CrossFit went through the exact same four stages.

6:10People listen to you, you have an audience, one-way communication. When you bring that audience together to interact with one another, it becomes a community. Now, here's the interesting part. When that community comes together to create impact towards a greater purpose, far greater than your product or 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 a religion. Audience, community, movement, religion. And I distill those learnings into 13 rules to build iconic brands with community-led growth. I mean, I wanted to write a book always because growing up, my mom was told that your son will amount to nothing.

6:56In fact, my wedding, my wife's a brilliant doctor, gone into med school in second year of undergrad without MCATs. Also Indian family, two days before the wedding, my wedding was called off, 2008 recession, the company had shut down. I had lost my job. We're in India now. And basically what was relayed was, your son's kind of like a bumbling idiot, jumping from thing to thing, not serious in life. Our daughter's a doctor. Our other kids are doctors. we feel like he's just going to live off her. He'll not amount to anything. We don't think at least he's the right fit for her. And my mom took it to heart.

7:30And she asked me one question that day that did I make a mistake to give up my career and stay at home and look after you? Are they right? Did I raise you wrong? I think every entrepreneur is driven by some spite or some burning anger to change the status quo or prove the naysayers wrong. And I hadn't realized, But that really, really drove me and did a couple of startups that failed, did an events company where the co-founder ran away with a quarter million in profits. Boast was successful. And despite making millions of selling half of Boast, I felt unsettled because it was always like he didn't finish high school.

8:09He bumbled his way into engineering. He finagled his way through engineering. He doesn't have a master's degree. My daughter is a doctor. And this book, I'm fortunate that the community has made it so successful so far that the pre-sale has topped Amazon's charts. Two weeks ago when I released it was next to Elon Musk's book. It was bestseller on business, et cetera. And so we'll see how it goes. But my goal is to do a bestseller campaign for Wall Street Journal. And copy number one of the bestseller is for mom saying, hey, you didn't make a mistake quitting your job to raise me. I may not have a master's degree.

8:46I may have been a bumbling idiot, but I wrote something that some of the most educated people on the planet are reading. You know, you said something, and I think, you know, when we think about this power, what a great story, by the way. Thank you so much for sharing. You know, I really want to tap into this. By the way, I just purchased your book because I'm so excited about this concept, From Grassroots to Greatness, 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community-Led growth. It's on Kindle. It's on Amazon. It's everywhere you get books. And so I'm so excited to read this. But we talked about this doing community well, right?

9:24And doing community right. And I think you'd said something, I don't know if it was before we started recording or not, but you talked about the fact that if you want to get a bunch of people together, and I've seen marketers do this bad, where it's like they want to create a community around themselves, or they want to create a community around their product or service. They're like, that's okay. But I think the bigger opportunity is try to identify what are these things that we all believe we have in common, right? By the way, you're referencing some stuff that I think is really eloquently put in Sapiens as well about this, you know, how we survive and thrive together and just that human spirit that really just, it craves connection.

10:07and um can you share maybe just a little bit about that um and you know just you know how to do community well or also maybe just a little bit of a red flag on maybe mistakes that you might not want to make in this process definitely so you know a few tips here but what you said is absolutely right loneliness is the number one killer in america i just told you that the only time i had money. I was depressed because I didn't have the community. All other times in life, I was piss poor and I was the happiest. Blue zones, this concept of blue zones where five places in the world where people live functionally, functionally is key because it doesn't matter how long you live as long as if you're dysfunctional.

10:48People live functionally until there are 100. Nine traits exist. Four or five out of those traits have to do with belonging and social connection and community. So a lot of people that come to me ask me, oh, you know what? I want to start a community. When can I monetize? The first question. And the second question is, do I build a Slack group? Do I build a Facebook group, WhatsApp group? So here's the thing. Asking a question like, do I build a Slack group or a WhatsApp group for my community is like saying, I want to build a church, but I don't know if I'm Hindu or Muslim or Christian. I don't know what religion I am, right?

11:26Or saying, I want to build a home, but I don't know what location, who's going to live there, none of that. So it starts with a few things. Number one, understanding your purpose, your why, your vision, which is one day what the world will be because of your existence, your mission, how you're going to do it, and your values. Now, values are really key when building a community or a community-led business because you need to have the DNA of giving. If you don't draw joy from giving, you can never sustain building a community because it's a labor of love. It's a marathon of the heart and mind. It takes a long time.

