Join Asher & Kelly on the Unlearn Podcast this week with special guest James Carbary as they discuss building and nurturing communities.
0:29 - Operating and acting like a media company
01:37 - Challenges in operationalizing to become a media company
07:22 - Building a personal connection.
09:28 - Reshaping your internal company culture.
13:38 - Community led growth.
17:42 - Understanding the relationship between community and media
29:51 - Free community vs paid community
33:10 - B2B tech communities at scale
40:18 - Creating connections at scale
“Content is the way that you win in 2023.”
00:17
To thrive in an era of visual transformation. you have to go up the market differently. Let's find out how. James, what's top of mind for you?
00:29
So I think what I'm thinking a lot about these days is the fact that Gary V has been talking about being a media company and companies acting like media companies for almost a decade now. and, Uh and we're still not doing anything about it. In, B to B land, people are still not, we're not even close to operating like media companies. We know content marketing is changing. We see the proof in the folks like Chris Walker who go from zero to building a $20 million business in three years by literally doing that by just becoming a media company. And we're not, we're not heating to that. Dave Gerhart is doing it. You're seeing these other vineyards doing it with sales feed and their media brand.
Um and, and it's still there, there's nobody, there's very few people, the audience plus is talking about it. We're talking about it, but there are very few people talking about how you operationalize becoming a media company. And because we know that content is, is the way that you win in 2023. Uh and so that's, that's what I'm thinking about.
01:37
Yeah. What, and let's sort of dive into, what do you think the biggest hurdles are? Because I agree this is kind of in the air as an idea and people are even receptive to the idea. It makes sense. but then to your point about operationalizing, there seems to be a huge gap there, and what are some of the big blockers? Because, you know, one thing that comes to mind, right is that businesses have this really hard mentality of, of getting out of, I would say two things, metrics. What can we track and track in the short term often? And then the other thing is, you know, sort of thinking about the skill set of a media company and what's, and what's the traditional skill set of B to B marketers who are working in tech or any other industry?
02:24
Yeah, so you mentioned a few different things there. One AI thinks it is very much. Uh, I think companies are very much hampered by short-term thinking. And if you're going to go all in on the strategy of being a media company and trying to win through content, it's not a short-term game, you've got to be committed to it. And I, and that's risky and scary and I get that.
Um And so my friend Jurgen, I heard him talk about on, on his show um the other day, how you, you can't go half in with the, with the media play like you either go all in and do it right? Or just pick another strategy like there, we, we say on our show on B to B growth all the time. There are lots of ways to win And so uh becoming a media company isn't the only way to win. But I think it's a very proven model of winning, and when you look at a lot of the category kings and queens of today, a lot of them won through content. And so, that's one thing I think we've, we've gotta shed the short term thinking if, if the media play is what you wanna is the path you want to go down. The second thing is The difference between marketers and creators. AI has served.
So, I did another podcast called Young Mary Christian. Uh, It was about a year and a half ago now, and AUTism is personally very passionate about the foster care crisis in America. And so there are 400,000 kids in the foster care system. and life in the foster care system as you could imagine is not great. And so I have been trying to raise awareness with Christians who I think are called to take care of the poor, the needy, and widows. And, so I was like, I'm gonna start a podcast. I know this space, so I'm gonna start a podcast to try to raise awareness. And I've been talking to a lot of Christian influencers.
They have amassed, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of followers online. And, we're running that playbook to try to grow the following for the show and, and to increase our influence in that space so that we can get more people thinking and considering foster care. and in that process, it's been fascinating to me how much it's helped me in my day job, so to speak with Sweet Fish because I've seen these creators, we fly them to Orlando, we record in a studio and I get to spend a day or two with these creators. They think differently than marketers. They are, they are consumed with the human on the other end of the content, they're consumed with their audience. They're not consumed with converting their audience into a particular thing.
And so a lot of them, surprisingly AI AI was surprised that a lot of them don't make a lot of money because that's not what they're consumed with. And so as AI started wrestling with like OK, AI live in B to B marketing land where all of these marketers are phenomenal at converting attention into revenue, but they're awful at building audiences because that's, they're, they're not consumed with what an audience wants to hear, they're consumed with converting into revenue. And so when I first started talking about this, it kind of came across like AI was crapping on marketers and praising creators.
But the reality is we need both, we need creators and we need marketers. The problem is that I found that a lot of marketers consider themselves to be creators. Not Have you built an audience of, you know, even 10,000 at first, I said 50,000. But you know, have you built an actual audience? Because I like Ai I've got a 30,000-person following on LinkedIn. I still don't consider myself a creator. I don't think like I'm not obsessed with coming up with the right hook or the right angle or the psychology of what goes into really thinking through what is going to engage someone's heart or mind in a certain way that makes them want to share this certain piece of content. Like I'm just not wired that way. I'm trying to hire those kinds of people on our team.
