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what is up everybody happy thursday so good to see you i'm broadcasting live from my studio here at home but we're piped in to our special guest today all the way from the uk let me get into my deck it looks something like this so hello donation futures you doers you know your doers not talkers you donuts you crazy people i know who you are so on today's show on today's show there's all this buzz that everybody's talking about this is about community how do we build community how do we harvest community how how do

we monetize and leverage community well that's the topic that we're going to be talking about we're going to be talking about how to build and engage online community and who are going to be talking to well none other than my friend tom ross he's of design cuts design cuts you guys know them because it's long time collaborate collaborates with the channel we love the products we love the people we love the culture that's what we're talking about if you don't know who tom ross is he is the ceo of design cuts and he's also the

host of the honest designers show a podcast tom welcome to the show how you doing buddy i'm amazing thank you so much chris i appreciate you guys having me on look at that we have the applause of two people okay there are people who are excited for you tom i already saw in the chat they're like everything he says out of his mouth is gold i'm not gonna see that from debbie love you debbie you're the best okay are you packing the audience here with all your super fans i can see some familiar names but

this is it right community they're showing up i appreciate it absolutely why don't we give a quick shout out to the people that are part of your community who's joining the future community who are they do you see them uh i can see i can see some names i can see uh be kind coca i can see uh johannes i can see debbie i can see a lot of people to be honest and because we work together quite a bit like design carts in the future i think we got a lot of same people in

the sea you know in the same communities chris i noticed this yes yes yes and we're we're grateful for you we really are there we go right back so tom i believe you have a you just recently released a book on community that's why we're talking and i think you've prepared a 40-minute ish presentation for us to talk about community that highlights the insights and not the low lights i've ran out of lights yes um i am trying to share a bunch and it's not just ideas from my book to be honest i break down

how the future build community so this might be a little exclusive because chris actually talked to me for this book we're going to get into some q a afterwards but you mentioned in one of your first slides chris i think community is like the hot new buzzword you see it everywhere right and i think a lot of people they don't fully understand what a community is so right at the start of the presentation i'm going to get to in a sec i kind of help define an understanding of what exactly community is okay well the

presentation's ready to go incredible all right let's jump in um and everyone you know notepads at the ready i want to make this as valuable as possible and thank you so much for being here so who am i chris you just did a way better intro than i'm about to do for myself but as you said i'm the ceo i'm the founder at designcuts.com the highest rated design marketplace in the world and my personal brand essentially my hobby in my spare time i'm the community building guy and i just love helping fellow entrepreneurs understand community

and build incredible online communities and when i started design cuts you know we had a very very small team as myself and my business partners we had no funding we were entirely bootstrapped we had no like capital behind us either but what we had was an incredible product so we had product market fit and really the secret source behind all of our early explosive growth was community community was at the heart of everything we built and i was so just adamant that i wanted to build the most engaged online community that i literally made best

friends with others 2 300 customers i was jumping on calls with them i was connecting them with one another and it was just hands-on relationship building at scale and this is something i'm really going to break down in this presentation but it's something i'm really really passionate about and to this day you know we've been going eight years and we get all of these incredible reviews i actually had a meeting with my team earlier this week just shouting out the amazing reviews that we see and so many of them cite community is the reason why

they're drawn to us and i think fundamentally you know we don't want to be just another e-commerce website we don't want to be this empty platform and the same thing at the future right you're not just another educational platform there's a ton of those i think people are drawn to both of our companies because of the vision because of the culture because of the community and the people and that fundamentally is some of the most powerful stuff when it comes to understanding marketing and what actually motivates people to show up [Music] so community there's a

ton of benefits and this is certainly not an extensive list these are some of the main ones which we experience but there are many many more so first of all you're far more in touch with your members you can understand them better you can empathize better you can anticipate their wants and their needs when you actually have a community versus if you're not really talking to your members you can build with them and so it's a great way to get very very agile feedback when you have a community platform a community space because you can

just go direct to your members and actually figure out what do they want what do they need and you can get feedback on new verticals and your product ideas we do it all the time like literally we get feedback like on our logo even and also you can get defended against haters i mean chris you don't get many haters we don't get many haters everybody loves crazy i know we're just so universally popular and so humble as well that's what i love about this mess so whenever the occasional hater shows up if you have a

close-knit community and like these true fans they genuinely back you and we've seen the occasional person kind of come in and try and spread negativity and everyone's like no no no not here and they band together and you know that's really really great to know that you have that support also incredible relationships i mean it's not just about the business roi stuff i love building relationships with our community members i find it fun it's literally like making friends with awesome people at scale what's not to like about that and then more on the business side

increased loyalty and retention and there's so many stats and studies that back this up essentially if you have an actual community people generally stick around longer they have more loyal buying habits they engage more regularly and they're going to be less likely to leave you for a competitor so there's a lot of real tangible benefits so i said at the start oh go ahead chris no they're good benefits i i see the case that you're they are yeah uh-huh and you guys experiencing you know them too on a regular basis i see it i see

people showing up for you guys they do so they do things like for example you don't have to promote your your your upcoming live streams or your courses they just happily share it with you unprompted when we host the room they'll just put out on twitter and instagram this room's happening and when you're doing the room they share with other people to say you can't miss this and then afterwards they share one more time the highlights and their learning who would i mean who will who would not want that and how much would you pay

for that and we just get it for free because of our community and that's the magic you can't pay for it you can run ads and stuff but like it takes years to build this stuff up and i know you and i are both just immeasurably grateful so grateful for what our community do for us so i said at the start there's a lot of confusion i think right now about like what constitutes a community and i think oftentimes people are kind of referring to an audience when they talk about this stuff generally speaking and

you know i will break this down in more detail but an audience is one to many so this is more of a broadcast medium this is where you as the uh you know content producer etc you're putting out content and then the masters are consuming it whereas a more traditional community is more many talking to many so it's some kind of environment or platform where members can talk to one another and interact with each other and it becomes something bigger than just you kind of preaching at your followers and so if we break this down

you can see that audience tends to be things you know like i say social media so youtube instagram maybe you've got a website maybe you've got a blog these are generally kind of more traditional uh one to many audience platforms on the other hand you've got a lot of really really fast emerging community platforms things like slack groups where people can hang out and network forums such as circle which chris i believe you're currently using right for the future pro yep we're using circle i'm a big fan so i'm about to launch a circle community

myself i think it's an awesome awesome platform and then you've got some of the more well-known ones so you've got stuff like facebook groups which can be highly effective or discord but there is an abundance and there's more launching every single day so there's a lot of kind of low code or no code platforms available for budding community builders and there are pros and cons of both so if you're running an audience set up then there's some definite pros you know you can reach a lot more people if you're on something like a social media

platform there's inherent shareability people can extend your reach that way and you're connecting with people on their native platforms so this is where they actually enjoy spending the majority of their time on the con side of things you know you can be very vulnerable to our algorithm shifts and i know a lot of people say like oh the algorithm doesn't matter just produce better content but it's very real and i have some incredibly talented friends running super big youtube channels and instagrams and like overnight their reach can just be cut in half and slashed and

that's pretty scary right that is out of your hands but the fact is if you're running an audience on social media you're on rented land and like i said that's a risky position to be in uh you also you don't control the platform and so this doesn't just extend to algorithms but i know youtube made some changes recently with what they're doing with ads you know anything could shift around or change or worst case scenario the platform could even go under it could go out of business and so again you're on rented land it's not

something which is your kind of property and then finally you're competing for your followers attention and social media as we all know it's a super busy place you know you've got everyone clawing at people's attention it can be really hard to cut through that noise community on the other hand is very different because you control the platform it's generally a platform which you've either paid for or you know you've kind of integrated it into your space and therefore you have people's full attention they are not getting distracted by loads of other people competing for their

attention or posting content um you know you've got your full focus there's no ads etc etc and best of all it provides a private intimate space for members they get to hang out and in a closed community often they feel you know able to open up more than perhaps in a public social forum cons though there are definitely some cons so it's harder to get discovered because often it can be kind of closed off from the world there's no inherent shareability and this is an issue obviously you can promote it in other places but it

