Communities as a foundation to kick-starting your product & brand - with Monica Lent @Bloggingfordevs

Welcome to the Product Bakery Podcast. I'm here today with my co-host Alex as well as a guest from Berlin, Monika Lent. Hey everybody. Hey there. Hi Monika. It's compared to the last episode that we just recorded where we were recording like at midnight 1am. Today it's quite early. So I think still drinking our coffees and getting a little bit like up to speed. It's not the first time like you never talked in this podcast, but you already got one shout out when we talked about design systems and the way the two of us together with Christian rocked the design system back at the SumUp days. So just to give a little bit more background, you are pretty much in the tech industry since more than 10 years. And after working for SumUp as frontend developer and then leading the frontend team, you're now like founder of your own tech company. And you just recently started a challenge where you're trying to launch one new startup every month. So pretty much for one year, 12 startups. Obviously while doing this, we know communities are also super important. So maybe like just handing it over to you, can you give us a little bit of an introduction of how your days currently look like? Yeah, sure. So thanks for having me. And yeah, I would love to talk about that. So one of the things that kind of surprises people when you tell them that you're going to launch one startup per month is how is this even possible to do not just from building a product standpoint, but also from like marketing and acquiring users, getting feedback, and also the kind of things that when you're talking about product, they expect you to be doing user interviews. How can you do all of that in one month? And in reality, building the product itself only takes a small part of the month right now. That may be something that I end up starting in the middle of the month. The thing I'm launching this month is starting, I'm starting it right now. So it's mid month, but the rest of the time I pretty much spend talking to people. I do try to ask people in advance like questions, if they're going to like the thing that I'm building or trying to find patterns in the wild. Let's say if it's from my newsletter or the community, how can I find that people are already interested or talking about it? For example, I also gauge interest on Twitter. So there are a lot of ways that you can also validate this stuff without necessarily going through an entire like customer development process, especially when you put that constraint on yourself to keep it as short as possible. I know it probably sounds heretical on like a product podcast to talk about, you know, keeping it lean on the customer development side. But I think once you have some experience doing that, it can be done like more efficiently and what to fish out when talking to people. So yeah, that's like how I have been spending my time really like looking for validation or disvalidation of my ideas and then spending about half of the month building the thing. And then post launch, of course, promoting it, following up, trying to get some mentions, shout outs, appearing on podcasts, things like that. Yeah, that's what I'm up to these days. Cool. But just maybe for everyone's understanding, if you say product and a product that you can actually build in half a month, because you only start like in the middle, like what would such a product be? Sure. So for example, last month, I launched a paid community. I began a newsletter back in May called Blogging for Devs. And it started as an email course, a seven day email course to teach developers about writing content, SEO, distributing content, all in a time span of seven days. You could even say that this itself was a product because I launched this in under one month from concept to getting feedback to public launch. And this grew to about over a thousand subscribers in two weeks. So you could say this, this was also a way- We didn't see it on product hunt. I also launched it on product hunt, but later on. So I did it as a two phase launch. So first on Twitter and a few months later, all the people who loved it came out and supported on product hunt. And that's how we became product of the day. I'm a big believer in this kind of like rolling launch or like launching multiple times as you build up momentum and kind of going bigger and bigger, but we can talk about that later. What I did is now that I had the newsletter subscribers and I had been like building relationships and helping people out, talking to them, getting to know them. This is what made it possible for me to launch a paid community in such a short timeframe. So I started with a beta free community, which was application only up until the first 100 members. And then I switched it to pay during the month of October. During that month, within about two weeks or so, I was able to do the technical aspect. So handling a unified login, events, all kinds of like techie stuff that you just need to get out there to make the whole thing work, sign up profiles, et cetera. And then I was able to, and I'm writing an article about this now, I was able to reach 5k in revenue in the first week. And of course, being able to do all of this in such a short amount of time, but it is long-term preparation in advance. And then you just put in the work in a concentrated time period and see those results. So the way I'm approaching the 12 startups in 12 months, which by the way, it's not my idea. I'm not the first person to do that, is by doing that preparation in advance so that when it comes to execution time, I do have everything that I need out in front so I can just make it happen, launch. And yeah, hopefully it's a success, but we'll see. Apart from the technical stuff you were doing that you needed to do to go live with the product, what was the kind of business preparation or the business thoughts you walked through to decide, Hey, the paid community is what I want or what could be beneficial later on for sure for my customers and for myself? Totally. The reason I went with community instead of something like a paid newsletter, which is also a popular format that creators are using to monetize these days was that first and foremost, knowing myself, I knew that I couldn't write two newsletters a week. And I also knew that my, like the subscribers of the newsletter, they're developers who blog mostly not full-time. Some of them aspire to make money from blogging. Many of them do it for their careers, but they just really don't need to read two articles a week about blogging. So does it really make sense for me to focus on pure content creation? Probably not. And on the other hand, what I also realized from my own experience in learning about blogging, learning about SEO, growing websites, was that what helped me the most was the communities that I was in because I could see more perspectives. It wasn't just one person preaching their idea to me because when it comes to this stuff, there's so many different perspectives. No one can know everything. My idea was that the community would be a way to