EP53: Alex Hillman is the king of JFDI

Alright.

Here we go.

Hey. It's Justin Jackson. Welcome to product people. This week on the show, Alex Hillman, the king of JFDI. He even has the tattoo to prove it.

Alex has many things. He's the founder of Indy Hall, a coworking space in Philadelphia. He's also Amy Hoy's partner in thirty by five hundred. We get into how those two work together. But most importantly, recently, he just launched his own product called groupbuzz.io.

So we talked about that, how he built that product, but also what communities and product businesses have in common. Whenever I talk to Alex, he blows my mind. He's super smart. This conversation was no exception. There's lots of good stuff in here.

I think you're really going to enjoy it. Just a quick update. I'm working on a new book called marketing for developers. You can find out more at Justin Jackson dot c a slash marketing marketing for developers. Alright.

I'm as I'm talking I'm just before we got going here, was, like, trying to I just got back from getting

a coffee and I'm a toque on. So I got a little bit of Canadian toque head going going on.

That's my favorite Canadian word by the way. I think I told you I've got friends from Toronto and I think my buddy's calling his beanie a toque and I was like a what? He goes a toque. I said a what? It's my favorite Canadian word.

Way better It's way better than sorry.

Yeah. The funny part is that to me, beanie is a hilarious word.

Right. Oh, is a hilarious word.

I hadn't heard that in so like, I'd never heard that I think until I got into high school. Yeah. What? It's a beanie? No, that's a toque.

The English language, is there anything you can't do?

It's true. All right, so I'm Justin Jackson and I am here with Alex Hillman, the king of GFDI among other things. How's it going, Alex?

Things are great. Things are great. How are things with you? Apart from cold. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the cold and my other problem I was up all night with a sick kid, which is basically, when you have four kids, there's always someone that's sick. It's just always one of them will be sick.

Well, think when I when I talked to you last, I had just moved into my new house, and my buddy that lived in it before me has two little kids. And so when I was cleaning the house right when I moved in, I kicked up all the little kid germs, and immediately was, like, put out for a week, but now I'm immunized against this warfare that comes out of children apparently.

That's right. Yeah. Once you get infected with that, you're good for a while. Yeah.

You're for a while.

So Alex, besides being the king of JFDI, and we can get into that a little bit later.

Sure,

We're gonna be chatting with Alex today about his new product Group Buzz. Groupbuzz.io. Yep. And the other great thing about Alex and I were chatting on Skype like he said I think a couple weeks ago. And I was just blown away with how much knowledge he had about building community and how those lessons kind of extend out to building products and building an audience and so I thought it would be good to do a live chat and share that knowledge with the rest of the community.

And like I said we're doing this live right now so if you have questions you can enter them on YouTube and we will get to those as we talk. So

Alex, I think a

lot of people know you because of your co working space in the That's

true. That's probably true.

Yeah. In Philadelphia. So maybe tell us how did you get into building products?

Well, so I do have a software development background. Before I started Indy Hall, I was a web developer. I started Indy Hall not because I needed a place to work, but because I was that quintessential, I'm a developer, I'm a freelancer, I work from home, that's cool but I miss having coworkers, people to bounce ideas off of, collaborate with and so my approach to coworking had nothing to do with real estate and everything to do with collaboration, people, community and things like that. As I've done less and less software development myself and more and more consulting and things like that, it's been really fun to be able to take my background in software even though I probably shouldn't be trusted in a code environment. Brad who I work with on GroupBuzz, he actually built all the core all the infrastructure.

Brad builds GroupBuzz. He lets me poke around in the code a little bit from time to time. But having, I don't know, having technology background, but also having sort of a connection with people, I think is really important. A lot of people build tools without really thinking about who the people are that are using them. Yeah.

And I think about people all day long, every day, and so I found that's really sort of useful in the product building conversation.

Yeah and maybe get into a little bit of what is Group Buzz how did you come up with the idea?

Yeah, so before Indy Hall was a physical place, which is one of the things that it is, we were meeting at events and we had an online discussion list as many communities have. And when we actually launched and started getting members, we switched from Google Groups to something that was a little bit less chaotic, know, less crap going on and we started using Basecamp actually, which I will say served us really well early on. Basecamp, this is old Basecamp, Basecamp Classic as it were. Yeah.

For all you kids out there.

Right. So Basecamp Classic had this actually really good messaging component because that was the problem that they set out to solve when they built Basecamp was trying to keep a conversation and flow over email as a team is really hard. Put files into the mix, all this other stuff, you bring new people into the project, it's a disaster. So they solved an e an email problem with Basecamp, but it was really designed for teams and and even though we scaled it to the point where we had hundreds of people in our Basecamp project using their sort of messages channel to have conversations, we started seeing some pretty major problems. And the crux of those problems were we knew that people were not staying involved when, you know, whether it's Basecamp or a Google group or a list serve with messages coming through, basically inviting people to an email list is giving everybody the ability to put things into other people's inboxes, right, which is our inboxes are already busy.

We all hate them, you know, fighting for inbox zero every day. So when you do that, and ultimately, if the value that we're creating is some of this conversation, this dialogue, but if it becomes too much, people tune out, Right? So I want information about what's going on my community. I wanna be a part of that pulse, but if it's too much, I have to turn it off because I have work to do. So there's like there's not really a volume control on it and so Brad, who is my partner in GroupBuzz, and is actually a student of me and Amy's from thirty by 500 way way back in the beginning.

