What's up, everyone? This is Courtland from Andy hackers dot com, and you're listening to the Indy Hackers podcast on this show. I talked to the founders of profitable Internet businesses and try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions both of their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses take the goal here as always, so that the rest of us could learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful online businesses? Say I am sitting down with Derek Anderson and David Spinks. Derek is a co founder of Startup Grind, a global community of entrepreneurs meeting each other in person and a conferences. And today he runs a business called Betty, which allows companies to hosting run thousands of real world community events like he did was sort of pride. David is the VP of community derricks company Betty. He's also the founder of C M X, which is a business he built after realizing the ironic fact that there are thousands of people like myself all over the world were building in organizing communities.

But none of them are actually talking to each other because they're not part of a community themselves. So he built C. Max to fix that. David Derek. Welcome to the an actress podcast. It is a pleasure to have you both on here. Thank you so much, Terry. All right, really Run a tight ship here, Derek. You go first. David, you follow exactly. Be here. Ugo excited to be here.

Thanks for having us.

So there's a lot of similarities between the three of us. Probably the most striking one is that we've all started communities, but specifically I started a community and the hackers. I ran it as a business until it was bought by a bigger company stripe. Wherever, Today and David, you did the same thing. You recently sold your community C max two derricks company bet. So we're really similar in that respect. The show is usually about people who are doing things the other way around. People who quit their jobs as employees to strike it out, become founders. What's it like going in the opposite direction and no longer being

a founder? It's definitely a lot of change, different expectations, different pressures. I think as a founder, you're constantly thinking about how are we getting to the next stage? Are we going in the right direction? You feel a lot of the weight on your shoulders to make all those kinds of directional decisions. And so no longer being a founder, definitely feeling a weight lifted that it's not all on my shoulders. It's mostly on Derek

Shoulders. Yeah, zits. His responsibility

now, Yeah, it's derricks, derricks, responsibility. But there's also unique pressures that I wouldn't have is a founder as a founder, you have a lot of freedom that the other side of that coin of having to make the decisions is that you get to make the decisions and you get to kind of choose a direction. You don't really have others that you're necessarily answering to. Now. I'm not my own boss and I do have to consider other people's goals, other people's direction and the direction that Derek wants to take things and align with that which thankfully, we have been very aligned on the direction of things and spent a lot of time making sure that that was true before moving forward with the acquisition,

you have a much better job title than me. I think you're VP of community. And Betty? Yeah, I think mine. I'm like Chief Andy Hacker. It's stripe or something completely silly. I think that what you're saying is very true. That's a very different type of pressure when you're founder that you just don't have as an employee. But at the same time, I think when you come into a company through an acquisition, at least for me, I feel like this intense pressure to, like, make sure the acquisition is a success. Like I don't want Patrick from strive to be disappointed that he bought any hackers. Do you feel the same with Cmx and Betty?

Yeah,

absolutely. I just remind her, David, that I'm on this podcast to see just what you know. I'm listening in on everything

you want. Just take a walk around the block. We'll call you when we're ready. Uh, yeah, I think there's there's pressure from multiple angles. There's definitely that pressure, too. I want to make it successful and to have Derek and the rest of the team. You know, if you're really good and excited about the decision because they're taking a risk on us. There's also pressure from my team that I made the right choice for the employees of cmx. Well came over with us that they're happy with the work they're doing and with the direction of C. M X. And then, of course, there's,

Ah, pressure from the community and wanting to make sure that you do right by them, which is the biggest concern ultimately in risk when you have a community be acquired is the community has a lot of questions about how things will change. Will we still be community driven and focused on the community? And so we We definitely put a lot of effort into making sure we communicate that stuff really clearly and we're really transparent and that we continue to be community driven.

Derek, what about you from the other side of things? I know that buying a company actually making an acquisition has to be stressful. And I say that because for me, just hiring the contractor is stressful, so I can't imagine buying an entire company. What goes into that on? How did it feel to actually go through this process? Well, I think the whole thing sort of started from the right place started where David and I had a lot of mutual respect for each other, had developed a friendship, and that's not necessarily the norm. Think sometimes these things happen really fast. It's sort of spur of the moment. I would also give David a lot of credit. I'm probably more loose and fast, and David's much more methodical and I think patient and anything sort of driving a lot of the questions in front of What is this gonna look like?

And I do this sometimes and I think it's a good exercise when you we're gonna employ one of your friends, which is not really advisable. I highly and not doing that in almost any situation. But when I do that, I would sit down with them and I'm like, Look, here's the worst case scenario Six months from now, we hate each other. I fire you or you quit or something in what happened, like what had to happen for that to happen and how do we avoid that? And so I think David and I discussed all different types of scenarios and it was exhausted and that. You know, I'm grateful for that level of detail at this point, and I felt great when it was completed, and it felt great when we gots announces a great when we had the positive response from the community. Think we didn't get a single piece of negative feedback about it?

Which course you you hope for that. But you don't. I don't think that's a realistic expectation. And so it's been, You know, it's been really fun to spend more time with David and his team and work from now on and for us to get better. Overall, we've taken some of their values and try to, you know, adopt some of ours too Tiu to better match what they had, which in many cases they have. You know, a better way of describing things or better way of doing certain pieces of marketing. Or, you know, there's just all these things that we're learning from them,

that sze helping us get better, too. So another similarity between us, besides the fact that David and I have sold our companies to bigger companies, is that all of us are involved in communities. All of us have started communities but the people listen to this podcast aren't necessarily obsessed with building communities. If they have one thing in common, it's that they want to be founders. And being a founder is really freaking hard. There's a 1,000,000 things to do. So the question for both of you, maybe David, you could go first. Why should founders care all about communities?