bring together and attract like-minded people with different types of experience, and then be able to provide growing knowledge base through those discussions to the community members. And then I see it as my job to both respond actively to a lot of these questions and spark interesting discussions, but to curate that knowledge as well. So I have what's called a digital garden inside the community. And this is inspired by Rosie Sherry. She has a community building newsletter called Rosyland. And the idea is that you just find all of the best conversations, resources, and discussions that happen organically in the community. And then you curate them so that they are easier to discover, refer back to, and that creates something that's way more valuable. It's like a living document of all of the knowledge that's cumulatively coming out of all of the community members and their experience. Do you see a difference between a community or a customer base, or would you rather treat this the same in terms of interactions and building up your product? I'm not sure. I have not really, I've never really thought about these people as my customers. The same way that maybe I think about the customers of my SaaS product as customers, because I don't know, I see it as more of a supporting role. So they are trying to achieve a long-term goal, let's say, and it's like a mutual commitment or a long-term commitment to join a community. It's not like I'm selling an ebook or a paid course where it's set it and forget it. Focusing on the conversion rate as much as possible, because that's what makes money. Communities are long-term businesses in the sense that you're not making that lifetime value upfront like you do with info products. So my goal is not necessarily just to convert any person because if they become a monthly member, they pay 12 bucks, it's not a fit for them, and then they leave. So what's really the point in then just driving that all towards the conversion? It's much better to have people who are more committed. The other aspect about it is that community scales differently than a normal product. So every single person that joins the community is someone I feel a personal obligation to. Of course, this is the same with a paid product, but for example, with a SAS product, you could maybe have 10,000 customers and yeah, you're going to have more and more support team to answer their questions. But if you have a community of 10,000 people, the dynamics are very different because it's not a single player mode, so to speak. It's not that everyone uses, say, a SAS product on their own versus in the community where everyone is using the product together, so to speak. To some degree, there is also like an optimal size of the number of active members before perhaps a community becomes overwhelming, or maybe you need to look at how you can break that down into smaller sub-communities that are going to feel more intimate. I think the dynamics are a bit different, and for that reason, I don't necessarily see it as exactly the same, although my SAS product, Affilimate, does also have a community, which is a Facebook group for the members. So I just approach those two things differently. What is the main scope of the community that you build for your SAS product? This is a place for everybody to give feedback on new features. It helps us not to send as much email, so anytime we release a new feature, we can post it in the community, get feedback, talk to people. People can also ask questions, so let's say they have a question about their website. They can post in the community and get answers from people who are, let's say, a little bit more advanced sometimes because they're using our product. This means there may be more advanced than people in other kinds of groups because if you're paying for a SAS product, you are most likely not a total beginner for certain kinds of things. So it's a way for us to do some product communication, and then we bundle those updates into regular emails, but we try to avoid sending people email because when you run a website, you receive a lot of email, and most of that email is noise. We try to instead engage with people and do it in a way where they can also talk to each other, exchange ideas, and then we get to learn from that. So it sounds almost like outsourcing also a little bit the support and kind of communications to whenever there are questions and to help people. Yeah, absolutely. In general, it's of course great when someone posts in my SAS Facebook group because other people can answer the question. So a lot of people do, of course, email me. I'm the primary support person because it's a two-person SAS business, but it's a great feeling when you see someone who is one of your customers answering another customer's question, and you can just give them a little heart reaction like, oh, thanks. That was nice. And yeah, helping other people out, it's much better than doing all the email one-on-one because of course people also learn from that. So they see someone asking a question, someone else replies. And again, everybody who's exposed to that has the learning instead of having it siloed into email. That's exactly the reason why we also are here today to talk about this whole community growth and the importance of communities. And I do have to say, also looking at what's going on in the world right now, I do have somehow the feeling that communities are becoming more and more relevant in the future. Plus the fact that it is work that you need to do, or you need to do a lot of work upfront because the long-term results or the long-term value will come later. So I would be curious to hear how you see this whole importance of developing a community, especially from a business point of view. Thinking about communities and business and how this all fits together. The best thing that you can do when you're building a product is in some way becoming friends with your users, especially when you're a small business, because people will be more likely to give you feedback. They're more likely to ask you a question maybe before they decide, maybe your tool or product isn't for them or going to a competitor there. It raises the affinity, let's say, if we want to be clinical about it, of the user to the product or the brand or whatever it is. And that's partly, I guess, why these days, a lot of companies, maybe you have also, you guys have also gotten some of these emails from products that you use. Join our community. It's all the rage, or they take the support forums and they're like, these are not support forums anymore. They're our community. I mean, for us, it's the same, right? To be honest, we were also building a community. And I also did Monika's online courses. And I can just tell you, try them out because my blog audience is growing. That's great. This is the thing, it's always better when you have someone else talking about your product. This lends a lot more credibility than just saying, I'm so great. And the way that I see it in terms of the community and how this fits into business and why and how this is working for me and for Blogging for Devs is really that the