Oh no way. Brad Brad and I had spoken about a year, maybe two years ago about the problem that he had set out to solve from what he had learned and how to do research in thirty five thousand five hundred, which if you haven't watched Amy's interview yet or if Justin hasn't published it yet, get on him because I'm sure she talks all about that in there and sort of our approach to research first instead of just coming up with ideas and hoping that you can figure out a way to sell them. Brad's pain that he identified was this email problem that I'm describing, people sort of tuning out. So he set out to try to solve that and then kinda nothing happened. I happened to bump into him at the bootstrapping conference that Amy and I run here in Philadelphia last June called Bacon BizConf and Brad and I were just chatting, catching up, and I was like, whatever happened to that listing that you were doing?

And he says, well, yeah, you know, it's it's good, but not I said, has anybody used it? He goes, no, you know, not really. And I said, what is it gonna take for us to get this in somebody's hands? And it was really, we need a community to try it out on. And I said, well, wouldn't you know, I've got one.

We've got some serious problems and we really need to replace Basecamp. I've tried everything. It's not because I don't wanna switch to something, it's that I wanna switch to something that's actually gonna be better. So show me what you have and he did and I was really impressed. My core product was so simple, but it did all the things that nobody else would think to do.

It's almost like people that build software for communities don't actually run or participate in communities themselves. Really is mind blowing. So this was so simple and I said, can we, I've got a list of two fifty people, can we roll it out? And I convinced them to say yes. I'm glad they did and it was a huge hit at Indy Hall.

The migration went really well. Within a couple of months, we started tracking sort of how people participating, were they posting threads, were they commenting on threads, and things like that, and all of our all the trackable engagement in the most rudimentary fashion possible, more than doubled. And then perhaps most importantly to me was when people actually went out of their way to say something. When a member would come up to me and say, yo, I'm so glad we switched to this group buzz thing because I always wanted to pay attention to Basecamp, but it was too much. And so I put it on a Gmail filter, and then it went to a folder, and then I never looked at it.

And for the settings that we chose as the default settings, which are obviously tweakable, but we sort of wanted the default settings to be more polite on your inbox and make it so you could know what's going on without feeling like you're suddenly under a pile of email from other people. And since since about September, we agreed to partner and work on this together. And I do have all the well, you know, design development background, so I've been able to do some UI work on the product as well, but I'm mostly focused on getting out there in the community, finding out what people are using, why it's not working for them, and if Group Buzz is a good fit for them, taking them for a tour through it and we've had really great results with the people who have brought their communities over to it as well.

Yeah. This is such an interesting problem because we're all a member of communities like real life communities and online communities.

Yeah.

And I think we've all experienced that, you know, like I'm I've been invited to like a couple Trello things and a couple Basecamp projects and a couple Discourse projects.

Right,

right. Inevitably, depending on, you know, how much I care, I guess, I keep getting all these notifications, you know? And so how did you deal with that? How did you deal with like the different levels of involvement that people have? And then like basically crafting, you know, how much the way notifications work and how to actually get people involved and benefiting from a community instead of just feeling bothered by it.

Sure, well, so this actually goes back to sort of one of our core models and philosophies that I sort of developed with a couple of colleagues of mine for for co working and community building in general, and it's the idea that participation. So I think that the keyword you said was care about, and it's like care about is not a binary thing. You care about things on sort of a sliding scale. It's based on what that thing is. Not everything in a community is gonna be interesting to you.

Not everything in a community you're gonna care about, and so not everything in the community you're gonna wanna participate in. So with that sort of idea, if caring about things isn't binary, it's not yes or no, then participation isn't binary either. Just because I don't want all the mail doesn't mean or just because I don't want some of the mail doesn't mean that I don't want to know generally what's going on. So we look at it from sort of like these concentric circles, and this was the model that I explained to you a couple of weeks ago. It's but for the for the rest of the folks that are watching, think about it as these rings, where the outermost people in the community, the people who know about your community are we call them observers.

Oh, you've got it up on the screen. That's awesome.

Yeah. So you can keep talking here and oh, I will actually it'll disappear as you talk, but that's okay.

Okay. Great. So and you can also go to the blog.groupbuzz. And there's a post where it's got the the sort of bull's eye looking thing. So observers on the outside, the next level in, call attendees, the next level in participants and the next level in from that are champions and these are all people that are sort of working towards common goals, that is what makes them a community is we have things in common, we're working towards things that is common ambition, as I would refer to it.

So the thought process with Group Buds is how do we create a notification setting level sort of for each of these things, for the people who just want to keep a finger on the pulse, who are observers, so be it. The people who are attendees are the folks who are going to jump in, they may comment on a post, they might like a post. The participants are generally the people who are going to start posts. The champions are people who are not just going to start posts but also encourage other people to start new conversations and things like that. So it's sort of a graded scale of participation is is with sort of the main design pattern for this saying notifications are important because if you're if you think about like web forums and stuff like that without email notifications, people just forget about it and even if they do care about it, something else is always demanding their attention and so you're you're fighting for it in a way.

So giving people the ability to opt in to a topic because they care about it, and then and then, but only then, get the rest of the comments subsequently in their inbox has been working really well. So new person, you let's say Justin, let's say you posted a message to the Indy Hall list, hey, me and Alex are getting together this afternoon to do a Google Hangout, if anybody's interested in posting any questions ahead of time to ask. That message would go out to everybody on the list. And if anybody else followed up because this is usually where things go wrong, it's it's a bunch of me too and a bunch of conversation that nobody or maybe not nobody, but a lot of people don't care about. For the person who cares about it, they can click a follow button right in the email and say, want follow-up comments or if they're on the web UI because there is a sort of a web form component to this as well, you can follow that.