I mean, I think every company is a community, So from the very start of building your company, what you're doing is actually building a community. That's a community with the intention of growing and driving profit and growing a team and providing a lot of value to customers. But it starts with the founder or founders with an idea that goes out and convinces other people that this idea is worth investing in and spending time on and being a part of, they get people to join their team. That team is gonna have a set of values. They have a common interest, a common goal, a common mission. It's all the things that are that we know to be, um, what makes a community. So from the very start, I think founders need Thio be thinking about not just how do we build a successful business, but how do we build a successful community?

Ah, place where people feel connected, where they feel aligned with that mission where they feel safe, where they can express themselves safely and communicate safely? Those are the things that also make really successful businesses. Now that's unlike a cultural values kind of mission and brand level in, ah, a practical level of how it can actually help a company achieve its goals. I think that community is the future of how businesses are working. And I shared this today. I think, like an interesting way of thinking about it is Cos. Have traditionally formed as or functioned as, sort of like authoritarian governments in a white like they centralized power. The team owns everything. The team decides everything,

and then they distribute their product and their marketing and things out to the customer. And what we're seeing is a shift to like the democratization of businesses and marketing where you have your brand, you have your products, you have your marketing and then you have these customers who want to be involved. They want to be advocates. They want to help you improve your product, they want to help bring more people in, and we're seeing more and more companies now actually give control and give power and autonomy to their customers and to these advocates and ambassadors and contributors to empower them to be a part of the visits to be a part of the brand. And so, you know, Step One is building a strong sense of community, something that people feel like they belong to, and they want to be a part of. And then Step two is looking for those opportunities toe. Activate those people, give them the opportunity to contribute to your mission and contribute to your objectives.

And if you do that, you can actually scale up your business and all the parts of your business in incredible ways with relatively extremely low costs, right? If I'm a marketer and I'm trying to reach 10,000 people in real life, right, actually try to build connections with them through offline interactions. I can either higher 1000 people all over the world, the host events or I could empower our community members to self organize and create events, and now I can actually have touch points with 10,000 customers and be spreading that Brandon a very on the ground grassroots kind of way with a relatively small teeth. So it's that exponential value of community, I think, is a real opportunity for businesses

as a founder. You know, Day one, you've got a 1,000,000 different things to do is really hard to focus on something that might not pay off for a while, like building a community. Is that true? Should found and start thinking about communities from day one? Or is it something they should put off until later?

Yeah, I mean, I think the quality of the community you build around your business will translate to the quality of your business. So if you build a culture in your business, that doesn't really value the voice of your customers and the people who are taking that early leap on you, that's gonna build a foundation that as your company grows, that'll just become part of the values that you have that you don't value community. So I think like by starting out with a fundamental belief, an investment in community where you're doing is creating a strong foundation for the future of your business. So as you get more customers as you grow, that value continues to show itself and continues to be a part of what kind of company your building so really depends. What kind of company want to build their people that want to just build an app, have very little interaction with customers, but just get kind of passive income? And that's all they want. They just basically one passive income. They're not really they don't have a grand mission.

They're just tryingto makes a little bit of money. If that's the case, then yeah, maybe you don't really need to invest in community. But I think I haven't met too many founders like that. And most of founders I meet are building something because they're really passionate about it because they're trying to make a meaningful impact on the world. They're trying to solve a n'importe problem or a problem that that they've experienced and and so the kind of company they build and how they interact with people on the experience they create for employees and customers is gonna be really important to them. So investing community is for those kinds of companies. I think a non negotiable. And if your indie business owner, especially in the early days you have to your product is probably still really minimal, it's probably got a whole lot of issues and doesn't solve all the problems. So the early adopters who are there are only willing to overlook those things and stick around and continue to be involved because they believe in you and your mission, and they feel like they're part of something. And so community is kind of a tool that can keep people engaged through those early, tough times. Make sure you have consistent communication with those users and customers so that you're learning how the product needs to be improved and building a foundation that will help you get to that point where the product is actually selling itself and has reached the point where people are there just for the product.

That's such a good point. A lot of any actors ask this question. How do I compete with a bigger business that has more features than I do? And more Resource is a larger team and they charge less money than I do, and I think communities is a good answer, a lot of times. These early adopter use you have are very excited to talk to you. They're very excited to talk to each other. And a bigger company might not take the time to really nurture those relationships. I want to understand how both of you guys ended up where you're at. But you guys had two wildly different paths, and that only just converged recently. So we're gonna go one at a time. Uh, Derek, let's start with you. You are the creator of Startup Grind,

which is an incredible person community of entrepreneurs and founders meeting all over the world in person. What was sort of the first step you took on that path. So 10 years ago, I was working at Electronic Arts. I decided to leave my job, too. I work for myself. I want to be more creative on Bend over the next four or five years has sort of stumbled through many different types of businesses, different ideas, different products that I had built with the teams that I have stumbled around me and most of them were totally unsuccessful. The fact that they launched, but it didn't really, ever have any overly passionate users or customers or community around this product. And amongst doing that I started using an event series in my office with some other founder friends, and we called it started a ride because that's sort of what my experience that I was going through reminded me of, you know,

five or 10 people came with the first event and five people came in second. It's sort of ruse slowly on. Dhe was not really intended to be anything other than just a gathering of friends and an excuse to hang out late one night each month. And But after about a year, we started to get a lot of traction and people really enjoyed it, and we started to get better, better speakers. And I spent 29 days of the month working on my product that not a lot of people like that. It's been one or two days before I start right and everybody liked. So so after about a year and 1/2 of doing that every month, we started to spend 10 days a month on it, 20 days on the product and then eventually spending 10 days on the product 20 days and start crying and I had someone in the audience say, Hey kid, not do this in my city, love the brand of the values of the community. Basically,