community is your most, I don't want to say loyal, but your most diehard or committed people who want to achieve whatever goal your product is about. They're the passionate users. They're also probably the people who are most likely to refer you to their friends, who are most likely to talk about you publicly. So why would you not want to foster closer relationships with those kind of people and make it mutually beneficial for them? I think they are also supporting you on defining and hopefully achieving your product vision. Yeah. For example, just yesterday, I sent out a newsletter where the entire topic was based on a question that somebody asked in the community. So it's extremely easy to then see, okay, what are the discussions that people are bringing up and which things elicit the most replies? You can understand a bit better. What do people feel passionately about? What sparks the discussion? If I post a topic and nobody responds to it, this is a big signal to me that this is boring for people or maybe people don't understand why this is important. I need to reframe this. But then when someone else posts a topic and you see it has 20 responses and lots of threads going on, it's like a super strong signal that this is something people are really interested in. I can take some of those responses and my own observations. I can also repackage this as content over the newsletter. Or for instance, I'm preparing an SEO workshop right now. So you can imagine where am I going to go to find what are the biggest questions that people have? I'm going to be looking in the community and the SEO space to see what are the biggest struggles people are having. And that's how I can create the best product inside my product. This SEO workshop for community members that is going to fulfill all of their requirements and answer the questions that they actually have. So it's really, again, it's like customer development, but again, it's happening organically. It doesn't have to happen in these research settings where I'm pretending not to tell you what my product is and all of that kind of stuff. So you can just be doing this discovery all the time of what are the issues that people are facing. And of course, this is post-validation. I validated the idea by launching the newsletter, and it grows organically every single day without any promotion from me. Okay, so that's like post-validation. But now to continue to grow it, I get all of these incredibly useful signals from people in the community. And it helps me figure out what's going to resonate with people who are at all levels of connection, whether they just visit the website, they are just newsletter subscribers, or they are community members. The whole conversation ties in so well to the previous chat we had with Sebastian, who also said, you don't need to have the perfect research on a perfect data point, but it's important to get and look out for signals that you get a direction you can move towards. Yeah, absolutely. I think it is so easy to over-research whatever you're doing, such to the point that you maybe even convince yourself of something in the process. It's very hard, especially when you're building your first product. Everything feels like validation. And the reality is you haven't validated anything until you've asked for something of value from the person. In my case, it was first asking for their email address, and then it's asking for money. And you can do a million interviews, and what they will all tell you in every product or customer development book is you got to get that kind of commitment. And this whole idea of shipping a startup in a month is that you don't spend three weeks doing interviews. You get that commitment, you jump ahead, and then you have maybe even saved yourself a lot of time. If you're a small business, you're one or two people, then time is of the essence, right? And let's be honest, whenever you do research and whenever you conduct interviews, the best feedback is the one that you get on past experiences. And asking for the future, would you use something or would you do it and whatsoever, usually never brings you a really good answer because it's simply hypothetical. And everyone, to some extent, probably would use something if they talk to the founder of this company. So I think getting this initial commitment is definitely much more valuable and will also help you to understand it better. Yeah, absolutely. At the beginning, you mentioned that There is also this SAS product that you have, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's the first big product you have developed by yourself. Can you share a little bit on how it was when you very likely went the deeper way of following more processes and doing more customer development? Yeah, we tried really hard to do that by the book, but we didn't. So I gave you so many book recommendations. I read them. Come on. I read them. No. So the thing about what I'm doing now is that I actually did it by the book, launching Lean, getting emails, listening to what people wanted before deciding to build a product, et cetera. Whereas with my SAS product, AffiliMate, so just to give some context to listeners, it's an affiliate analytics tool for bloggers, affiliate marketers, to basically help them to optimize their on-page performance in terms of affiliate revenue. So how they can move around elements on the page, improve CTAs, et cetera. We started building this product, me and my partner. So to be clear, I'm not building it 100% by myself. We started through Facebook groups, actually, seeing people asking questions. It's the natural place. You are at the so-called watering hole of your prospective customers. You see them asking these types of questions over and over again, and this starts making you think, okay, could I build something for these people to answer these questions? So what we did is we started with a wait list. We said, we got permission to share in a big Facebook group from the admin, Hey, we're building and we're going to be launching this product. It's going to be a free beta, please sign up. And from this, we got, I don't remember how much, but it was probably something like 60 signups or so. So it went okay. And then what we did is we started doing interviews with these people. We didn't explain too much about what the product was or anything. We just said, we are trying to solve some of these problems around managing your affiliate links and basically earning more money. And so then we talked to these people and we just asked them about what do you do today? It's like what Alex was saying. We wanted to find out what are your current behaviors. And we were looking for those people who were using complex spreadsheets. Maybe they had hired people to do these spreadsheets for them. However, I would say there was also a lot of people who are just like, I don't, and I have no idea. So we very clearly have two types of users, at least one are the very like analytical spreadsheets. You know, we have a former CFO, we have a former business analyst. A lot of people get into blogging from different areas, so they have interesting and very analytical