- Learn how you can turn your brand iconic through human-to-human connections
- Understand why you shouldn’t suddenly jump into technology when trying to make connections happen
- Find out what mistakes you should avoid doing when it comes to building a community
Resources/Links:
- Want to find out the secret sauce to turn your brand into something iconic? Click here: https://www.lloyedlobo.com/
Summary
Do you want to know how you can organically shift your business and increase your sales without the cost?
Having a business doesn’t always revolve around marketing and sales. It’s also about the impact your product makes on your customers’ lives. To be iconic is to be remembered. Thus, growing your company through building communities can change your impact just as much as the right marketing.
Lloyed Lobo is an entrepreneur, podcast host, and community builder. He has experienced the Gulf War as a young refugee in Kuwait, witnessing the strength of the community in evacuating the population to safety. As the co-founder of Boast.AI, he leveraged the Community-Led Growth model to bootstrap the company from zero to eight figures and secured over $100m in funding, while also co-founding Traction, a community empowering over 100k innovators through connections, content, and capital.
Grab a seat and a snack because you’re in for a treat as Lloyed explains how you can turn your brand into something iconic through community-led growth. He also shares his awesome and mind-blowing rules on how you can start accomplishing this success in your own business or brand.
Check out these episode highlights:
- 03:36 – Lloyed’s ideal client: The ideal audience for the book is any entrepreneur, any innovator. Anyone who’s looking to help other people to give, to build a community beyond their product or service.
- 04:14 – The problem he helps solve: There are twofold. One is, as you know, in 2023, there are a few problems. Marketing is taking a bloodbath, okay? CPMs are up– TikTok, and Facebook, there is a sea of sameness being generated by generative AI.
- 08:42 – Clients’ common mistakes before consulting Lloyed: A lot of people who come to me for advice and community building asked me, “Should I start a Slack channel? Should I start a WhatsApp group? Should I start a Facebook group?” And I tell them, “Don’t do any of that.”
- 08:42 – Lloyed’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): Figure out what are your customers’ aspirations and goals and what gets in their way. And then start building an audience by delivering value around content in a white space that they’re not getting.
- 09:42 – Lloyed’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Want to find out the secret sauce to turn your brand into something iconic? Click here: https://www.lloyedlobo.com/
- 10:05 – Q: What do you do once you have an ideal customer profile? A: The thing is, build your circle of influence around it. Once you’ve figured out your ICP, and who you’re targeting, and what are their pain points, the way to do it is to figure out, who do they fund, meaning, what are tools they pay for?
Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:
“Customers buy outcomes, not products.” -Lloyed Lobo Share on XTranscript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)
Tom Poland 00:10
Greetings, everyone, and an especially warm welcome to Marketing the Invisible today. I’m Tom Poland beaming out to you from the sunny coast in Australia, joined today by Lloyed Lobo. Lloyed, it’s an absolute thrill to have you on the show. Folks! Welcome, first of all, Lloyed. Where are you based? Tell people where you’re hanging out.
Lloyed Lobo 00:25
I am hanging out in Dubai for the next year at least and then we’ll see where it goes. But I am home-based from San Francisco and I came to Dubai to explore if people live and work very differently. Dubai’s a great mix of Miami meets Singapore and it’s a land of convenience. I think moving here easily has added four or five hours of free time to my day because I don’t run around. I don’t do chores. Everything is walkable and accessible. So I love it!
Tom Poland 00:50
It’s a very different culture to Silicon Valley.
Lloyed Lobo 00:53
Definitely! There’s not as much running around or hustle. So, definitely.