I thought it was a terrible idea, and I thought he must not have any idea what he's talking about. No, we don't have this in a way. He's something like this. And so we started ringing Elaine and worked and, you know, fast forward. A few more months, we were able to sell the product that we have been working on it to completely get out of it. And then we just went to work on sort of right, and within six months or going full time on it. We've gone from five or 10 cities, too 30 or 40 cities. It's been about six years, seven years since we start working full time on it,

and that time we've grown to over 650 cities. We have millions of viewers and the network. Our goal is to educate every on turn the world on and the start of teams that are associated with those entrepreneurs, and we have about 1000 tears. We're going in so sort of again started it was not the thing it was meet up on. Dhe is, you know, this may be small and inconsequential is that sounds, but it's, you know, it's it's what people want it and, uh, like the products liability. And so we listen to, you know, people speed back and and has had a great ride working on that.

Last year's well, you just blew through this story and made it sound easy. I want to talk about your startup grind period where you're spending, you know, year after year, working on these ideas. It didn't really work out because I've been there, spent a long period of my life in that phase. I think a lot of people listening have tried that as well, and it's pretty scary to quit your job and go into this place where nothing seems to be working. What's one of these failures that you worked on, and maybe a lesson that you learned from it that you took with you into your future ventures? You know, I kept a journal through that time because so many of the things I think I've locked out on and I think this lessons would be good for me to remember. Of course, I remember a lot of I remember the big things.

I One point raised $202,000 for an iPad game, which was launched. Nobody. Law. I put probably 200,000 of my own dollars consulting dollars into a social networking product that nobody likes or downloaded way had some people very small amount of people. You know, numerous people that tried to start companies with I, like, could not find a technical co founder, work with me on a sort of product manager and bag dozens and dozens of other people on trying to find ways to work with us bitch years to partner with me. Almost all almost totally unsuccessfully. Uh, that Michael founder who worked with today. It's a full stack engineer. Seems Joe Fernandez. Hey,

I get it for nine years. So that's been really fortunate for me to have found him and too, for him to work with me. What have I like? You asked for one. Something like that. I've learned like, I mean just to not give up. I like it sounds so cliche. I know it's like the worst advice, but I just really really. There were many, many times where I think the tunnel was completely dark. And somehow John, I squeaked out off out of it and got to the next phase. And,

um you know, I mean, I've been rejected by how many incubators, like, all of, like, all the things that could happen, like a truck. And I think, you know, 10 years later, things some things are working, and, uh, it's not all working. It's not all perfect,

but we definitely have momentum. And once you create momentum, like a lot of things, good things just happen to, but it takes. It's so hard to get momentum. And you just have to survive a really, really long time in order to do that. And so you know, you may not be working on a great idea right now. You may not be. You may think it's the best thing you've ever done, but no one likes it. But if you if you could just figure out how to survive, I think you will get a chance. I believe everyone gets a chance to really showcase themselves and basically a shot on goal.

Everybody gets a shot on goal, but it may be that you don't have the right talking, you don't have the right stick, and maybe you're in the wrong position on, you know, on on the field. But just stick it out and you'll get a chance. But it's gonna take a lot longer and cost a lot more than you. I never imagined her hose, and so, you know, make it work with what you got and don't give up is it is cliche advice, but at the same time it's underrated advice because the fact of the matter is, most people give up regardless, right? No matter how much people will say this advice,

no matter how often it proves to be true, it's still really, really hard not to give up. I think people would benefit from trying to find a way to make it so they're less likely to give up right if that means consulting on the side. If that means building a community of friends and entrepreneurs and founders around, you are finding them online just to keep supporting you like it's so important not to give up that you're really doing yourself a disservice. If you don't actively think about how to make following that advice Easier for yourself. How did it feel after these years of hardship, Of of wasting in her own money, of getting rejected from accelerators. Do you start started grinding. See this thing, actually picking up momentum? I really remember when people started to say like, Oh, like what?

You working on a sequel? Start, Start you D'oh! Really? Are you sure? Are you just saying that? Like, Because And I would call people out, which is a very nice, but I just didn't believe them. Yeah, um, so But they had and they had a gun and I attended in L A or attended it. You know, New York or something. I saw you did this or someone your videos on YouTube or something like that.

It was, You know, it wasn't like this huge overwhelming, you know, financial moment or something like that. But I think it was just that we finally build Something is Paul Graham says we build something that people actually want and that they needed, and that was incredibly satisfying. I think to at some point we've had so much failure and we had to survive in spite of that we just didn't We didn't really care about all the things that you shouldn't care about It. It didn't matter to me that, like the Preston right house, It didn't. It didn't It didn't matter to me that people didn't know are like what I was working on. I didn't care anymore. Like had been through too many cycles of screwing up to care. And so I think when people find us, they're coming around saying like,

Hey, like, actually like, what you're doing is cool or I've seen it and it seems like it's like it's got this Momenta. My thing, because we've been through the Valley of Death like that actually meant a lot to us. And you're still working in my garage for many years, many years, Uh, and, uh, you know, working in your garage and have people like how it seems like something seems like this thing's getting really big. It's like I work in my garage, you know, But you don't care about the same thing.