takes. Then you also have the people who are like pure creatives, let's say they love writing, they love photography, and they're not necessarily, they weren't working in spreadsheets before and they will probably never begin working in spreadsheets. We had this kind of like clear divide of like power users and then the majority of the users. And so we began building the product originally a little bit more for the power users. Then we realized it was a little bit too complex, so we started building it for the normal users. And then we realized most of the normal users will actually take a lot of customer support. So we're back building for the power users. It's a lot of back and forth. I'm not going to say I have a perfect like strategy or vision for this, but what I have learned is I think building for the people who are most passionate about your product, as long as they are not only 1%, but maybe you can find more people who are those prospective passion users that has helped shape the direction. And yeah, by now we're not doing as many customer development interviews anymore. It's more that we are focusing on marketing, distribution, but we had to find some kind of creative ways because the SEO space that we are in is very competitive and saturated and we are not targeting beginners. Yeah. It's easy when you build a tool for beginners because everybody's a beginner, but our tool is for intermediate advanced people. Reaching them is very different than want to make money online? Use our tool. Like it's not like that at all. We are looking for experienced users. So that's how we have approached it and a bit where we are today. Apart from the customer development, to me, it sounds like that you are still finding the product market fit or am I wrong? Oh, totally. Totally. So the interesting thing about this SaaS is that there are a lot of tools out there that kind of try to do affiliate analytics or aggregation in some form or another. But the ones who appear to be making real money operating as real businesses actually target agencies and large media publishers. And we are currently tailored for consumers, like not consumers, independent business owners. They're one person business. They are like the consumers of the business space. If you can even say that. They don't have dedicated BI people. They maybe don't have any employees or maybe they have one or two. They're very small businesses. And so it will be a real question for us. Do we want to invest in trying to do a lot of education because that's what it would take for a large enough number of these kind of consumer level, like small B2B customers to actually know enough about how links, how the internet, how redirects and all of these technical things work in order to fully understand what our product does and how to set it up? Or is that not necessarily worth it? And we need to go for bigger customers because actually you need hands-on onboarding because it is so specific to the website that our tool is monitoring. Do we want to go quote unquote upmarket? And that's a, it's a real question because the business of web scraping and analytics, it's very messy. It's not. I send a newsletter with like an ad in it and then I make money. It's so much more complex than that. And it's technically complex. And the more you go upmarket, the more you go upmarket, the less your community can help answering questions. Yes, that's true. That's true. Well, yeah, that's, I think that's going to be something we're going to be figuring out quite a bit in 2021. Is there, is the reason that there are no products that are really like killing it in the small B2B space in the area that we are doing? Is the reason because it's just not viable? Because the problem is actually not really solvable for that market in a way that is cost effective and scalable, or are we going to try and be the first to do it? And do we go upmarket or not? So those are some of like the open questions that are in my mind about the direction of the SaaS, but yeah. And hearing that story and also knowing you and your partner, your focus was in the past mainly also around like the development side of building the product. So it sounds like you started having a lot of different hats also during this period of launching your SA as a service product. So I'm wondering, what would you say is the skillset someone should bring to the table if they want to start their own project or company? Yeah, I think what I have learned, especially in the last couple of months, launching this paid community and actually reaching some kind of profitability in a very quick setting, let's say, is that, and there's a really famous quote, I don't remember who said it, but it's that first time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution. And I think I embody this statement. So I think it's so easy to get caught up in making an amazing product, focusing on the UI details, onboarding, like how am I going to make this so smooth, tutorials, help center, but you can spend so much time on that. But if you don't come in with this mindset of scalable, reproducible distribution of your product and having a channel that's not just, oh, we're going to get some people from Facebook and then it will just be word of mouth, I'm sure. That's not a growth plan. And that's something I have definitely learned the hard way over the last year and a half. It will be two years in February since I started working on this SaaS product. The skills that you have to bring in is this mindset actually for acquiring users. It's not the sexiest thing when you are a developer and you want to build a product, you want to build something amazing. You want to build something where, okay, when I worked at a company, I never had time to make anything as nice as I wanted because of all of these business deadlines and like having to ship stuff too fast and now I can finally make the product of my dreams with all of the great design and like cool animations or whatever it is. And then the reality is that it matters a lot more of what is the market and how are you going to scalably distribute to them? I think of course, being a developer has been a huge help in building my products and it's given me this, the ability to actually do stuff that someone who is pure marketer, pure designer, pure product person, they wouldn't be able to do, or maybe they wouldn't even know it's possible, so they might not have the idea at all. So that's a benefit. But I think the thing that has led to the most results in terms of actual making money from a business is thinking about distribution, how I'm going to scale it and so forth. That's the side that I think is going to indicate success quicker than pure product and then hoping that it's going to just spread on its own. So launching your new communities and so on is a little bit like the reaction to this learning to actually looking. more on the distribution channels? Yeah, if you create a product, and you listen to any of these like business podcasts, or like the podcast, Indie Hackers podcast, or any of these where they talk about how to create a lean indie business, they will tell you, okay, first thing