280: From Kuwait Refugee to Multi-Millionaire - How Lloyed Lobo Used Community Led Growth to Succeed

Matt Wolach: 0:10

You're definitely going to want to hear the story of Lloyd Lobo this guy went from a refugee in Kuwait as a kid to be able to exit his company still keep a good share of the company still keep a board seat still impacts how that company moves forward because of how he run his company. He is an expert at community led growth. He had a lot of struggle figured out how to solve that struggle in terms of growing his company through community led growth and he shares exactly what to do so that you can get a lot of people excited about what you're doing passionate and evangelical about your product. This is a great listen, I tell you, he is so fun to listen to to hear his story. So really enjoy this one.

Intro/ Outro: 0:51

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach,

Matt Wolach: 1:07

and welcome to Scale Your SaaS Thank you very much for being here. I am really glad that you made it. So if you have to first time definitely subscribe to the show. This is something where we're gonna be here to help you grow, help you scale help you understand how to run an incredible company, and somebody who knows how to do all of those things is with us today. And I am jacked for this. Everybody meet Lloyd Lobo. Lloyd, how you doing?

Lloyd Lobo: 1:29

I am doing well what energy Matt. Now you you created this virtuous cycle here because I'm gonna have to match your energy you attract the energy you give out. This is gonna be exciting. I'm super pumped. Thanks for having me.

Matt Wolach: 1:40

Absolutely. I'm so glad to have you here. And I feel like you're somebody who brings the enthusiasm and the passion. So I don't think you'll have any trouble matching that energy. But let me make sure that everybody knows who you are. So Lloyd Lobo, he is the Co-founder and a board member at Boast he has been an entrepreneur podcast host community builder and as the co-founder of Boast.ai. He leverages the community led growth model to bootstrap the company to eight figure revenue insecure, over 100 million in funding, while also co founding traction, which is a community empowering over 100,000 innovators through connections content and capital. Boast is a fin tech platform that provides R&D funding to help innovative companies fuel their growth. So Lloyd absolutely understands growing companies scale, and making sure that he helps others along the way. So Lloyd, once again, thanks for coming on the show.

Lloyd Lobo: 2:33

Thank you for having me. I've heard great things. I love your show. So I'm super pumped. Super excited to be in front of your community.

Matt Wolach: 2:39

Awesome. Thank you. Well, tell me what have you been up to lately? And what's coming up for you?