You just like you care about the things that that and keeping customers happy, you know, being able to afford to hire one more person like such a luxury do not have to do every single job in the company. What a gift, you know, and I know you can't tell anyone about those things, but it just you just you feel it in the impact on your life and you bring something that's way better at it. I remember saying like no one can ever sell sponsorship or start writing me. I remember telling and had explicit conversations people about that. They providing the seven years I can't like No, Why can nobody sells for a crime but me And then somebody came along and they in two months I saw the way better and it was like, Oh, it's just like the grandest feeling effort. It's not like the feeling shadows, and you're seriously inapt like Look how much better persons that two months and you are. But actually,

it's just like cetera, leaf and just joy like this can work, and you don't have to do everything. There's a lot of just personal satisfaction in that, and that's even just with two or three or four police like you could get that basically immediately. Once you get through the Valley of Death, there's so much good stuff in there. And there's something that you said that keeps coming up over and over, which is that you're, I guess, perspective of your own success and impact as a founder is oftentimes, like, understated, like You're just so your head's in the weeds like you're actually doing work day to day today and you're not really sure like how the thing you're doing is affecting people. So you said, you know,

people come up to you and, you know, talk to you about started grind in the early days and like you don't even believe that they really knew what it was. And I know so many founders who do that. My friend Cajun runs his online community, Alfa, and people were part of that community. Talk to me about it all the time, like there is a community for women in tech. And I'll tell the public a cage. And someone told me, you know, the great thing about Alfa and she doesn't believe me because you know, from her perspective, it's just not as big as it really is. I want to get into the story of how you transitioned from started grind into bevy,

but hold off and switch over to David David. You ran a community called Cmx, and it was a community for people who themselves run communities. So I imagine it's a lot of pressure to do that. What was sort of the origin story? How did you get your first community members Adagio build CMAX into it eventually

became So I mean, like the threat of community kind of goes way, way back for me like childhood, very much struggled to find community, felt pretty ashamed of who I was, didn't really find my group. Didn't really find my identity end up turning to video games a lot to find the community. Ah, ended up. I was always very entrepreneurial is well, so like, if I couldn't find community, my I would end up building one or out end up creating something to solve my own problem. So in the early days of video games, I don't like, uh, the Tony Hawk's pro skater for community was like the first online community ever built,

and we had a very active forum were running online competitions. We we had a whole ecosystem going and I was 13 that running it out of out of my house in my room. And so I've always been really fascinated by how technology can bring people connection. And as someone who struggled early on to find it in the real world and then found it online, that power was always really impressive to me. And so, as as I grew up and new social platforms kept coming out, whether it was like the early days of, like the Journal Live Journal or AH, MySpace and Friendster and all those kinds of platforms there, I just became really interested in all these new tools and how they're connecting people. And so when I went to college, I ended up going for business and and started writing a lot about how community was developing online, about how businesses were starting to use these kinds of social platforms to connect with customers. And that ultimately led to me getting first, an internship that was focused on kind of digital media and how businesses were going online and then,

eventually to my first community manager job. And so, like I graduated college, I got this community manager job. I was pumped. I felt like felt like I knew kind of the space in general and just kind of assumed that there were a lot of other people doing this work that I could learn from. And so when I got the job, I kind of started looking around for training programs I could take or other people that I could learn from her communities that I can connect with around community management in building community for business. And there just wasn't anything there. No one was talking about it as a profession or an industry. There were no resource is on how to do this work. There were no communities to connect with other people. And so I found myself just figuring it out on my own and then slowly but surely would find other people who were doing this kind of work and just connect with them and ask them questions. And I was living in New York and just started having regular lunches or breakfasts with other people who were doing community work and just supporting each other. So it kind of just we found each other, all feeling isolated in her work building community,

ironically, and over time it started to grow. The group started to grow more. People started to talk about community. There was, Ah, meet up in New York, called the community manager. Meet up that that started. And so we started all getting together in person once a month, and I ended up co founding the community manager dot com. And so we were one of the first sight's focused on this profession. And so we had a job board. We had articles that were publishing. We're inviting other people who are doing this work to publish their articles, so starting to create kind of more of a narrative and a messaging around this category of community and kind of simultaneously.

I had also been building other businesses. So after that first community manager job, I ended up running a company called Blogged Ash, which was connecting businesses with bloggers. I did that for a year and 1/2 before joining Zarley as the head of community there, and I was running a full community team and running our New York office. My dear, this is still two years after I graduated and I was a director of community managing multiple people cells in way over my head, in a job that was still had no guidance on how to actually do that work and knowing you had a value community. And then I also started a company called Feast, which was an online cooking school, which is very random in my narrative of my career, but an incredible learning experience. It didn't work out in the end. We worked on that for about two years as well went through 500 startups. One of the first batches were about six of 500 startups,

but S o, the community manager dot com was a side project, while we're kind of working on that. And then we had talked about doing a conference for for a long time, but it just never quite happened. Running a conference felt pretty intimidating, pretty scary to run a big event. Didn't know how to do all deal in logistics. It was actually my friend Max Altshuler who Ah, he ran a conference called Sales Hacker. And so he came to me and said, Hey, you know that conference that you wanted to start for community professionals? I know how to run a conference. Now Do you want to start it together? I will handle the logistics and hey was gonna help the sponsorships and stuff like that as well.

And I would handle the marketing and curating the speakers. And essentially, they create the the messaging and shape the whole event. And so, you know, I said, Yes, let's try it and we kind of just put it together. It was kind of fire festival style. Could have gone really poorly because we just started selling tickets and we didn't have ah, venue or food or anything. And then when we'd make enough money, we would put down ah, down payment on the venue, and then we'd sell more tickets and we

put it down, man, cater. Stressful. It

was very stressful. But, you know, I did. I did a bunch of research first and talked to a lot of people to gauge whether or not, you know, they would pay to come to an event like that and got a very positive response all around. So I felt pretty good that there was demand for it. And then when we did it, I mean, the demand was there. We had 300 people came out from all over the world, all of them were practicing community professionals. There were people who, as part of their job, was building community, and all of them felt like they were the only ones who were doing that.

