Lessons - How I Built a Cult Following | Yosef Martin - BoxyCharm CEO

In this lessons episode, explore how viral momentum emerges from deliberate community building and product focus. Discover how coordinated engagement creates algorithmic lift, understand why listening to loyal users reduces churn, and strengthens advocacy, and uncover how founders gain an edge by avoiding noise and staying close to the trends that matter. I want to talk about the virality that you created and some of the things that also come from the virality because I think that that will help a lot of the other things you're trying to accomplish if it's paid or if it's trending on Twitter or whatever it is, but you saw those groups of 90,000 people. You took advantage of that, and that makes sense. But how looking back, how would you reverse engineer somebody to try and do that and build that group purposefully? That's what I think the magic is. You had this cult like following, but how do you get that cult like following so that I don't I don't want as a company. I don't want to be forced to create my own community. I want my product to be so cult like and I want people to be so passionate about my product that they create their own communities. I think you said it's first to start with your product. No one's going to get excited over what they say everywhere else. They have to get excited over your then you can like it's a recipe. It's not one ingredient, but it's like you it was like you were actually selling you were selling other people's products. Yeah, so it's like the product was actually but it's your brain understanding what was what resonated. Yeah, that was the product. Yeah, so exactly. I mean, I was the chief product officer until I had Christy that was working for us and she was taking over and she was amazing, but it took me years to find that and then I was the marketing guy behind this. But look, when you build the community, I guess a lot of a lot of the elements is that when you trend, right, when you trend, you get to be seen everywhere, right? And how do you trend yourself using the community as a utility? Alvinize that community you're talking exactly. You're going and so the way I was doing every month, there was a spike when people received their boxes on the I want to say around the say the 15th of the month, people get the box and there was a spike. And I needed to kind of like and my problem was that if you look at the chart, it was unlike the beginning of the month, a little spike when I would give them a sneak peak, then it would go down after two, three days. And the discussion around boxy charm because they saw the sneak peak if they came to our to our platforms and then eventually they start receiving the boxes. There's another hype spike blah, blah, blah, blah, it goes down towards the end of the month all the way to the next month. And I needed to lift it in those two, those two, I needed to kind of be the market market maker. Yeah, I want to be the market maker. So I said, you know what, let's do it this way. I'm going to go and introduce to a small group of people, but very, very loud, what's going to be next month in the box during the dips. And I can go and do just those, those two times. I'll take the two strongest items that will be next month marks. And on the first dip and on the second dip, that's what I'm going to show that. And I'm going to do it in different ways. But my point was, I would go on the forums and then say, is there any interest in the sneak peak? I would always use the same phrase. Is there any interest? Eventually, I just said, is there any interest? And that said, they would already know what I mean. And all of them would say, yes, and you would see hundreds of comments, yes, of course, why are you asking this one? And then, oh, well, it's just being funny, always that, that just telling me, yes, we can show it to us. And it was just really, really fun. And then I would go in and say, well, go tomorrow, tomorrow at 3 PM Eastern time, you're going to find somewhere. I'm going to post something about the sneak peak. Where do you have? You have a couple hundred thousand members at the same time, searching boxy charm. What happened with 300,000 people are searching at that time? Don't, don't, don't, if you, if you were to spread it across 30 days, there would be no, it wouldn't trigger the output for, it wouldn't train, but if it's over an hour or a couple, everyone, everyone's trained at the same time. Now, you would go on Google Trend, and you would see in Google Trend, a spike, ball boxy charm, whenever there's a spike in the trend, anyone that mentioned anything about boxy charm is going, is getting tons of views. Anyone that mentioned their box, anyone that mentioned what to anything. So what happened is they said that they trend when you do mention boxy charm, then they want to mention us more. Now, they just created more variety concept for free. You just are, for funnily again, everybody hears boxy boxy boxy boxy boxy, but you just manipulated the algorithm. You just use your community to come in at the same precise time and you do it two or three times a month, and you keep the discussion going, you get, you get the discussion going, and that's how you chase the cool factor. Just in the cool factor, make everybody wants to like you emotionally. They look at you different emotionally. I would say that also having a non faceless company does, does the trick, right? But put yourself out there. Yeah, you put yourself out there, right? But being a face for the company coming all the way from the founder makes a big deal. The fact that you don't take things too seriously, you're being funny and you have those consistent words that you keep all the time creates lingual