The flip side of that is I'm in a conversation, maybe we were planning a snowboarding trip and then I found out that that my schedule changed, I'm not gonna be able to make it. I tell the crew, hey, guys, I'm sorry, but if I'm already subscribed to that thread, I'm gonna keep seeing emails about this thing that I know I'm not going to. I'm perpetually bummed out, and it's filling my inbox, so a mute button. Now Gmail has a mute button too, but a lot of people don't know about it, don't use it, even the people that I tell about it, they go, oh yeah, the mute button, because there isn't actually a button, it's a key. Right?

So we put the button right there in the email. It's a mute or follow depending on what your notification settings are. And then the last thing sort of for making sure that things that as as conversation churns, maybe the first person, maybe Justin posting a comment about interviewing, you know with me today wouldn't have caught interest but if somebody posted a follow-up with a question and if that somebody let's say it's Amy, you know that whenever Amy had a question it's really interesting so you weren't interested in this interview but now you're a little more interested because you saw that Amy commented on it. We've got a digest system that you can set right now, it's sort of like an active digest, it comes every four hours. So for these in real life communities where like time is actually a consideration, you're getting an email of here's everything that happened in the last half a day, half a workday as it were.

Our number one request right now is for a daily digest, which has pushed us to redesign our digest design so that you can basically have that same amount of vision, like view into what's going on in the conversation in a digest. Because a digest that's like really long and has everything that happened over twenty four hours is overwhelming, almost if not more overwhelming than stuff being in your inbox, you're gonna open it and say, shit what is all this stuff and just archive the email and never look at it. So basically, we're trying to make the job of the person who's, and I look at the role of a community manager or community moderator, whatever it might be, is not to enforce, it's not to make people do things, it's to help people do whatever it is they already want to do, right? So get out of their way is really your number one job, and when the tools you're using to interact with your community get in people's way, it makes you hard for you to do your job.

I mean, there's a couple things. One is that you're focused on smaller communities as opposed to like the first thing I thought of was Twitter. You know, Twitter is this huge community and their notification settings are terrible. Everybody hates them. They're basically doing that for growth, right?

They need more people and one kind of hack to getting people more involved is to always berate them with email.

To nag them, right.

Yeah, nag them and then get So, them you know, there is like a threshold that you cross when you're joining a community, any community, you know. And you might go once and then you might feel like, I don't know, I don't know if I fit in or and then maybe you might try it for a week and then you just get out of the habit of checking in. So what are some things that you've kind of learned or done and maybe even put into Group Buzz to help with some of that? Onboarding then also just helping people that want to be active. But you know, there's a habit there.

How do you help them with that?

Right, so I think your point about growth through nagging, because let's be honest, it works. But is that the objective? Is that sustainable, right? So the good habits, And how do you not force people to do things, but help it easier for the things that would happen happen? So one of the things that we know, and I know this through Indy Hall and through studying other communities, co working spaces and and online communities and all of that, is you you get it you get that connection with a community, which is really where the value is gonna start to come from when you start building relationships, when you start connecting with people.

Right? And those connections don't come from, hi, you know, I'm I'm Justin and I build products. It's hi, I'm Justin and I love Iron Maiden. I'm not sure. Right?

That's right. Sweet. I'm an Iron Maiden fan too and that's an opportunity for us to make a connection. Yeah. So meanwhile, we have these bad habits where we say, I'm Justin and I'm a product manager.

Yeah. Nobody really cares. Not that that we think like, let's be honest, nobody cares what anybody else does. We're only really interested in ourselves. The reason we connect through something like, you're an Iron Maiden, I'm an Iron Maiden is that tells me something about you and what you care about and maybe some common values that we have.

Maybe, you know, you've been to a show that I was, you know, I was dreaming, I wish I was there, whatever it was. So how do you do this in software? So when the goal is to get people to connect with each other, you can try to force it or you can try and have this organic growth. So we took the route of introductions, making introductions be sort of stage one to onboarding. You get invited to GroupBuzz, and the email that the system sends comes from a community mod or a manager, someone that you've met.

So it's not coming from a machine, it's coming from a person. And it's the usual stuff, hey, welcome, you know, to the Indy Hall Group Buzz. This is where we have our online conversations. Click here to activate your account. That's like super simple.

It's two lines. Yeah. Right below it, nice big call out. Hey. Are you new here?

And then we say, you know, a little bit empathy. It's scary to be the new kid on the first day of class. Right? That's what this feels like. It doesn't need to be.

Introduce yourself. I guarantee that some people are gonna be interested. Here's some tips, and we sort of outline we give and people introduce themselves in a million different ways, but when you say introduce yourself, people are like, yeah, it's like writing your own bio, everybody sucks So at we wanna make it really easy, and so we say, and we also don't want them to go the route of, hi, I'm Justin, I'm a product manager, we want to be, hey, I'm Justin, I'm a huge Iron Maiden fan, and things along those lines. The questions are things like, why did you join this community? Like, what are you interested in that made you sign up?