They didn't know that there was anyone else who did that work. For the most part, they all felt isolated. And then we put them in a room, 300 of them, put, you know, the best speakers I knew in the space on stage and inspired them and gave them a message of importance and validation because I said, I think this is the future of how businesses will work. I think community professionals, it's going to be an entire professional industry. I think community's gonna be extremely valuable to businesses and essentially validated that their work is important and that it's a growing space, which is something they never heard before. And the response was incredible. Just people felt empowered. We got tons of messages from people that just couldn't believe that event like that could exist,

just like walked in and I kind of walked in expecting it to be like other marketing events or something else. But then realizing they're surrounded by their people was really impactful and so kind of going back to a derrick was saying about momentum. We had felt zero momentum for a while with Feast and I all of a sudden I felt this, like huge amount of momentum around CMX and building the community industry. We might co founder and I at Feast Nadia at ball. We kind of around the same page and mutually decided to wind down feast, and I switched my full time focus over to see Max. We started growing the community and products that we would offer from there.

So first I want to make a note to people listening. If you are in the market for coming up with an idea, you're not sure we should work on notice. The similarities between my story with Andy hackers. I wanted a spin any hacker. I didn't know anyone else who wanted to be. Once I started community where like minded people could come together. Derek Similarly, it was a founder was going through all the struggles wanted to meet up with other founders. Suddenly, the small meet up among friends turned into something much bigger, and that is not started. Grind, which has hundreds of thousands of people attending events all over the world every year. And David, same with you, right?

You wanted to meet other community managers, and these community managers have never met each other and just like bringing them together to create a ton of value. So this is an idea that I think can exist, and Miri Ad space is probably everybody listening. To do this right now has some area where they feel slightly alone, where there's others who probably feel alone as well. There might be some value in bringing them together. The other thing I want to mention is that and both of your stories and in mind, there's this common threat of starting things over and over and over again, and something's kind of working out. Some thing's not really working out, but then, having like a really success, that all of us Comptel is something really meaningful because we couldn't compare it to like our past failures basically and say, Hey, this one really stands out like this one's got legs. Let me double down on this David, where did you go from? From the point of your first conference succeeding to building CM accent. What eventually became?

Yes. So we immediately, like, put the profits back into the company. We took just a little bit of our to pay bills and started planning our New York conference. That conference did not go so well. Uh, we were were kind of high on the momentum and and we're like, Great, we'll throw an even bigger events on the East Coast Now that we know how to do 300 people, let's go like 400 people. And it turned out like the Bay Area was a much easier market to sell tickets in. And they're just Maur community people here at the time. And in New York it was much harder to sell tickets. And so we kind of bit off more than we could chew and, you know, put made commitments on venues and things that we ended up not really being able to afford.

So we had to make some, like, pretty massive decisions in crunch time, Thio, you know? Yeah, she switched their venue and like the month before the event, which, if you've ever organized a conference, I'm sure you just had a heart palpitation just hearing about that. It's a very scary moment, but like we're able to make some really big key changes and still throw a pretty incredible that and all of our speakers were happy over. Attendees were happy. It just ended up being like smaller, and we didn't really make money on it. But that was better than losing $50,000 which is the predicament we're facing.

And that would have just ended cmx right there. So we kind of like, survives that and then just kept our heads above water basically and that and then started planning the next San Francisco event again. And all three of these of 1st 3 events were in the same year in 2014. So we threw three conferences that first year, which, in hindsight, was insane. Now we do one a year, but you know, we're hungry and felt that momentum and tried to take advantage of it. And so we hosted the next San Francisco van, and that one went really well. The next year we did one in San Francisco, one in New York again, and this time we're just a lot smarter about predictions of numbers and didn't and we're able to make money on each one.

So we just kind of like, made a little bit of money and put it back in and made a little bit of money and put it back in. So that first event we hosted, we created a Facebook group for attendees. And then, after the events were like, What do we do with this group? Now we decide to open it up to anyone who wanted to join. And so that's now the CMX Hub Facebook group, which has kind of been like the heart of our community for the last five years now. And it all started from that first event, just like a space very tender used to talk to each other. And now there's close to 10,000 members, and it's like extremely active, extremely positive. We do very little moderation.

It's a pretty incredible space for community professionals. And so, you know, the next five years, I would say, like, here's the interesting thing because we talked about like that moment, um and like feeling something that worked and it definitely did. But like the next five years was somewhat of like just pushing through plateaus after plateau. It was like we're trying to bootstrap this business we're trying to figure out like a profitable, sustainable business model. We're running two events a year. We launched a training program. We started doing some consulting for companies helping them with their community strategy. We tried all these different programs and products and things. But you know,

it turned out to be a really hard space to build a business in because even though it's growing, it's still has been pretty nascent over the last five years has been pretty small. Community professionals are still, you know, hustling to get by in and their companies and hustling to get budget. And so you know, when we asked for a premium price point on products, it was hard for community professionals to get that support from their companies. And so you know, I wouldn't I wouldn't I struggle with it? Sometimes We're like CMAX doesn't feel like it was that it wasn't like a runaway success or anything like that. It's been a lot of really, really hard work and keeping our heads above water over over five years to keep bringing value to the industry and keep experimenting and iterating that said I think like the impact we had on the space has been really substantial, and and it's definitely the most impactful work that I've ever done. And so, like,

it's, it's been worth continuing to really hustle and push through those those hard Part's too, just like keep getting to that next level, which ultimately led to the acquisition with Heavy, which has been pretty incredible. You know, it's only been two months since acquisition about, and we've already been able to unlock so much more value and do so many more of the things that we've known needed to be done in this space but just didn't have the band with Resource is to d'oh Now with heavy, you know, we're growing the event by more than two x this year. It could be over 1000 people. We look relaunched our local events program. We're re launching a research program. All these things that were really important that we just weren't able to d'oh. So it's kind of just like the next chapter of this journey.