Because I want that to be a skill that we have in our agency that we can deploy for our clients, but it's a very different skill set. And so AI I think creators have this understanding of human psychology, they also understand nuances of social platforms that most marketers aren't even close to understanding. Like when AI when I talked to these creators when I was talking to them with us when they were in town for young married Christian it was crazy like the nuances of the algorithm that they understood and liked and that's AI Gotta,
07:11
I'll push back on that- I'm a marketer. I think marketers uh know that stuff like the back of their hand because it's the science of marketing, right? and everybody
07:20
Do you think so?
07:21
But I think that so I think, your point about the difference between a creator and a marketer um is 100% valid and that authenticity is personal. That isengagement because marketers can build a list of 30,000, with no problem.
But that's the engagement? What's loyalty? Usually, it's low because of the point you're saying, which is they weren't trying to build a personal connection with that list. They were only thinking about how I could build this list. So they'll click through my content, click through the demo, and my salesperson will call them up.
That's why they're laser-focused on that sort of conversion funnel. But the creator persona is thinking about how to form this engaged personal connection at scale, which is a very difficult skill, right? Because most of us kind of have a sense of how to form a personal connection on a small 1 to-1 not all of us, but most of us do it at scale. I mean, it's an incredible skill, right? And not everybody has it.
And I think the question for B-to-Btech companies is: How do you hire this skill and also allow it to operate as it is designed to operate and not try to pull it into that funnel because I think that's what and, and we've seen a lot of acquisitions, right? LAsI works at Hubspot, and we acquired the Hustle. I mean, it was a pretty recent acquisition, but you know, the brand has continued to operate, but I think it'll be interesting to watch.
Companies that are saying, hey, we're just gonna acquire because we don't have the skill set to build it. But then what will happen, will those creators remain autonomous and have that freedom because businesses want to control, right? Like they want to control the narrative and you have to let a creator Say things that are personal or maybe not like on the dotted corporate line. So I think that one of the challenges is how companies can do that. How can, how can they let that creator be free even though it goes against how they're used to operating?
09:28
Kelly. it's interesting with you being at HubSpot I've said about b to b growth before the reason think it's brilliant that HubSpot did what they did with the hustle, what outreach did with sales hacker is I think, to me, it seems like it, it seems like a play to change your internal culture. So if you are acquiring a media company by bringing that talent in-house you're shaping what you want your culture to be moving forward. So we're in the process right now of hiring a creative director, and the AI I've been very specific with the job profile, for this particular role that I want it to be, I want this person to be a creator. So going back to what you said earlier about how we do this? I think this is because there are so many creators out there that are so passionate about the craft and the creation of content. They don't focus as much on the monetization of it.
So I think there are more of these creators available to the market, to companies that want to hire this type of person on their team. So long as the culture is good, they give them autonomy and freedom. As you mentioned, which requires an undoing of a lot of kinds of traditional corporate thinking, but AI I'm seeing more and more companies that are starting to get it.
You can get these folks for, you know, at, at, at a salary. That is not crazy. I mean, you're gonna have to pay them. Well, this is not a $4 40,000-a-year kind of entry-level position. Ai, I don't think, I think they have immense talent and they need to be rewarded and compensated. Um, As you would think about other roles in marketing, I think that like it'll be interesting to me to the culture of HubSpot internally in five years after having the talent that they brought over from HubSpot inside their organization like I will other parts of the marketing team start to think more like creators. And yeah, I'm, I'm excited to see it play out.
11:29
It's tough. so in my, let's call it a day gig, right? because I'm in the demand base, right? I've led a little bit of a sea to some of the leading CMO and when we do our CMO’s forums, right? like nobody's talking about media companies and I feel like the construct of let's call it venture-back companies don't allow for the freedom of a creator to exist just because of the pressure of performing, right? Um and so, you've got these creators, which in my definition, are people who have experienced the pain, whether they pay, pay, experience the pain directly or indirectly, they experience the pain. And that's what allows them to even care about caring about the topic and producing a lot of content on it because they want to make a difference, right? And then the influencer it's like because the marketer word is coming up less and less, but I think the word influencer comes up quite, quite a bit because like those are the 22 buckets, right? And the influences are these master tacticians of uh kind of converting and making some sort of affiliate commission on the back end, right? Basically. Right. And so, but I would say of all the conversations I've had over the last like, let's call it like nine months with CMO S, maybe one has talked about of any scale, by the way, not like an early startup because I think the early startups are all like picking up on this uh on this train. But if you were a company of any scale, they're thinking, OK, how do I get my event strategy going now? You know, how do I get my mothers to work closely with sales on making sure that my joint accounts are being used if I create an activity that they're being followed up on? Right. They're not talking about this stuff. And I think there is a long journey here too. It's right. It's the right thing to do because all the B DC brands do it right. They come across as very authentic, at least the good ones do. But, the BB-to-B Brands just don't. So I thought I would just drop that data point in because we're talking about HubSpot But Hops is a very different Company.