Mhmm. What are where do you live? We happen to be sort of a location based thing, but even if it's a virtual community, people join a virtual community, those people don't only live online, they're from a place, so talking about the place that you live can potentially connect you with other people, but it can also Mhmm. Say something about who you are, different places have different cultures, and then also there's an add on to that, it's something like, you know, what's your favorite place you've ever lived or a place that you want to live? Again, someone out there say, I used to live there.

It's not as cool as you think or it is like, oh, you get what I'm saying. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

It is like, tell us something that people wouldn't guess about you by looking at you.

Yeah.

So people can do one, some, all or none of those questions. They're just prompts. But we try to make it really easy for people to even think about the fact that I'm new to this community, I should introduce myself. Now here's what's interesting is we used to do this manually at Indy Hall and people did it sometimes. It was a part of the welcome package.

It was a recommendation, a pretty soft recommendation, introduce yourself.

Yeah.

Following up now, now that we've built it into group buzz, the number, the percentage of people who join Indy Hall and then introduce themselves within the first few days or at least week has skyrocketed. And every time somebody posts a bunch of other people come out of the work woodwork, potentially people who never even went out of the way to introduce themselves and all of a sudden they're talking about something because something caught their interest. The other kind of neat thing that was absolutely unexpected, but has been really fun to watch is we've had one person will post their introduction, it's sort of a ripple effect. It's like throwing a rock in a pond. Another person who knew they were supposed to, but forgot, got busy, whatever goes, oh, shit.

That was a really good introduction. I should make my introduction, and they do it. So one introduction is almost always followed within twenty four hours by another introduction. And then things go even further when we have alumni who have been around, not even alumni, active members, but they've been here forever since before we did this active introduction email built into Grupa's, and they do these old member introductions that sort of follow on to the new member introductions. So just got more people sharing about who they are, and ultimately, I I view that as a tool for the community member.

It's useful for the community owners and moderators and managers to know these things about their people, but it's a tool for the community member, because then it goes back to that resilience. People stay a part of a community that they feel connected to and they feel connected to the other people, that's where that comes from. Mhmm. So when people have that little token of knowledge, when somebody else sees you at the coffee pot or in another thread, they go, that's Justin, he likes Iron Maiden, we're buds, right, and it's a tool for them to come up to you and say, so did you, you know, what's what's your favorite song? Yeah.

Or, you know, do you hear that, you know, they might be doing another album? That sort of thing. It's a tool for conversation, which is really what this is all about, and you know, I've been involved in a lot of software projects of a lot of different scales, the engineering stuff gets me really kind of pumped too, even when I'm not building the software and designing systems, but communities are systems too, which is kind of a unique way to look at it. Just because they're organic doesn't mean they're not you can't look at them as systems, and knowing that if I sort of tweak this dial, something that I want has a better chance of happening is really gratifying, and to know that in the case of a community, ultimately, I think we're in that happiness business. Our job is to make people love being there, otherwise why the hell would you pay to be a part of a community?

Mhmm. So doing things that increase people's happiness through each other, like I'm not actually in the room when they're doing it, it's it's amazing. It's really, really cool.

Yeah. Now, did you are most of the communities that are using group buzz, are most of them paid, like membership communities?

A 100% of them. Yeah. So that was a decision that we made was to avoid the the freemium model. Sort of when we looked at who who's our core customer, right? So this could go mean, a tool like this could be used by co working spaces, it could be used by these sort of learning communities, it could be used by even by teams and companies ultimately, but who are we solving for?

Who know, we have to get the more specific we get, the more useful this thing is for anybody.

Yeah.

And when we start looking at the business models and how we wanted to charge for it and how other people charge for things like this, sort of doing our competitive analysis, we said, paid membership subscription communities are the most resilient potential customer for us. Mhmm. Because if they're in a business for it, which means they're making money month after month, they never have to worry about making or being able to pay their group buzz bill. Yeah. As they grow, they make more money, which means they're gonna be more comfortable paying for it.

So basically, are you in the business of running a community, or do you just run a community? Now, I don't the the sort of tough part for me to grapple with is, you know, I'm involved in communities that aren't, you know, for profit, aren't aren't businesses, and I would love to use group buzz in them. It's just not a core part of our business model, and at an early stage, I think it's important for us to be okay with that, know, Brad and I are in this for the long haul, if we can find ways to open up group buzz to more kinds of communities, absolutely. I would love people to be you know, banging on the door and wanting this, but a 100% of our customers right now are paying customers, we're doing sort of a concierge onboarding, so super high touch, like unusually high touch I imagine, part of that is to find fit really. Yeah.

But because we were interested in success stories, like I want someone who's coming from Google groups or Facebook, and has the kind of problems that I know GroupBuzz is gonna solve, so when they use it, they go, this has made everything amazing. Mhmm. And if it's not, then I like, it's not that I don't want them using group buzz, it's that want, if we're putting time into something, want it to be for the people where it's amazing now, why, you know, we can widen things up later. And so far everyone that's made the decision to, you know, we've had a really good conversion rate from the people who come for one of these sort of concierge onboarding tours to the people that decide to sign up. So we have a goal of our first 50 communities, 50 paying communities by April fools day.

And and I I think, I really think we have a we're gonna have no problem hitting that.

Yeah. Okay. I've got a bunch of questions kind of around this. Cool. The first question was from Sarah.

She's asking when my community, GFDI. BZ, is going to start using it. And we've talked about it. I think as soon as we can figure out the we're using Memberful for billing, as soon as we can figure that out, I'd love to start using it.