Lloyd Lobo: 2:42

Definitely. So not too long ago, we sold a majority stake in the company at boast right 50 To some odd percent, and had a transition. So me and my co founders, like stepped out of the day to day of the company. As a part of that I went through my internal journey of like, ah, what do I do this company was my identity. I had probably over the last several years only focused on last 10 years only focused on business on work, right did a couple of failed startups boast traction, that that whole work environment, that community that that was my tribe, that was my identity. So leaving the day to day of both and stepping to a board was actually a hard decision for me. I ended up probably depressed I ended up like clueless what to do. And my wife kept nagging at me, she's like, you're in a fortunate position, you can do whatever you want. Why are you Where are you latching on to things you don't have instead of making the most of what you have. But I realized that over the last several years, I've neglected my kids, I spent no time with them. So ejected out of San Francisco Bay Area and moved to Dubai a location where like, you know, it's completely disconnected but still have a lot of friends and but like not that same day to day vibe, like, hey, Brandon, hustle, you got to do a company. It's a different environment, which is more relaxed, more subdued, everything is done for you kind of like Disneyland for adults. So I came upon all this free time and I started to reflect on my journey as a kid growing up. And this is a very common thread in my life. It was community. My grandparents grew up in the slums of India. My mom grew up in the slums of Mumbai. And as a kid, when I used to visit those, my grandparents, it was all community. It was all people coming together. They lived in this, probably four walls that was maybe fit for three, four people, but 10 kids, and two parents lived in there, and tin foil roof. And every time I'd visit India asked my grandfather, why do you have the stranger living here? And he would tell me the only way to create abundance in life is to help others without expecting anything in return. And those memories as a kid. It used to Rain every summer I'd go and like puddles would turn into ponds and we were swimming in the muck and watching TV was a social activity because not many of those houses i It's hard to say houses because I don't know what to call it. Right those structures had TVs so like, every night you'd watch TV or a movie that will come on the cable television, people would come in and watch so they're cooked in and like others are, are watching from the grills of the window. I remember like you'd get fresh milk from the from the cows and there was like a cow shed there. And one evening, I as a kid, I wanted to bring a cow home and they let me bring it so like, that was a very community wide vibe. And then I was nine years old. One morning, my mom wakes me up and says, Hey, I don't think you can go to school anymore. There's a war has been hit the Gulf War and Kuwait. My first reaction as a kid was I knew I was going to fail. Grade four, because I had studied for a math exam. I always used to procrastinate as a kid, show up. It's a geo exam geography exam. My mom wakes me up and she's like, I don't think you can go to school. The war is hit my first reaction is yes, you're never gonna find out. I failed. But then when it sank in, right? When I started to see a kid, I see the worry on their face currencies are invalid. There's no phones, you don't know where you're gonna go. And that day, I went down the building with my dad and saw concern faces around. And people are trying to figure out what do you do? Right, the security has completely lapsed Saddam Hussein has taken over the country with his troops. There's no no certainty of what's going to happen. And so people started to come together and say, okay, you don't want all guarded the building from eight to 12. You guarded from 12, to four, all organized food, all organized supplies, yada, yada. And that's that's what I realized, like what is communities like? Somebody has an aspiration or a problem, they look around, others face the same, they come together. And every building became a sub community. And the word of mouth spread, coordinated with the UN embassies and it became the largest evacuation movement probably in his time, and took us to safety. And as I went from Kuwait, to Baghdad, to Jordan, on this rickety bus on the Highway of Death, buses were bombed, you weren't sure you're going to live or die currencies are invalid. Probably there should have been concerned adult faces around the bus. But all I could see is my parents, our friends, all these adults singing, playing the guitar laughing. And I'm like, What is going on here? And then I realized that it's neither the destination nor the journeys, the companions that matter the most, right? You could be on the Highway of Death, on the way to hell. But great companions make it memorable. Or you could be sipping champagne with your ship sipping Doha caviar with toxic people and want to get out of there. Right? And then after that, already, Canada, yeah, you've been there. You energy vampires, you just don't want to be there. Right.

Matt Wolach: 8:14

So true, so true.

