Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Gina Bianchini - Helping Creators Build Communities - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 51]

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

My guest today is Gina Bianchini, founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, which gives creators a platform to start, grow and own their social communities.   In our conversation, we cover the differences between leadership and management, the lessons Gina learned building a similar business in the 2000s with Marc Andreessen, and the elements that make up a thriving community. We talk about community design, finding ways to connect like-minded people, why it’s so important to create movement, and what the future may hold for creators.   Please enjoy this great conversation with Gina Bianchini.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is the ultimate marketing platform for e-commerce. With targeted segmentation, email automation, SMS marketing, and more, Klaviyo helps you create your ideal customer experience.   See why brands like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad trust Klaviyo to grow their business. For a free trial, check out klaviyo.com/founders.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Versett. Versett designs, builds, and scales digital platforms for some of the world's most ambitious companies. If you require a high-performance team to tackle a hard or ambitious problem, then Versett is the firm to call. To check them out, visit versett.com/patrick.    -----   Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:02:35] - [First question] - A period in Gina’s career of deep intensity that she learned from [00:04:28] - Solving ways to preserve her energy as a high performing entrepreneur [00:08:19] - How much of her day is spent doing things she wants to do  [00:11:24] - What is unique to leadership that differs from management [00:14:49] - The insight that led to what eventually became Mighty Networks [00:27:19] - Enabling features of a community that Mighty Networks offers creators  [00:31:51] - Key symptoms of a healthy online community [00:37:35] - Differences between their emerging communities and the power of belonging [00:41:38] - Turning movement and accomplishment into a software platform [00:47:32] - Tying passion into purpose and the structure of a movement [00:50:20] - The biggest potential risks and challenges that Mighty Networks faces [00:52:56] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for Gina 

This week's episode of Founders Field Guide is sponsored by Clavio. Want to deliver marketing moments that last a lifetime, Clavio is the ultimate marketing platform for e-commerce. With targeted segmentation, email automation, SMS marketing, and more. Clavio helps you create your ideal customer experience and keep your customers coming back. See why brands like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad trust Clavio to grow their business. Get a free trial at clavio.com slash founders. That's K-L-A-V-I-O.

com slash founders. This episode is brought to you by Verset. Verset designs, builds, and scales digital platforms for some of the world's most ambitious companies like TD Bank, Getty Images, and American Express. If you require a high-performance team to tackle a hard or ambitious problem, then Verset is the firm to call. Listeners to the show can get free access to their private internal repository, containing the most interesting essays, memos, and reading the Verset team has discovered across the internet over the past 10 years. To check it out, visit for set.com slash Patrick. That's V-E-R-S-E-T-T-T-com slash Patrick.

Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Founders Field Guide. Founders Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way, and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founders Field Guide is part of the colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, notes and resources to keep learning at join colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do

not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunacy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaunosite Asset Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest today is Gina Biancini, founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, which gives creators and platform to start, grow, and own their social communities. In our conversation, we cover the differences between leadership and management, the lessons

Gina learned building a similar business in the 2000s with Mark Andreessen and the elements that make up a thriving community. We talk about community design, finding ways to connect like-minded people, why it's so important to create movement, and what the future may hold for creators. Please enjoy this great conversation with. Gina Bianchini. So Gina, we were just talking about some of our favorite books and especially Bob Eiger's book, specifically the opening of that book when he's dealing with the opening of, I think, the Shanghai Disney World or Disneyland and the horrific death of a child at another

resort in Florida all in the same morning. It's this harrowing experience. What in your professional career does that episode most call to mind? Like, what was a period of just deep intensity in your work. And what do you remember most from that episode? I wish I could say that there was one day where it's like all kind of hit. But anybody who chooses this path of entrepreneurship knows that on any given day, something's probably going pretty well. And then something is like a mess. And to me, both the challenge and the fun is, okay, how do you show up for a podcast when you just had four other meetings that are massively context switching. How to treat that as a challenge that I want to take on versus, oh my God, I just need to stop. I just need to stop and have lunch and have a break.