12:02I'll give you an example. Atlassian,$40 billion,$50 billion company. Last year, the community came together to self-organize 5 ,000 events. What that tells you is they have 5 ,000 super fans that on average engaged 100 people. So now you've got the community self on their own engaging half a million people. That took 20 years, but it took 20 years of enabling the community. If you are all about control, saying, oh, I don't stretch my logo like this and don't say this and don't say that, they're going to be like, go screw yourself. We don't want to do anything for you. So I think the values are important.

12:38One of the things I found key to community-led businesses are six values. I call it camper, connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy, and recognition. Energy and recognition are really important because community, if there's no energy, you're gonna fall flat, right? Look at the biggest movements, there's energy. Recognition is important because people are showing up. You can't just assume that they're gonna do the work and it's their job. No, it's not their job. It's your job to uplift them, to recognize them, to thank them because they're giving their time. The next thing is understanding the kind of community you wanna build.

13:13There's three kinds of communities you can build. A community of practice. A community of practice is educating people on how to become good at a skill, become better versions of themselves, right? So like HubSpot's inbound marketing community in the early days, what HubSpot was doing was teaching people how to become better marketers. They didn't even have software. In fact, I didn't know they had software. Everything I learned about marketing, digital marketing in 2004, 2005, when no other digital marketing content was there was from HubSpot. or the next kind of community you can build is a community of product.

13:48A community of product is like notions community where people come together to build templates and learn and best practices, evangelize your product or the Atlassian community or the Microsoft community. There you're educating people on your product. You're helping them build on your product. You're helping them distribute on your product. And the third one is a community of play where you come together to have fun like the Harley Davidson community, like the Nike running club, like your local paddle club or your golf club. Now, what I tell people in business, if you don't have product market fit or you don't have any customers or you're a product that's barely used, meaning like it's a set it and forget it, then don't build a community of product because people are gonna be like, you're trying to sell to us.

14:31Build a community of practice. A community of practice you land on by understanding not only your customer's problems and goals, because problems and goals are short-lived, right? Like the goals change, problems may change, come and go. It's about understanding your customer's aspirations, which is the forever. What is the aspiration this ideal customer profile has and what stands in the way? So it's a combination of understanding the aspirations, the goals, the problems, and then providing value to that. Now for us, for both, our customers were founders, innovators. What is an innovator's aspiration?

15:07To create impact, to change the world. Why? Like, what are they looking for? The aspiration is, what is the forever? Traction, right? Everyone wants traction. They're never going to stop wanting traction. So we called the community traction because every innovator wants traction on the product or their business. If we called it the Bose community, I don't think it would have gone far because people were thought we're trying to sell them our service. Yeah. Lloyd, again, I want to just encourage folks to grab this book, From Grassroots to Greatness, 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community-Led Growth.

15:43Lloyd, how do people plug in with your community? Definitely. So one, follow me on LinkedIn, Lloyd Lobo, double L-O-Y-E-D, Lobo on LinkedIn, and go to fromgrassroots2greatness.com. The book will be there now. I wrote this book in story. So one of the hardest things for me growing up was reading and writing. I wasn't good at it. And so everything I learned is through doing or through listening. And so So this book was a massive challenge. And I think that the spite to honor my mom is what drove me a lot. But so I wrote this book in a way that I could consume. It's written through stories. So I have an accompanying notion workbook, which is gonna be for each chapter, there's gonna be very tactical academic templates to go with the stories and the case studies in the book.

16:30And then there'll be interviews that I've done, some of the select interviews I'm gonna put on there. All the podcasts that I've been on will be on there. so you can reference. So it'll be a great accompaniment to the book. And then for the Traction community, just go to tractionconf.io and you'll see newsletter sign up in the footer or on the podcast. And you can just sign up and you'll be able to get access to our newsletter and the events we're hosting and whatnot. Loed Lobo, it's been great having you again, co-founder of boast.ai, Traction and author of the book from grassroots to greatness.

17:07Well, all the links, Lloyd, that you just shared in the show notes for this episode to our friend that's listening to us, just click on the little information icon, click on the click around, keep clicking. You're going to find it. Lloyd, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you for inspiring more authentic community and connectedness in the world today. It's what we need most and it's what we all crave. Lloyd, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. You know, yesterday's innovation always becomes tomorrow's commodity. From electronics to AI, if you build a community, you won't become a commodity.

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