Lloyd Lobo: 8:16

And you know what I look at the slums of India or the Gulf War. And then after engineering, I made my way to Canada with my parents after graduating engineering work at a number of startups actually, I finished engineering and the first job I took was cold calling for a small company. And entrepreneur I talked to said, the best skill you can learn if you want to be an entrepreneur someday sales. And I agree sales is everything fast forward today, sales is finding your first customers figuring out and prioritizing what to build convincing your wife after repeated failure to do the next step of convincing investors evangelizing the press employees to join on low pay. It's everything. But so through that cold calling job, my parents were losing it right. You're making 30k dialing for dollars, or a friend's kids did engineering the work and Microsoft and Google What are you doing, right? But I made my way from from Canada to the United States because my my girlfriend who was also refugee of the Gulf War, went to med school and work on a series of startups after a few failures, then connected with my best friend from college, who was in the space and wanted to do a start up in this r&d tax credits r&d funding because he was doing it manually at big four accounting firms. And when we came together to make cold calls to people to see if they'll buy the service, nobody would talk to us imagine I randomly call you and say hey, you know what, if you give me your product development information, I'll get you some money from the government. You gotta think like, you know, 10 years ago, you're gonna think this is like a spammy thing. And even should do it. Why should I give two randos my, my data when I can go to a big four accounting firm So we were getting slammed shut a lot or like talking to like, companies that could even use a service. And so the light bulb went on is like K. Community is part of like, the DNA here like mine personally. And the one thing I can do is rely on that community we had as a function of being a part of failed startups have a bit of a network. And, you know, it's never the product you're selling, but it's the outcome, you're driving for the customer. And we knew people wanted r&d funding to accelerate innovation. They wanted to accelerate innovation, to drive business growth. Why can't they what stops them from driving business growth is all these things that they don't know. So that was a timer podcast in exists? There were no like tactical events, it was all very high level. So we started finding founders in our network was a level up from our audience to come and share behind closed doors, their learnings, how did you get your first customers? How did you write your first sales scripts? How did you build your first product? How do you make your first few hires Right? Like, how do you run a marketing campaign that generates results are just not from straight from the people who did it? The founders or the early employees? And then our messaging change from Hey, buy my stuff to hey, we're hosting an event with X influencer or x person who's going to talk about why topic that's relevant to your business. We got 10 spots would you love to come? There's going to be some pizza. People started coming. first meetup. 10 people showed up 1520 30 People started showing up. One fine day 200 people landed at that co working space. And they're like, Guys, this is not a pizza night meet up. It's a full blown conference. Fast forward now seven, eight years that's evolved into a large community traction, it helped us bootstrap to almost 10 million in funding. I mean, almost 10 million in revenue and lots of funding between debt and equity took over 100 million. We met our investors who bought the company. Through that community, they came to an event we met the guys who gave us the 100 million that facility through that communities is done a lot. So that was the other reflection that I that I left the day to day of the company. And like I said, I ended up depressed, drunk, overweight, I was like, I lost my identity. So I started just dabbling in things. And things that I think's to overcome it, right, like a lot of what we do, to battled depression is what medication meditation and masturbation, masturbation being euphemism for all the other things you do, you don't go to the root cause. But sometimes, you know, attacking the root cause is the most important thing. Because if it's the environment, or the people that's bothering you, then you got to change that. Because no amount of medication or meditation is going to solve it. It's just kicking the can further. And I kept thinking that you know, drinking and partying and doing all these other things is going to help me get away and then I realized it's not it's the environment, right? But But through that exercise, I got extremely overweight and unhealthy and the peloton community is what helped me get to good health. My wife wakes me up and she's like, look at you. If something happens to you, your family is going to be left holding the bag you've barely spent any time with the kids. Now that you've come into some money instead of spending time with them, you're moping about like leaving the day to day of your company. And in she's like, right after Easter. The funny thing was right after the exit. I was working, working working and our seller let the deal go through and I'll take everyone to Bora Bora. And she's she would always say nobody cares about your Bora Bora. We care about having dinner time with you are focused on with you with the phones away. Nobody cares about one vacation a year that is a compound interest on being together a little bit every day is what builds relationships and I never thought about that. And, and so the deal happened. We booked everyone to Bora Bora, my family my parents my sister two days before Moreover, I got bilateral COVID pneumonia was hospitalized unable to breathe. Oh no. And and I promised myself after that incident that I'd come back and spend more time with the kids and get better. But all habits die real hard. The company went obviously came into funding in growth mode. We added like 80 100 people and it's just things got chaotic and my daughter comes to me and she's like dad, everything you said in the press and to us that if you died your biggest regret would would be you didn't spend enough time with us was a lie. And I'm like sweetie, listen. I don't want to say we got lots of people there's you know It's chaotic times when you grow from like 3040 ish to 120 130 ish we got to do right by them and she's like Dad Why don't you go work for somebody thinks like you so I can have my dad back. Right and so a lot of these conflicting things as they depart the day to day was was eating me and my wife's like, you might not get a third chance if you rely on these things, these external you know external things to get your mind off right it has to come from within you the glass is always half full. So that night as I lay on bed, unable to sleep, I see the peloton which had probably we had for like four years but turn into a clothing rush. So Mike, let me hop on regular she's given me the health lecture over and over, she's a physician I'm gonna hop on and hop on the the instructor Coincidentally, I get this instructor which I'm glad that happened. I felt an instant connection she was coming off maternity leave and didn't feel as strong. And so she brought her vulnerable self and she said, Hey, I don't feel as strong. I'm weak. I can't write as before I don't want to do this. And then she yells out self pity is toxic one crank one shift one right on the block I am I can, with I have the tiger from Rocky playing. So that one ride went so fast turned into two turn three. And as a community I relied on people high fiving each other I was looking forward to my daily rides, streaks. And so when I came back to good health and freedom, and as I reflected on like, I've been an entrepreneur working like 80 100 hours a week for the last 10 years, I don't know how to sit and do nothing. And I have all this free time. And my journey from my parents being the slums of India to having literally Slumdog Millionaire, being financial freedom, the one thing I can do is pay homage to the community. Right. And so I started talking to hundreds and 1000s of people about community researching and just trying to see if there are parallels to my learnings like we bootstrap boast based on that and got our investors and start to find very common threads and then started talking and asking the same questions and found 13 common rules amongst all these community led businesses from Harley Davidson to HubSpot, that I put into a book called from grassroots to greatness, 13 rules to build iconic brands with community led growth. And the one common theme, or 111, common theme in that in that journey was which which you will find funny is from Christ or Christianity, to CrossFit. Therefore common themes are very common framework. Really, when people listen to you, or buy your product, you have an audience. You bring that audience together, to interact with one another, you have a community, you bring that community together to create impact. It's a movement, and through rituals and undying faith and its purpose. That movement then turns into a cult or religion. That's why I said from Christ to CrossFit, this is the journey of every obscure idea to iconic, right. And so it was interesting, right? Audience, community, movement, religion, or cult, like, try to try to, you know, ignore our religion side of things, because I don't want to take it in that track, but argue with somebody with a cult brand like a CrossFit or a Harley fan, or Apple, Apple, or Bitcoin and they'll