is landing page, get as many emails as you can. Second thing is talking to people understanding their problems. Third thing is maybe building a product and guess what, now you have an email list to launch it to. This playbook is something that you hear over and over being recommended to people. Also, they say don't start with a SaaS, you should be starting with an info product, something like one time sale, because it is so much easier to convince people to buy something once than to subscribe to anything. And so I did what I think a lot of people do, which is taking that kind of step backwards in order to learn some lessons I tried to skip. And then hopefully, in my 12 months of startups, maybe I will be able to go back up the stairs a couple of steps as well. But it's really just that playbook of waitlist, getting emails, launching, and then launching later like I did on Product Hunt, where I could already, you know, I already had an email list of something like 2000 people by the time I did that. All of those things and, and looking at it intentionally, from building up a scalable way to reach people first, it works, they recommend it for a reason. And I think that was my big aha moment. And also the fact that when I launched the community, the most people who joined it were subscribers to the newsletter. In some ways, this was also my first time seeing like a funnel in action that works. As people who come to my website, 30 to 60% of them sign up for the newsletter. And then people who become community members, over 70% were already newsletter subscribers. And there is a lot of people who talk about like sales and like business development, you need a funnel and blah, blah, blah. But it's as a developer, you're just like, whatever, this is marketing stuff. I just want to build something awesome. But in reality, people do need to get introduced gradually to some kinds of products. Uppaid community is clearly one of those kinds of products. Probably my analytics SaaS is also one of those kinds of products where people need to be gradually introduced and understand the problem and why this is the solution. And yeah, I think it all ties together and is definitely a reaction to, to seeing something just not work in the middle of pandemic because my SaaS stopped growing because all of our users were in the travel vertical. I also learned about how word of mouth can exist inside a closed network on accident. And that's what happened to us. We were growing by word of mouth and now we're not. But yeah, to wrap it up, I think it was a reaction and it was also a way for me to try something in a short period of time and validate it without having to talk to a ton of people or even to write much code. Even though your startup is, one of your startups is not growing, you have still 12 others that you're going to build right now. But something that you said was that you try to skip a couple of steps while building your first SaaS, for example, which IndieHackers, for example, would not recommend. Why did you try to skip those? And the reason I'm asking is it would be very interesting also for our community and people listening in to understand the thoughts behind it and maybe not making the same mistakes as for example, you did. Yeah, for sure. Totally. Mistaken quotes, obviously. Of course. No, it is a simple fact that SaaS is slow. Growing SaaS is just a slow process, but in case the listeners are not super tuned in to like the bootstrapper space and every, all of the discussions going on there. There are two articles that are pretty relevant for anybody who is thinking about starting an Indie business. And those are the Ladders of Wealth Creation by Nathan Berry, the founder of ConvertKit. And there's another one about the stair-step approach to bootstrapping, I believe, which is by Rob Walling. And he's a host of also a podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us. And they both promote this idea that you should be starting small with one sale info products. You learn about building an audience, you learn about selling something, and then you go into products that let's say can make more money and are more scalable, but also have new skills that you need, new levels of complexity. For example, you don't have to do sales and customer support as much when you sell an ebook, but as soon as you have a SaaS, sales and the customer support might actually end up being everything you do. And the reason I skipped is one, I didn't even know this was a thing. That you should start like that. Also Amy Hoy has a great article about that's called Build Tiny Products First, something along those lines. And I didn't know that this was a thing. But even so, I probably would have thought that I'm an exception. Everybody thinks they're an exception, right? Because you are special. Because I am special because I'm smarter than your average bear, however you want to put it. So of course, I thought I've been working in startups for a while. I have seen everything you shouldn't do. Surely I have seen it all. And so of course I thought going in with that knowledge, going in with all of the books that Christian has recommended to me, and I was judiciously reading them. Yes, I read all the, I read them all. Still like I thought that if I had all of this knowledge that I would be able to make it work. And I just underestimated how hard it is to build a SaaS product, how complex it is, how many moving parts. There are so many things that you have to do to get it running. I still don't have a super friendly onboarding email sequence. It's just all of those things that takes so much work and takes so much time and you just don't get to them because you're too busy answering emails. Or maybe you're trying to do like cold emails to like outreach to people because like me, I don't have a scalable distribution channel yet. So it's all those things. It's hard to learn from other people's mistakes. Maybe someone listening to this podcast will learn from my mistake and they will start. Yeah, they will start with something that helps them discover the scalable distribution channel first for their product before they even start building it. That would be like the wise thing to do. But I think sometimes making these mistakes, it's inevitable. You learn a lot. I learned a lot and am learning a lot from building a SaaS product. And my goal is still to build a successful SaaS product. I want to build something and get it to a million ARR. I want to maybe even be able to sell it one day. I want to go through that experience, but I also realize it takes time and it's also the product itself and all of the code and all of that kind of stuff. It's not necessarily going to be the number one determining factor for whether I achieve those goals. More likely it will be scalably reaching people who will pay me enough money to reach certain revenue and profit levels. And that's just something that I didn't really fully grasp when I started this SaaS, especially something where people pay a comparatively low amount of money. For example, one of my goals for building 12 stars in 12 months is that I want to build something where when someone