13:29
Are they talking about it? your perspective is really interesting because uh like, are they talking about the community?
13:38
So they are talking about community and it's interesting because they were talking about the community before too. It's not that the community just like this whole thing about the community-led growth just became a big thing because of like, it's kind of like because of COVID pre primarily, right? And I'm, I'm close to it because of the work we're doing at partnership leaders, right? So, the companies Were there? I would say companies are talking about conferences more than community. even to today right now, right? The dialogue and like the C MS is like, what is our conference going to do and where is it going to be? And what is it gonna be like and Stuff like that?
14:16
And when they're talking about their conference, are they talking about a conference for their industry as a whole? like the industry, they serve, or is it for their, for their customers?
14:27
It's primarily for prospects, interest, like bringing customers there to pitch to the current playbook is like, bring the c like, it's an old playbook but it's just being renewed. uh, have The customers.
14:40
Yeah,
14:41
Bringing them together with the companies that try to do this is so there's another, uh, case of mistaken identity also, right? As you do, you have these venture-backed companies or companies of scale that will put on industry conferences and they're like, inherently the people that come to it, they're like, this is not an industry conference, this is just a custom conference, I'm gonna go to it, right? Because the industry conference is supposed to be thrown by an entity that has nothing to do with the vendor, right? Whether you're a technology or data vendor, right?
So, these are some data points that I just have access to? And I was like, as you guys are talking super interesting conversation, but I'm like, I don't, I don't see it any way that it does not come up in any of our slack channels. It doesn't come up in any of our, our, our emails and stuff like that. And so I feel like you need like some anchor CMOs that are a little bit more AI would even say not from B to B Sass, but they're from B to B other things because I've always, some, I found that like those people are very open to like trying new things out versus the B to B A S guys are like, hey, my board told me this playbook and we have 50 companies and 49 of them use this playbook. So let's just use this playbook.
15:51
I think that there's a little bit of, a trend happening still on the community level, and maybe part of it, it has to come from the CEO as well. because a lot of times CMO S are under that short-term pressure to get those leads and those MQLs up, and community is never going to be that short-term answer.
But when you have a CEO that gets it, then I, I think you get the same time that sort of the branch gr group gets right, like they usually have longer-term metrics as well. But uh you know, amplitude, I think acquired mine the product which is a, was a, just an industry group. I know there are slat groups that are, it used to be called O D, what is it? It used to be Fish Town, analytics, And then they changed but it's a data analytics company and they have a slack group in the tens of thousands that because they're based on an open source technology and it's just people helping each other around this technology and, and I think that um products and yes, DVD Labs would be.
16:56
I think, what you're talking about but they have like 7000 or some, several people, and when you talk to them, they're like, wait, we started like this and we realized that that part of our business is a different company. Yeah, The Community
17:17
But there, that community is like a great source of A lot.
17:21
But like when, as we look at the construct of our company, we're like, we have a software company and we have a community company, we manage it like that.
17:30
Oh yes, which goes back to our original point. I think of recognizing what things are and ensuring they're operationalized in the way that they need to be, to be successful because you can't oppose one and AI would. AI would be curious. Um James, what your take is on a couple of things around this, which is what's the relationship between community and media because I think that these are two separate but very related concepts.
And a minor note, Asher drops the word influencer, which I think is interesting, AI I'd be curious for your take on the difference between a creator and an influencer. Um Is it just terminology? For me? I'll be honest, influencer has a more negative connotation. But, I'm not a social media person Um So yeah, curious about those two distinctions and what you're the influencer
18:19
Man.
18:19
Ai, I don't, but that's not an objective opinion. That's my personal bias. I am not even Sure,
18:27
influencers like the word influencer. um because I think that it's because it's taken on a more negative connotation in a lot of circles. so you're not the only one that feels that way. I think there is a distinction between community and media. Uh It's is interesting because I think a lot of people conflate an audience in a community and the way I like I, I don't know, coming, coming from a church background, I mentioned young Mary Christian earlier, coming from a church background, like the community in the church is like, is like small groups
and when you go to church on Sunday, like you're meeting with the community in a sense like there's other, a bunch of other people in the room that are going to their small groups, but as the community happens, in kind of your Bible study on Wednesday or Thursday, not in the big room where you're worshiping together and, and listening to the pastor give them like, you know, their, their sermon or whatever. And so I, I think about that when and translate it over here and I'm like community happens in the micro. It's the groups that, like, I, I'm a part of a couple of mastermind groups and we meet up a couple of times a year and when I get to spend.