Matt Wolach: 18:38

cut you, right? Yes, absolutely.

Lloyd Lobo: 18:41

How did it start? It started with an audience. And then we came together and became a community, then the community started to work together to create something, and it became a movement and then through certain rituals and beliefs. In this purpose, it turns into a call. So I talked about some of that. And it is very, very fascinating.

Matt Wolach: 19:04

We'll be right back. Skill your SAS is supported by Toro wave. Lots of software leaders I talked to who are looking to scale their SAS and I keep hearing over and over about one major struggle getting ghosted by buyers after the demo. How frustrating is it when you have a great demo? You're feeling good, they like it. It seems like a done deal. And then crickets, nothing reach out. They're not responding to you at all. And when these software companies they asked me to dive in, I noticed that the sellers are following up the wrong way. Or actually, I should say with the wrong medium. What they're doing is they're hammering emails over and over again. I got a newsflash for you. Email effectiveness is dwindling down and down every year. So why beat your head against the wall losing all kinds of business, start texting mixing texts, along with emails and calls and watch your conversion rates go up. In fact conversion rates go up by about 50% When you use texting as part of the follow up people are used to it and did you know though response rate on text is 98% 98% So why throw emails into a black hole knowing that they're never gonna get returned text buyers and get results but don't use your own phone all kinds of security and compliance issues if you do also none of that data is with your company. That's not good. Instead use this system Toro wave. Toro wave is designed for sales. It makes texting with buyers super simple and fast and it helps drive more deals, deals that you've been losing until now for being a listener. You get 50% off your first month of using Toro away 50% off just go to Toro wave.com/scale It's t o r o wav.com/scale get signed up and start winning more deals like Tracy who closed $170,000 In three days after starting again, go to Toro wave.com/scale Catch up and win by texting with poor wind. And we're back. Yeah. And this book coming up. I mean, that sounds amazing. It's coming out in September, right.

Lloyd Lobo: 21:08

September 12. We'll do the pre sale later this week, early next week. And and yeah, so September 12, is what it is.

Matt Wolach: 21:18

I love it. So what can you share with our audience about some of these rules for community led growth that they can apply within their own businesses?