When I was trying to raise a series A and we were at the 11th, 12th hour and they tried to change the rules on it. And at the same point in time, navigating a brand new customer that we closed them, it would make the biggest difference in the world. And yet, I, I feel like the times I have had those moments, what I just described actually has happened to me. I don't feel like that is a different day than any other day where I'm like, okay, how do I keep the North Star of what we're doing? How do I keep the things that I'm really proud of and excited about in perspective when I'm like navigating something where I'm like, why didn't that get done the way that I thought I was going to get done? What did I miss? How did this work or how didn't this work?

You mentioned you were interested in how entrepreneurs manage their energy through the course of a day, and you're kind of alluding to it here too. What interests you about that and how have you solved that problem? Like, I've certainly experienced that context switching stress and anxiety. It's like a weird drug that if you're not careful, you can get just buried by. And I'm just curious how others do this, kind of how you do it yourself. I love this topic. Money stops and resources stop being a challenge at a certain point in time. When you're generating enough revenue and you're able to raise it. money and things like that. And attention and scarcity of attention is, I would say, the new most valuable resource any of us have. If that's the case, then how I manage my energy or spend my time

is the most important thing and the most important set of decisions that I can make in any given day. That is truly the thing that any of us, in an entrepreneurial context, we have the most control over. Because that's part of the reason you're an entrepreneur and you're in charge and you don't work for other people, but you work for the people who work for you. So for me, one of the things that I started to do a few years ago was pay attention to when was I at my most creative? When did I have the most energy? When do I have the least amount of energy? Can I build my schedule to make sure that the times where I am the most creative, and by creative meaning, I'll go to sleep thinking about a problem. The last thing in the world I'm going to do is wake up in the morning

with 14 meetings first thing that doesn't let me take the time to process how to solve that problem. So my schedule, I started a few years ago waking up, sitting down with printer paper. Whatever I start the day thinking about, I just write it down. I think it's called morning pages or whatever. Like I read about it in some book, write down your goals every morning. And so I started of doing that. And then I realized what was actually better for me was just write. So sit down with a latte. I sit down with some paper and I just write for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. And that has been fantastic because then what happens is that time of like 30 minutes to an hour, it's my best thinking. And then I basically think about the rest of my day is implementing whatever

those ideas were first thing in the morning. So I'll work out and then I start my day. I know some people like start by working out. I feel totally different when I work out versus when I don't work out. And then the other thing is I feel absolutely no guilt or sense of obligation to be in any meeting that I don't want to be in. And I know that that might almost sound controversial, but like I think there are so many meetings that just don't have to take. place or that I just don't need to be in. And then there's other meetings where whether it's a topic I'm curious about, whether it is something that I feel like a half hour before a project gets started to kick it off with the things that I think are most important about it, that's going to be so much more important in terms of just efficiency and effectiveness than a review well after the fact

where it's like somebody thinks that a CEO, I'm just going to sign off on the thing that they want to do and have thought a lot about, and that hasn't worked particularly well. So that is how I do it. And then by about 11 or 12, I am no longer creative. To me, that protected morning time where it's not about Slack and it's not about Zoom and it's not about meetings and it's not about other people, that has been one of the most important things that I've done. What percent of a given day on average do you think the things in the day are things that you really are excited to be a part of? And do you try to manage that percentage up over time? I would say 80 percent of them.

Because again, if I'm not excited about it... Just don't go. I don't. Especially as I've gotten what I hope is better as I go along. I also am like much clearer in terms of the people. that I'm going to work with and that are going to report to me that are going to be, what is that successful dynamic and like the kinds of people that are going to have a great time working together and then there are going to be other people. Like if you want a lot of direction,

I'm probably not your person. And at the same point in time, if you want to be challenged that we can build something together, I think I'm a great partner. I think that I pay very careful attention to wanting to work with the people that I work with and that I respect them. I feel like I can learn from them. But I also feel in addition to learning from them, we can collaborate and together we're going to come up with better ideas than certainly I can come up with on my own or that they can come up with on their own. And that kind of alchemy is why I love my job. So there is not a lot of meetings that I have in any given day that I'm just like, oh, I'm so glad we're going to have another 30-minute Zoom

where everybody gets to check a box that we all sat around and looked at this thing and feel really good about it. There's a time and a place for that, but I try to minimize it as much as I can. If we were to somehow pull every CEO of a certain size and they had taken truth serum or something, and we asked that same question, what do you think the percentage would be?