can't like catch fire and go viral typically in the same way a social media post could and there can be a lot of friction so most people spend their time on their phones on social media on instagram or whatever asking them to leave their favorite feeds in their favorite places to come over to your private closed community can be a really big ask and this is one of the biggest struggles you know community built to see so i have broken down in this presentation how to try and think that and overcome it but what we're

looking at here is a very very typical model and one that i see increasingly emerging in 2021 you have the big social media audience within that you're gonna have you know unengaged people you're gonna have engaged people you're gonna have your core community your true fans etc your most engaged audience members and they are the people typically that you're able to siphon off and then bring over into your closed community platform so you're not looking to get your entire social media audience into a close community platform you're just going to kind of port across the

most engaged people and case in point like at the future chris you have millions of followers across your youtube instagram etc but you definitely don't have millions of people inside the future pro community i believe you just hit 500 people today which is incredible but the point is you've actually siphoned off those really really engaged high quality individuals is that right that's right we're actually at 503 and growing we hope to get our numbers to a thousand before and then to 2000 so we have some big goals this year i love that and yeah i

saw that on twitter earlier congratulations man thank you very much so in terms of these closed communities you can generally split them into three camps you've got the free communities you've got the paid communities and you've got the freemium communities and i'll give you three quick examples in the creative space so adobe and again i've seen so many of these launching like in the last 12 months i really really believe there's a fundamental shift that everyone's taking right now towards communities in close communities adobe launched this discord server and out of their millions and millions

of users you can see they've got thousands of users in here but it's really growing fast and it's a great space where people can share work they can get feedback they can chat they can get help with their adobe software etc and this is a really really great emerging community it's free as i just mentioned the future pro community this is a high-end super high quality paid community and it's a great great example of that like we just said it's just hit 500 members and it's about to go to the moon not like crypto not

in a roller coaster way in a sustainable way and this is a really really good good model and i know chris when we've talked about this this is a big focus for you at the future right now yes it is it's my entire focus right now and i see uh johnny in the chat said does that make us low-quality individuals if we're not in there it doesn't johnny it makes you a high-quality individual because you're here right now and this is the point like no one's low quality but as a business you need to realize

you're always going to get people that might like have you on mute or they followed you four years ago and they've never seen your stuff since they just don't care so you are definitely not one of those people johnny you're someone that showed up you know you're part of the hundreds of people watching this live that makes you one of you know the bottom of the triangle one of the the most high value awesome people so i hope that clarifies and then final example we have retro supply this is run by my good friend dustin

lee who i do the honest designers show podcast with and he's been on the future as well he crushed his session and he launched this again i think about six months ago so he's part of the shift towards community um oh cool we've got mathilde here as well from circles creator community amazing to see and this is a great example of a freemium community because you know large sections of it are available for everyone but there is a premium kind of tier where you can only access parts of the community so this is how you

kind of can conflate those uh paid and free models and i know you're joking johnny i can see you in the chat um but what i'm really seeing at the minute is people are craving conversation not just passive consumption for the last 10 years plus everyone's just been kind of thumbing through their instagram feed or whatever it might be on social media and i feel like particularly following covert and this epidemic of loneliness which has been widely reported on people at large are just yearning for deeper connection we we lost interest a long time ago

and these highlight rails on social media mindlessly scrolling through we actually want conversation and we want connection and humanity and relationships and you know this is one of the key reasons i think community is going to continue to emerge over the next decade so can a community exist outside of a community platform if we're talking about this kind of one to many and many to many and i think to an extent it can and a lot of the die hard community builders are like no you have to be strict it only constitutes a community if

it's in this many to many setup and where i think this isn't entirely true is i think you can actually have a sense of community even with an audience and this can come down to several things but as you can see here it's a sense of belonging is one of the key elements i would say of community a shared sense of identity that people can buy into belief in a shared vision and i'm going to break this down in case studies as well because the future do an incredible job with their vision and things like

a shared vocabulary and inside jokes etc and the point is so many companies including mine when we started everyone was raving about our community and this was long before we had our live events and our facebook groups and our closed community spaces people loved being part of the design cuts community really because they bought into our vision they loved how we treated them and we talked all the time about how much we appreciated our community and so really the takeaway is community is more about the people than the platform and it's not that one day

you go from having zero community to flicking a switch on circle or something like that and boom suddenly you have a community it's more that those closed spaces can put your existing community on steroids it can give them a really really excellent place to hang out and foster relationships so you might be wondering how do you pick your ideal community and really it's you know pretty simple but it's two things you need to figure out what platforms do your intended community members already use and what platforms do you personally resonate with and the reason you

have to resonate with it is community building takes a lot of work and if you don't enjoy using the medium or the platform you are going to burn out you won't be able to sustain the prolonged effort to build your community in terms of you know choosing a platform based on where your intended community members spend time this is all about friction and to give you an example if i was building a community tomorrow for gamers i would absolutely establish it on something like twitch or discord because that's where gamers hang out it would be

nuts for me to start a facebook group for them and expect them to leave their favorite native platforms they're familiar with to come and join my facebook group so really you know bear in mind those two considerations when you're starting your community next you've got to think about value proposition you have to answer the question why should people actually want to be part of your community in the first place and first of all you know we've got networking this is one of the main form this is a space for people to connect with each other

and meet each other create moments of serendipity you've got information you know i would argue the future is a great example of this it's a teaching community you come to the community to learn to get value from the teachers inside belonging this is actually one of the strongest emotive triggers to be part of a community and a great example of this would be religion if you're going to the mosque once a week or the church once a week it's a great environment to meet with like-minded people and have that shared sense of belonging and kind

of be part of that same tribe but of course this extends to all kinds of areas you could argue that trekkies fans of star trek have a sense of belonging when they're going to conventions and stuff like that you know that you're amongst your people and that's a really really powerful thing it's one of the most compelling value props for a community builder and then finally entertainment you might just want to be part of the community because it's fun maybe you get to laugh there maybe you get to kind of make friends and you can

actually you know combine uh different combinations of these value propositions so in the case of the future you know i would argue it's perhaps largely informational it's a teaching based educational community but there's absolutely opportunities for making friends having that sense of belonging networking etc so you can really hit on a lot of these in your community and as i say you need to answer these two questions why should someone actually want to join your community in the first place and why should they stick around if you don't have clear answers for these questions you

are really really going to struggle so it's imperative that you do the foundational work to figure them out so let's talk about how to actually grow your community once you've picked a platform you've got the fundamentals down you figured that stuff out in my mind there's four main triggers for community building you've got one-to-one you've got word of mouth you've got distribution and inbound and i'm going to talk you through how to do each of these so one-to-one is literally one-to-one conversations at scale it's building relationships at scale and it really frustrates me when people

try and start an audience to start a community and they're just putting out content and they think it's like field of dreams it's not field of dreams it's not build it and they will come and if you're finding you're not getting your people you're not getting members you're not getting very much engagement what you need to realize is you need to go to them don't expect people to come to you especially not early on so you need to figure out who your perfect person is who your idol community member is what they look like and

then go find them figure out where they spend their time online go to them build relationships join comparable groups and relevant groups and become a person of value and just build and build and build and talk to as many people as you can that's a really controllable thing you can do at the start of building your community next up let's talk about word of mouth so think about some of the people and brands who you regularly refer i would say generally they hit on two things so quality and conviction quality is obvious we only recommend

stuff which is super high quality but conviction is an interesting one because i would say that very rarely do people actually want to niche down or specialize both things which chris i know you talk about a lot right you're a big fan of special specialization what does it say it's like a mile deep instead of like a mile wide that would say yeah yeah you you you want to go instead of a mile wide and an inch deep you want to go an inch wide and a mile deep because by repeated exposure to something you're

going to get really good at it you're going to be able to spot patterns and intelligence is pattern pattern matching pattern recognition yes well said [Music] so here's an example of how this played out for me previously i've been talking about community for years i'm really passionate about it but i was talking about all kinds of stuff to do with creatives and entrepreneurship and it was only recently i pivoted and said you know what my main passion i keep coming back to community so i'm going to become the community guy and what i did was

i made a couple of announcements on social media i kind of planted my flag and almost immediately i saw some positive momentum from this my coaching inquiry is picked up because people said i need help with my community my friend started referring to me and saying oh yeah tom he's the community guy talk to him people started making introductions and saying oh you should connect with this person they're really you know hot in the community space as well and literally all i did was kind of have a bit of conviction about what i was doing