Tom Poland 00:58
Okay, so folks, you’re in for a treat! Lloyed has gotten to where he is today through blood, sweat, tears, depression, failures, disadvantages, the challenges that are just enormous. But he sold out a majority share in one of the companies he started. I don’t think it was a secret. Lloyed, it’s millions of dollars! You’ve got a bit of a slump after that, decided to freshen up his life and move to Dubai for a change of environment. And it sounds like it’s worked incredibly well! He’s launching a book, which by the time you read this, it will be available, “From Grassroots to Greatness”. And I’m going to let Lloyed, sort of, tell you a bit about that, but we’re doing something pretty special on this interview. There’s a whole conversation that Lloyed and I had before the interview started, and I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to put it at the end of the interview. Normally, as you guys know, I have seven questions in seven minutes– that’s it! It’s all over, but this is too special to leave out. So Lloyed has given me his permission to do that. I happen to have a recording which was kind of fortuitous. So we’ll rock and roll with a recording, Lloyed. For those of you who don’t know Lloyed, let me just give you a quick heads-up. He’s an entrepreneur. I mean, Lloyd is an entrepreneur. Everyone says they’re an entrepreneur, but Lloyd is, okay? He’s got serial failures and successes to prove it. He’s a podcast host. I think more than anything else, Lloyed’s a community builder and we’re going to unpack some of that. This is a concept which is so powerful! It’s two steps away from building a religion, as Lloyed has explained to me. But Lloyed grew up in the slums in India. He moved to Kuwait. He married his childhood sweetheart from India, ended up in the middle of a Gulf War, became a refugee, and went to San Francisco. He’s the co-founder of Boost.AI. He’s leveraged a community-led growth model to bootstrap the company from zero to eig- figures and secured over $100 million in funding, co-founded Traction- I mean, it goes on and on. I think what’s going to be on your headstone, Lloyed not any day, I hope, but it’s about you building communities and bringing richness to the people in those communities, creating a purpose and a vision that has transcended and I think, to use your words, “transcends individual people and certainly transcends profit”. So pleasant to have you here, sir! The title is, “13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands With Community Led Growth”. Let’s kick off the seven minutes by asking who’s your ideal client, sir?
Lloyed Lobo 03:36
Definitely! So the ideal audience for the book is any entrepreneur, any innovator. Anyone who’s looking to help other people to give, to build a community beyond their product or service, right? Someone who is looking to create and give to the world, a bigger impact that transcends the profits or the product they’re working on.
Tom Poland 04:04
And so unpacking that a bit further, question two is what’s the problem you solve? But it may not even be a problem you’re solving, it might be a potential you’re releasing.
Lloyed Lobo 04:14
I think it’s both, right? So there are twofold. One is, as you know, in 2023, there are a few problems. Marketing is taking a bloodbath, okay? CPMs are up– TikTok, and Facebook, there is a sea of sameness being generated by generative AI. After the initial buzz has died, copy-pasting from generative AI and you know, the content is the same. Consumers are tired- right, Tom- of clickbait, of spam, of seeing the same thing over and over again, of giving sensitive personal data to access crappy white papers. Consumers are saying no to the same old marketing, and that’s why marketing is getting harder. It’s getting more challenging. Outbound lead generation is getting harder. And so I want to convey the message, that the problem that I’m trying to solve is in an age where it’s getting harder to differentiate, the technological innovation has even made product differentiations harder. Think about it, there are websites out there where you can go and literally buy the front end of Airbnb or any website you pick. No code, local chat GPT tools have made building the next software product very easy! So in a time where you can replicate anything, and marketing has gotten so saturated, how do you stand out? Yeah, the best way to stand out is not technological innovation, because yesterday’s innovation always becomes tomorrow’s commodity, right? There was the internet and there was the Cloud. And there was the social and there was the mobile. And then there was fintech. And now AI. We don’t say internet company or mobile company, and we won’t say AI company. But eventually, if you build a community, you won’t become a commodity. As I talked to a thousand-plus people, I realized one thing that was in common between obscure ideas that became long-term enduring brands, and that was the power of human-to-human connections. People create innovation. People create technologies. And through this book, I want to convey the message that if you’re an entrepreneur, that draws joy from creating impact and wants to build an enduring brand, you can build a community. And I’m not saying stop doing sales, because I did sales, or stop doing traditional direct response marketing. But I’m saying while you’re doing those things in parallel, start building your community because, over time, your community will be your feedback source. It will be your product, a differentiator. It’ll be a channel for distribution. It will be your channel for retention. They will stay with you to help you because if you fall in love with your customers, and make them successful beyond your product or service, they will show up for you in the same way. And a perfect example, you’re in Australia. So you know Atlassian. We’ve all heard of it. Right? A big $40 billion success! Atlassian started fairly small and grassroots. I think largely a product-led company that didn’t raise money for a while. Last year, Atlassian’s community self-organized 5000 events! If you take an average clip of 100 people per event that averages, you get half a million people engaged with the community without Atlassian being involved.