Look, I think that there are people that are better managers than I am. Your Mighty Networks, we think that is the I, the it. So it's like, how are you managing your own energy and your own contribution? And then there's the we of how are we working together? Is there a high degree of trust? Do we have the right agreements in place? And then there's the it. What is it that we are trying to do together? And I think that for a very specific kind of executive, I'm great with what that we dynamic looks like. I'm very confident that in terms of creating those team dynamics that we can create and have created something really healthy and really invest in that. But if you want a manager coach, I'm probably not your person. And that's why our other executives, I've really gone out of my way to make sure that we're hiring people who are fantastic manager coaches. And I've had a lot of confidence that the people that we've put in roles of managers are really good at it. And I do think there is a difference between management and leadership. And I invest heavily and think a lot about leadership.

and what that looks like. And that's also why that time in the morning is so important because as a leader, more than a manager, as a leader, it's critical to always know where we're going and anticipate things three or four steps ahead. Maybe dig in a little bit more there. The difference between very specifically the leadership component, I think I understand what you'd mean by management, but what is unique to leadership that isn't a requirement of management? leadership is the why and what we are going to go do, whereas management is great, how are we going to go get there? How are we going to execute on it? What are those smaller strategic questions that we

need to go answer? But leadership is, why are we doing what we're doing? What is it that we're doing to deliver on that why? So for example, for us at Mighty Networks, we are building towards a world where there are a million unique and vibrant communities that are mastering something interesting or important together, that are building their own cultures with their own look and feel and their own people and their own mixed and matched combination of features so that they can actually create in a way that only really engineers have been able to create up until this point in time. And that is our vision. And living in that world where every, everybody can show up in a community and instantly feel welcomed.

And when it's the right community for them, there's a strong motivation for that community, that they are able to meet the most relevant people very naturally and normally. And the amazing magical world of software delivers on that relevancy, especially when you have the context of a specific interest or passion or goal. And then from there, this ability for the software to really make and build deeper connections that make membership so exciting and powerful and just ultimately help members achieve the results and transformations that they want in their lives. Community is amazing at that. So that to me, and for our team is the why. We're doing this because communities unlock results and transformation for members, especially when they're.

They are fueled and funded by digital subscriptions or payments because people pay attention to what they pay for. And when somebody is paying attention, they are much more likely to achieve the results that they want. They stick with something longer, especially if they're in a community. And like, the example I was used is you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, I don't want to get up. It's too cold out. I don't want to like go work out. And you look at your phone and there's like a bunch of people posting messages about having worked out. What do you do?

You're like, okay, fine. I'll go work out. And if you do that enough times, guess what? You've achieved the goal of health or stamina that you want. And that is where a community is just better than any gadget or elixir or equipment or anything that promises transformation. A community actually gets you there. So in that context, what do we have to build at Mighty Networks to be able to deliver results in transformation for members? an amazing, easy experience for that host of that community. And then if we do those two things, right, we can unlock that world with a million unique

and vibrant communities mastering something interesting or important together. Now, that's all to just even get to, okay, great, now what are we going to go build? That's what leadership is. I think it's the right excuse and time to spend probably a good chunk of our conversation on what you've learned about community. And if that's the sort of North Star that your infrastructure or at a platform enabling the million communities out there that are interested in whatever it is, they're interested in.

We're not quite at a million yet, but still keep going there. Aspirationally, rewind back to the first day or time that you ever even thought about mighty networks and the experiences that you had had thus far that were formative for what you then ended up doing and are doing today. Maybe walk us through one or two or those experiences. I was like understanding the soil from which the idea emerges. So what was your experience up to that point that was most important? important in terms of the direction of mighty networks?

I grew up in a time and a place that everyone I knew, every adult I knew, every kid I knew, had an interest. They had hobbies. It was a culture of interest and passion. So, for example, my father restored old cars. So when he was 16, he got a Model T Ford, model A Ford, excuse me, with like a rumble seat and like the whole thing. super old and restored it from parts, was always interested and building. We totally had that

garage with the car studio and fancy cars that we weren't allowed to touch his children and also like put to work in terms of whether it was scraping paint or whether it was doing other forms of child manual labor. And then at the same time, my mom was interested in so many different things. When I was a kid, she was raising guinea pigs so that she could show them. So on the weekends, my dad and our family, we were members of a Model T Ford Club. Then there was a guinea pig club of Santa Clara County. And so this was the environment. I mean, two miles away was where the home brew computer club met.