It's something telling your story that I think really highlights the value of community is that you're sort of the opposite problem that most founders have most founders. I talk to you. They've got their business model sort of straight. Their business model that makes sense. They have a product, but it's really hard for them to get customers or users or anybody to care. Where's you were almost the opposite situation where you had a ton of people who were touched by seeing Max. We're actually impacted. Who cared about what you were doing on talking to you about your business? Well, you couldn't fit a successful business model onto that. And I think it speaks to the fact that community is so good for growth. It's just so strong. If you want to actually build a loyal customer base and user base to organize them into a community. Even if you don't have a business model, it still seems to work on the growth and things. So question for both of you.

Since Derek also had a lot of success with growth turning sort of grind from just one small meet up into hundreds of events and conferences all over the world, what have you guys learned through your struggles and your trial's entrepreneurs about growth, about marketing and about getting people to care about the things you're building. Derek, why don't you go first, Since you been silent for a while? Well, I think that having one clear goal or to clear goals and everyone driving around that I think that helped us really. Early on, our goal was to get into 20 cities. And once you get into 20 cities, our goals in 50 cities. And it seemed to me in my brain that if we could get what we're doing in 50 cities, that somebody that was much more established, that was that had a much bigger brand, that it would be very hard for them,

too. Common displaces if we were in 50 cities. I don't know that that, you know, there are other people that were doing similar things to us, but we just sort of relentlessly focused on that one goal. And I moved my office back into my garage. I had a very I was sharing an office with someone, and this is just sort of previous, all the court in spaces and everything. And I moved back into my garage in like I worked and I dinner with my family and got my kids to bed. And then I went back and worked. And it was just around this goal we took, you know, phone calls at all hours of the night with trying to convince chapter leaders in different cities around the world to do it. And,

you know, we're just on Skype, sometimes for 56 hours a day, just trying to talk to people and find people that matched who we were and try to figure this out with lots of lots of failure. People without great it didn't work out. Others who didn't think would be great turned out to be great. So I think I like having a clear goal in the early on. Once you sort of figure out like this is the general direction I need to go. You don't need to. You don't need thio. You know, Start transmission. Alice, educate every startup team in the world or everyone in the world. That's not what the mission was. In the beginning,

I had no concept that there were hundreds of millions of dollars. I had no concept that and so but I couldn't see into 20 or 50 cities. I sort of thought once I got 50. Maybe we'd be saturated across the world. I knew we could get into 50 and then we find the hit 50 and then we plotted those dots on the map. First, we're like, OK, great. Like it's gonna be really hard for anybody else to catch us and copy it. So they should just partner with this. And then I plotted the dots on the map. Sick. Oh, my gosh. We're not even in,

you know, a fraction of the biggest cities in the world. And we're in different cities. You know, we have a chapter in, you know, in Reno or bolder or something. It's like she should. We don't even have a chapter in Paris yet or in London. And so it's just like then our mind sort of start to expand to what was possible. But But the only thing that matters is getting into 20 cities and getting into 50 cities. And we just were relentlessly focused on that one goal. And then we pop their heads up to that point, and then we re evaluate goals and set new goals. And I remember at one point somebody saying in one of her brainstorm sessions were in about 100 cities, they said.

They said, you know, what are we gonna do in war in 500 cities? And I just I remember laughing because they just thought It's just not possible to be invited so impossible to manage 500 cities. Not like who does that? Who has five or six? Well, now we have 650 cities and we have hosted events in over 800 cities, but we have 150 or so that are inactive. And so we don't we don't count those trying to reactivate those. But like now we're talking about what? How do we get to 1000 or two people that we work with some of the companies that work with their in thousands of cities? And it's like she how are you? I mean, I have it now, like I think that now,

how are you doing this in thousands of cities? That's impossible. But I have I have somebody. I'm talking to you right now. That's literally saying, like, What are we gonna do when we're in 10 10,000 cities? I'm like, this is just insane, But then you get there and then you're like, Oh, like, why did I ever think this isn't saying It's totally logical but could get here And just like, compounding interest of time and energy And, you know, and all this work overtime and now,

you know, many years later, you know, very hard it would be it would be stupid for somebody to try to copy, Start. I think they should just work with us or, you know, or or, you know, trying to be a partner or something, which people like Google and, you know, and into it and work on others have done. Um, there's no strikes on it, you know,

great partner hearts for many years. So, like these air that, you know, I think over time your mind expands and grows into you know what you can actually be and what this can can be common in the beginning, like just one or two really clear simple goals and just charging at them at all costs. You know that that was really helpful for us.

Yeah, I think to build on focus. So, like knowing what direction you're heading is really important. And then something I've learned is to give up control to give up control. To really great people, that could mean people on your team. And that could also mean your community. So I think, like, especially when you're a small indie kind of company, it's something to do everything yourself. And for a long time I probably needed to have my hands on everything too much, and I handled most of our growth. I handle most of our things and, you know, and then eventually,

like I hired, I was able to hire really great people. Um, so we have, like Erica McGill MacGillivray, who runs CMX Summit, who took our event to a level that I never could have and saw things that I couldn't see because she had a different level of experience with running events and different viewpoints, and that was hard. And I was really hard for me at first to give up that control because it's like kind of hitting over your baby to other people. But that that's what unlocked that next level of growth and then same. We hired Sam Weber about a year ago, who's now our head of growth of marketing, and he took all of our content in our marketing and over metrics and everything to a whole another level. And so if you have to be really clear on what your goals are like, they're excited, have that really clear focus and then put really great people in the position to execute on those goals and kind of like,

get out of the way Well, just try toe, unblock them and make sure they're set up to be successful. And I think you can continue that mentality into your community. So I like started crying, being driven by these local organizers who are running events all over the world. CMX has had local that organizer's all over the world. We've empowered members of the community. To be admin is an online community and to take more active roles there. We have an entire slack network that's completely run by the community. And so, you know, giving up this need to control every aspect of our brand in every aspect of the business, and trust our community members to to continue to grow and to take it to that next level. That's really how you grow a CZ. You empower other people to take that that special thing that you've built in, then spread it.