i stopped flirting with the idea of community and i decided to propose to it to get married to it and just by having that conviction word of mouth spread and spread and spread and this compounds over time it's very early still for me in this direction but i'm already feeling the benefits and you have to think like most people they're almost scared to have that much conviction they don't want to go all in on a topic i know people that have written a whole book on community but they've written 20 other books about all kinds

of stuff or someone that's done a whole podcast episode on community but they got 300 episodes about all kind of other stuff so who would you refer the person that day in day out talks about the subject and there's a specialist or the person who kind of dabbled in it 18 months ago for me the answer is pretty clear and this is my new favorite saying chris let me know if you've seen this before but i'm pretty sure i came up with this maybe i need to copyright it but conviction kills competition because most people

aren't willing to compete at that mile depth what do you think about that i like it i don't think i've heard it before cool okay i'm feeling very profound then i'll take it nice so let's talk next about distribution distribution is key and the reason it's key is because all of that other stuff matters i'm still such a believer in terms of actually let me stop for a second this is a good point acts are in the live chat said it's not competition it's about connection i completely agree i'm not here being like you need

to cut anyone down all i'm saying is that you will differentiate you will stand out in a positive way by fully committing to something by planting your flag so it's not about like you know knocking down the other buildings it's kind of building the biggest building in in town in a sense by actually just going all in on something so it's definitely in a positive way but as i say distribution is key and the reason it's key is because it's so effective case in point i did a guest newsletter for a friend of mine last

year and it took me a few hours to write on the back of it i literally got a thousand new email subscribers and members coming into my community those thousand people would have taken me so long to go out and find in the more manual relationship building way so you definitely should combine these strategies but distribution can be a great lever to pull on in terms of your community growth and there are some very specific ways to do it most people do a blanket approach to like i'm just going to get my name out everywhere

i'm going to be seen everywhere and that's going to raise awareness and bring people back to my community i actually think you need to be a lot smarter about it and so there's two things which i like to focus on first one when you're looking at audiences to get in front of is relevance you need to find an audience that is super super relevant to what you do so i'll give you an example imagine you're trying to start a crossfit community if you got in front of a general fitness community maybe only five percent of

their members are actually into crossfit maybe the rest of them are into like bodybuilding and power lifting and pilates and yoga zumba jazzercise like you know it could be all kinds of stuff and you're actually only going to reach five percent that are irrelevant but if you did a distribution effort in front of a dedicated crossfit community you would know that 100 of their members would be into what you're talking about and would be hopefully suitable to actually come and discover your community and then active audience this is so so huge chrissy you familiar with

uh noah kagan from okay dork i've heard him yeah so he yeah he's the guy behind like appsumo as well and he said this really genius thing which sounds so obvious but again most people don't talk about this he said if you've got an email list of 100 000 people and only 10 000 ever open your emails you really have an email list of 10 000 people and this is what we're talking about in terms of active audience it sounds so obvious but everyone's always looking to do partnerships and work with people with the biggest

possible audience and i have this famous example i did where we did a partnership with an audience that had a million people and it fell really flat it was super quiet in terms of the results we did another partnership with an audience that had 5 000 people and it outperformed the million audience by 20x meaning that on average the 5 000 audience or community uh rather were worth four thousand times more and so it's like orders of magnitude different and this all comes down to how active their community was it has nothing to do with

the top level number of followers or metrics etc so i would really consider these two things primarily when you're looking for great audiences to get in front of when you get in front of an audience have a call to action otherwise all you're getting is brand awareness and that's great but if you have a way to actually bring people back for something of value that's a highly effective strategy so it should be something that's highly relevant and valuable for the audience of course and it should be something that's ideally a natural extension of whatever it

is you're sharing or teaching and the example i give here imagine i was on the future right now teaching you how to sketch cartoon characters and you learn that for an hour it would be great if i then had a free resource or something like that where it's like for the next step you can grab my free resource for how to color in your sketches that you just did that converts so much better than something that's more generic and then finally make it something easy to get hold of so something like an email signup is

super easy and low friction for people and here's a bunch of distribution ideas it's not an exhaustive list but of course you can do things like guest blogs guess newsletters chris i know you often accept guest posts on your instagram for example you know that would be a great way to get distribution and there's partnerships and on and on and on but the main thing is you need to respect the hell out of these people's audience because they are letting you get in front right now chris you're letting me get in front of your fantastic

community here at the future hence i want to bring as much value as i possibly can i deeply respect your audience and i just want to serve and give and give and give as much as i can today well and we appreciate you tom we really do like you've got a really tight presentation i i can tell from people writing in the chat this is a really good conversation presentation community you're going really deep whereas people go wide you're going really deep here so we appreciate that and i also want to say hello to everyone

who's watching us live all 342 of you we've seen the audience grow and shrink and grow and it's just really nice it must mean you're doing something right tom so i'll get out of your way no i appreciate that thank you mate and i had to step up my game because when i came on here two years ago i did my presentation using a default template on keynote and it looked horrible so i was like i need to design something i was like the wrong channel for that yeah shame shame on you shame let's go

game of thrones okay so um i talked about this before but you generally can filter down to the most engaged most high value people within a community and the beautiful thing is that when you actually do these distribution efforts and you do guest content and so on by definition you're generally going to be reaching their most engaged most high value people so right now we've got hundreds of people watching live and there's going to be thousands watching after the fact and the point is these are some of the most incredible members of the future community

so i'm genuinely honored to be in front of you talking to you right now let's talk about inbound quickly it's why the rich get richer chris i guarantee you like all of us found this with your social accounts did you find that as you built momentum and you started to kind of hit a critical mass it naturally just started growing faster and faster organically but when you first started it was really slow going right it's that traditional compound interest hockey stick thing right yes i can confirm this is true yeah and it feels painfully slow

let's start it sucks you're like i'm not getting anywhere but then it just picks up and it picks up and it kind of takes on a life of its own quite often yep and the reason it's you know important to understand this is it gives you the patience to stick at it through the early days but it also lets you realize that it will get easier as your community grows and this is for all kinds of reasons but for example when you've got more people in your community there's more people to actually talk about and

spread it fire word of mouth and that kind of exponentially increases you get more social proof and credibility because no one wants to join an empty party when you've got zero followers or members so the bigger you are the more attractive you become there's a value prop for people and i'll give you another quick example so it's not just about size of course it is about intention and at my company design cuts we noticed that a lot of people were into procreate a super fun bit of software and we thought well let's not just you

know use distribution to get in front of wider procreate audiences and communities let's create our own so we created the procreate creative community it is now creeping up towards 10 000 members on facebook it's one of the fastest growing program community groups in the world and we don't we just create it and we moderate it but this is because there's people on facebook who are searching for procreate and then we're popping up in the search results as one of the main groups and they're discovering us that way so we've got like a constant inbound organic

interest happening for people to discover our brand and community and that's really powerful and again that's a lot more scalable than just the hand-to-hand combat one-to-one relationship building but in terms of these four strategies i would use all of them i would combine them they're all powerful in their own ways hey tom i have to read a separate chat here let me just button here from blou w blah blah films our community is growing which feels fantastic but it's scattered our content covers a broad range of topics within the filmmaking pipeline tips on bringing the

community together what do you think oh interesting one so i think when you're scattered you really got two options you can either pick one element of what you're doing and double down on it and kind of niche effectively and a good way of thinking about this is people generally won't have equal amounts of interest for all the moving parts of what you're doing it's like the 80 20 principle so you might find if you pick 20 of what you're focused on currently you're still going to get 80 to 90 percent of your community who are

super into that thing and so by focusing you're actually still going to serve the majority of them but you're going to benefit from all the uh you know aspects of niching the other thing is you can just put an umbrella over all of it and have this kind of umbrella brand concept which is going to be the thing that attracts people into your community does that make sense chris about the umbrella it does make sense please continue cool um also i saw becca from the happy ever crafter who is amazing say hey becca um so

i want to talk about critical mass for a second this is a really in on the back of a really interesting conversation i had with dom mcgregor who is the co-founder of social chain which is europe's fastest growing ever social media agency super impressive company now worth over 300 million so he knows a thing or two about online audience and community building and he explained that in all the history of doing it they kept coming back to this number of around 200 people as a critical mass and what he meant by this is that until