It's very normal for the people and the environment I grew up in, for people to take things apart and put them back together. for me, I was like, yeah, let me play my Atari. Let me play pitfall on my Atari. Like, that's cool or whatever. We were, like, being taught how to code, but like, that was not my thing. My thing was how do people work? How do groups work? And I played sports growing up.

And to me, just that peripheral vision of, like, how is this all working together to achieve a goal? Literally, how do we score some goals, whether it was in soccer or field talking? So that was, to me, always what. I was passionate about and obsessive about. So I specifically loved studying social movements and political movements. And fast forward, went to Stanford, majored in political science just because it to me was how I understood systems and systems thinking.

And then got my first job at Goldman Sachs in their high technology group when it was literally five people. It was viewed as a career limiting move to be in the technology industry because it was like, IPOs are only $25 million. Who wants to do that? It was 1994 and a lot happened in 1994 related to technology. And fast forward, when the social web started to emerge in 2002, 2003, 2004, it just made sense to me because I had spent my formative years thinking about communities

and people and teams and how human systems work. And then I spent the first part of my career up until that point, I guess six, eight years at that point, working in technology. And my experience in the technology industry has been different, I think, than maybe some other people where I wasn't an engineer, but nobody like made me feel bad about it. And I felt and was surrounded by so many amazing engineers who wanted to explain things to me. And to this day, I feel incredibly fortunate that I'm still surrounded by people who are builders. and engineers who just want to explain things to me. And, like, great engineers love to talk about what they're building and how they're building it. And I've just been very fortunate in my career to have had a front row seat to those experiences.

So when all of this was coming together, I was like, I get this. One of my friends had started this professional social network called LinkedIn. And then another friend of mine was, like, investing in, like, Friendster. and then another friend of mine was like, oh, I'm really interested in this user-generated content. And so it all kind of just, it was all happening in like a five-block radius of each other in downtown Palo Alto. And so when I started Ning with my friend, Mark, and what we were doing was let's go create a programmable platform for social applications. That just made sense to me. And what we found actually, so we put out this programmable platform for social applications, building it, thinking it was going to

be similar to what people had done with the web and websites. There would be social sites. What we found within the first year was our customer was more about normal people that weren't ever going to learn how to code. They weren't ever going to take our primitives and turn them into new applications that they were building on. And that was our original vision at NING. We pivoted. And in February of 2007, we launched NING networks, which was a drag and drop platform. for creating your own social network for anything. And that took off. And that took off nearly overnight. It was basically MySpace had taught people that they could have creativity and that they could trick out their MySpace pages. And it was before Facebook had opened itself up beyond colleges. And Ning really just

had a moment as a very pioneering service. For me, in my experience, when we launched Ning networks and we started to have, whether it was people who were navigating type 1 diabetes or other people who collected PEZ dispensers, 14 hip hop stars, the Dallas Mavericks. Like everybody was like, oh my God, this is so cool. We can have our own social networks. And we can have our own place, photos and videos and a blog, make it our own design. And then if we want to like get into the source code, we can do that too. that was when all, I know this has been a very long story,

but that was the moment where I was like, I get this. These are my people. And people are awesome. They're just awesome. Now, did we have some dark networks? For sure. But I would say on balance, when I have watched people have access to creating and creative software,

to build communities that get more valuable to every member with each new person who joins and contributes, it's magic. That was when I knew what I was going to work on forever. And we made two mistakes at Ning, two big mistakes at Ning. And I chalked them up to us being early and us also being in Silicon Valley. One was that we thought it was an advertising model as opposed to a subscription service. When I left Ning, we had three million Ning networks created, 300,000 active on a month basis, reaching nearly 100 million people around the world, about 60% of our traffic was outside the U.S., 40% in the U.S. And we thought it was going to be an ad business, like it was going to be AdSense for social networks. And our unique take was

going to be that they were interest-based. So if you had a Ning network, for offbeat brides, Doc Martins would love to advertise on your NING network. That was a model. What we didn't realize or didn't really pay attention to is that we had a subscription service that allowed you to pay us a whopping $36 a month to, like, remove some of the NING branding and run your own ads and, like, do some various things. We had IBM paying us $36 a month. They had like 100,000 people in an intranet using Nang and like we were charging them $36 a month.