Lloyd Lobo: 21:25

Definitely. So I'll break down some very basic things. And it might be it might be very easy to digest here. So five or four or five rules, I'll share in a very tactical way and effectively put it in the framework of not maybe how Harley did it or Apple did it because it's it might be very hard to connect with a brand that's worth billions. But I could talk about my journey going into 10 million bootstrap with no marketing team. Right? And that that might connect better. So I think the step number one and you'll appreciate this given you sales is your life is your lifeline, right is starting with the ideal customer profile, like figuring out an underserved niche and identifying their pains, figure out where they eat, breathe, drink sleep, don't just figure out the problems, but figure out their aspirations and goals, how can they become the best versions of themselves, right? So a lot of the times what happens is we focused on the solution should focus on the problem or the aspiration because customers care about the outcome for them, they don't care about your product. I want to I want to get fit, I don't care about a gym membership. I want to get more leads, I don't care about the marketing automation tool. But the thing is, we get so hyped up in our product and our features that we forget the customer and some of these big big iconic brands are focused on the purpose right the end purpose is like what are you driving? What is the outcome you're driving? What is it what is the purpose for the customer for that audience? So start there, once you have that, draw the circle of influence around your customer. So you have the ICP so I boasted was innovators basically people who build new products or improved existing products. Now what is the circle of influence? Meaning? Who are the influencers, that your ideal customer profile listens to? When you have that list? Those are people if you host events or podcasts or meetups or webinars, you can invite us speakers, right? Because you will get their brand rub. The second is who what are the tools or services do they buy? So if it's an entrepreneur and I'm selling them r&d funding, well, probably it's startup legal, probably it's venture capitalists probably it is people who sell tools like Stripe or HubSpot, all the whole stack that founder would buy, right? That's the gusto for payroll. So those are people that you could partner with like say if you did events, conferences, webinars, meetups, like you can do joint partner activity with them. And then the third is what channels where are the Hangout? Basically, where are they frequent? Like? Are they on LinkedIn? Or are they on Twitter? Like you got to figure out where they hang out what blogs what magazines they read, so you can be prevalent there so if they read TechCrunch, but you're throwing stuff on PR Newswire, then why like go where your audiences, right? If they're asking for LinkedIn and you're blasting the hell out of friggin Instagram, then you got to ask yourself where What are you trying to attract? Right. So that the so you start with the ICP, you figure out the aspirations and goals and the problems, not just what your solution solves. And the other benefit of focusing on the aspiration or the problem is if you focus on the solution, you'll keep making your solution better. If you focus on the problem and the customers aspiration You'll grow beyond your solution to a big iconic company, right? Because if you look at every company that's 100 million in revenue, they're always Multi Product companies like Salesforce like Salesforce, a web billions in revenue, they don't just have the CRM, they have the Cs, and they have the marketing automation. They have services. Every major company has a second act and a third act and a fourth act. If you're just focused on your solution, you will never see beyond your product, you have to understand what is the customer's aspiration? What are the goals? What are they what are they trying to drive, what are they trying to become. And that's how you can make that leap of adding product to product free. So it's very important. And that's how you can come up with also with content, right? If you only think about your solution, you'll only ever talk about your solution. But if you think about the customer's aspiration, you fall in love with your customer. And you can help them become successful beyond your product or service. You're obviously for you know, HubSpot, which we're all familiar with. I was an engineer who went into sales, like I said, and eventually ended up at a startup in sales. But it's so happens when startups don't have product market fit. You end up in sales, but you have to actually be also product manager, product manager and do marketing for like, Oh, we don't have any customers So figure out who you should sell to and then by the way, figure out what what we need to build. And then also figure out how we launched this was the best experience ever. I never complain I barely got paid, I think I got paid like $45,000 is the best experience ever. Those were the like, you know, that drawn a lot. You learn so much. But during that time, this was I think design five or six. There was no content around digital marketing, online marketing anything so I started Googling on all I found was HubSpot inbound community and their inbound marketing certificate. And I remember Gary Vaynerchuk with chubby little guy selling wine wine TV was teaching a course on their on YouTube, YouTube marketing, like how to how to create YouTube videos. So I learned a lot is a function of that. But that's that's what it is right? If you focus on the customers aspiration, then HubSpot became one of the top marketing automation platforms and added sales now adding CES, it's grown based on following the customers aspirations. So that's what you should start with. Then the second step, the third, the once you figure out the ICP and figure out their circle of influence, then you figure out what type of community you want to build. There are three types of communities you can build. There is a community of practice, which is bringing people together to learn about our topic, right? You're, you're building effectively a community of practice here with the SAS, SAS ver is a community of practice, as well. HubSpot inbound is a community of practice, where people want to learn about a specific field that has nothing to do with the product, gain sites, customer success, community pulse. Gainsight is a great example. I joined their community, they had no product. And then eventually someday they built they built a product and people were like, Hey, you educated me on customer success? Why wouldn't I use your product? So once you've once you've figured that out, so Community of Practice, then the second one is community a product, which is learning about a product, like how do I get better at Microsoft? Or how do I get better at GitHub? Or how do I get better at Atlassian? Right. And the third one is a community of play where you come together around social activities. Like I would say, in many ways all the Red Bull has a community of evangelists around Red Bull, but it's really a community of player hosting high energy events, right? But like your paddle club, or your soccer club, do you belong to any of those kinds of communities?

