Lessons - Building a Business Around Purpose, Passion, and Community | Lloyed Lobo - Co-Founder & President of Boast.ai

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