you hit that point you're going to have to be pushing and driving the community you're going to have to be super active in there making sure it doesn't fizzle out because without you in it it's going to die but once you hit a critical mass it means that you could step away you could go on vacation and the members are going to support each other the community is going to become self-sustaining and kind of generative in terms of the content and interaction inside and this is the position we all want to get to as community

builders so you may be thinking okay that's great tom but how do i actually get to that point how do i get to that critical mass because as dom explained to me it's important to get there as quickly as you can you don't want like a trickle of people going in your community where you've got this empty party and there's five people in there and they leave because they get bored so one of the best ways you can do this is something like a wait list you can actually have a pre-launch you can build some

buzz and hype about your upcoming community and before you open the doors you ensure that you have those 200 or more people there and you know for the record if you don't have 200 people there and ready to go that's fine there are of course examples of communities that are smaller and still very effective and close-knit but for the most you know majority of us we want to try and work out what our critical mass is and try and hit it so a wait list is highly effective and not just a wait list of people

saying yeah i'm ready let me in when the doors are open you know they put their email into a form or whatever it might be but you can take it a step further so for the community i'm working on right now for my personal brand i'm literally interviewing people i've got an application process because i want to make sure that people are really going to stick around they're kind of qualifying themselves they're having to jump through hoops so i know that when i open the doors i've got a filter group of people who truly want

to be there and they're going to show up they're going to engage and be incredible community members instead of me just like opening the floodgates to any old person [Music] so let's talk for a second about nurturing your community this is something i believe in so so much and uh chris hopefully we're okay on time i have a lot to share on this but i think 15 minutes is that good keep going yeah we're good incredible um and there's a lot of people here this is cool this is one of my favorite quotes ever this

is from a previous business mentor of mine like over 10 years ago chase reeves great guy and he said you can either use your community or you can serve them this was such a paradigm shift when i first heard this because generally everyone's in the business of using their community they're using them to appease their ego they're using them to get more likes or to monetize them they're trying to just squeeze stuff out of them whereas when you shift into a service mindset it becomes all about how can i do a better job for them

how can i show up and bring them more value how can i learn more about them how can i better understand them it's like you're the concierge a five-star hotel you're trying to fall over yourself to actually just make your members as happy as possible and this mindset really informs everything that i've done over the last decade i believe there is magic in the unscalable i love the fun of unscalable moments because they mean so much to people and i'm going to give you a bunch of examples here first of all respond to everyone chris

when i interviewed you for my book you said to my amazement you still get back to everyone personally across all your social platforms which i found insane given your follow-up numbers i try it's getting increasingly difficult especially with the in the release of shorts because now we have a bunch of strangers commenting and many comments are worth responding to yeah we do have our trolls we get it you don't like me yeah i respect that that's okay find another channel that works for you but yeah i do try my very best to respond to everyone

and it's very impressive but it matters and you shared with me that people write back and they're genuinely staggered that i can't believe you got back to me i really appreciate it and i've had the same thing we get the same thing at my company it really matters to people they want to feel heard the mindset i adopt with this is i think when i've reached out to anyone that i respect and they leave me on red and i feel like a piece of crap i'm like oh man that hurt and so i never want

anyone to feel like that so that kind of mindset really motivates me to try and get back to every single message and you can do this in interesting ways you can channel the unscalable and create some magic so chris this room may look familiar because i think you actually did a talk in here like possibly right after me oh yeah in birmingham do you remember that a couple of years ago yeah and there was over 100 people in this room and as you can see on the uh the screen there i was talking about this

stuff way back then and i said to everyone i'm gonna put my money where my mouth is i'm gonna show you how much i believe in this unscalable magic i want everyone to get their phones out go to my instagram send me a dm saying prove it prove that you're actually into this stuff and so i did it i finished the talk and i went and found a room somewhere on their university campus and i hold myself up open my dms and then i had over 100 dms from people saying prove it in like aggressive

capital letters and i was meeting our mutual friend ian barnard for dinner and a few other people i was super late because it took me like two hours of being in this tiny room sending personalized video messages to every single one of those hundred plus people and i would call them out by name if their name wasn't obvious i'd go through their profile figure it out i'd send them a lovely personal message thanks for coming to my talk etc etc and the response was insane people wrote back i can't believe you actually followed through i

can't believe you did this and many of those people became really really good community members and they're still members of my community today so it's super powerful and some of you might be listening to this and thinking okay that's great but that's really unscalable that's a lot of work surely i can't do this kind of thing regularly and i want to throw a little challenge your way everywhere so think about this how many hours each day do you waste aimlessly scrolling through your social feed if you're anything like me quite a few and now our

phone even gives us stats on this it tells us how crappy we are in terms of you know procrastinating and that kind of stuff so imagine for a second that you used some of those precious hours to do gestures like the one i just described to make an impact with your community you'd be amazed at the incredible positive impact you can have with just one hour of your time here and there doing some nice gestures with people and blowing them away how much better is that than just flicking through reels this is a mindset which

i actually train our team at design cuts to adopt i call it the one community member mindset so imagine this you only have one community member you only have one customer and they pay all your bills they support your family all of the comments all of the engagement comes from this one person that's it that's your whole community think how you would treat that person you would presumably make them your best friend you would deeply care about them you'd know every one of their wants and needs you would bend over backwards to serve them and

i always say to my team i'm like try and get as close to that as you possibly can with every single member of our community and every single customer and trying to adopt that mindset at scale as much as you can next you might be thinking chris why is there a giant photo of the rock's head on your screen right now and it's because of something i like to call value magnitude so i'm a bit of a fanboy of the rock and i'm pretty sure if he liked my instagram photo that i would probably giggle

or freak out and get screenshot it post it all over my stories put it in a freaking frame and stick it on my wall and share it everywhere and tell all my friends it'd be pretty cool right but it would just take him a second to take a second of his day and it would like make my month but for most of us we are not like a super famous celebrity action hollywood movie star so we don't have the leverage that it takes to make that impact on someone with a second of our time so

what we need to think about is value magnitude we need to actually give back more value than they give us an order of magnitude greater than what they provide us with so here's a quick example let's say a community member leaves a short comment on your instagram post you could respond to their comment of course we talked about that go to their profile and comment on three of their posts super in-depth supportive feedback dm them thank them for their comment figure out how to help them engage with them and build an actual relationship and then

look for other ways to bring them value and in a world where most people are flat out ignoring their communities and not getting back to people full stop when you act like this especially in those crucial early days that's where people will gravitate towards you and will stick around because you're giving back more than anyone else in their universe right now and yes it's not scalable but guess what when most of us start out we only have like three people showing up for us one person showing up for us these are the early people where

you should be given back a value magnitude greater than what they give you and then personalizing delay you know this isn't the same kind of realm as magic and the unscalable but i just love these moments so at design cuts i remember one christmas i said i want to do a video for all of the 500 designers that we work with but i don't want to do a generic merry christmas video we're going to blast out to all of them i want to do a personalized video for each one of the 500 and so i

stood there with marco our poor video guy and he filmed me for three hours doing a personalized message calling them out by name and wishing them and their families merry christmas and i talked for three hours doing it i lost my voice and because unlike you guys at the future we didn't have a fancy studio i did this in the middle of our office my whole team were just working quietly around me filming and they hated me by the end of it because 500 times of hearing like merry christmas chris have a good one like

they were going crazy but when we cut up the videos and we emailed them out to everyone the response was ridiculous they were like who does this your ceo sent me like a personalized christmas video this is ridiculous and people lost their minds because most people don't operate in this way so again when you personalize and delight there's real power in it for people i want to talk about relationships it's pretty common you know we all understand that relationships in real life take time and this is actually an infographic i don't think she knows i

made this an infographic of the relationship i have with my fiance because when we met we were strangers of course then we became acquaintances and then friends and then we dated and then we became a couple and then we got engaged and sadly it's been delayed twice because of covert we're trying for the third time to get married later this month and then we're going to be married and hopefully be very happy for the rest of our lives much to her chagrin it took nine years to get to this point and that's a long time