You know, two or three days with those groups of people, whether it's a group of a mastermind group of other agency owners or a mastermind group of Christian entrepreneurs. Um like that's a community, we're talking about real stuff and an audience is built. I think when, when somebody has sharp points of view that challenge people's thinking and that help people think in, in new and fresh ways, and you're the audience is consuming that thought leader or uh Asher's word influencer content. And, so I think both are good. Again, I AI I don't think it's a matter of villainizing one to prop up another. but they are very different things. And so you just have to get clear with what we are trying to do. And so one of the things we tried and failed, quite frankly at uh our attempt at, at the community was trying to, trying to do like these monthly, uh we call the marketing squads.
and so every month we would get CMO S or VVPS of marketing, we'd get probably 8 to 10 of them a month to show up on a Zoom call. It wasn't recorded intentionally, it wasn't recorded so that they would feel more comfortable sharing and we would kind of prompt discussion, But the, and, and the reason we, we couldn't, I mean, we had a few different people internally try to manage them and, and people are, schedules are busy. We clearly could not figure out a way to make the group valuable enough to get 8 to 10 people to show up consistently every month. And so it would always, you know, it, it was always the call that got canceled whenever they had an emergency or something popped up that they needed to work on.
And so we couldn't, we couldn't quite figure it out. So I don't want to sit here from a space of saying like, look, I've, I've figured out how to do community. There are lots of people that have figured it out. We are not one of those people, but then it's more reflective of the, at least the way that I think about it, which is small groups, meeting together in intimate spaces, being able to talk about things that they wouldn't otherwise get to talk about with other people. Um, because they resonate like they understand each other's worlds. Um, where building an audience is, is really about refining your points of view. Um Getting good at communicating those points of view. My friend Jay Z talks. Uh, I heard him say this the other day
You know ESPN and these massive media companies invest millions of dollars into the on-air talent and I don't know why I just did quotes there. It, it, it's, it's an exceptional talent that it takes to be on camera and to be the voice and to be able to communicate a message. But in B to B land, we're just like, oh yeah, our subject matter expert can, can be the face of it. and it's like, well,
22:34
There's no performance around it, you know.
22:37
Maybe they can. but to your point actually, it requires performance. It's performative. there's a lot of nuances to like, can you do this thing in a way that engages people and, and gets them to understand, you know, the brand's points of view? uh, and it is awesome enough that people want to follow it. and, you know, all the things. But anyway, I, I, I went off on a little bit of this.
23:01
This is the reason why I wanted James uh uh is because we connect at what I would call spirituality at the right uh level also, right? Because so James, you may not know this but like I helped co-founded uh partnership leaders. there are 1300 partnerships people for partnerships like it's the, it's the, it's a home for partnerships, right? It's the number one community for partnership people today, right? And then, the sole reason I did it was that when I had a bad experience in being a V P of, right? AI was lost. And I'm like, where do I go to connect with other people? Like me and there's nobody, there's no place for it. And I called up some of my friends and they were going through similar experiences. I'm like, well, where do you go to connect, right? And, then, AI Met Chris. Uh basically, right? And we talked about this and then we kind of started this email chain with a few people and then that email chain,
It had seven people on it. And now it's like 1300 people that this group has its conference that they like, like it became a thing, right? But like even some of the previous stuff that we were chatting about on LinkedIn, right? AI gives the example internally as we operate and we like the best example of a community at scale is Saddleback Church
Because I went and studied how saddleback church works. Right? South Church had 200 employees, but they had 20,000 connected groups like the level that they operate on. Interesting then like church pastor Rick Warren was actually from San Jose and then they just got uh Andy who's also from San San Jose, right? But uh there may be something in San Jose is what I'm saying. But anyway, that's beside the point but the way they operate, right? They don't care about the conversation, which I think is what media companies care about because the audience cares about the conversation and they want to have the conversation and they want to consume content. But at the end of the day, it's really about the conversation and making sure the conversation is widespread, right? And then the communities are all about connections and then you can have scale connections where you have like 500 people at a conference. You can have these, like we're doing this like, like let's call it P L experience as we're calling it, but it's people connecting with other people and their families.
