Lessons - HubSpot As A Model For Entrepreneurship | Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder & President of Boast.ai

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today my guest is Lloyd Lobo. Lloyd is the co-founder and president of Bose.ai, which automates access to billions in R&D tax credits and innovation incentives so companies can fuel their growth while preserving equity and avoiding red tape. Armed with $123 million in funding, Bose.ai is on a mission to help innovative companies become successful. Lloyd also co-chairs traction, a company of over 90,000 founders and tech professionals co-founded by Bose.ai that brings leaders from the fastest growing companies like Shopify, Billio, Slack, LinkedIn, GitHub, Cloudflare and many more to share learnings on building, growing and scaling startups, via weekly webinars, meetups and annual conferences. Today we're going to be speaking about building startups, but we're going to be looking at one very specific model, HubSpot. HubSpot was a great entrepreneurial success story. We're going to speak about HubSpot's model and whether or not that type of model in terms of building a business is how all entrepreneurs should build businesses. So the way that they scaled up, the way that they attracted attention with their marketing and their content, some of the inner workings of the company and the culture is HubSpot a great model for entrepreneurship, if it is, if it isn't and what great entrepreneurship looks like. Or actually, in your opinion, do you think the future of entrepreneurship should be like HubSpot community from the get go versus just trying to scale something and then build community after the fact? So I have this fundamental learning and also because I run a big community with traction, people come and ask me all the time, what's the new growth hack? Tell me just one channel I can spend money and to get customers. Like back in the day, hot mail jump started growth by putting in the signature, right? I love you. Yes, I love you. Get your free email and hot mail, they got 12 million users in 18 months and Airbnb that in this hack where they used to cross post to Craigslist and automatically send emails to people listing on Craigslist. So people are always asking, what's the next growth hack? And I kid you not man, the last 12 months has been the era of community, right? Airbnb CEO changes title to CEO and head of community, Dio Lingo went IPO 300 million plus global users based on community, Peloton, Canva, Notion, MailChimp, all community minded. And people always ask me, how do I build community? And I love this quote by Elon Musk. He says, don't reason from analogy, just because it worked for somebody doesn't mean it's going to work for you. Reason from first principles, boil things down to the fundamental truth. And when people ask me about community, I tell them that if you don't have the DNA of giving, meaning you don't innately get happiness from seeing others succeed, don't do community. It takes a long time, it doesn't build overnight and there are 10,000 other ways to get customers from running ads, to cold calling, to cold emailing, sponsoring events, there's the Brazilian things you could do, then build community that will give you instant gratification. But let's say you're not ready to grow yet, right? Let's say you don't have an ideal, when are you not ready to go grow? I think that's a very important question. I often say, if you don't have an ideal customer, meaning people don't come to your product to get a specific job done. If you're trying to serve like all kinds of customer profiles, then you're serving nobody, at least in the early days, right? It's about pleasing a small group of people. So if you don't have an ideal customer and the second thing is you have poor retention, meaning people, that ideal person doesn't come to your product any time they want to get that job done. So if you don't have that, you should invest in growth. But what you can do is start building community to get that customer feedback to meet people, to basically say, hey, you know what, I'm super stoked about solving this problem. These are the people impacted by this problem. Let me go and serve them to become successful, and then eventually the product comes out of it. I feel when you do that, you build stronger connections, and I fundamentally believe that the biggest companies of the future, long-lasting, enduring, and daring companies will be built on a foundation of community. So long-winded answer, but I wanted to walk through that framework a little bit, right? The hub spots, the game sites, the Nike's. When you have community, people feel connected to each other, right? I think it's also important to understand what makes people tick. And this is a framework that I borrowed here and there from, and sort of borrowed different pieces from and made it my own, but I feel like to build a great community or a great company culture, it's about building people, right? Your job as a leader is to build, inspire, and motivate a team. Deliver is the lagging indicator. If you treat your people with love and help them grow, they'll treat your business with love and your business will grow. But what makes people tick? And I've come up with this framework called Camper, where connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy, and recognition. Now the autonomy mastery purpose is framework that Daniel Pinkett, but I felt like there was something fundamentally missing from that framework, which was connection, energy, and recognition. I wanted the Camper framework, and if people implement Camper in their companies and their communities, they'll build a team or a community of happy campers around them, a little cheesy. But happy to dive a little bit into that, right? I often feel like, yeah, please go for it, go for it. Yeah, like working in a company should be like writing a palatine. Right? Of what they've done. Yes, there are stocks taking up beating right now. But the fundamentals, some of them are great and worth learning from, right? When you hop in a palatine, you feel extreme connection to all the writers next to you and the instructor. There's autonomy because no one's micromanaging you. You're in charge of your destiny. There's mastery because you're constantly increasing the speed or resistance to improve, right? Get better and better. There's a great sense of purpose. What is the purpose? Self, better well-being. Your energize, music, the instructor in front of you, people around you. And there's constant proactive recognition. Every time you complete a milestone or do X number of rides, they'll proactively reward you, recognize you, right? So people crave that innately. If it's just autonomy, mastery and purpose, that's great. Nobody wants to just go and collect a paycheck. Eventually, they're like, if two, if no two paychecks, or if two paychecks are the same, what is the greater purpose I'm serving? But connection is really important, right? And the great resignation from the pandemic and two years of working from home has showed us that people deeply crave connection. They deeply crave energy. They deeply crave recognition. Or else you're just like on a hamster wheel. And so I find that having these six traits, connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy and recognition. And embedding those principles proactively in your company creates a flywheel of passionate people who are ready to conquer the world. And that is also very important in the community, because most communities, the community doesn't work for you, unlike your employees, they're not collecting a paycheck. So what keeps them ticking, what keeps them cupping back week on week or month on month, what keeps them engaged. That camper.