pays $99 a month for it, they think, damn, that's a great deal. I want to build something that is worth charging that much money for, because it is so frustrating when you have people convert for your product and you're like, okay, now I have $9. Maybe you did a demo call, maybe you built a feature for them or whatever, and then you get $9. It's like, oh my God, I'm going to die before I can fund my pasta habit with this money. Yeah, you live and you learn and I'm learning every day and hopefully I'll learn faster by building something every month that I can either monetize or can act as a growth channel for one of my other products. And I hope you don't end up in McDonald's working for $9 an hour. I'd rather do that than go work at a big tech company again. I actually, I joke with my partner, I'm like, I would clean floors before I went back to a normal job. It's not really true, but Drew, I'm not sure. I just never want to be an employee again. I feel that so strongly with every fiber of my being. But speaking about that, one thing that I'm curious about is, do you think you can have a different approach to how you start your company when you're not bootstrapped and you would, for example, go in after an initial first round of investment, seed round or something where, let's say you can actually, or you would build your customer base more through actively spending in marketing and like pretty much buying your customers and therefore focusing differently on the whole process? I mean, from working at SumUp with you guys, I obviously learned a lot about the power of online marketing, spending a lot of money to acquire customers, this entire concept of a payback period, knowing when you're going to break even on your customer acquisition costs. I think. I personally have no problem with spending money to acquire customers. The only problem is I am so far a complete disaster at Facebook ads and our customers are not solution aware. So they don't, for our SaaS, they don't Google the kind of things that would bring them directly to our product. So we have a lot of educating to do because they are not solution aware. They may be even very experienced people don't realize a solution is possible because they think that the problem is too complex to be solved. Of course, if I had a lot of money from like investors, one, that would be a huge amount of pressure. Two, I would hire people who actually understand some of the stuff that I clearly don't. So my skills are clearly around content, acquiring customers through SEO. Those would be like the main skills I would bring in terms of acquiring users. However, they are not a perfect fit for a tool where people are not aware of the problem or rather aware that there is a solution to this problem. And so for that, of course, I would hire people who know a lot about online marketing, who would actually understand how to target our potential users. I'm still figuring out how do I do any of that? And yeah, of course I would approach it differently because I would hire people who have the skills that I am clearly lacking and I need to learn a lot about. But I don't know because I have never taken funding and to be honest, I have never once aspired to build a hyper growth startup in part because I have worked at a company like that and while it was fun as an employee to learn and grow, I think that is such a long-term commitment, it's five, 10 years, even more of your life that you need to be so passionate about that problem. And to be honest, I don't think that anything I'm doing right now is something I would consider like my life's work as a problem, these are like things I'm learning and then hopefully I will discover something in the process where I say, okay, this is something I want to go big on, but right now it's not the case and I certainly wouldn't feel good about taking money from investors for something that I don't say, okay, I would feel comfortable spending like 10 years of my life solving this problem. I'm not in that position right now. All right. To slowly start wrapping up the conversation, Monica, what would be, and now we're going already a little bit into this marketing, nicely catchy phrased question, what would be five tips you would recommend to build up a community as either someone who wants to start a business or maybe even an enhanced tip for people who are working already with a product? All right. My first tip, these are based on my learnings, is one, starting with a newsletter is a very natural way to build a community because people who subscribe to a newsletter, especially if you position it the right way, they have common goals. So it just makes sense that when you create a community, you are bringing together people with common goals who can help each other achieve those goals. And beginning with a newsletter is like a very natural way to do that. There are a lot of people who write paid newsletters, who add communities on top. And even if you're building a normal product, like a SaaS product, having a reputable or industry-leading newsletter that where you send out insights to that email list, this is also one way that you can bring people into the fold. They start to see your brand and your company, and they see you as a source, a reputable source of information. The second thing is really optimizing your welcome email. The main thing you want to do is you want to start having one-on-one conversations with people. So it doesn't work if you have an email list and you build all these people up who have common goals, and then you never talk to them and they just hear from you. Right? It's this one directional communication. If you improve your welcome email so that more people will reply to it, you are automatically going to start meeting people who are prospective members of your community, because they are the ones who are the most invested and engaged. And they want to talk to you. Next thing I would do is if for people who maybe want to have a paid community is I would start with a wait list, but also don't just ask for an email address. Ask for more information. What are, what do you want to get out of this? And what are you going to contribute back? Because having a wait list is totally fine. If you just want to get a bunch of email addresses and send them a mass broadcast of information, once your community is live, but I took a different approach. So I asked everybody to describe what they wanted out of the community. And then I wrote personal emails to every single person on the wait list. It was something like 113, I think people. And I started with the ones who had the best answers because they were the ones that I really wanted to join. So I invested my energy and writing personal emails to them. And as of now, or no, as of the first week. Okay. So I launched right before the U S elections and within one week already, 21% of people on the wait list joined the community. This is like comparatively high quote unquote conversion rates. And I expect that to continue because I plan to follow up personally again with the people who I think are the best fit again, doing everything in a way, at least at the beginning