And so it's a different level of connection, right? And then you have these like small groups that you're talking about, but what Saliba Church does well, right? They went from like, like from the early days, I think they were like, OK, we everybody kind of gets together and like, talks about their uh, the issues that they're going through and like, you know, young couples, then they, they did segmentation well. Right. So they're like, you know, young couples with young couples, people with kids, people that are like, like empty nesters with empty nests, they got the segmentation, right? I mean, I feel like they were such good marketers, right? Uh And then, and then they went and said no, no, no. The better way to do it is if we just connect
what you're learning on Sunday with what you're learning, what, what you can have um have a discussion around in uh uh during the week. And by the way, we're gonna broadcast it to the minute they broadcasted it, they became, at least in my opinion, they became some form of a media company because now the audience is huge, right? And, the community aspect of it brings the connection home. And uh and interesting that this Sunday, like literally I was sitting and I, I was like, this is such a divine sign for us to all connect right in a way because like I'm sitting there and the pastor goes well, you know, the community is how we bring of how we connect the church to you, right? Um And I'm like, That's kind of what it is. I mean, mine is the church part, right? Like, like, like, because I think like there's a lot of lives and things that like that, that is happening too. Not everybody goes to church and stuff too. But uh but yes, AI would say my way of looking at this is like, the community is all about connection, at scale. at uh 1 to 11 to 10, 1 to 101 to 1000 many to many, like it's all about that. But the media companies have to nail the conversation, they have to know what's on top of minds. and what will be on top of my mind at that level did become a little bit of an analyst as well. So I think that if you look at it like I'm a big fan of organ design, right? So if you look at like the perfect or design for, for a community, it's like you have domain experts, you have like educators, you have like facilitators and stuff and then you're like, if you look at uh media you're like, OK, you have like the creative people like you're saying, right? You have the performers call them creative influencers, whatever it is. And then you have the analysts and the researchers basically because they have to know how to pick the trends and connect the dots in the future versus the community that can connect the dots in the past, right? They don't care like if that happened, we have to go talk about it as a group and figure out how we can handle it
27:59
Yeah, and I, and I think that distinction of actually having someone, it, it's interesting like the analyst or the researcher having someone on the team that is tracking down what those conversations can be where most, I think marketing teams just default to like, oh, well, the topics are gonna be the things that most behoove us because if We've got metrics to hit and we've got, you know, we've, we've got to hit our number. And so there's, there's, there's so much bias in the, in the topics that get selected that it ends up not resonating with the people that you want to resonate with because all you're doing is talking about what's beneficial to you instead of really what's, what's beneficial to them.
28:40
Yeah, I think uh I think it's worth going into this community at scale a little bit more because I think that's an interesting example, asher of because I don't agree with it. I think what James was saying is, I don't think you can have a community that's 10,000 to 1. That, that doesn't, that doesn't work. And I've seen a lot of these Slack groups actually in different industries that become like 60,000 people in slack. And they essentially at that point become a media company because it no longer is facilitating connections, what they're doing. It's hosting events now. They have a blog, they're posting their articles and even if you can pop into a channel and get answers from random people to a question, it doesn't feel like a community anymore because you lost that person all the time.
29:23
It's a bad phone at that point. It's like a form of friendship. right. it's like well, where are my friends at? Like, I don't trust anything on Linkedin or Twitter. But I'll go over here where I know a whole bunch of people and by chance somebody. So, OK, now we're getting, getting to a point where, like, I care about this topic. Right? It's that, and there's like free communities and then there are paid communities. The issue with free communities is they just don't have the resources to take that community experience, to scale
29:50
Unless they're started by a company, right? so like if a company starts a free community, then they can certainly scale it out to the numbers. Now, do they have the skill set to make it? the connection component is a, is a different question. but so I
30:07
I'll give you an example, right? like, so at the demand base, we have a rev circle and we have several, of like c-level people there and then we are also in the pavilion, And when we do let's call it annual planning. We are not, we should be, but we like, I haven't heard anything around like, hey, we're gonna like put seven people into our community and I want to make sure its scales and like AI wanna make sure there's like this onboarding experience and I wanna make sure this, this is there versus you go to Pavilion and they're like, yes, we have this onboarding experience and we have this experience and we have this experience and they're thinking about like, how do I take this at scale and how to operationalize it. The same thing we're doing with partnership leaders too, right? We are hired like two people only to focus on managing all the programs that everybody is asking us for because if it's up to us, there's no way that any of us could manage the programs because you need a project manager or a program manager, right? So like, like when, when you're in this free and I say this because we were a free community
And then we're like, wow, we are like 900 people. So, like, what do we do now? And then then, we're like, we have to get paid because we're not gonna be able to do anything material for this audience. And that, the minute we get, when paid, The first thing we did is we hired a marketer because we said the need of the hour is to help people tell their story and showcase their brands and a lot of the partnership, people never had brands and now so many of them do. Right. And so, my theory is that free communities will just never be able to offer that scale of experience. And you're right, they will become media companies, but the paid communities have enough money to hire specialized resources to create this at scale. And you can take the playbook like, I mean, Saddleback Church is just one example. There are a lot of other examples out there uh that have done it um uh uh that have com community quote to quote communities at scale.
