Lloyed Lobo, an entrepreneur, podcast host, author of a WSJ best-selling book, and a community builder. He 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 fintech platform Boast.Al, leveraged the Community-Led Growth model to bootstrap the company to $10 million in annual recurring revenue while also co-founding Traction, a community empowering more than 100k innovators through connections, content, and capital.
Key Takeaways
(00:05-09:12) How Community Powers a 10 Million ARR Business
(09:13-16:01) Rethinking Success in Entrepreneurship
(24:47-29:57) Decoding Startup Success Secrets
(29:58-37:36) From Audience to Community Power
(44:08-47:32) Giving Digital Superpowers to Communities
(47:33-51:09) Insights for Empowering Communities Post-COVID
(51:10-57:08) Expert Insights for Thriving in the Digital Age
(57:09-1:00) The Power of Super Users in Building Iconic Brands
(16:02-24:46) Navigating Startup Love & Niches
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Bootstrapping
to $10M ARR
From navigating the often-murky waters of venture capital and highlighting the overlooked realities of startup failures, to unveiling unconventional paths to building a multi-million dollar business, Lloyed shares a wealth of wisdom gleaned from over a decade in the trenches. We'll explore his contrarian approach to early-stage growth, the critical importance of aligning personal values with business aspirations, and the profound power of transforming an audience into a passionate and engaged community in today's digital landscape. Get ready for actionable insights and a refreshing perspective on what it truly takes to thrive as an entrepreneur.
1. How Community Powers a 10 Million ARR Business
This discussion between Alex and Lloyed highlights Lloyed's remarkable entrepreneurial journey, culminating in a $10 million ARR business built without external investment. Their conversation touches upon Lloyed's decade-long experience and consistent drive, tracing back to a 2012 Silicon Valley encounter. Lloyed shared his unconventional yet successful approach, notably detailed in a LinkedIn post advocating for starting with service salesβa strategy often overlooked by venture capitalists.
The dialogue further explores the startup ecosystem's fixation on exponential growth, contrasting it with the success of companies like UiPath and Basecamp that initially leveraged service offerings. Alex and Lloyed critique the overemphasis on pitch perfection and the often-indistinct advice given for B2B and B2C ventures. Lloyed emphasizes the crucial need for entrepreneurs to adopt strategies tailored to their specific business models, challenging the conventional wisdom that fundraising is the only path to success and championing community-led growth and practical methodologies.
If you want to build a massive, high-scale company, you want to hypergrow, to blitz scale. Unfortunately, that is the only path. It's like making a Steven Spielberg movie. There's only one way to make that movie β by raising a lot of money.
2. Rethinking Success in Entrepreneurship
Lloyed shares the often overlooked failures alongside the successes of venture-backed businesses. He advises founders to align personal values with business aspirations before diving into startups, urging them to consider what success truly means. Lloyed prompts critical questions: What's my version of success? How much money do I need? What company culture do I want to avoid?
Drawing from Boast AI's experience, he stresses starting small and understanding niche markets, emphasizing the role of personal values in shaping a purposeful entrepreneurial journey.
We glorify a lot of successes. But aside every major success that you hear about in the press, there's 99% failure in the venture backspace. Failure meaning founder burnout, fallout, replacement, company shutdowns.
3. From Audience to Community Power
Alex and Lloyed dive into the dynamics between content output and meaningful outcomes, spurred by the era of generative AI. They chat about the significance of standing out amidst the noise by offering real value rather than just producing content for the sake of it.
The talk leads to the importance of "propensity to pay", where Lloyed shares how they navigated a high price point by introducing a contingency fee model, enabling startups to access services without upfront costs. Shifting gears, they discuss the profound impact of communities in the B2B world. Lloyed unwraps the evolution from an audience to a thriving community, emphasizing the role of shared purpose in community formation.
They draw distinctions between having an audience and fostering a community, citing examples like CrossFit and Harley-Davidson, where a united purpose fuels robust community bonds.
Every small little idea that eventually became a global, enduring phenomena, from Christ and Christianity to CrossFit, had the exact same four stages. Number one: people listen to you or buy your product or service. You have an audience. When you bring that audience together to interact with one another on a cadence, it goes from being a one-way communication to a two-way communication.
4. Giving Digital Superpowers to Communities
Alex and Lloyed explore the power of engaging multiple senses in content, making it interactive, diverse, and adaptable to different learning styles. They discuss the challenge of inaccessible events for many decision-makers and offer solutions like "event books" to extend the event experience digitally. They delve into how digitizing content can replicate the community magic, creating adaptive digital experiences that resonate with diverse preferences.
The idea is that the more senses you get involved, the better. If we go to the early stages of B2B journey, let's say, βI wanna learn about something or read like a top of the funnel research document.β It's like black & white paper style. Maybe, if you're lucky, we'll have some images in there. So there is at least a visual thing. But it feels the opposite of interaction.
5. Expert Insights for Thriving in the Digital Age
Lloyed shares golden nuggets of wisdom on how to evolve from simply addressing an audience to nurturing a robust community. The speakers highlight the power of consistent content creation across various platforms that resonate with different audience preferences, whether it's TikTok, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
Throughout the discussion, Lloyed emphasizes the value of handpicking the initial community members, those 1% super fans, to set the tone and pace for community growth. They share success stories like Justin Welsh's journey, underlining the potential of turning an audience into a passionate community.
Figure out who your 1% of super fans are, create a community for them and provide value to them. Then let them bring more people in and grow from there in the early days.
Check the episode's Transcript (AI-generated) HERE.
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Author
Experience-focused Leaders is the #1 Multimedia Podcast! We talk to senior business & tech leaders about the experiences that move forward organizations, customers and society at large. True to form, we mix audio, video, web and eBook formats to turn these authentic conversations into personalized nuggets you'll remember & use.
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