when it's possible and your email list is not so huge and your wait list is not so huge, those personal connections will mean a lot more than just like spamming people with an invite and hope that they hope they decide to join. So that's three. Yeah. Now, number four. Oh my God. Number four. What else am I going to say? So those are the topics related to the wait list and email. Um, what would I say for number four? Ah, here's the thing. And it's a, it's something that I have been hearing a lot from, from Rosie, who's doing this newsletter about community building at Rosyland. He said, community is not about the tools. For example, I'm using a tool called circle and they're at circle.so and I've been with them since, since they were in beta. And of course, if I was, I'm a developer, I could build a tool myself. If I wanted to, it would have all of the most perfect features. The reality is that the value people are getting out of the community. Isn't just that everything works perfectly and it's totally free of bugs or some other kind of unique features, but it's the discussions and connections. So you can see that people in the community, they're adding each other on LinkedIn, following each other on Twitter. They're following up outside the community with more discussions. None of those things wouldn't happen if I had a custom tool or if I didn't have a custom tool. It's just not a thing that the product is just the technology, right? The product is the experience of being there, getting help and support and the environment that you create. So that's number four. Number five would be being mindful about who you attract. This is something that I think a lot of people who create content, and this is something actually we talked about Christian when I was, when I was at your house the other day, um, yeah, for coworking, a lot of times people create content and they aren't necessarily thinking about the persona of the people who are going to be consuming it, for example, let's say that I wanted to, or I built this community for people who are at all stages of their blogging journey. Right? So I started with an email that says, Hey, this is for everybody. If you are writing tech content, you're a developer, you're a technical person, and you want to grow your audience through blogging, this is for you. You don't have to be super experienced. You don't have to have a blog yet. And what this means is that people on the email list are at all skill levels. But if I was just launching, let's say a mastermind group where I wanted to only people who are super experienced and they're going to be networking to level up or whatever, and I wanted an exclusive community of those people, then probably the email list that I built would have a very small number of those people in it. Might not even be enough to have a community of the size that I would want. The summary is being mindful that when you create something that you want to, let's say lead into your community, whether that's a newsletter, free email course, other kinds of content, you have to be mindful of who are the people I want in the community later, or who are the people who I want to maybe buy another product later that I can get into my universe by thinking intentionally. Like what stage are they at in their journey? What are their goals? How can I attract those types of people and be sure that they're the right kind of people that are going to make fit well into whatever I'm building later, whether it's a community or product or something else. And the last thing I would say is that as always, whenever you can favor personal over automation, when it's possible, as I mentioned, the communities are not about the tech stack or whatever it is. It can also be tempting to try to think about it like a SaaS product, especially if you've built SaaS products before, that you want to automate everything. You want it to be smooth. You think about this as a naturally running machine, but depending on the kind of community, how it is set up, maybe there is optimal size or optimal number of active members or whatever it is, then at the end of the day, you're going to create a stronger community by being personal with people. That doesn't necessarily happen if the only kind of interaction that people have with you is the community manager, so to speak, is through automated emails. For example, I send every new member, they do get like an onboarding email sequence, which just helps them discover stuff, but I also sent each one of them a personal email to say, Hey, glad you're here, checked out your website. Here are some things that I liked about it. I would really love to know X, Y, Z, what are you planning for this or that? And one, it helps you get to know the people so you can create connections between that new member and existing members who maybe have common goals or could help each other. And it's also just something that surprises people, to be honest. They're like, Oh my God, I like, didn't expect you to write me a personal email. Uh, and it makes a great first impression. And actually later today, I'm planning to write a follow-up email for people who've been in for two weeks and just say, Hey, how can I improve? What do you think is what's going on? What are you lost? Are you having any troubles? What can I do to support you? And I won't be able to do it forever, but for now it will make a big difference in setting the culture and the tone of the community. Amazing. That sounds great. I can't believe I just came up with five things out of my head. I think it was even six. It was six. Yes. Yeah. Whoops. Yeah. You could have stopped before the last one, but I think the last one was actually cool. And I think like hearing this personal touch, and I think it's something that I've also observed, like I've seen when you launched, and I think it was last week, election night, like all the Twitter messages and the feedback that you also got out of the community and the positive responses. That's exactly because you are also personally growing this community. Maybe one last question from my side before closing the call. We are now in November. Can you already spoil what your next startup will be? Yeah. So this month I am building a growth channel. I'm trying to take my own advice and I'm not just going to launch something that I'm going to be charging for. So this month, my plan and my goal is to build the outer ring of my funnel for the paid community. And this is going to be some automatically generated content for SEO. What I'm going to be doing is I am going to be ranking in kind of listicle style posts, so like top 50 posts, the best blogs across a number of different tech stacks and programming languages. I'm going to be automatically generating, for example, 50 best JavaScript blogs. And I'm going to do that based on scanning for Twitter mentions. Anytime somebody's blog gets mentioned on Twitter, who is in my system being monitored as one of the potential best, I will be accumulating those mentions and then automatically generating these listicle articles. And my goal there is to, one, ranking Google. I want to get organic traffic to this website. Right