Tom Poland 07:27
Unbelievable!
Lloyed Lobo 07:29
So that tells you the power of community. Or if you look at a brand like Harley Davidson in the 80s, they almost went bankrupt when the Japanese manufacturers came in. They rebuild the company on the ethos of community. Management had direct oversight. The President had direct oversight. Leaders became writers. Writers became employees. They created the same Harley movement, and they created campaigns and movements to donate to breast cancer and many other causes. Today, you don’t recognize a Honda CBR fan, but you know when a person tattoos your logo, that it’s a cult. And that’s what a community does for you.
Tom Poland 08:05
Yeah, I know. And it’s fascinating stuff! And so what you’re saying is this concept of the community is really going to transcend or it’s going to endure longer than individual check fad, or even a product or a service. So okay, so that’s good news. We’ve only got two minutes left. So I’m going to skip a little bit of something here and get to question five. It’s a big subject! You’ve written a book. it’s going to be launched soon. But can you give folks a top tip, one step they could just take forward? It’s not going to build a new community, but it might get them started. What’s one thing they could do?
Lloyed Lobo 08:42
So I’ll answer your four and five with this one thing. A lot of people who come to me for advice and community building asked me, “Should I start a Slack channel? Should I start a WhatsApp group? Should I start a Facebook group?” And I tell them, “Don’t do any of that. You’re jumping into the technology. It always starts with the problem. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?” So pick the ideal customer profile. Who is it that you’re targeting? Who is that customer? What are the needs, goals, pains, aspirations? Customers buy outcomes, not products. I don’t want a gym membership, I want a six-pack. I don’t want marketing automation software, I want more leads. There’s a graphic of Mario eating a mushroom and turning into Super Mario. Super Mario is what customers want to become. They don’t care about buying mushrooms. And so figure out what are your customers’ aspirations and goals and what gets in their way. And then start building an audience by delivering value around content in a white space that they’re not getting, like deliver the value of whether it’s meetups or online content. Deliver value that they’re not already getting.
Tom Poland 09:42
Fabulous! Folks, that answers question four, the common mistakes, and the top tip. Question six is a valuable free action. Folks. Go to lloyedlobo.com and grab the book. We’ve got 15 seconds left, Lloyed. Big challenge! One question I should have asked you but failed to? What’s the question, and the answer?
Lloyed Lobo 10:05
Definitely. Oh, seven seconds! I think the one question is, what do you do once you have an ideal customer profile? The thing is, build your circle of influence around it. Once you’ve figured out your ICP, and who you’re targeting, and what are their pain points, the way to do it is to figure out, who do they fund, meaning, what are the tools they pay for? Who do they follow? Who are the influencers? And what do they frequent? What are the platforms they hang out on? So once you understand your ICP and their circle of influence, then you can do a podcast by inviting influencers that they resonate with. Then you can partner with other partners that they buy tools from and you can distribute it on the channels they hang out.
Tom Poland 10:40
Perfect! Lloyd, thanks so much for your time.
Lloyed Lobo 10:42
Thank you, man.
Tom Poland 10:44
This has been fun.
Tom Poland 10:46
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