Yeah, and that's actually that's actually, you know, it's it's because we said, okay, paid subscription membership communities, one of the questions was, are you guys gonna integrate billing? Mhmm. And the answer is not no. Yeah. The trick is is knowing that I run a subscription membership business, and having evaluated many many tools out there, I know how I know how hard it is to build a billing tool that works for lots of different communities.

So I want to get the discussion stuff right before we jump onto that, but I know that's like, that's still in the wheelhouse, I think it's, whether it's integrating with stuff like Memberful or, and we're gonna start there before we build our own, but yeah, absolutely.

Cool. Cool. And I think we're going to talk a little bit about the idea of I actually have kind of two questions. So Jeremy's wondering sorry, James is wondering tips for bootstrapping an online community from scratch and he's specifically wondering about a paid community. What do you think?

What are some things you've noticed that have worked and some things that haven't worked?

Yeah, so questions for online communities, I really think that the my answer is gonna be related to both. The the thing the thing about starting any community, bootstrapping any community, is it's not hard to get a group of people in a room. It's hard to get people in a room doing anything useful together. So it's sort of like building a product in a way, finding with a product, you find it a really specific pain that a bunch of people have and you find a way to solve it and deliver that to them. That's the value you create, exchange for money, yay, everybody's happy.

Yeah. Communities are largely the same way with a pretty unique difference, in that the value is not just being delivered by you, it's people delivering the value to each other. Mhmm. So the thing about bootstrapping an online community is you need to be really concrete about who's there and why. So saying, you know, for for JFDI, it's what well, I mean you could tell me probably better than I could I could say.

My guess is this is for people who are building building bootstrap products. Yep. It's all bootstrappers, Mostly bootstrappers?

Mostly,

yeah. Mostly, so people that are start running products, building products, growing products, and wanna stay productive moving forward. Yeah. Is that that fairly accurate?

Yeah. Yeah. And and I mean, there was I think the interesting thing because when we we talked about this on our Skype call and you know when you're maybe I'll get you to explain the difference between communities of interest and communities of practice.

Sure.

But you know I think a lot of products and communities whatever get started as you know, here's a thing that we're solving, right? You know, so you need time tracking, here's time tracking.

Yeah.

But the idea of in a community, well, we're actually all moving towards a goal.

Right, well that's that ambition, thing in the middle of that bullseye, that's not you Justin, it's a thing that everyone is moving towards, you're a champion. You're not in the middle of it, that's important. And if you are in the middle of it, you've got a cult of personality, which is one of the most dangerous style, it's effective but extraordinarily dangerous. It's really, really, it makes you a liability. Basically if you leave, the community goes away.

Yeah. So you don't want that.

Yeah and since you and I talked, I said, you know, we've been talking a little bit. I've emailed people in JFDI and I've said, I think that big crazy goal we're all working towards is that anybody in JFDI that wants to have an independent income from building products could if they wanted to. And that's kind of the idea. As soon as you put that goal in the middle, it does clarify a lot of things.

Sure does.

It's not just me, right? It's not just me like going along doing it on my own. It's like, I gotta help all these people do this too. Like we gotta work together on this. Yeah.

Can we

as a the group kind goal, yeah. So the kind of goal that you're talking about too, let's get really specific about the kind of goal that you're setting. So back to the question, how do you bootstrap a community? Step one, find a goal that a bunch of people have, right? And the kind of goal we're talking about is not a goal that you're gonna solve anytime soon.

It's an ambitious goal. It's not just that it's so there's the big hairy audacious goal concept in terms of like company culture bringing people together. It's like that but it's bigger. It's a goal that you will never actually complete in your lifetime, right? It's a goal that you can't complete in your lifetime because if you do complete it, what's community's purpose anymore, Right, so it's something that needs to work in perpetuity, something that any at any point in the lifetime of the community, a new person can join and say, I have that goal, we all have that goal, some people are further along in that goal, but we all work towards it together.

The other thing that it does, you said about clarity, I think you're a 100% right, it lets you sort of take some of the ego out of it, right? So communities are these really complicated things when it comes to decision making. Mhmm. Excuse me. So you wanna say this is what's good, this is what's best for us, and it's sort of the benevolent dictator for life kind of position, right?

Yeah. But that starts trending into the cult of personality, like everybody looks to you for all the answers, which isn't good. Yeah. It's okay to start, but ultimately, the sooner you can hand over that kind of responsibility and sort of federate that across the community, the better. The more resilient the community is, the longer it'll last, and the easier it is for you to go on vacation for a month and come back and have the community be better than it was when you left.

That's my mark of a good community. When an Indy Hall is better when I'm gone, I've done a good job. Right? So how do you take the ego out of it? Well, that's the other so that goal that we're talking about, I call it an ambition.

That's sort of the central part of that bull's eye model is an ambition. With the ambition, making becomes, is this in service of the ambition or not? Yes or no? Are we working towards it or not? Things that do, we should do.

Things that don't, we shouldn't do. And it's not because I like it or don't. We do lots of things that I don't like, but I know are in service of the ambition.

Mhmm.

And the great thing about that is because I don't like it, it makes it easy for me to step away and say, this is good, but it's not mine to run. So if I I'm going to say this is good for anyone else who wants to run it, and it makes it really easy for me to delegate to new rising leaders within the community because that's ultimately, like, a big part of the job. Mhmm. The other, like sort of step in bootstrapping the community, sort of figuring out what that ambition is, what you want people to rally around, and facilitating conversations about it. You know, I had met with a group last night that's starting a new community in West Philly, and one of the questions said, well, how should we have these conversations?

