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Lloyed Lobo, co-founder of Boast.ai and Traction, shares his insights on building communities, acquiring customers, and hiring in the startup world. He emphasizes the importance of building a community around your product or brand, using examples of successful companies like HubSpot and Ferrari. Lobo stresses the need for consistent engagement and fostering genuine connections within the community. When it comes to acquiring customers, Lobo advises founders to start local, host meetups, and be scrappy in the early stages. He also encourages founders to learn how to sell themselves before hiring a sales team. Finally, Lobo highlights the importance of clarity, alignment, and focus in a startup, as well as hiring individuals based on trajectory and motivation rather than just experience.
In this section, Lloyd Lobo, co-founder of Boast.ai and Traction, provides background information on his journey and his company. Boast.ai automates tax credits and funding for businesses from governments, making the process faster and less risky. Lobo explains how he and his co-founder started the company after experiencing the stress of the startup culture and wanting to build a company they would want to work for. Additionally, Lobo discusses Traction, a community for founders that offers webinars, podcasts, meetups, and an annual conference. The community was built as a side hustle to help establish a brand for Boast.ai and provide founders with valuable resources and insights on building and scaling their businesses.
In this section, Lloyed Lobo explains the difference between an audience and a community, highlighting that audience members interact with the influencer or content creator, while community members interact with each other. He shares his experience with building a community and how it started unintentionally with pizza nights for founders and CEOs of technology companies. Over time, these events grew in attendance and eventually transitioned into conferences, meetups, and retreats. Lobo emphasizes the importance of consistently hosting in-person events, as they create stronger connections and genuine relationships within the community. He also mentions the incorporation of online activities, such as webinars and podcasts, to further foster growth. Overall, Lobo believes that building a community requires a focus on one thing consistently over time.
In this section, Lloyed Lobo talks about the importance of building a community around your product or brand. He shares examples of companies like HubSpot, GainSight, and Gong that have successfully created communities of practice and communities of product. Lobo emphasizes that starting with a community of practice, where people come together to learn about a specific field, can be beneficial for early-stage companies without many users. He also highlights how building a community creates a flywheel effect, fostering brand loyalty and generating valuable feedback and interactions between the company and its community members. Lobo mentions Harley-Davidson as an example of a company that revitalized its brand through community engagement.
In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of building a community around your product or brand. They use the example of Ferrari, where a community of fans has been built through merchandise and events, even though not everyone can afford to buy a Ferrari car. The speaker then shares their own experience of building a community around their company, MicroAcquire, and asks for tips on how to further develop it. The other speaker suggests starting with identifying the ideal buyer and their interests, and gradually expanding the community through platforms like Facebook groups and meetups. They also emphasize the significance of understanding the different layers within the community, such as buyers, sellers, and advisors.
In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of identifying the key ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) when building a community. They suggest that the key ICP for their business, MicroAcquire, is founders, particularly bootstrap founders. To cater to this ICP, they focus on creating content and resources that empower founders and put them in a strong position when negotiating with potential buyers. The speaker emphasizes the need for a founder-led community and highlights the difference between building a bootstrap company and a venture-backed company. They also discuss the concept of building a community flywheel, where engaged community members drive the growth of the business by inviting friends, engaging with content, and participating in events.
In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of regularly engaging with the community and building connections for bootstrap founders. They mention the success they've had with webinars, podcasts, and online events in terms of gaining subscribers and increasing views on their YouTube channel. They also express the desire for a mastermind group where they can have regular chats with other founders who sell similar annual contract values (ACVs). The speaker emphasizes the value of person-to-person connections and suggests the idea of launching a community to facilitate more deliberate ways for people to connect. They then shift the conversation to discuss the journey of acquiring the first customer for their startup, which involved cold calling and manually delivering services to generate income for product development. They stress the importance of learning to sell as a founder and share their own experience of making calls and sending emails to engage potential customers.
In this section of the video, the speaker discusses their strategy for acquiring customers in the early days of their businesses. They started with a local approach, hosting small meetups with influential speakers in the space to attract attendees. By leveraging the brand of these speakers, they were able to attract bigger names and expand their strategy to different cities. The focus was on sales and getting the first customers in the door, rather than obsessing over perfection or automation. They also shifted their model to partnering with other businesses and offering a white label program, which allowed them to scale and increase profitability. The speaker emphasizes the importance of talking to customers and being scrappy when bootstrapping a business.
In this section, Lloyed Lobo discusses the importance of founders selling their own products before hiring a sales team. He emphasizes that founders need to gain knowledge and experience in selling to understand product-market fit and develop a scalable business model. Lobo suggests cold emailing potential customers, getting them on the phone, and learning from them to figure out the sales playbook. He also advises founders to pivot their messaging and test different approaches until they have high retention and product-market fit. Lobo discourages founders from immediately hiring a VP of Sales and instead recommends that they learn to sell themselves first to make it easier to find the right sales hire. He highlights the flexibility and adaptability that founders have in the early stages and emphasizes the importance of mastering the sales process before scaling. Overall, Lobo stresses the value of hands-on experience and learning by doing when it comes to building companies.
In this section, the speaker emphasizes the importance of having a clear framework when building a company. He highlights the need for great alignment, purpose, vision, mission, and values, as these can help avoid friction in the future. He also discusses the importance of building startups in phases and not trying to do too many things at once, as this can lead to failure. Leveraging data and using frameworks like the product score framework called RICE can help in making data-driven decisions. The speaker also agrees with the importance of having a team of stars who are aligned and enjoy working together. Finally, he emphasizes the need to focus on what's working in marketing before expanding into other channels.
In this section, the speaker discusses the common trap that founders fall into, where they try to expand and optimize too quickly instead of focusing on what is already working. They also emphasize the importance of clarity of focus and understanding the stage of the startup. The speaker shares that building a startup requires a lot of hard work and stresses the need to do a few things exceptionally well instead of spreading resources across multiple markets. They also caution against the temptation to immediately go after big markets and instead suggest starting small and validating the target audience and message. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the importance of staying focused on the target market and not chasing shiny objects. The speaker also touches on personal growth and the need to make time for family and self-care, as well as the hiring process and the importance of hiring builders in the early stages of a company.
In this section, Lloyed Lobo shares his perspective on hiring and promoting employees based on their trajectory and motivation rather than just their years of experience. He believes that hiring individuals with high trajectory and passion can be more valuable than focusing solely on years of experience. Lobo also emphasizes the importance of hiring for motivation, attitude, and skill set in that order. He believes that working with motivated and optimistic individuals makes navigating the challenges of running a startup much easier.
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