Easier said than done, especially as a founder of a tiny company where you run everything by yourself and you're worried other people won't understand it. Care about it as much as you do.

Yeah, and I think like we've also probably all had experiences where we handed it off to somebody and they didn't do a great job. And might we kind of, like, developed a sphere from those experiences that we can't end it off like they're not gonna do it as well as us? Might as well just do it all yourself. But I think you have to, like, keep keep trying because ultimately that's the only way things will scale beyond yourself.

So, David, you had a community of community managers. I think one of the coolest things about running in communities you just learned from so many talented people like we're talking about right now. What are some things that you learned from the people, the community leaders and your community? It Cemex?

I don't know. That's a big question. I learned an insane amount. I mean, we've had a couple 100 different speakers on our stage at CMX Summit who have all brought completely different perspectives and voices and tactics and things that they've shared. Um, I would say, like everything that I know is ah, combination of insights that I've learned from our community and and from the work that we've done I mean, I guess I would say that like, I've spent the last five years in this kind of meta role of building a community of community professionals and now, like working with Debbie has been kind of an exciting new experience where I get to actually think about building community for a brand again and focus on customers. And it overlaps really well with with heavy, obviously because, like Bevy, customers are also cmx community members. It's it's the same audience.

But instead of just building community largely for the sake of community, like with CMAX, now there's a bevy platform, which is this really powerful tool to help them manager communities. And so you know, babies still growing and and at a relatively early stage to a lot of other SAS products. And it's fun to think about, you know, the on boarding experience, and how do you create content of materials and support that ensures that people are really successful in using the product. And how can community contribute to that experience? How can you build a community that makes every single customer who uses your product feel not just supported and not just like they could get answers to their technical questions, but like they are truly valued and connected to everyone else who believes in that mission? And who's using that product so kind of taking all those lessons from the last five years and now getting to apply to really business.

Derek, What about you? You spent a decade as an entrepreneur. You've run an entire community full of founders. What are some of the things you've learned from that? That you've applied to Betty, especially getting started with heavy in the early days? Well, I always think that actually started. Grind is its own greatest success, that we made a mistake after mistake after mistake and then, you know, start doing these interviews with these influential and brilliant people who have been there and who had done it. And then you couldn't help with the end of these events, like go home and sort of sit back and chair and be like Oh my gosh, like, why am I not doing that and compound in the next one to get somebody else knew and somebody else do it?

Somebody else. And so you know, we applied all the things that we've learned up on the stages and from these people. One thing that I learned is I've learned is that spending time around these speakers of these very successful people, you know, in billionaires, in some cases people on the cover of Time magazine and Newsweek magazine or other things. I've learned that these people are a human and as similar to you as just about anybody. You know, you have spent a bunch of time on Steve Case's rise at the rest of us. 60 men interested Epic feature on them recently that you should check out if you haven't seen it or heard of it. I've spent hours and hours and hours around Steve Case observing him talking to him, you know, having dinner with him, traveling with him, And the overwhelming thing that I learned is that Steve Case,

who is one of these, like the Internet, you know, first Internet, I pose a well founder co founder. He is no different than anybody. He's no different than my uncle or my dad or, you know, my neighbor. Or like he's got the same issues that we all have so that that really start to empower me to say, like, wow, like this, people on the cover of magazines and having success that really like there, there. I mean,

you know, they say they're human beings like they're really not that different from from anybody else. So, uh, that's that's something. And you know, that other thing that I've learned is that despite people being somebody that's at the top of the food chain said somebody being really successful and, well, the and whatever a lot of these people, you know, they're still very thoughtful and kind and generous people and, you know, narrative that we have about a lot of, you know, the founders of Strike, uh,

Patrick and John being at the very, very top of that list thes. These guys have every reason in the world to be rude and to be demanding and to be, uh, you know, high mighty. And these were some of the most humble people I've ever met there also the smartest people literally that I think I've ever met. So it's like it's very interesting to see people at who have been incredibly successful in business who are also still, you know, just decent human beings. And that's that's not always the case that we see in the media. It's interesting listening to you guys talk about the things that you've learned because there's there's like the salient events where you hear somebody talk in the, you know, bestow some amazing wisdom or advice on you, and then you go home and you ponder it. Then there's like this undercurrent of things that you're not really aware that you're learning,

but you look back 10 years from now on, you're a totally different person and you realize you your entire world view has changed. Mostly blessing under this podcast are in the very early stages of their careers as founders and entrepreneurs. Their worldviews haven't changed that much, and they're gonna be completely different people five or 10 years from now. What advice did you guys have for this sort of fledgling entrepreneurs? How might they change the way they look at this entire journey today to help them be more successful. I I look at my entrepreneur career as a 20 or 30 year journey, so you know what happens to me this week is probably not that important, you know, unless it's something just absolutely crazy outlier think that happens, but generally speaking like it's not really going to matter that much. And so I'm not gonna get too worked up about it. Whether it's good or bad, it could happen. It's a dot on the radar and I'll get another dog next week and it'll be better or it'll be worse than the dot was today.