Should

we Wait a second, in West Philadelphia?

Born and raised. Yeah. I walked right into that one. Yeah. So so this crew is is setting up it's like it's a new co working space as it were.

But they said, you know, how how should we have these conversations about this thing that we believe in, that we're working towards? Should they be, you know, the one on one, you know, sort of coaching style, you know, really intimate? Should we do, like, big community town halls? Should we do, you know, group activities? And the answer is yes.

All of them. So not everyone's gonna come to the big stuff. Not everyone's gonna be able to come to a one on one intimate. The answer is yes. So for an online community, you're and an offline community for that matter, your job is to find the thing that a bunch of people have share as a goal and invite them.

Invitation is the key, invite them, hey, we're gonna have a conversation about this, just like you invited a bunch of people to this conversation today, the only difference would be, it wouldn't be just me and you, would be, you know, more people, more people actually able to dialogue in it. It's it's the role of a facilitator is the one you have to play when you're bootstrapping a community. It's I guess the only other thing that I haven't said that I I I'm glad I didn't say it at the beginning because it probably would have gotten lost in all of the other things that I just said, but the point that I'll leave you with is to listen. Community building is a lot of listening, and there's the listening you need to do when you ask questions, but there's the listening that you need to do when people don't even know you're listening. Not in a creepy way, but in the same way that so again, sort of referring that, and this is like the common thread between my approach to community building and my approach to product development that me and Amy teach is, you know, in thirty five, four hundred we say customer development, customer interviews are bullshit, because people lie to your face and not because they're liars, but because they're nice.

No one short of sociopaths is going to tell you that you suck

Yeah.

Or your idea sucks because they don't want to hurt your feelings and so you have to observe what people do, not what they say and community building is a lot of that as well. You really have to become a you have you're a pattern watcher. You gotta look not what people say yes, but put a lot more stock in what people do. People will ask you for all kinds of things. The community would be great if only we had this, this, that, and the other, and then you put those things in and nobody uses them.

Mhmm.

So instead, you have to turn it into an action and say, that sounds great. What are you gonna do to help, you know, bring that thing into fruition? Yeah. Lot of listening, lot of paying attention to how people act, how people interact.

Yeah. And I actually think that building a community is a great way to practice a lot of the skills that you need to build a great product. Because when you're talking to these folks every day and listening, that's the key part.

Absolutely.

Then you start to practice that pattern recognition in terms of, okay, what do people actually really need here? How can we offer that? That's been really helpful for me.

Although I'll say this and this is one of the things that we teach in thirty five thousand five hundred is how to go out to communities and do this observational, it's sort of ethnography light, sort of going out taking notes, of gorillas in the mist looking looking at these animals out in the wild, not the customers are animals. But the a common thing that one of our students will say to us is, I can't find a watering hole, that's how we refer to them, it's by the community, I can't find a community of people for my audience, I'm gonna go build one and we're like, woah woah woah, hold the phone. Yeah. That is it's a benevolent style of procrastination is what it is. A community that is big enough, strong enough and useful enough to be able to be used to build a product from that community is more it's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's an insane amount of work.

Yeah. And the odds of you being able to shift from community builder to product builder for that community at the right time, if that's the reason you're building the community, you're gonna run into all kinds of problems. So go out and do your homework and find out what communities are out there and the best way to be a leader is to participate. So again, going back to those concentric circles, another sort of dynamic of those rings is you can't leap from observer to champion, you got to spend time at each of the levels. So if you're not out there attending and participating in other communities, it's really hard for you to be a good leader in your own.

So be a leader in somebody else's community before you try being a leader in your own, you're gonna learn a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a that reminds me of a great Derek Sivers post. He used a different video, but he said, The most important person is actually not the leader, it's the person that comes second and follows that first leader. It's a really great post.

I agree, that's one of my favorites.

Jeremy wants to know more about your experience doing 30x500 with Amy. So maybe we can talk about that. The question I have is how did that even happen? How did you guys meet up in the first place and start working together on that?

South by Southwest, 02/2007, was standing in line for coffee at the Starbucks in the Austin Convention Center with Amy Hoy and Tom Conrad, who's the CTO of Pandora. The rest is history. No. I mean, I met Amy literally in the lobby of the hotel. She knew another friend of mine, Tara Hunt, who's who's in Montreal, who's an incredible community builder.

I learned a lot from Tara in sort of my earlier days of doing Indy Hall and community building as well. Don't know, Amy and I just sort of clicked as friends and stayed in touch online, and we chat, and then she when she moved to Vienna and then eventually married her husband Thomas, I was going to Vienna a couple of times a year, just we stayed friends and one day, I sort of realized that we hadn't actually like built something together, which is I I you know, that's a common realization in my circle of friends is like, we've been friends for a while. Why haven't we built something cool yet? Yeah. And it was really it.

And we sat down in her kitchen in Vienna and sketched out, there's a picture of it somewhere on the internet, of a bunch of post it notes on the wall, and it was a brainstorm of what are all the reasons that people don't launch product companies. Yeah. It's basically the idea was zero to launch. Now prior to us doing this, Amy had done a couple of webinars, like a three hour brain dump style webinar of here's everything I've learned about building freckle so far, and people were like, more and more, I want more. So she already had momentum and some audience built up.