Now, needless to say, this was 2008, 2009. It wasn't a thing. Like it just didn't cross our minds to be a SaaS business that was serving our customers. And then the other piece was with so much creativity, so much that you could do on the web and like make it so awesome. When mobile came along, it was like, oh, how do we do this? So we ended up selling Neng for not an insignificant amount of money, like it's nothing to sneeze at, but certainly didn't feel like I was finished by any stretch. And I love this customer.

And so I started Mighty Software to deliver your own unique community as it's evolved into. it was very much in the spirit of this is a SaaS business, we're going to be mobile first, and that we're going to continue this journey. I'm unapologetic in the fact that I've just continued to build on the same idea of creators, entrepreneurs, and brands should have their own corner of the internet, and that it shouldn't be static websites. And that's, I think, one of the saddest things about the last decade is that brands and entrepreneurs and creators felt like they couldn't compete, quote unquote, with Facebook.

They had to go where all of the people were. And the thing I've known to be true, the world is leaning in our direction. And I think it's going to continue to move in this direction is that actually the software is catching up to be able to offer a member, consumer, end users, whatever you want to call it, but to offer a member as compelling of an experience. And I would actually argue an even more compelling experience in one's own destination community. When you have a community, it's not just I'm talking out at you, you're talking back at me, or I'm talking out at you, and I'm going to continue to talk out at you, and I'm

competing in your feed on Instagram or Facebook or on Twitter to keep your attention. Once you have members in your own community, you're not only bringing people there, but they're coming back for other members. They are a member of your own community, your own network. That's what we're ultimately doing, which is 90% of software value over the last 30 years has been created by companies that had a network effect. They built a platform or a network that got more valuable to every member with each new person who joined and contributed. or any node in the network that was added to that network. What has kept people on Facebook is that they felt like they couldn't have their own network effect. They couldn't create because people wouldn't come.

Well, they're not going to come if your website sucks. They're not going to come if you're not building something that surfaces the most relevant members to each other that breaks the ice, that brings people back to learn from each other, to talk to each other, to meet each other in more comfortable ways. From where I'm sitting, what we are fundamentally doing is essentially unbundling and making possible any creator, entrepreneur, or brand to have their own network effect in the same way that Shopify enables individual merchants or brands to have their own fully integrated e-commerce experience. I also am a passionate believer that one, the world bends towards

decentralization. It bends towards fragmentation and unbundling. And two, people are frigging awesome. And the creativity that they have and the things that they want to do are not going to be held by the same feed we've been scrolling for the last 15 years. I totally buy the vision. And I'm a huge fan of enabling platforms. And what's unique here is that you're sort of like handing off the network effect. You're not trying to capture it for yourself. I mean, the Shopify comparison is very apt, I think. And it begs the question, like, where the line is. I did this with Toby. And Toby says it really elegantly, which is like, it's the merchant's responsibility to have the great product and to sell it. We want to just do everything else. Or I think of Bezos's idea for AWS, I think he told the story

that Guinness factory that they were doing their own electricity generation. He said, you don't need to do that. Like, the electricity doesn't take the beer taste better. And so the question is, what's electricity and what makes the beer takes better and where's that line? So from your perspective, for Mighty Networks, what is the electricity? What are the enabling features of a community that you've learned need to be there that you can do for them? That isn't their magic. And then I want to hear about what their magic is. There's two pieces to that.

We think about them as the table stakes features. We call our customers hosts. They are looking for, okay, does it have profiles check? Does it have events check? Does it have chat? Check. Does it have the ability to post articles check? Big surprise for us was, after we launched, our hosts were like, this is all great. You guys have a phenomenal community platform. Can you just pull in some online courses? And we're like, oh, sure. We'll just like, like, and they're like, yeah, no, we're going to need you to build online courses into the platform.