Matt Wolach: 28:47

I have a golf fleet. Yep.

Lloyd Lobo: 28:48

Exactly right. That's great. It's fun, it's fun. If you don't have product market fit, meaning you don't have at least 100 Customers who love your product, use it and want to congregate. There is no point in building a community product because in the beginning, you're just trying to get people to learn about you and spread the message. And when you have a community a product, when you barely have any customers, nobody's going to want to come hang out there. Like we don't want to buy your stuff, right. And so So figure out the community you want to build if you don't a product market fit, it's a community of practice or community of play. Then you start following that framework of audience community, movement, religion and creating the audience can start with you know, ICP, write down 100 200 burning questions that your audience has. So you can generate a repository of ideas like think hey, if I have to write this ultimate guide to XYZ, what chapters sub chapters and topics it would include. Then you can turn that one form of content into multiple forms right like so you interview say, sure you have your list of influencers, interview them on a live zoom like an on a zoom webinar. Turn that into The video for YouTube the audio for podcast, turned the shorts into YouTube shorts, tick tock in serials. Take the text posted on LinkedIn on on Twitter. So you start building a bit of an audience there. Consistency is key, you can you can turn a series of videos into an e book or a course like on Maven or one of these cohort based learning courses or just a recorded course on Thinkific or something like that. But you start building an audience. The key is consistency, though a lot of people are not consistent, right? We the first meetup we did if we just stopped after the third meetup, because only 1010 10 People were showing up, then we'd give up right? But because we kept that consistency, we got kicked out of the core game space when 200 people showed up one day, and it turned into attraction eventually. And then during the pandemic, we had to cancel a conference. And he didn't know what to do. We had 54 or 55 speakers lined up. I personally couldn't bring myself to do a two day virtual summit because I can't sit through a virtual summit personally. So I'm like, I'm never gonna organize this, let alone if the tech fail. Let's see. You know how that happens. Yeah, reports. So I requested every speaker to join us for a live ama session once a week. And that gave me like webinars for a year now blasted our same audience. And every week, five 600 people show up. But very quickly, within a matter of a month or two, we started getting requests from other speakers to join because people liked that format of one hour a week like a TV show that unit. So we made it to a week and now you're getting four or 500 people tuning in your videos went to YouTube or YouTube on average. Yeah, YouTube's if you go to the traction coffee, YouTube, you'll see each session in the past several months averages eight to 10,000 views. And and then that grew our email database went from I think in the pandemic from 30,000 subscribers to 100 and some odd 1000 subscribers over a two year span. That's phenomena have consistent the first few ones we did 4050 people showed up. If we weren't consistent though. It's done ran just

Matt Wolach: 32:20

staying with it. I talked to so many leaders who try something and it might have been the right thing, but they never gave themselves a chance to prove it. They never gave themselves a chance to get better at it and show themselves that that's the right thing. And so they stop it before it ever evolves into that phenomenal, perfect way to drive leads or get people excited or close deals or whatever it is. So I love that you're saying that be consistent, be persistent with it, keep it going. And I think that that's really critical.