I absolutely came on, but I think our philosophy on bootstrapping products and companies was so aligned that even just working through the conversation of what are the things that are in people's ways and can we teach them that, was the origin of 30 by 500 and in full disclosure, I actually stepped away from 30 by 500 for about a year and a half and only rejoined, I guess about a year and a half ago. So there was like a window where Amy was heavily evolving the original material that we built, actually rewrote it from, when I say rewrote it, I mean literally, not just rewrote it, but we inverted the process. One of the weird, and there's gotta be a name for this phenomenon, and if it's it's definitely it's akin to if you're familiar with learning spirals, this is a philosophy in education design that learning is not linear, it's a cycle. Like you learn something and then it folds back on itself and you learn it again and it folds back and that's how you make progress. So a bunch of times and this has happened in almost every class Amy and I have built together is that we create the curriculum and it's good and then we teach it once and then we look at it and go it's backwards and we literally reverse the order and that requires more than just reversing the order, that's where I say rewrite.

It's not just patching, you know, chapters together in a different order, it's a completely different sequence of the same concepts. Yeah. And I feel like it comes out of your brain in one direction, but in order for it to be useful to somebody else, it needs to go back in reverse. Yeah. So that's sort of one of our guiding principles is if it's not working, try it the other way.

Yeah. Yeah. And so so last last last year, not sorry, not 2013, I guess it was the 2012 I rejoined 30 by 500, but that was the last time we taught the like four month long mega class. Yeah. Which was brutal for both of us and the students.

It was just a ton of time and it was a slog. By the end, everybody was exhausted. Yeah. And Amy and I said, we need to try and make this, you know, different format that's better and that was how we came up with the boot camp and so I've been on full bore since we started redesigning the boot camp, is about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago. Yeah.

But the boot camp that we've been running for the last year, we've never gotten we've never gotten better results, even though like the core lessons that we teach still go back to that those post it notes on the wall. This is like product iteration at its finest, but Yeah. The cool thing is is now we've got people that are shipping faster, they're implementing the lessons faster, they're getting results faster, but we're also going back to the original generations of alumni that were willing to slog through some of the material and ultimately struggled because of the way we were teaching it and the new techniques are helping them. And we've had alumni come back and take the class and go, oh, all the things that I struggled with, you guys figured out and it was almost like the you know, we applied our own research process to figuring out what to build on the class and go, this is what you know, within the material, within our own audience going, people are struggling with this, fix it, make it better and almost not reselling it because we give it to our alumni for free. Yeah.

But they've said you know, they've said this is is great and now they're starting to pick up where they left off, ship, help each other. So that the Alumni thirty by five hundred community has gone through its own really interesting evolution as Amy and I have sort of stepped away and sort of let it do its own thing and we're working on our next two products are a product that'll be sort of a ebook and video set called just fucking ship. It's it's it's an it's basically a tool kit almost like sort of been describing it as a sort of a blend between thirty seven signal style of rework where it's like short essays or or getting real with short essays, but also like really practical actionable worksheets and stuff like that where you can sort of jump in and problem solve your way through a problem, but the whole thing is focused around business habits. So we love habits as we've studied habits and worked habit forming habit design into the way we teach and so we took a look at all of the habits related to being successful in business, everything from motivation and procrastination to how you price, how you communicate, and sort of looking at it all from a habit stance and basically giving you a toolkit to look into and say which habit is holding me back today, how do I rewire that habit?

And so Just Fucking Ship is coming out as our next sort of 30 by 500 universe product. And then a paid ongoing community for the continual practice. So not terribly unlike what you do with JFDI, but specifically geared towards our alumni. It'll be only for alumni of 35, 100 because it's really about keeping in the practice, which you were gonna ask me about communities of interest versus community of practice, maybe that's a good transition to that.

Yeah, yeah, so talk a little bit about that because I think that's an important thing, not just for product development. When you told me this, it was like, I immediately was just like, like I thought like, it was crazy because I thought like that the bullseye model that you shared with this idea of communities of interest and communities versus practice, I immediately said, well, this applies to building a team, this applies to building a product, and this applies to building a community. So yeah, if you could explain this idea of interest versus practice, I think that's really helpful.

So the study, this is where like, I'm gonna try to not get too accurate, because this is definitely an academic concept. So I'm gonna try, like this is where Alex Hillman, the armchair academic shows up, and I'm gonna try and keep him like in a corner over there.

Don't you have like a cardigan and a pipe that goes with this?

So there's a wide field of study on communities and community principles, and one of the cool things about communities is in spite of all of the really smart scientists and academic studying of this, most things people don't agree on. Mhmm. And so one of the concepts that is a bit more widespread is this sort of delineation of different community types. Right? And the one that I latched on to, at least one of the differentiations that I latched on to because like you, it like it crystallized so much, is this difference between a community of interest and a community of practice.

So think about it this way. The startup community is a great example. Actually, any startup community because there's not one startup community. There's there's a startup communities in every city. There's different, you know, there's hacker news.

There's your community. There's multitudes of them and they're they're growing like crazy. Right? Most of those communities though are communities of interest, which means going back to we're talking about the bull's eye model and the ambition, that doesn't exist. The community exists simply as a population of people who have an interest in common.

I like startups. I think startups are cool. Think about how many people are in starved communities, but not doing startups. That is a great indicator of an interest based community.

Yeah.