now, the traffic to the website is very, very much driven by Twitter and the newsletter and word of mouth links, things like that. But I want to scale it and I know that I don't want to spend all my time on Twitter driving traffic to this website. That's why I'm taking an SEO approach to it. And the idea is that people who are interested in reading great blogs on different tech topics are probably also interested in creating blogs on those topics. I'm making the bet that people who show up to that website, if I have something there for them, which says, by the way, do you want to create an amazing blog yourself? Do you want to get better at blogging? Take my free email course, sign up for this newsletter, and you can learn that. And then those kind of people will, at least some percentage of them, will be driven and interested and ambitious enough that they want to then join the community and grow their own blogs. That's what I'm working on. I'm going to be launching it this month. And actually, my goal is to rank it on Hacker News. So my goal will be to get to the first page of Hacker News. I'm going to be designing all the features, the copy, the design. I'm going to be really trying to focus on what's something that would appeal to the Hacker News audience. So that's going to be interesting. But my goal is that if I can launch it on Hacker News and have it be there, take off just enough, this will also generate enough backlinks from an SEO perspective that will help me rank higher and faster in Google for all the search terms I'm targeting with my list of goals. So that's what I'm going to be launching. And yeah, I'm going to be building most of it this weekend, I hope. You will have our full support on social media. And talking about social media and the internet, how and where can people find you, Monica? All right. So I am on Twitter at Monica Lent. I also have a personal website, MonicaLent.com, as you might expect. And if you are, you happen to be a tech founder or somebody who is moderately technical and you want to learn about blogging, SEO and content, you can also check out my email course and weekly newsletter at blogging4devs.com. So those would be the main spots where you could connect with me. Great. We will make sure to list all the recommendations that you've mentioned and blog posts in the description, as well as your website and Twitter link. With that, then I would say, thank you very much, Monica. It was a pleasure having you. And Alex and I will now jump into our debrief. Fabulous. Thanks for having me guys. Communities for the win. What do you think about that, Alex? I think looking at communities, this is a very different approach than what I was pretty much used from bigger tech companies or what I am seeing on a daily basis on bigger tech companies, where it's more about, as Monica already said in the first time when she launched her software as a service product, you try to build this perfect product and you always think of, okay, what are like the best features that we can put in and whatsoever. And then you somehow have a lot of people in the company that think of the how to market it, how to place it in the market. And you have enough money usually to also launch it to the market. So I think not having this whole, like all these foundations of a team with all the different, with a lot of expertise in different areas, as well as the money to like really have this big launch focusing on this communities is super powerful. And if you do it right and you really have this engagement and I'm looking at it like Monica in the community definitely is pretty successful. And I think people really look up to her because she is very experienced in what she's saying. Also her approach of being like so open and personal with everyone. Think about it. You have the founder of Blogging for Devs who writes you on a personal note and has seen your website. This is so powerful also of setting the tone of the brand and of everything that I can only see this automatically pick up. And I think definitely something that we for even our podcast should consider is how could we apply some of these principles to what we do on our daily basis? Because I think it's not too different. Especially when you look at companies and the way they grow usually, especially with money, as you said, there are two phases, right? You have the phase where you evaluate your product and you build it. And then the next phase is how you sell it. And this whole kind of selling phase with online marketing, with a team, etc. costs shitloads of money. While community building, at least how Monica approaches it, is a time investment. It's an investment into your people. It's an investment into the group and the dynamics, which I really like. I totally agree with you. The Product Bakery podcast is also about that. It is for the community. It's something that we do to help people. It is something that we invest in. And these principles that Monica shared should definitely fall also into our place by, for example, and this may be something we can share with our audience, the step we are making now towards building a website, setting up a newsletter, getting started on social media to be present to people, to be able to interact with them and to be able to make this collaborative instead of just a one-sided communication, as Monica said. And I think one final thing that I always love about communities and that I've also seen working pretty well in the industry, like even for bigger companies that are not using the communities as entry points. But if you build a strong community, it's also a very good point of contact to your customers. And this is very helpful for future feature development. This is like helpful for insights generation that Monica also mentioned for research and so on. And I think there are some really good examples out there. The first one that comes to my mind would be like something like Monzo in the fintech space where they like really actively engage with the users and where the community is also really the driver for their roadmap. And I think this is something I usually would recommend to any company. I really like this mix of customers and communities. And what I really like here is, for example, looking at the gaming industry. When we talked recently to Alex, you have these gamers and the people who are actively using the product. and also paying for it. And at the same time, you have these communities on, as Alex mentioned, Reddit or Facebook groups, et cetera, where these both words coming together. And you have also in one person, both, both aspects, right? A person is at one point the user and at the other hand, or the customer. And on the other hand, it's also part of the community, but not necessarily. Some people just want to play, but bringing these two words together and merge them or try to merge them or let them merge is definitely something that will help you accelerate and improving also the whole customer and community development. Awesome. I think that's a wrap Christian. Thank you again. It was lovely to see you this morning. Same here. And we talk soon. Bye everyone. Bye.