Lloyd Lobo: 32:51

That is that is very critical consistency. So Jason Lemkin did the foreword on my book from grassroots to greatness, and honest forward, he, there's a quote I use, which says consistency is the magic ingredient that turns small actions into big achievements. You see if what Jason did with Sastre is he, before it became faster and the world's largest community for business software. He wrote two to three posts every day on Quora for two years, never stopped, never stopped even till today, he writes every day, right? On LinkedIn, when when the audience changed the world change from other platforms and blogs to LinkedIn for business. Sure that consistency is key, man, we stop. And really consistency is what leads to eventually becoming an overnight success. We talked about our friend, Melissa cornea, she had been writing on LinkedIn every day, almost every day or three, four times a week, for the last year and a half or so. And lately, every post of her has been going viral, like 1000 plus views in the last six weeks, right? She's had like a hit, and every six it takes time. So you got to be consistent. So once once you do that, once you do that, you have one form of content, you turn into multiple pieces of content. This is where people don't realize it's not super hard. If you figure out your ICP and figure out their influencers, you start reaching out, even start a podcast, right. I understand lots of podcasts here. But if you have the best podcast for a very specific niche that nobody else is doing, right? It's better to go and enjoy

Matt Wolach: 34:38

a lot of people from our show. We get a lot of people who come to us from our show. Exactly. It's so much fun. And you're right we get a lot of repurposing out of it. And it's it's I mean, a lot of great things marketing wise come from it. But what I love is just the learning the meeting great people like yourself, it's just so cool how, you know you can just kind of create this community like you're saying, and now you've got people who are supportive of you, people who believe in you, and people who trust you to help them out. And it's pretty cool.

Lloyd Lobo: 35:09

Definitely. So now you have this audience building. The next step is bring your audience together. You can one a few ways you can do it. Right. You can open these recordings up to the public, make it live interactive online meetup. Have the newsletter because the audience again is one way communication. Yes, LinkedIn, you can comment and all of that, but it's still one to many in many regards, right? Well, community is where audience to audience happens not audience to host where your own community members can interact with one another. So maybe you start by opening up the Zoom recordings, but maybe have like a chat group on WhatsApp or discord. I think though, what is invaluable is hosting meetups every once in a while. Because anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you start to build stronger connections and bonds, right? If we were doing this in person, we'd get to know each other as families and probably have a meal or two together would talk about random things. And that's when you start to build genuine connections and you know, the power of in person when it comes to sales, right? Why do you go on the golf course with people,

Matt Wolach: 36:13

I literally just told my clients today face to face is the number one way to sell. And in software, we don't get that often we get, you know, zoom, which is next best thing, but it's definitely not as good as being right there.

Lloyd Lobo: 36:27

But bringing people together in a community setting is not really selling, it's having fun, right and around a specific topic. And so when you do that, you start to build stronger connections. So do the online stuff. Do the discord or Whatsapp group or slack. If your audience wants to interact their seed and drive, you really have to curate and seed it to drive that interaction. And do the live amas. But try to have in person cadence of meetups, it doesn't have to be a fancy conference that you take a year to plan. I mean, yes, we do that attraction. But imagine just bringing 2032 people together. You can you can do something like that with a two week notice and put it on rotation every two weeks. Right? That's easy to do. Yeah. 2030 people show, but that that camaraderie builds over time, right. So you brought people together, then from there, you know, I think I think what that looks like is making that commitment to say I'm gonna post daily. I'm gonna, I'm gonna send a newsletter, weekly, I'm going to release a podcast Weekly. I'm going to curate the chat daily, then I'll do monthly meetups. I'll do quarterly retreats and maybe a big event, once a year kind of thing, some cadence where people can feel they're part of a ritual kind of thing. How do you go go to being a movement, it's all about coming together for a purpose that's greater and beyond your product, right? It's bring like Harley almost went bankrupt in the 80s. Rebuild the company in the ethos of community community is not a marketing strategy. That's the one thing I want to say. Community is a business strategy, Harley, when they faced competition from the Japanese manufacturers, whatever, almost under in the 80s. So employees went out there and deliberately started Harley riding clubs, employees became writers, writers became employees oversight from the President, they organize the big same Harley campaign. Today, Harley has launched campaigns to donate to breast cancer and autism and all kinds of things. It's a movement, right? Like weekend warriors plays a hardly person just by what they're wearing. Now, you don't have to go that far back. Because you know, a lot of people will say, Oh, these are iconic brands from like, decades ago. Look at Mr. Beast. Right and Mr. Beast is biggest influencer came out of nowhere through consistency, the same thing. But what did he do with his money, he didn't lace his pockets. He could hop on a private jet. But he took that money and he does things differently. That stands out right like curing people of blindness or raising bringing the community together, putting where his money he putting his mouth where his money is or money where his mouth is saying, I'm gonna put this money but you donate to so bringing people together to donate 20 million to plant 20 million trees or raise 30 million to take out 30 million out of the ocean. That's how you bring your community to create a movement because I truly believe there is no good or bad people. There's Shades of Grey, everyone wants to do something good or has good intentions for the most. And life happens right? Think about the lives we live, pick drive kids, mortgage, car payments, taxes, life happens. You running around, you're working and so you can't bring sometimes you can't don't have the time to take up a cause solo. But if you can join, you know, in great community communities are built on great alignment around great purpose. If you can align with somebody's purpose, and feel like even if you're making a small effort, those small droplets lead to a big ocean and creates a big impact. You will do it.