Right? Yeah. And interest based communities are really valuable. So none of this is to say that, you know, startup communities suck or interest based communities suck. It's a way of gathering people and that's something that we as human beings need to do, so that's good.

Yeah. But I'm the kind of person who I'm not okay with good, everything like, I want better, and that's really the key. The difference between a community of interest and a community of practice is better, is betterness, it's betterment, it's that momentum, that ambition, that goal that we're talking about. And a community of practice often is a subset of a community of interest. So there's, it's either a subset or an overlap, there's a bunch of different ways you can look at that, but a community of practice is a community where everyone is working towards this goal in common and successes don't happen in vacuum.

Vacuums, progress doesn't happen in a vacuum. When I win, it's our win, when you win, it's our win, right, and that's these communities where people are working at their craft, they're working at betterment, they're working at progress, they're working at learning, and a really good friend of mine, her name is Vanessa Gennarelli, She's she's a former Indy Hall member. She's a researcher. She has a degree from I hope I don't screw this up. I think it's from Harvard.

So like Ivy League, super this chick is so smart and so great. Yeah. And she's a learning researcher. She works for a company called p to p u that does peer learning stuff online. And it's a lot of stuff that you know, Vanessa and I geek out over this stuff because her all of her research, all of her interests in learning are so in line with mine of communities because ultimately they're the same thing.

Mhmm. And they just she published an article two articles that you can look at for since I imagine we're gonna be wrapping up soon. One is, if you go to my blog, which is danjulceawesome.com, not today's post, which is about a weird experience I had at a bar in West Philly last night, but the one right before that, which is about designing community events and experiences that people will love and remember, is Vanessa's. So you'll get an idea of how freaking smart this chick is. Two, was she told me about another post that I don't have the link to off the top of my head, but I can dig it up and and send it to you so you can post it later, talking about the participation and learning going hand in hand.

Mhmm. My response to Vanessa, actually, where the heck did I put it? I wish I had it in front of me. I don't. My my response was something along the lines of that that participate like, without learning, a community is not making progress.

A community becomes static, and that learning doesn't need to be you teaching me how to grow my business, it could be me learning that you love Iron Maiden. Yeah. The point is is that that learning, that advancement, learning is a critical glue even in those little interactions of the the culture of a community, of what people are working towards, what binds them, what brings them together, what gets them to do the cool things that like, communities I'm, like, I'm a fanatic for it because it's like, I look at communities, they're like a creature. Like, they do things. And at this point, like, I I I feel so lucky to be a part of Indy Hall because it's literally it's like it makes its own decisions.

I haven't been in control in a really long time, and I love that. I can go away for a day, a week, a month, whatever, come back and it's changed, it's grown, it's evolved. I don't have four kids or one kid for that matter. Yeah. But I mean, I imagine the process of raising kids is a similar sense of gratification because they start learning how to do things that you didn't show them how to do.

Mhmm. And you go, wow, you figured that out, that's really awesome. And that's how I feel about the power of a community is when people are learning together, not necessarily even from each other, but literally together.

Yeah. And I actually thought about, as dad, I thought about using this model of us setting a goal as a family that's crazy, like that we may never achieve in our lifetime, but something that we can all work towards as a family. And the other example, like the examples of all of these things. So like a good example of a community of interest might be like a subreddit on Reddit, like rstartups. I'm interested in this keyword startups.

Interest of a, you know, an example of a community of practice would be something like 30 by 500, where you guys are all basically working towards this goal together that is not just based on like, I'm interested in startups or bootstrapping, but as we wanna achieve this goal Yeah. Together. And

And when it comes to paid communities, by the way, the it's really hard to turn a community of interest into a paid community because you don't and and the reason is is because I think most of the people that you'll get to become a paying member from the community of interest are actually people who want a community of practice. Mhmm. I think about a lot of like professional associations where people are gathering around a common interest of whatever it is I can, Like the worst example I can come up with, first example is also the worst example, because people assume that because I'm interested in co working, would be interested in business centers and like Yeah. Business center and real estate associations, which by the way are huge. But having now gone and spoken at them and been to some other events, it is largely a community of interest where there are pockets of communities of practice or where people are actually working together and that's where sort of the paid membership associations and things like that, that's a pretty, if you look at organizations that have paid membership, that's a very, very common delineation is, you know, who's gonna pay just to say, you know, I'm a card holding member of the I'm interested in startups club.

Yeah. Yeah.

And there's some people, but when they're no longer interested in startups, they're gonna cancel.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Let's

let

me just show everyone where you can find Alex on the web. So he's alexknowshtml on Twitter. Indyhall.org is the co working space he was talking about. Groupbuzz.io is this product we've been talking about. And if you're thinking about building a community, definitely check this out.

And I think they have a blog too. Is it just blog it?

It's blog. Yeah. And not following my own advice, which which is what happens when you teach is you don't always get to follow your own advice. There's a bunch of posts that are queued up here to go out. We've been working on product and the new marketing page.

But yeah, there's there's there's one really cool post up right now and a bunch more stuff in the queue if you're interested in subscribing to that.

Yeah. Yeah. The the the bullseye model is in this post here.

Yeah. That's that is.

So check that out. And then his blog, dangerouslyawesome.com. And then there's also 30 by 500, which is the class he runs with Amy Hull. Yeah. So thanks again, Alex.

If you're still listening, why don't you check out my email newsletter, Justin Jackson dot CA slash newsletter. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time.