Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Building a Business Around Purpose, Passion, and Community | Lloyed Lobo - Co-Founder & President of Boast.ai

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Lessons - Building a Business Around Purpose, Passion, and Community | Lloyed Lobo - Co-Founder & President of Boast.ai · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this episode, we dive into the essentials of building a community and how to decide between
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  a community of practice or a community of product. You'll learn why understanding your purpose,
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  mission, and values is crucial for long-term success and how passion, teamwork, and empathy
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  play a key role in creating meaningful connections that can drive your business forward.
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  You mentioned if you don't love serving people and helping people don't build community,
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  there's other ways to build your business, but ultimately your belief is, and we're on the
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  same page here, that the future of business will be built around community. I think that will
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  differentiate businesses and allow them to achieve levels of success that a commodity-based
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  business would not be able to achieve easily and even more so in the future. But how do you
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  actually, again, the question everybody asks you, how do you actually build community?
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  Definitely. So the first thing to understand is, you know, I went through those six steps,
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  right? Those are the ethos you need to keep in mind because that's what people create. But then
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  after that, you got to differentiate and understand the types of communities. There are two types of
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  communities. One's a community of practice where you're bringing people together who share
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  a common goal of learning about a specific field or a common passion, like writing motorcycles.
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  And then there's a community of product which is built for users to ask questions about your
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  product, get insights, and stay connected with the company. So it's really important to start with
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  the community of practice because especially if you're not a product market fit, you're early on.
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  It's important to start a community of practice, that's what HubSpot did, right? Helping people
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  become better digital marketers or gainside dead, elevating the profession of customer success
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  and helping people become better customer success professionals. If you don't have a product or
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  your pre-product market fit, you got to build a community of practice. If you build a community
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  of product when you're pre-product market fit and you're hawking your product all the time,
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  people might see that as contrived, right? They're like, these guys are just wanting to sell
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  any stuff. The step one is understanding what kind of community do you want to build? Do you want
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  to build a community of practice or a community of product? And now within each of them,
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  there are different type of sub-communities like a pool community or a hub community or
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  and so on. One of the best ways to build a community is where there's person-to-person interaction,
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  not just a one-to-many, so people within the community can interact whether or not that central
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  figure lives or die, right? It's very important to have that person-to-person. But the step one is
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  focus on building a practice, community of practice to elevate that field of learning or
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  field of passion. Number one, very important, especially if you don't have a product or your
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  pre-product market fit. Number two is align. You know, you need to understand the purpose, the
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  mission, the vision. You got to write these down and a lot of people say, man, he got bullshit
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  things that people write on the walls. It's bullshit you can't build a long-lasting,
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  sustainable company, right? So for me, it's funny years ago, I wrote down my purpose mission,
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  vision, values, personally. And it's funny, the two kind of companies that have built both
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  and traction aligned with exactly that, right? Why purpose in life is to enable innovators to
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  change the world? Why every dollar spending innovation returns 20 to the universe. Vaccines,
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  robots, clean drinking water is a function of innovation. If you're not innovating,
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  you're going to die. My vision is to accelerate that innovation, be the
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  accelerate of that innovation. So then how do I do it? Right? Through content, through connections,
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  through community, to capital. So let's unpack that a little bit. To provide these innovators,
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  one of the biggest reasons why innovators fail is they don't have access to resources.
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  Simple, content connections, community capital, right? And so create a community that provides that
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  and then I created both to provide entrepreneurs to get access to innovation funding and
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  government incentives, right? So those are companies that build from from the purpose, my innate
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  purpose. And then the last thing is one of your values. I think it's very, very important,
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  because if you values tell you how you behave every waking hour, your mission tells you what you
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  do every day. Your vision tells you what you will be as a result of that. Like what will the world
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  look like? Right? And then your purpose is, why do you exist? What is the forever? But your
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  values are really important. And for me, my values are impact, passion, teamwork, right? Those are
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  an empathy, key things. And so I realized that for me, those things are so important. It's so
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  important to have impact, impact over power and money. People who hunger for power, destroy
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  relationships, people who just focus on money, make short-term decisions, this is like the like
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  the Wall Street. People who focus on impact can change the world. So impact passion, passion,
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  because you know, I've seen oftentimes people with their luck and experience 10X overcompensate
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  with passion, teamwork, because you can't win alone. You win together, you lose together. Great
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  great outcomes are a result of many people collaborating, not just one. At empathy, empathy is
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  really, really important. If you don't have empathy, end the good products, the lasting companies.