yet everyone's acting online like they expect to get deep relationships building overnight or in the first month realize that community actually compounds and gets stronger and stronger as the years go on so the connections you're building now if you keep at it and you're consistent they are just going to get stronger and stronger and you're going to be in an infinitely stronger and better position in two years time three years time five years time than you are now be patient work at it so how do you scale you might be freaking out right now and

being like this sounds like a lot of work you know i need to actually scale or maybe your community is already there and it is a little bit bigger you're like how do i keep up with all of this well first of all i think you need to think about filtering your members so i've talked a lot about this but you will have the less engaged people and the more engaged people and thank you everyone for the congratulations in the live chat can't wait it's finally happening um but yeah you've got your highly engaged people

these are the people where you should be doing your super unscalable personal delightful magical moments with the less engaged people you can do a bunch of the stuff i'm about to teach you and it's still great it's still going to bring them value but you can't obviously be really hands-on and really unscalable with everyone with thousands of people so first of all authenticity i know it's like a real buzz word right now and everyone's throwing this word around but authenticity is a great way and there's tons of case studies in my book and they cite

authenticity as one of the greatest ways they've been able to build that human connection and subsequently their communities so let's make this practical first of all show all sides of yourself drop the filter and stop just showing the perfect stuff or the highlight reel and chris i saw you did this really well recently right you actually did i think a tweet or a series of content where you were calling out your more negative attributes it was like really really impressive self-awareness i try and do this as well none of us are perfect and you're like

here's some things that you know aren't so polished and perfect and what did it do right i guarantee people connected with you more after you did that yeah they did it's because when you are successful and things seem to be working out for you you wind up being not so relatable there's a good distance between where people are at your audience and where you're at today because you know i'm 25 years into building and running a business so that's a pretty long and big gap so when you talk about the things that most people don't

talk about we're you're you're not so proud but you know there are parts of you and then they then you feel like more of a dimensional person versus a cartoon character so i want to let people in i love that i will let people know who i'm about and they're i have dark days i have days where i don't don't feel that successful and i struggle just like everybody else i have a chapter in my book where i talk about this and i open up and i get really vulnerable and then at the end i'm

like how much more connected to me do you feel than like the lamborghini guy on youtube ads you know these people are like posturing and posing and trying to have the perfect life like no one likes that guy no one relates to that guy so you know the next couple of points here it's like go deeper i think that's super important you just touched on that and then be less polished i think there's been a real shift towards things like uh youtube shorts and instagram reels and tick tocks because it's not like edited to death

it's more in the moment and people appreciate that authentic content he's back again chris the rock he has returned and it's because i want to talk about macro branding versus micro branding this is a concept which i've come up with where macro branding is basically the top level of what you're known for so in the case of the rock like he's a former pro wrestler he's a hollywood action movie star but the micro branding is in my mind where the magic happens this is where people actually connect with you and buy into you as a

human this is like your personality it's the little idiosyncrasies which you open up and share with the world and in the case of the rock you know it's great that he's a movie star but really why i connect with him is because i love what he shares about his work ethic i love his crazy cheat meals that he makes his brotherly banter with kevin hart or how he's like super kind and generous with his crew and with his fans and he gives so much of himself to them it's all of these little moments whether they're

profound or silly which actually let me connect with him and his personal brand and we can all do this i find this all the time whenever i open up and share a little piece of myself with my community that's the stuff that actually gets the most response if i play a bit of guitar or piano i get dozens of messages saying oh i play two i love this like i play the piano i'm learning or if i share me walking my sweet golden retriever dakota people start sharing photos of their dogs and so don't just

be a business card don't be a label don't be a job title you are so much more you can actually open up and share that you are a multifaceted multi-dimensional person going live how meta is this chris but this what we're doing right now this is inherently this is a scalable way to build community and and bring value to people we're talking to a lot of people hundreds of people right now going live is a great way to build community and arguably i'm sure you find this it has more propensity for connection than just like

an edited video that you stick up and wait and see what the comments is like we're able to respond and kind of get a a read on the room yeah you know recently i saw you join in a clubhouse room which i don't see you very often and they were talking about community and there's something that's very alluring about being on clubhouse which i want to articulate and to tie it into the concept of being live so when we're seeing a video on youtube and it's not live there can be scripting somebody could be reading

off a teleprompter there can be setups which you're not aware of and then a lot of editing that happens afterwards to delete and remove all the parts that they don't like that's natural it's just called editing there's nothing wrong with that i'm not trying to throw shade on that but we're having a live conversation like this and you're tuning in live with us everybody that's watching you never know what's going to happen tom may get bothered by something and he might want to yell at me or he might say something super funny it may not

be appropriate for all audiences and then we edit it out the whole point of live is the true characters revealed and that's what's happening yeah right so you can't hide behind who you are you're going to say what you're going to say and you're going to do what you're going to do and then i think people appreciate that yeah and i go live all the time now so i feel pretty comfortable but there's like here's being authentic right there's been a couple of moments where i've like fumbled my words slightly like very small amounts and

i don't really do that anymore but i think it's because i'm aware it's not how many people are here live now it's like how big the future channel is and i guess that's in the back of my head but does that make the value i share less compelling does that make me less professional i don't think so i think it makes me a human being and it's the christmas point of like share all sides of yourself and you can actually be vulnerable so next oh sorry chris go ahead i got a question there's another super

chat question here from md gashkar um the the gist of the question is he seems like md has a pretty decent following but md is getting really low engagement relatively speaking on linkedin and even on youtube what what are some tips you have be beyond what you've already said if if you have a channel of your posting md says the company has 15 000 followers on linkedin but it's only like 20 or 40 comments what can you do to drive engagement okay so first of all i would say that doesn't actually sound terrible you have

to realize that most people are lurkers the algorithm won't show your content to many of them so i would actually be super grateful and connect with those 15 to 20 comments i'm actually about to write a whole blog article on this so this is very serendipitous timing but i think what you need to do is you need to filter down your people and you need to engage with them so if you had 500 followers i would say reach out and private message all of them and start a conversation and be like i appreciate you following

how can i help you you can't do that with 15 000. so what you need to do is you need to actually look for the people that have indicators of fanship or indicators of engagement and then you need to go and actually one-on-one talk to them and build relationships and you will see your engagement spike so there's different ways of doing this like i say if you got 15 20 people commenting i would start there let's say you had no comments or even less comments then i would look at the people who were liking your

posts and let's say that's maybe hundreds i would go and message those hundreds of people and this is something i'm actually doing right now with some of my coaching students so there's people that have comments and they start there and build relationships there in a manual capacity there's people with no comments but they have 100 people liking every single post and so they start there they outreach and talk to those people thanks for liking my content i hope it helped anything you want to see from me in the future when you start having conversations with

50 to 100 people on a regular basis who are already engaging with your content you will find they start showing up and engaging a hell of a lot more and that's how you can start to kind of breathe life back into your community there are other tactics but i would start there i hope that helps chris yeah thank you tom cool um so answer one i had so many this is so perfect i don't know if you deliberately planned that chris but i just answered a question for one person and hopefully anyone else here who

was wondering about that thing got an answer too so again it's a more scalable it worked out actually that was perfect a little bit of serendipity there yeah tom i have a question for you you're a pretty smooth speaker i've noticed and you're able to do a presentation while somehow miraculously reading the comments and not missing a beat does this have something to do with your english background um no well maybe but truthfully it's just practice and i know you've had the same thing doing this channel you are so slick now compared to video number

one and the truth is like growing up i was a horrible speaker i was pretty inarticulate and actually i just got nerves so i remember having to go and give speeches at school my hands would be shaking i would just look like the least confident person on earth it was terrible but guess what help with that i've now done about 500 podcast episodes i must have gone live 400 times with my company sometimes up to like 2 000 people and i've just done it over and over and over again on my instagram i did a

series a few years ago called dailytom where i forced myself to pick up my phone and just record a video in one take no matter how bad it was and hit publish when you do that over and over again it's like muscle memory and it gets so much easier so like i got a bit of nerves right now i'm also partly getting heat stroke because it's so hot here in the uk so i'm like trying to multitask and not die but like it gets more comfortable that's the point and i've talked very publicly about this