For like six months, we were like, what? Really? And then we did. And it turns out that that's really popular. And specifically this ability to have online courses and community together in one place, what does it do? It allows the course to be much more effective. More people are going to come back because it's not just about your content. It's about the other members taking the course. It's kind of obvious. Like college. Exactly. For us checking off those features and then we're about to come out with video and going live and all of these things that folks want. That's sort of, I would say, the sort of externally facing set of things that we need to do that just even get us in the door. Now, the things we're the most excited about, the things that we are building behind the scenes,

that again, if we do our jobs right, they will feel increasingly like magic, like just being at like a phenomenal party. But they're all around, how do we connect the most relevant members to each other? How do we break the ice? How do we create a platform that if a host brings in 10 members, that those 10 members are able to see what are unique about each other, what do they have in common with each other, and what are the ways that they can just get to know each other such that the value of the network is not the host content, which is kind of where we're at in the evolution of whether you want to call it the passion economy, creator economy, or just evolution of community.

So to me and to our team, being able to offer both of those things at one time is really what sets us apart as a platform and is going to increasingly, again, feel like magic. Because the challenge of social media when it comes to making those connections between the most relevant people, they're trying to do it without any context. If you think about it, it's like the equivalent of general AI. It's just super, super hard when you're trying to connect the most relevant 2 billion people. It gets a heck of a lot easier when there is the context of an interest or a passion or a goal and a host that is setting up and creating the motivation for that community.

But what we're doing that's pretty special is that intelligence layer on top of, okay, who are the members that should know each other? And that's just not happening on other platforms. It should. I think it will. But we just happen to be ahead of the curve on that and working on things that are easier to work on when you don't self-identify as a we're a chat platform or we do audio or we do video.

When you are defined by your feature as opposed to, in our case, we're building a network effect in a box. when you do that, building that magic in for how your members are meeting and building relationships with each other is one of the most important things that we can do. And it's the thing that excites us the most. If I were to oversimplify it, you've got a host or set of hosts that want to create a new digital space, a new community. They pay you just for the platform itself, presumably as they bring on new members, they can

charge members so they can run a business. And you probably have some sort of participation in that from a business standpoint. If I'm starting a new community, I'm a new host, you get the master of you down into all these different communities to see how they function quantitatively. From a quantitative standpoint, what does community health look like? What does the healthiest community have as features? Is it the number of pairwise connections between members that aren't the host? Is it a number of chats per member per day?

What are like North Stars for the health of a community like this? At the beginning of any community, a host is going to do a little bit of work. They're going to lay out the rules of the game. What are we doing? How are we doing it? And that's where we have features for things like polls or prompts or we even have templated articles. So it just like makes it really easy to get started. And then what you want to see after about 30 days is that the members are talking to each other. And that might be in the contributions that members are making.

We think about contributions as like they're posting, they're contributing in a chat, they're replying to other people's chats. They are not just chats, but the threaded conversations because we have all of those things. But they're DMing with each other. We have DMs per members and things like that, participating in courses and then sticking around. And all of those things, actually it turns out get easier if you're charging for your community or your course. We have up into the right engagement pretty much across every kind of mighty network. But because of a mighty network can be free or paid or you can make it freemium.

where your front door to your Mighty network is free. And then you can charge for a course or membership in a group within a Mighty network and then also bundle courses and groups and different things as well. So there's a lot of flexibility there. People pay attention to what they pay for. And we are seeing that the networks on Mighty that are charging money have more engagement. members are actually building relationships with each other faster and more efficiently and effectively. They're sticking around longer. And what has been crazy cool about it is, I'm glad we

started off with like every day in the life of an entrepreneur is like a little bit of good, a little bit of bad because it is, especially when we're growing kind of as fast as we are. But I will say, now I'm going to give you the good stuff. So one of the things that is so fun about Mighty Networks is 76% of Mighty Networks that charge for either a course or group or access actually have sales of that course group or access. 76%. So the probability that if you show up at Mighty Networks and you have that interest, that passion, that goal that you are bringing people together around, it is highly likely that you are going to be able to sell memberships to that when you choose to bring your community and your courses and content together in one place.