32:08
Kelly ai ai ai get what you're saying though, like if you're a venture-backed company, you should, I mean, you can hear the resources. yeah. to hire
32:18
The flips, the benefit of a paid community for connection is that people show up right to your point, Jamesabout what you were saying about meetings being bumped, and I see this all over the place is when people pay for something, gym, gym memberships aside, they usually want to like get the value out of it, right. So there's, they have skin in the game. So I, I think that that helps foster a real community versus if anyone can come in, you get a ton of people who just fly by and often spam, right? They're just like, hey, I'm gonna come to this group and share things like mine that will get a demo from my company. um versus a paid group, people engage. So that's where the paid groups have the advantages on the member side. Um Now, yes, if you're trying to bootstrap a group and it's free then yeah, you're not gonna be able to do it, but bI I would AI would, are there examples of like communities at scale and B to B tech that have been successful because Asher Partnership leaders aren't scale yet, right? Like you guys have 1300 people and that's, and I would say pavilions, you know, they're farther along but they're still not at like the scale that you're talking about with the church.
33:32
Yeah. I mean, that's like, but if you think about it so if you, if you again if you go study Saddleback Church, right? They have funds, right? Then they go and support other communities around the world and their way of doing it is through other churches because then they support programs for other churches and that's how their partnerships work, right? But, then they also have, let's call it the Saddleback network, right? This is considered, it's a similar thing to the Hubspot podcast network, right? Which is huge and like it's about everybody sharing their content. But again, there is some level of resources that are allocated specifically to supporting this initiative at scale and then to bring it back to your point today, venture-backed companies or larger B DB companies. They just don't think like that. They just don't say AI needs a CSM for me and maybe this conversation and a whole bunch of other work that we're all gonna do, right? That they start thinking like that because it brings. their prospects are much closer to them.
34:36
The loyalty of not prospects and customers and word-of-mouth referrals like the impact is there. But I think It circles back to that short-term thinking, it takes time to build that connection and those referrals, but also the lack of tracking, right? We are not in a place where if you develop that loyalty and then you have people just word of mouth spreading through networks, which is how people businesses buy, right? That is how businesses buy, whether we can track it or not. Um But it makes the typical CMO and CEO wary when they can't see it right? When there's that luckiness,
35:14
What does Hubspot like with the inbound community? Kelly? What if, what's, what's uh yeah, what could you share about how HubSpot thinks about the community? Because I would imagine that if anybody could do it at scale, it would be a company like HubSpot.
35:31
Yeah. and it's interesting because we just attend inbound or big conferences, which is part of our community strategy. we announced that we're gonna go all in on community-led growth. like that was the keynote speech, speech. and I think we do a lot of different interesting things but as we're talking, I'm kind of thinking through how the pieces fit together because we have something called pugs and hugs, which is a partnership, user group meetups, and um HubSpot user group meetups and These are all over the place and they're partner and member, member, customer-led but it's interesting, right? So in that sense, it's scaled like these are successful, these go on, but we don't have a lot of control, right? Because once you make that partner-led and you make it member-led um you don't have complete visibility like there isn't a lot of tracking around it, but it is a great active community and I consider it to like be fostering our community Um, and then, you know, I know, on our developer side, we have a Slack group with, you know, over 10,000 people. Very, it's very active um Slack and it's just a community for hub swat developers and then we have community forums on our web page, right? So like that's another place that people go. And I would say the forums are actually, maybe a little bit less. But, the interesting thing is we have a ton of solution partners on there regularly engaging, answering questions, and then you do have more fly-by-users who have a particular pain point and come through. But there are partners on there that just are always that kind of Manning, Manning the station and engaging.
37:14
So it's interesting. because I was thinking about the hug groups too. uh ai didn't even know about the pug groups, but it makes sense. but it's interesting because I think so many companies aspire to have a product that is so integral to their business operation that it becomes part of their professional identity, that you want to be a part of a community of other HubSpot users or other HubSpot partners. And so like Other marketing agencies that I know are like hHubSpotpartners. I mean, they eat sleep drink hubSpot because that's what they're, you know, that's what they're selling to their clients. And then the folks that are administering Hubspot and that are like the hHubSpotexpert inside their company. It's because you guys have built a product that adds so much value and is so critical to the company's operation.
That they have somebody on their team that is dedicated to like, hey, stay up to date with this. Here, go, go be a part of this hug. And so part of me wonders, like, man, it seems like a lot of these companies that are building community. It's like they don't, they don't have that as they may, the nature of their product maybe doesn't lend itself to the fact that you know, it's not AC R M or it's not something that is as business critical as, as you all. What, were your thoughts on that?