like even past school when i did my first instagram video it took me one hour chris i sat on my bed for an hour i did a hundred takes i'd record five seconds and be like no i look like an idiot delete no people are gonna judge me delete my team are gonna make fun of me delete by the time i published that 30 second video i felt like i'd run a freaking marathon it was the most exhausting thing in my life but fast forward like five years and i can jump on live with you

and i feel pretty comfortable apart from the heatstroke very nice see what tom just did there he revealed something a character flaw something that he's worked on how he's overcome that and by revealing that to you you on board or you bring in people into your community and say wow one day i too can speak so smoothly like tom well thank you chris and thank you for all the kind comments and to be honest i still get like particularly nervous in person because i haven't done it as much i've done i think four literally this

is the funny thing chris i was like i'm gonna be like chris i'm gonna start doing a bunch of public speaking that's gonna be a real pillar stone of my uh career and then covert happens like right as it started picking up and i started started getting speaking gigs so that is the next thing to tackle i want to feel comfortable going and speaking to like 10 000 people in a room somewhere um but anyway back to community so as you scale you can and should elect leaders and mods you will see these people kind

of self-identifying every community has people that are particularly engaged and particularly helpful these are the people that you actually want to empower and you want to give them added responsibility so give them a title give them some you know responsibility in your community and you will see them thrive and flourish and actually let you scale out your vision and hire help you know moderators are great but they tend to be more part-time there are so many jobs right now emerging in the space of community like i say community is the future and i see an

explosion of like community manager jobs and all kind of community related jobs um dave talas in fact chris i um i worked with dave and i encouraged him to hire a community manager and he has never been happier because he's like i couldn't keep up and now she does such an awesome job i can step back and look more strategically at my business so it's fantastic for me and the community that's great scaling your vision this you can see here here i am with my incredibly skinny looking head with my buddy tama who is actually

or was in the live chat um and we are hugging next so chris this was the year i met you for the first time in person you came and were very quiet and had a nice chat with me and i was very drunk by the elevator and had to put myself to bed but it was very nice to meet you and you remember mike mike jones the uh mike jones the organizer of creative south his whole slogan for the conference is hug next right like grab strangers and give them a big old bear hug and

that really translates to the code of contact and the culture at creative south it's the warmest conference i've ever been to and it stems from mike's vision which gets adopted by the community members now tom you're a pretty tall guy right yeah i think i was like stooped there because i'm actually taller than the camera he's not like a giant yeah you make him look like he's seven foot four because next to me i'm tiny right okay um is that jonah coughing in the background is that your your tom yeah sorry jonah you could put

mute mute i didn't realize that i was right join the party jenna we just keep you hearing sneezing and coughing like come on all right comb it excuse me keep going um all right so we're nearly there people stick with me so make them feel welcome it is so imperative that people get a pleasant onboarding experience when they join your community otherwise they're just going to bounce they're not going to stick around so here's a few ways to do this you kind of of course have a pinned welcome post i believe you probably have something

similar in your circle community chris like a pinned video or intro message or something like that yep um have fun with it so one of my favorite entrepreneurial communities i used to be a member of after you joined and signed up they didn't take you to a dry page being like blind people signing up maybe you could consider starting here they actually had an animated gif of the founders letting off bloons and like having a party in your honor and i thought it was the coolest thing ever because it was so different and it was

so fun so get creative you know your audience are a creative bunch don't be lazy with the onboarding really think outside the box you could uh of course use an email follow-up sequence where you can drip feed and kind of hold their hand that's the whole principle of this you make it clear just week and week you tell them what they should be doing and guide them to the appropriate places and how to get the most value from your community you could have a start here post and this is more applicable to things like blogs

if someone discovers your blog and they're really overwhelmed where do they start it's like cool direct all roads lead to this one page where it's like takes them by the hand again and walks them through and then facebook groups this is a cool hack actually that was taught to me by jillian and jordan who run lovely loops who have an incredible lettering community they do a thing where you can actually tag up there's a feature in the sidebar of facebook groups where you can tag personally the last hundred members to join your group and if

you do this periodically you can have this giant tag cloud and welcome everyone by name and they all get an individual personalized notification which brings them back in the group and then everyone's saying hi and you get a real conversation going so that's a really good facebook group tip build with your community i love doing this like literally we check everything with our community i do it with my personal brand we do it at design cuts if we have a new idea of like oh we're going to try this new model out what do you

guys think we have a rebrand coming up and we're actually going to run it by our community rather than just rolling out a scale we're going to be like what do you think have you got any feedback we do it with everything so get into the habit of over asking and actually involving your community make it more interactive don't just impose stuff on them get their feedback let them help shape your community set the tone and rules this is like slightly more boring i guess but it is necessary you need to obviously attract the right

kind of people and eschew the wrong kind of people and rules and guidelines are a great way to do this just to have a reference point where you can point to and say that kind of behavior is not really acceptable that's not what we stand for in this community and then this i chris can you clarify is it futurists is that your future members yes we call ourselves futurists we've also referred to ourselves as donuts i like that and uh i feel like there's another one like your master doe and you got the doughisms i

feel like daily dose welcome to the dojo this is the donation see i'm jonah i need to get a better name the only one i got was ross bosses i'm like damn [Laughter] what are you saying in the peanut gallery there jonah what the heck are you saying i'm saying i'm jonah though just taking all of those yeah okay we'll work on you um yeah the cutter if you have an idea yeah futurists donuts or you guys i need a good community name because i i believe in this so much and like it sounds perhaps

kind of dumb but the best we could come up with at design cuts was design cutters but guess what it's not about how perfect the name is it's just having a name that people buy into and now people at the time they're like yeah i'm a design cutter welcome you're a design cutter now really really powerful again it creates that um that much valued sense of belonging gary vee i know now it's known as the veiner nation which has a typo and it's not veya it's vayner nation my bad um but in the early days

they were called the vaniacs and i love that like i often think the best uh names like chris just demonstrated they're a kind of merging of a clever concept that indicates fandom combined with the person's name and ideally it should capture their essence so vayniacs is perfect because gary's like super high energy so it's like maniac maniac super clever huligans this is the name for the fans of huel which is a food supplement business and holy god the biggest moth in the world just flew in the room and landed on my lap that's freaking me

out but i'm going to keep going and then you've got steflon it's because i got my window open because it's so hot and then stefan london she's a london uk-based rapper and she calls her fans the dons again it's a play on her name but she shouts out her dons all the time she shows love to the dons and again people self-identify it's one of the most powerful things about community where they say yeah that's me i'm a don i'm a donor i'm a futurist i'm a master don't wanna be whatever it might be um

it's a really powerful tactic and uh um i have to say of the for example that we need to work on yours a little bit more yeah it's not movie enough that's a problem it needs to be yeah i want to give it up i'm accepting all ideas i want your 20 plus years creative experience chris let's let's activate the community here all 323 of you i believe in group intelligence and crowdsourcing i'm sure tom will give you something amazing and fantastic beyond his respect and appreciation whoever comes up with the winning name please contact

tom directly he will give you a fabulous prize i yeah i would love that um anyone that gives me the best name i will give you uh five hours of christmas consultation time it's very kind very expensive tom i'm glad you're going to buy that for them [Laughter] okay you heard it here [Laughter] so um we are damn it i've dug a hole for myself we are nearly there i just wanted to wrap up by showing how you guys build community and chris i know you featured in my book and you were very generous sharing

that but i've broken it down in visual form here so how did the future build community well to be honest all kinds of ways but here's some of the highlights for me vision and mission when we chatted chris you talked about what a fundamental difference this made to the engagement in your community when you laid out that one billion minus one mission people really bought into it and they took that ownership and they proudly shared that they were one of the billion that you're helping and so you know the same way we talked about hugging

next to creative south i think it's such a great community strategy extreme quality again i break this down further in the book but chris went really in depth with how seriously the future take the quality of their content and honestly you guys excel at this like more than anyone i know it's super polished super high production incredibly valuable and this really sets you apart and the fact that you just give and give and give without asking for stuff in return i think that's been fundamental to building your community openness and vulnerability talked about this before

chris owning his full self sharing that self awareness being very open you know you have your personal brand people know you they know your team they're connecting with jonah coffin and freaking out behind the scenes like people love you guys right because you're awesome and you open up and it matters sorry jonah i'm calling you up um and then badges i thought this was very clever so you create these badges and people can kind of get them attributed to them when they're part of the future pro group and people have actually started sticking their face