around the community. Is there any interest and they would repeatedly use the same words? It was ingenious. It's very easy. Nothing is a rocket science technically. It's just easy to do. You know what? All you're doing is just paying attention, which is like it sounds, it sounds like so basic. But I mean, how many companies don't pay attention? How many people don't look at the feedback from their product and their users and they're just like, no, that's what it is. I'm going to keep putting it out there. I'm going to figure out and optimize performance marketing and I'm going to find a way to convert people that have never heard the product before and they're not focused on people that are their biggest fans and their biggest evangelists and how do you serve them? It's just like, find new customers, bring them in. This is a big issue with like SaaS companies too. You always focus on bringing new customers and you don't focus on churn. You have churn, you have churn in subscription boxes as well. You don't focus on churn. You have like a leaky whatever, like the leaky yeah, like I'm trying to think of that analogy. Someone told me really good analogy. It's like if you take the plug out of a bathtub and you let the water run, it's always going to drain but try and fill it. Imagine like if you like plug that hole and you put water and it's going to overflow with money and customers and all that. So you have to focus on the churn. You have to focus on the customers that have already purchased your product as opposed to just always bringing that new end and how do you focus on them? We just listen to the feedback from the people that have already purchased. Good and bad. That's all you're doing. Yeah. When you make decisions, when you run a business, you have a decision to make sure you're going to spend your day. You can spend your day reading cohort data and put yourself in endless meetings that you have created for yourself to follow up and reporting and ask everyone to go and think for you and create strategies for you or you can decide to still be the technician. In a way, you're going to say, well, I'm not letting that piece go until I find someone that does it like me or better. And then I can always over seal what they're doing, but at least I know that it's in good hands. And this way, for us, there was one meeting a week for our VPs and above. Just to follow up, we have to call it a stand-up meeting. We have to talk only about what's absolutely important. That's it. Nothing else. Not everyone needs to hear everything about everything. So when you have enough time on your hand, you can be plugged into the consumer's discussion. You understand what they're thinking about your product. You can maneuver. You're in touch with influencers to become your friends. They'll tell you, hey, listen, you should go and jump on this feature right now. You're going to blow up at that time. Every new feature is going to give you a new view. Okay. So guess what? Boxy-chan would be the first to start using say IGTV at the time when you would get all the views to IGTV because it was a supply and demand issue. They wanted to make sure that the adoption is going to be there. So you did. But then you go in a month and a half, sooner than your competition, you get a month and a half free time. By the time your competition came into a traffic gym, you already created a gap. Then after that, you're going to reels and so on or other features and reels. So you're plugged into the trend and you have enough time in a day to look at those little things that can make you getting another little unfair advantage because you have the time to actually do it instead of bearing yourself with meetings. And in many cases, that's what people know. They just look at the business as a process process oriented business and all they have to do is step aside and let the people work, make it smaller meetings, less meetings. I think a big mistake that people are doing is big meetings. You see, we have a large meeting with 100 people, but you have so many things to discuss. 14, 15 topics to discuss. You'll find those meetings where most people don't even participate and they're from different departments and not everyone from every department needs to hear everything about every department. They need to work and they need to know only what they need to know at the time when it. If they want to ask questions, come in, we'll tell you, but you do not need to contribute so much data for them for no reason because one year out the other, it's not going to stay or adversely if they do a lot on a certain piece of data, though, contacts, it provide incorrect information or they could get stressed about things or what exactly. It's like my analogy was biblical analogy. When Moses came with the 10 commandments to the Hebrews, they only 10. He didn't go with the whole Bible decks of explanations of the Bibles because it's useless. You have a lot of people, give them a little bit of information, only what's important. You have smaller group of people, now you can go a little bit more specific. It can retain more, depends on the group. So you start, if you have a big meeting, kind of like a town hall meeting, everybody's there, two, three things everybody needs to hear, don't overkill it. You have your 10 commandments. This is your 10 commandments. Don't go and discuss everything about everyone to everyone. It doesn't, it's waste of resources in the companies. You can find large companies being deployed poorly and then they're going to go and lose for a smaller, more nimble competitor that just focus on what's important and urgent all the time. And then they have enough time to always be tuned to the trend. 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.