38:36
I think that's 100% right? and I think those companies have to go to the broader business concept. so we also really like going all in on inbound marketing as a concept, right? and we kind of popularized that, I think for companies that have a more niche product where you're never gonna be able to have those like regular meetings around the product itself, you're gonna have to look at the larger sort of business impact that you're driving and create the community around that.
I do think, you know, when you're looking at an ultimately long-term driving revenue, the motion might look a little different as to how that quote pays off for you. But I think you can still create it in a way that makes sense and ultimately returns to your business, right?
39:21
That was a really good point. By the way, I mean, I think the nature of what you're trying to do is pro or what you're offering probably dictates how we value it. But again, it goes back to the same thing, right? You could be a future today and then you have like five features tomorrow and then you're like, wow, we are mission critical like, you know, snow like snow, like if you look at the history of snow or even at last right? So casting may be the other example of somebody who did community really because like they then started promoting their user groups and their partner groups and stuff like that on their website. And there were tons of events and stuff like that. But I think the one other way to think about this right is um and it's, it was a good call art that we are not at scale. Kelly. Thanks for that.
40:02
Um, You Know, you just pick on me. I have, you know,
40:06
I'm like, wow, I just got called out by my co-host like, that's great, you know, interview for new cohost tomorrow.
40:16
Like, how do you create connections at scale? right? and if you think about that, right? because LinkedIn tried it, Facebook tried to tik Tok Instagram, everybody's working on it, right? and, and, and ai guess even before we ask the question of like what's uh how do you create a collection scale? The question used to be like, what change are you trying to drive? Right. So we'll go back to Saliba Church, right? So Saliba Church has this book called Purpose Driven Life. Yeah, it was extremely beneficial. AI would say even more beneficial than all the stuff that Tony Robbins did. Because Tony Robbins says that if you go to any of the Tony Robbins events, they're fantastic. By the way, when you go there, it's an experience. You're like hyped, et cetera, et cetera, right? And then you learn this curriculum and then you kind of have to do this. There is a self-journey that takes place and there is some sort of connections and stuff, but it doesn't run the way. So Tony Robbins, I think would be like the example of somebody who manages an audience really, right? Uh But then AI Church would be somebody who manages the community well because they're all about like, and the book is not like it has some spirituality concepts in it, but that's a really good life book, right? And it made a difference in people's lives. So if that's what your goal is then. You should go down the community path. I think a lot of B-to-B companies go down this audience path because they're like, well, I don't have an audience, I'll go create one, I'll start. And then my end goal is this conversion. If the company's end goal was
41:48
We, which is what keeps them from being able to build an audience in the first place.
41:51. totally. you know, if you, if you if your end goal is like, we are gonna Change the way truly, like, really like the CEO of the founders, like, I've been dealing with this problem for 20 years and I just wanted to solve this now though, I feel like those are the people who take it big. I was in AI in a company called Alara where we felt the founders at the problem and they were like, we are going to automate every single sales tax compliance transaction in the world. It was there since they wanted to join.
And then when I left, when there were like 3000 people, I mean, they just got bought by, by best equity, they're still on the same path. and they have this community of developers. They have this community of, they have this mini-conference and stuff like that. They, they created maybe they were, they were, that may be an example of James, like a media company, right? Because like they staffed eleven people on their content team and there are 11 people at their trade shows. And then they were like, we'll go to all these conferences and start creating connections and then we'll put some content out there and stuff and start to activate it ourselves because nobody cares about sales tax compliance. Uh except for all the 175,000, like uh CPA S out there or bookkeepers. And then they created this like change and they're still honored.
And if you go to the website, it's still the same thing with automating sales tax compliance, and it never changed. And they've made a difference and their community is connected also. So that could be another example. So we, we got Hubspot we got a, we got a maybe in this podcast
43:19
Yeah. I think on the media side, one of the, one of the b to b SaaS companies that I have been admiring. I'm gonna be co-hosting a series with their CMO on, on uh media brands on uh on b to b growth. uh but his name is Tyler Lassard and he's over at Vidyard like a video email company.
and they just passed 100,000 followers for their media brand, which is sales feed and to hear him, you know, as I've talked to him now a couple of times about it like they staff that team completely separately. Like them, the sales feed team has dedicated resources. They've got like an executive, you know, Tyler kind of acts as the executive producer and he's Vidyard CMO But then they went out and hired a creator, somebody that had already built a following in the sales space. So, they already had a proven demonstrable ability to build an audience because he built one for himself. They brought him on staff. I think they, they said they've got somebody that focuses on, I think youtube and newsletter, they've got another person that focuses on a couple of other elements of the media brand itself. But it, it, he was, I was asking, I was like, does the marketing team get jealous because the tales feed team gets to do like all the fun videos that go viral and he's like, not, I mean, there, I, if, if anything, I think the sales feed team is inspiring the Vidyard team to content differently.