in front of the badge and using that as their social media avatar so not only is this saying like i'm a future head i'm a future pro group community member but they can actually spot each other out in the wild so i'd imagine members are out there being like oh you're a member too and it's the same way i talked about before right we got the struggle there the trekkies you can see each other a mile off or the harley davidson bikers whatever it might be oh that's very i'm not i'm not gonna attempt that

one that's too hard but you know what i mean like people can actually see that identifying sense of belonging in a visual way i think that's super super smart what you guys did there and then here is like an overall look at a lot of what we talked about in this presentation so you do a bunch of stuff in terms of inbound content you do podcasts you do your blog you obviously do your youtube and your instagram and so on you do speaking gigs clubhouse partnerships and all kinds of other distribution efforts all of these

people then discover the future they become part of your audience part of your wider community you boil down into the core community of true fans and then these are the 500 and soon to be 2 000 people in the future pro community you siphon them across and give them that incredible space to interact that is it from me again many of the ideas in this presentation were taken from the book which is even longer believe it or not 175 pages and features 30 case studies from incredible people like chris mike janna and many many others

chris thank you again for being part of that book your case study was actually one of my favorites and thank you so so much you and the entire team for having me on today it's been a blast i really really enjoyed it thank you tom and for those that are visually impaired where can they go to download the book the book is available at communitymanual.com and it's been really humbling to be honest i only launched it recently there's been thousands of people getting it and it's completely free i put it out there i want more

people building communities and helping others and caring about people i really hope this book has a very positive impact on people beautiful and how can people find out more about you tom out on the social social media internets um so i'm at tom ross media on most socials and my website is tomross.com which is ceo which it turns out is the worst um domain for any email address because anytime i use it with anyone outside of like the online space they're like you mean dot com and no one understands dot co but that is a

random aside yes you gotta get a it.com that's that's the gold standard right now well it's time it is time for us to do a little q and a so let's open it up to people in the chat um tom why don't you do this you're very good at reading your own questions so why don't we do that okay you go ahead and try it questions all right let's do this together i'll try with you all right so we have a question for tom about uh building community a vulnerability uh how you can get your

own set of raving lunatic fans true fans authentic true fans yes all those people go ahead and ask us the question in the chat and we'll do our best in the next few minutes to to try to read them and to answer your questions i'm going to go back in time now and look for a good question maybe jonah amazing do you have one for yourself yeah but i have a couple um clouds like these asked do you think paid communities communities can work for news slash media sites that don't sell products or courses yes

yeah i don't want to over simplify this but you'd be amazed i think communities are the future in general but i think they're the future for virtually every kind of business and interestingly in the book i didn't just talk to people like chris i got a plethora of different individuals and companies and the rules around community are pretty ubiquitous so i think again it's about defining the value prop why should someone actually show up and why should they stick around but i could absolutely see it working for that model and indeed many others there were

some freaking there was some random case studies in the book guys there's one which is a community predicated around an illustrated frog believe it or not over at rainy lynn it's got like 2 000 paying members around an illustrated frog so if the awesome rachael behind rainy gloom can start that i'm pretty sure you can start it around some kind of news outlet or informational community beautiful okay let's keep standing for questions i love the way that you said that that tom and we're gonna have to cut this from the broadcast to little clips i

don't know if you guys have noticed on our future channel they've rolled out clips uh for a few channels and you can do this where you can use that scissor icon and grab something from the channel it's well within your copyright use and it actually gives us credit every time it's seen so that's one thing that i want to do to empower and to activate our community whenever you watch one of our videos and you see something that you like and you want to save it for later don't add it to a bookmark don't try

and save it somewhere else just use the clip feature inside of youtube and it will allow you to save segments from videos that you like now what i love what you said there tom was communities are the future and that to that i have to say thank you that that was very own brand i actually just wrote that clue you're giving value chris i just wrote that clipping technique to tell my team because i actually didn't realize that um do you mind if i read katya's question because cat is awesome i really like her and

she has a good one so um katya says tips for hiring good community managers uh i've tried multiple remote community managers um and then never and i've never really found a good balance between a good engager and good at sales i think you're making the common mistake um katya which is actually um like arden community builders speak out about this i think because community is becoming a bit of a buzzword much like in the general marketing space we kind of conflate roles and we expect someone to do it all and that's actually not the right

thing so it is not a community manager's job to sell that is your sales team job community is all about nurturing the community fostering those connections trying to elicit feedback from them and feed that back to relevant departments and of course they can work hand in hand with sales departments and people but you shouldn't really be pushing or expecting your community manager to be there selling for you that is a very different role so i wanted to draw that distinction i also want to say hi to katya and i've spoken to katya before so hello

there's a bunch of really good questions here so the next one's going to come from c vandenberg does asking people to pay money make people more loyal tom yes i would say in my experience you wanted to say no but you had to say the truth it's the truth it's the truth so what it is it's just another filter and like i so i'll put it this way right we have some amazing free communities as part of design cuts what i'm working on right now for my personal brand is going to be a paid community

and it's not because i'm looking to like get rich or something like that it's truly because of a filter because i've experimented with a bunch of free communities before and what happens is you open the floodgates you get an average lower quality of member and i don't mean they're a bad person i mean like on average you'll see lower average engagement from members you will see more spam you'll see lower retention and the fact is when you pay for something you have a higher level of commitment and chris will you know i'm sure attest to

this with the future pro community people are paying a reasonable amount to be in there and so they're going to be much more likely to put in the work and continue to show up and you will be attracting your ideal audience persona in that community versus just like anyone and everyone which i think can be dangerous ground so you know i am a believer in free and paid and freemium communities um but i think in answer to your question steve it's like a hundred percent it adds that filter it leads to higher quality of commitment

and membership i want to add something to this it's like the thing that makes this as a community is we have a shared world view we feel like it's us sometimes versus them i know it's not about competition but we we share something and there's something that makes it different from everyone else and when you totally open it up that specialness that exclusivity is lost now think about this when you hear about a band like a really cool band that's plays in a really small venue you feel really special because it's you and maybe 50

other people in this little dive bar that's hearing this band for the first time and you feel a deep connection to the band what happens when the band starts to blow up and starts to go on tour and then everybody including your mom is talking about this band the band hasn't changed but your relationship with the band has changed it feels like like now you're sharing the band with so many more people so that specialness that deeper connection now is lost and what do you say you don't say congratulations ben for being successful and you

know you you've earned it this is your moment take it you say what you say the ban has sold out so think about that so there's a relationship between the size of the community and how connected you feel to that person or that community okay tom i want to ask you this question and i have a problem i almost forgot here's the question this is coming for me what's the weirdest or most memorable or unique thing that somebody from your community has done for you out in the wild or sent you or done with you

for you something weird tell us a funny weird story okay this is very uh relevant i can show you i have it right here so i mentioned tama before you remember tamar the giant yes uh in that photo so um tama's awesome and i did a bunch of value magnitude with tama and many others he was there at start with my community and what i did was i didn't just like respond back and comment back and dm a bit i actually picked seven people in my early community and i appreciate appreciated them showing up before

anyone else did so much that i said right guys i'm gonna give you free coaching every single week and i did that for seven months completely free the giant moths flying in now i'm going to ignore it and so i did that and i kept showing up and i kept showing up and i made some incredible friends and some great fans in that midst and i love those people dearly and after bringing so much value about six months to a year later i'm in my office with my team and i'm sat there and this giant

cardboard box shows up and i'm like what is that and they're like oh it's for you i'm like okay i open it up and inside i find a gibson les paul guitar cherry sunburst exactly my perfect guitar and i remembered six months previously i'd had a conversation with tamar talking about i want to buy this guitar for myself maybe when i'm like 50 years old and i retire you know i'm holding out for this thing he remembered that and six months plus later he sent it to me and there was no no i had to

bring up the guitar company and they're like yeah it's this crazy guy in texas sending you guitars and i'll get it right now bear with me look at that thing and this is on my wall every time i play it every time i look at it i'm reminded of tamar's kindness and he's the sweetest guy in the world but in a more holistic sense it reminds me like what happens when you show up and you do good for people and i recommend everyone in the book read chris's case study because he's had some very similar