Now, second thing is that those networks, it has an extraordinarily long tail. So the vast majority of people who are running subscriptions successfully don't have a massive following. They are creating really deep, really powerful communities with less than 50 people. and they're charging anywhere from $30 a month to $500 a year or more. They're seeing great engagement, members making connections with each other, and sticking around. And that is the power of bringing content and community together in one place and not trying to, like, set up your Patreon rewards in one place and then send people over to Discord. and then Discord is like super crazy and it's really hard to figure out

who is the most relevant people to me here and where are all the other newbies and how is this working and what is going on here? The metric is how quickly you said 30 days, I think members are talking to each other, probably more, and obviously it's not sustainable for a host to talk to every single member. So you need that intra-group communication.

It's crazy that in 2021, most creators are trying to answer private DMs. There's no skill. to that. You literally can't do it. So who's winning in that? Instagram has their own network effect. But how can you as a creator who's trying to manage their DMs ever get any scale? The only way you can get scale is if you are connecting your members or your followers to each other and giving them the conditions by which they find value from each other. This is not controversial or rocket science. To me, I sort of feel at times like the crazy person who's like, guys, this is how a network's

been built for 30 plus years. We need to give creators and entrepreneurs and brands the opportunity to build their own network effects. And the benefits of that for members of these communities is going to be awesome. It is going to be awesome because they will be able to achieve the results and transformation that they want in their lives. And they'll be able to do it in the way that it's just not possible in social media that has created a true epidemic of loneliness. I remember Jason Citron of Discord saying when they really dug down to the bottom of what was going on and why this thing was working, it was this idea of belonging, that everyone

was seeking some sort of feeling of belonging. And effectively, these mighty networks are something to which one can then go belong. So it's a very cool job to be done. How do you see the difference between the types of communities? And maybe I'll say like between a community and like a movement. We were talking about cults before we hit record. And so obviously there's good and there's bad movements. What have you seen there?

Like in terms of looking at the data, is it really top heavy, meaning the top 20% of the communities have 80% of the members or something? And the long tail thing is that that's not true. We see a massive long tail, which is by the way, why we're set up the way that we're set up. Harkening back to Ning, we had a very strong power locker. We have one at Mighty. Our tail is much longer today, which I think is cool. Here's what I'll

say about belonging. I think belonging feels static. So belonging feels like, oh, I belong in this place, and therefore I will belong in this place forever. And what I've actually observed about the most successful communities is that they actually have movement to them. It's a journey. And for most members, it's a journey to, whether it's to get better in their career or to explore a particular art form or learn something new and learn something new surrounded by people where you're like, I'm pretty awesome because I'm looking around and I'm surrounded by people I think are awesome and therefore I think I'm a little bit more awesome than I was before I belonged in this place. But there is this sense when we talk about community as this singular noun and

belonging as a thing that like we wake up in the morning and we're like, oh, yeah, we belong. The way to solve the cold start problem over and over and over again is by giving a community a goal. We talk about it as the big purpose. What is the motivation for your community? And it's got to have movement to it. We bring together. Who do you bring together to? What are we going to do together? And I always say this, learn, share, and grow is like the Charlie Brown adult voice of community building. It just doesn't mean anything to anybody anymore, but like make better or more well-informed decisions, navigate and define what it means to be a traitor or what it means to be a user experience designer in 2022 so that we can. What are the rewards and benefits? Again,

I think sometimes people get stuck at the identity or they get stuck at the belonging step as if it's this finite thing, people join something that is new to them because they want something different. They want results. They want their lives to look or feel different than what they are today. And I think that the most successful community designers and entrepreneurs going forward, and this is true for brands as well, are those that are going to be offering members, mastery, results, transformation, and that we're going to go co-create, we're going to go build something together. And I think that that's one of the things we're seeing in all of these, whether you call them headless brands or crypto clubs, where the NFT is the price of membership. But it's because an NFT unlocks not just the community, but creating something new together.

And I think that that is what's missing from the vast majority of what's viewed as a community today when it's just chat or it's whizzing by you in your Facebook feed. And it's something that we know to be true, not just because of the features we brought together in the amazing mighty networks that we have today, but the fact that this has been universal for at least me and what I have watched over the last 15 years. It's an awesome idea. And I'm really curious how it figures into actual product and software. So if movement and achievement and accomplishment is the engine that keeps these things going,

what does that look like in terms of codifying that? Courses make a lot of sense in this regard. You can start and finish a course. But what else have you learned about trying to build these sorts of things into an actual community software platform? So number one, you've got to have multiple features in one place. certainly have heard a lot of it over the years of like, oh, well, you really need to focus on one thing. Well, guess what?