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  And so, you know, you need to understand that. Those two things, what are you building,
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  what kind of community, what is the purpose, the mission, the vision, the values, because the
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  thing is this, those things are important, although they're hard because it sustains, right? You
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  don't build something that starts and stops. If you're just doing it to get something out of it,
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  then you start and stop. It's important to internalize what is your purpose and so on. Then
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  you've got to figure out who is your ideal customer profile. Can I ask you something? Can I
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  send a quick before before you? So how did you figure out yours? How did you figure out yours and
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  you made sure that they sustained across both of your companies? So it's funny. I didn't make
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  sure they sustained across both my companies. It's just my behaviors caused me to go in. No,
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  but that means that you found that means that you found things that were valid or else I wouldn't
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  They wouldn't have. So you know, I often tell people when you're in an interview, don't ask
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  somebody, what do you, what do you create at? What do you not create at? Just observe them,
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  right? Because people will bullshit anyway, but when you observe them, so I often found myself,
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  what do I love doing? Even if I didn't get paid to do it and for years I didn't get paid to do
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  it, I would keep doing. Before I started traction, I was doing community building at startup
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  weekend. I used to facilitate fly on my own dime. I ran a pre-accelerator called startup next.
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  I was doing all this community support stuff every time that drove me and the things I hated were
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  like, you know, things that actually paid the bills like doing financials and all that stuff.
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  Like, you know what? Let me pause you for a second. Like, what about me? Should I hurry? What about?
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  Right? So, so then you realize it and trust me, this works. What are the things you procrastinate on?
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  You should never do that. If every week you hit snooze on your Google, Google email, like I have
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  this thing where I block either counter times or I mark emails under it and the things that I keep
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  putting snooze on week, there's like some stuff that's been snoozed for two years almost every week,
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  right? Dude, I exactly what you're talking about. I know exactly what you're talking about. I have
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  emails sitting in my inbox right now. You just said that and it's like motivated me to like just
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  delete them and never talk, because I know that I don't want to do the every Friday I snooze, like
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  by a week, by a week, right? And so you got to realize the most important thing for a founder
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  or any creator, let's just say it, right, is leverage. So, what are the things that, you know,
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  you're passionate about? When passion meets profession, you become Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan,
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  right? When passion meets profession, just think about that for a second. When passion meets
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  profession, it's not work anymore. You're Michael Jackson, man, you love dancing, you love
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  shooting hooks, right? And so you got to find that. And for me, it was helping others. And it just
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  didn't come in 80. I think it was my upbringing a lot to do with the Gulf War. My parents grew up
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  in the slums in India, in Mumbai, and my mom had 10 siblings. They didn't have their bathroom.
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  Anytime I'd go there, there would be some stranger staying in their house. Because Mumbai is like
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  the New York City of India. And I asked them, like, why do you have this stranger staying here? Like,
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  why you guys don't have room? And I'd often hear that, you know, if you help enough people
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  get to their destination, you'll get to your destination. Those people may not help you,
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  but the karma comes back. And so like a lot of life is what? How you behave is part nature and
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  part nurture? A lot of it, this part nurture, right? And so I'd seen that growing up. And so just very
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  naturally, I would do stuff and people would tell me like, you know, throughout my career, like,
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  what are you doing? Like volunteering here? And then why are you like wasting it? What are you
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  doing? And then I came to a conclusion after a couple of failed startups that this is my life's
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  mission, man. And this is what I like doing, right? Even now at both, now both raised the $23 million
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  USD Series A, we did a hundred million dollar fund to fund innovation at R&D. And all my time
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  is spent running traction. Everything else I procrastinate on. So you eventually come to the
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  conclusion, what are you love doing versus what you're okay with doing and what do you hate doing?
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  And if you can surround yourself with people of failure gaps, so you can do what you love
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  doing, then you'll have a happy life forever. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable,
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  don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive
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  deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.
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  See you in the next one.