instances of just crazy acts of generosity which come because he's given and given and given so much of himself time before you go before you put that guitar away can you play something for us on the guitar or not oh man is that an electronic plugged in oh okay okay is it in tune i can't do this with the future numbers that are showing up yes yes you can is that picking it closer bring it closer i can barely hear it i like what i'm hearing just bring it closer to the mic you could do

it [Laughter] can you hear that yes it's kind of out of tune but you get the idea okay yeah yeah beautiful yeah okay the trick is it's a much better guitar than i am a guitarist i want to share two quick stories uh and maybe if you have another one to share with us in terms of this idea i believe there is this thing called karmic equity there's karma and equity is like currency and you trade in the currency of karma and that the more good you do in the world the more your account swells

and it grows and you never have to take anything out and every once in a while it comes back to you and i will tell you i was at the design conference in brisbane and it was the last day and i was thinking about getting getting a cab or an uber or something to get myself back to the airport i had to leave a little bit early this young man who who spoke to me earlier that day had seen me and it looked like you know i'm ready to go because i have my luggage and

everything he says what are you doing so i gotta go catch an airport or or i gotta get to the airport here and he goes um do you mind if i if i take you i said no i i couldn't impose this just too much he goes no it'd be my pleasure so here's a young man who i've never met before who's watched some of our video content and has a connection with what it is that we've done that he would go out of his way he was working the event but he's like i'm just

finished if you give me two minutes i'll wrap up i'll get out of here and i'll take you to the airport and i'd just love to spend time talking to you normally i would not get in a cab like that because i have trust issues but i i felt good about this man we got in the car and and he was just like this has made my day i said you've made my day what are you talking about so that's just one quick story and i have something right behind me that i'm going to bring

up okay so let me grab this oh shimmy yep oh sorry check out christmas that's a nice plant thank you what is that it's a monstera i believe uh-huh no no i mean what's the thing you're holding i mean oh yeah yeah hold on i'm gonna show you i have to set up the story man i just can't just i meet somebody via instagram and he's chatting with me he's like i really love that room that you're running this is what i do i'd love to help you in any way and give value he's a

neuro-linguistic programming trainer and expert and we've been doing some calls together i love this first of all he's 27 i'm almost 50 years old so it's like a father-son relationship he's very wise for his years but he's like i got something for you so he sent this to me recently and he describes the relationship as you know you're you've always referenced the karate kid so you're like you're mr my you're my mr miyagi so this is what he had made for me can you see this it's a wooden plaque this is like carved with our

logo it says miyagido and karate how cool is that you guys with the future logo that's amazing come on karate kid cobra amazing i love that show and i love that gift that i i i feel like we'll be here all day at this rate but can you see on top go get it just go get it all right ignore the sweatpants guys i didn't be standing up i'm wearing like a dress shirt and sweatpants all right so one one of my community made this for me where it's like this delightful personalized message and she

did like a super lovely handwritten message on the back amazing oh can you hear me chris just checking yeah i can hear you know i'm just listening yeah i'm leaning in we got johannes in the chat did this hand-painted work of art i could see him there amazing love this thing for our birthday we got the letters back there from debbie who's also in the chat these dc letters for design cuts incredible renee's in the chat like this is so meta my laptop right now i actually showed her this earlier it's rested on a box

which i love and look at every day it's one of the original lights from the first las vegas sign and renae is based in las vegas and chris i don't know if you agree for me like this is the metric if you want to call it that which i care about the most like it's not how many likes i get on instagram it's that if you have enough impact and a deep enough relationship and a strong enough community that people are sending you incredible gestures and gives that's a really good sign that you're doing something

right in my opinion and i know you get this stuff all the time we've talked about this oh we're not done yet tom [Laughter] so i was in amsterdam at awards and somebody said you know a friend of ours couldn't make it but he had a very special gift we all have to present it to you i believe they're ukrainian or russian or something like that i'm sorry i'm forgetting parts of the story here but he had made me look at this a custom lego guy look at this guy he looks just like me i

can't believe it with special packaging and everything the amount of effort that somebody went through to make this amazing build it he even has a little golden microphone it's ridiculous you guys and i showed my kids this and they freaked out they totally freaked out like town why would anybody do that for you is it sun unlike most of you you actually appreciate me people actually appreciate your father chris you could have given me a hundred thousand guesses of what you were about to lift up there and i would not have guessed tiny legos i

love that thing that's minnie me okay let's take on another question you did answer a question by accident and maybe you were actually looking at the questions but somebody had asked you what's the best part of building a community and you said this is what you do it for right all right so this i know you agree with this this is where i get confused because it's like you look at how 99.9 of people are operating where they're ignoring messages and being pretty sleazy and pushy and salesy and stuff and for me that's inconceivable so

it's not a question of like why would you build communities like why wouldn't you so it's like you're you're making friends at scale you're chatting passionately with amazing like-minded individuals and then if you do a good job they rally around you and cheer you on and support you and that feels amazing and then you have this whole giant impact together like why wouldn't you do it the only thing is you know not to is is a lot of work but guess what it doesn't really feel like work that much if you're just having fun and

connecting with people so i find it very surprising that more people don't act in this way but more power for you and i and everyone in the chat who does act this way because i believe we're going to win in the long term yes you look at this somebody who has followed us from clubhouse to say and he knows exactly what i'm talking about cody g gerald i see you and i want to read this comment and we're getting a little bit long here so we'll probably have to wrap up pretty soon that i think

you've inspired some people here today tom because i think people are like community community yeah we get it yeah you guys are into community building so self-serving right but i think it's johannes bellock saying you have no hide how freaking i can't even read this i'm sorry let me scratch that it's actually from joy i was reading the wrong comment joey said this is awesome i feel motivated to value my community yeah and here's what yo johanna said you have no idea how much it means to me that you have my painting there with you

and it's so appreciated by you thank you so much tom that's from johannes there you go thank you mate appreciate you i just realized that my powers of observation are on point today i realize that when i speak there's a blue banner behind me and when our guest speaks there's a burgundy banner behind them well done well done jonah just that we make sure that we know who is in the blue corner and the red corner so to speak mom can we swap that is my favorite color get in line okay tom any final thoughts

for you are from you from uh in terms of building community and what it means to you and how people can get started i hopefully this session i would say go back and re-watch it and just get started because there's so much in here you know i wanted to make it very actionable but i've kept saying during this live i really think community is the future like it is exploding and this is not just me surmising this there is data there is an explosion in community related jobs and roles like i talked about community-led businesses

are getting crazy vc backing whereas they wouldn't have before i feel like the world is starting to wake up to the power of community and many of the examples i cited earlier including chris's community only really launched in the last year and so i would say not only should you build community and it's amazing but you don't want to be left behind you don't want to be the person in six years time where everyone else has a community and has six years worth of community equity built in and you're just waking up to it so

i want this session to be your prompt your call to action to light a fire under you and go build that community today and get a head start on the masses i'm going to read this one final comment thank you very much tom this is from sauna sono is she saying i'm in the purple corner with both communities not blue not red she's in the purple corner to support both of us thank you very much everybody i'm going to yes it is so before we get out of here i want to just say thank you

very much to tom ross let's go full screen on that tom ross thank you very much for being a part of this community having a conversation sharing the tips on how you build community it got super super meta here so he is tom ross he's the ceo of designcuts.com right designcutsys.com and he is at tom ross media on on most social medias you can follow him there and and you can bet if you send him a message he'll probably send you a lovely video greeting or he'll probably send you a sandwich or a cake or

something that's the other thing about you tom that's the other thing i forgot to mention that whenever we do something together there's always a nice little box from you that arrives at my place and i'm like god that guy that brit he's got good manners his mama raised i need to up my game i need to make lego chris next time or maybe something more original right jonah people gotta level up the gift giving here that's all i'm saying okay that's it for us thank you very much everybody thank you thank you thank you jonah

there's a graphic here it says thank you thank you donuts futurists step into the dojo have your daily dose you know you know what you're talking about you're part of that one billion one billion person mission and don't forget to i'm gonna play some music here don't forget to like comment and subscribe hit that bell for notifications that's it for us i'm hoping that you have an amazing rest of your day tom thank you very much jonah thanks for doing this everybody peace out bye everyone