44:48
I'd be curious to know what their KPIs are.
44:51
Yeah. So he said they're, they're, they're in the process right now. like, so they've been at it for about a year. so they've built this audience of 100,000 people. and I think he said for the last I think the first six months, they were just focused on audience building. So for the last six months, they've been working on the conversion path of how to OK, how do we take the audience and continue to create the content that allowed us to build the audience? But then uh like, how do we mention vid yard strategically without it being like cringy and like and so they're, they're AI Like we're, we're gonna get into that in the series on B to B growth. But uh but AI So, so they're, they're the, they're ones that I'm looking at it like they, you know, Anthony Kenned at audience plus is in the early stages of doing this. I think they've come to market with like three or four different shows. And so they're starting multiple media brands. Profit. Well, did this well and just got acquired for $200 million from Paddle, I think last year or the year before that, And so there's, there's certainly folks out there that are, that have, that have figured this out. But then the examples are few and far between, in my opinion.
46:01
I'd be curious, like as you go through this and we'll have you on the show a little bit later in the year, right? I'd be curious to see if there are some innovators out there that are like, hey, we're gonna build the audience, but we're gonna add the community because the community is the way to probably get called out for this one also, but monetize the audience a little bit, right? Because it's natural because you need to like to do things naturally, right? And so if the art of the conversation happened and then you bring all the conversations into an area where connections happen, then the conversation continues, in a place where other people can participate at their own time naturally. There are going to be macro forces that help a company succeed or not, right? I mean, they like one, you can have an awesome product but there's always a macro trend that helps the product like really going to like to do like that hockey stick growth, right? And so naturally, if that happens, then you experience AI as growth. If it doesn't happen, you experience growth, which is still really good. Right. Right. Right. So maybe at some point in time and maybe some, some people are already doing this, right? Like I was just thinking about as you're thinking like, OK, well, how do we connect the audience and then, then figure out how to like put some KPIs on earth. Maybe you're like with the KPIs or community KPIs and then you have the AI the audience and the community and then this whole other corner cord proverbially funnel, you know that hat, that allows people to get closer to you and then they buy it
47:33
Well and the media and community synergy, I think that you're alluding to there is, is, is key. I think if you do it right, you can have those two things kind of reinforce each other and work well. but, I think they are distinct and as we've discussed, I'll have different KPIs and different operational goals. and if this stuff were easy.
47:51
Right lies big media companies would all have massive communities, but it's not easy. it's like it's hard enough to just do what pavilion did, which is the community, it's hard enough to just build a media company, which is why you have all these media companies that, that's all they do is they're a media company. It's why SASS companies are a company like, so it's not this easy nut to crack to say, oh, every company should be a media company. Well, that's an entirely different business. The content has to be so good that it builds a massive audience so much to just and, and the content is paid for because other people will pay to get in front of that audience because the content was so good that it amassed such a big one. And like, so it's, this is not easy stuff. I AI Think it's aspirational though, for companies to be at least asking themselves the question of how we could resource.
Either developing focusing on community or media, but like trying to do both at the same time, I think it would be a huge mistake because it's hard enough to just add one of these other components and do it right in such a way that it can, that it can have business impact.
49:00
All right, I want to be, be respectful of everybody's time, you know, AI AI feels like we could all be talking about this forever, but maybe we'll do another episode where we bring James back to James. We're OK with this uh later, later in the year, maybe like in September, October time frame and say, OK, well, what do we, we had this episode at the beginning of the year, we had this idea of like our audience and communities and like maybe the two of them coming together working, uh you have separate resources, separate teams, you know, people to understand what their purpose is, what their identity is, right? And then see what happened, right? Were there more companies that we can give an example of other than HubSpot Avara? And, and that went down this path. But thanks so much for coming to the show. I appreciate you. Thanks for having me. You're doing. This was fantastic and uh we'll see you
49:45
Soon. this was a blast, I'll have to say before I, before I jump off here, there's a lot of folks that are saying, hey, this isn't gonna be a podcast interview. It's just gonna be a dialogue. Um And that is hard to pull off. And so I can, I can tell you having, you know, obviously being a podcast agency, seeing a lot of shows, you guys do a fantastic job of actually making it a conversation instead of just feeling like, you know, the host is setting the guest up to share their point of view. And then they agree with it and move on. So, hats off to youtube for a format that I think is rare but that a lot of people are aspiring to do. You guys do it well.
50:26
So, Asher, you can't go find another coho that compliments you. I was just like, I'm stuck with kelly,
50:35
All right, have a fantastic weekend. Bye bye, y'all.
50:40
Thank you for listening to unlearn, subscribe wherever you listen and visit www.unlearnpodcast.com for the transcripts.
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