But I think when I left E A and started working for myself, I sort of thought like, Oh, I'm gonna like you know, I just my impression of it was more of like they're doing it for all of the wrong reasons. And I think that is the years and passed as the failures piled up. Um, and then is a few successes, which is what we spend most of this time talking about. It's David and I successes, which probably the things in certainly like that impacted us the most are the things that we think about the most probably failures. You gotta think, What am I gonna be doing in five or 10 or 15 or 20 years? And when I talked to somebody, am I treating them that way? And when I'm dealing with a customer,

am I treating them that way? And in my when I hire somebody, you know, I used to think like man, no one ever works companies from 1 to 3 years. And I have people. Now that I've worked with that mention my cofounder for nine years, I think he and I hope we work together for the rest of our lives. And I have other people that I've worked with for five or six years. So, like, now I'm thinking, Well, how could I get that person to work with me for 10 years? Or maybe can I add other people to that sort of career journey? We can all go through life together,

And so I think like I now just think about things that are much longer scale and it and I think if you think like that, like you won't get so, so despondent when when somebody shuts an important door on you and you won't get so you know you for it. When somebody opens the door for you that you really need open you kind of like you kind of stay in the middle and just realize like it's gonna happen flow. And I'm gonna take it as it comes and just she plotting long And, you know, I'll look up every couple of years and see Wow, I've personally made a lot of progress. Wow. My business has made a lot of progress. Wow. The people who work with me has really grown as human beings. Wow, my customers, their lives have really been impacted by what we're doing. Those things to me are ultimately,

like the most rewarding things that I've gotten from being arch. You're not speaking or I'd love this podcast Corland. I'm really grateful to do it, but, um, it's not speaking. It's not pressed. Certainly not press, you know, it's not the praise of people. Give me It's not what you know. My parents think, Oh, are you know, my in laws think about me. It's really these core things that you know,

um, I personally growing are my team members around me. Are they growing or my customers? You know, finding joy in my product and success and, you know, is the business Is the business healthy? And is it more helping today than it was? You know, before when I last looked at it and, you know, hopefully, hopefully people. If they don't have that perspective, maybe they can start trying to find that perspective. It's It's good for what they're doing. David, what about you? How do you think your perspective has changed throughout the course of your journey? Is the founder And how do you think some of these changes might benefit others who are just now getting started?

Well, first, I kind of wanna just like that. What they're just said really reminded me of a line from Ted Rheingold was an entrepreneur, founder of Castor and dog stare, too, of the earliest most successful online communities, Hey, passed away recently, but one of the messages he left it was actually the auto responder that he put up while while he was in the hospital. But when it one of the key messages from that was the journey is the destination, and that really stuck with me It's all everything that Derek just described that I think for most of my entrepreneurial career, you kind of paint this picture of this point that you're going to reach where now you're successful. Now you have the answers. Now you've done it all, and you're you're accomplished and people see you a successful, and you have this,

like state that you imagine you're gonna reach when in reality like the day you reach that, you're probably gonna be terribly bored. You're probably never gonna reach that, right, because you're an entrepreneur and you're always gonna have more questions. You're always gonna have more challenges. You're always going to be trying to improve yourself. And the day that you're not growing and you're not seeing yourself improved, you're gonna get really antsy, and you're gonna look for new challenges. And so just reminding yourself that Ah, the journey is the destination. There isn't this destination that you're going to reach where now you have everything figured out. What you're doing now is the point. Your experience now, whether it's good or bad,

and that's gonna change from day to day or even out an hour to hour. That's what's really that that is it. That's the experience. And finding that appreciation for that experience is what's important. And then I think one other thing that I've learned is just to, like, not take all advice at face value. You know, early on in my entrepreneurial career. And I still do this where, like you'll see someone say something on stage or tweet something about house, how you should build a business or how you shouldn't build a business or what you should do to grow what you shouldn't do to grow. And, um, the temptation is immediately apply. That's what you're doing and say like,

Oh, well, shit, I should be doing that. Or, um well, I've been doing this thing all realm. What I've actually found in practice is that most advices not that helpful. You have to take into context where that person giving the advice is coming from. So if somebody's running a $1,000,000,000 company and telling you how to build your culture, that may not be helpful for you if you're just starting your company and you have two employees. People coming from different backgrounds with different levels of privilege affect their advice. People give advice based on what they know best. So if you asked ah, 100 different marketers how to grow your business, the ASIO person will tell you to do a CEO that adds personal,

tell you to do ads a community personal tell you to do community. And so you're going to get all this advice online offline from mentors from advisers. And it can really create analysis paralysis and make it hard to make decisions. And so, uh, listen to advice. Consider it, but always kind of come back to your own truth and come back to what you know and what you believe. Follow that because you have to kind of figure out where your center of gravity is so that you're not constant being pulled in every different direction. I think that following too much different advice has directly led to failures that I've seen throughout my entrepreneur Oak.

Yeah, it would really suck to follow somebody else's advice and have that take your start up to the graveyard because you don't even have the satisfaction of knowing that at least you did things your own way and you really gave it your best shot. Anyway, I've enjoyed having both of you guys on the podcast. Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about your journeys to start up grind? Cmx and bevy? Yeah, absolutely. My emails. This Derek, it's dark green dot com. That's my primary email for start grant stuff or just advice in general. So feel free to reach out to me if I could be useful And, uh, you know, in terms of star friend, just go to start crying dot com slash about us if you want to learn more about it or if you want to attend an event in your city,

Um and you're not sure it's worth it. Just you can drop me a note and we'll get you get you a ticket for a local event. Um, but dear J. Anderson

on Twitter and I'm at David Spinks on Twitter David at cmx hub dot com. You can find everything out about cmx at cmx hub dot com. You could find our conference there. You can read more about the bed, the acquisition on our blogged there. Yeah, that's it.

All right. Thanks so much, guys.

Thanks for having us. This is great.

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