Matt Wolach: 40:27

I love it. I love it. And as we wrap here, something about Mr. B, since you brought him up, the reason he was able to make that impact is because you go back to your consistency. He did 1000 days, 1000 days of videos straight, kept doing it kept doing it kept doing it and learning, learning learning every single time to try and tweak update. What can I change? He spoke with others, hey, what can I fix? How can we improve it? And 1000 days straight? You mean you want to get good at something, do it every day for 1000 days. And that's what he did.

Lloyd Lobo: 41:02

That is consistency is the magic ingredient that turns small actions into big outcomes as a quote from Jason Lemkin in the book. And yeah, you can get it on from grassroots to greatness.com, or Lloyd lobo.com. There's an E in my name. So type from grassroots to greatness.com. It'll be on presale on August 16, or 17th. And then you can get a copy on September, the 12th. But, you know, as we as we wrap here. Yesterday's innovation is always today's option and tomorrow's commodity. If you build a community, you won't you won't become a commodity. Look at Apple, it always talks about the aspiration, it doesn't have better features than its competitors. Not quite. It's always talking about the aspiration. Look at Nike, the same thing, right? Nike has probably one of the largest communities of athletes with this running clubs, basketball clubs. It's it's around the aspiration, not the product, when you sell features, you die with those features. When you sell the aspiration, the aspiration lives on forever. And so building around the purpose is what people want to align on, especially in today, right in 2023, we're talking about record number of layoffs. But people are able to make a living by consulting on Fiverr or Upwork. Right, or driving an Uber and doing DoorDash people can make a living and guess what the living they make right now. They can optimize for taxes. And they don't have to be answerable to your clock. So they want to be a part of something, it better be purpose driven. A great example of that alignment is when President Kennedy was walking the halls of NASA at midnight, he sees this janitor sweeping the room. And he asks, What are you doing this late? And he's like, sir, I'm putting a man on the moon. Think about how powerful that is, right? Cascading the purpose from the top to the person who does the smallest of the small jobs thinks that that little piece of work is doing is part of moving the purpose in a great direction. So that's how I love it.

Matt Wolach: 43:24

I love it, Lloyd, this has been super enjoyable. I really appreciate you coming on sharing your story, we will put the link to the book into the show notes. So everybody go grab that. And we'll put also your link for your LinkedIn, all that fun stuff. If you're watching this, you'll see that in the description down on YouTube, if you're listening to it, you'll see it in the show notes. But Lloyd, this is awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your wisdom.

Lloyd Lobo: 43:48

Thank you so much, Matt. This was a pleasure. And like I said at the beginning you attract the energy you give out so thank you for for being that energetic host and putting out the best in me man.

Matt Wolach: 43:59

My pleasure. I really appreciate that and everybody out there. I appreciate you being here. Again, make sure you're subscribed to the show. You do not want to miss any other upcoming amazing guests like Lloyd. So definitely hit that and then we will see you next time. Take care. Awesome.

Intro/ Outro: 44:17

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS for more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com