Focusing on one thing has created a mess for entrepreneurs and creators and brands. They're Frankenstining, all of these different services together because we're going to carve out and be video provider for personal trainers. Or we're going to be the events platform for small groups. The reality is, and again, because of our North Star at Mighty Networks is to create a network effect as a hosted service, it just makes sense to bring events and articles and chat and threaded comments and polls and prompts. But again, that's all the things we're going to do together. The magic that we believe is a part of our platform today and only going to get stronger from here is the ways that we're connecting the most relevant members to each other. Today,

it's by members near you, members like you, members who care about the same topics, members that you're in the same course with. Over time, all of these building blocks actually are being used today right now for host creating movement in their networks, in their communities. And that comes with the way we teach it in our community design accelerator is you've got your big purpose, That's 80% of it. If you don't have a compelling motivation for that community, you don't have clarity around what you're going to do together. And that's really, again, that movement, that journey that you're taking people on.

And what are the incredibly valuable rewards of doing that? It doesn't work. And then after that, what gets really easy is we talk about like, how do you lay out? And this is less about features and more about strategy. And again, software, hopefully you're able to deliver great strategy. And that's how we think about blending these two things, community design and a mighty network. So we talk about your year in the life. What is the year in the life of your member?

What is your member able to do a year from now that they are not able to do today? It just seems so obvious. And yet it's actually not totally obvious. When you're talking about belonging and it feels so much like, okay, well, what are we doing right now? And it's like, no, no, no, what are you setting up for your member to be able to do a year from now that they're not able to do today? And that's where having courses or having events, because again, one of the other things that we then think is really important is then as you deliver on that year in the life, how are you going to help that member and all of your members go from where they are today to where they want to go, which by the way is what people pay for. People pay for the promise of results in transformation. That's why there is a booming advertising business on Instagram.

It literally took it over from late-night infomercials. It is about the promise of transformation. It is about the promise of progress. And a community actually delivers on it. And so when you think about then, okay, how do you deliver on that year in the life? How do you bring that big purpose or the motivation for the community into someone's day-to-day life? Well, you do it really with three things that are pretty obvious. Monthly themes.

So that, again, there's movement. It's not that this community is static. and I'm going to just expect all of my members to chat and share gifts every day. That will happen. You can address the cold start problem, which again, unlock so many more people to be able to do this, both as hosts and as members, by offering monthly themes that build on each other,

that keep it interesting and different. It's also easier to manage. A weekly calendar, Tuesdays at 9 a.m., we hop on a live call. Thursdays at 4 p.m., we hop on a live call. on Mondays, we offer what this week's challenge is going to be. By Friday, upload the results of your challenge to the community, to a specific topic. So that's a weekly calendar that, again, is supporting those monthly themes. And then lastly, daily actions.

And the daily actions are really designed for members to meet each other, whether that's a poll, that, again, super simple thing, but never launch a poll that doesn't have a final answer, which is, tell us more in the comments. That simple decision, tell us more in the comments, starts some of the best conversations that I've seen across our communities. When you think about just those five simple elements, and then we also, in community design,

ask for five agreements, try new things, stay curious, reframe, listen and adapt, and trust the process. Because so much of this, and I think, again, this is an area in addition to the myths of I have to have a big audience, to be successful with a subscription. I have to produce all of this content.

You don't. The other big one is I am going to put something out there and have to do all of the work. It's just simply not true. It's simply not true. Rather, when you are able to have strategy that then you package that with software that can deliver on that strategy, you can create something that is a paid subscription with 30 members and have it be pretty damn special. Yeah, it's amazing.

All the points in the community of design, that makes me wonder if we've missed anything. So you've got this idea of the big purpose and the reason and what progress looks like and the monthly, weekly, daily. You're really creating this canonical structure of a movement. And I think always of Eric Hoffer and the nature of mass movements research that he did. And it basically sounds like this. I mean, it's not rocket science. You just have to do it.

And you have to have unique purpose. Yeah, and it's not rocket science, but here's the thing I know to be true. At the beginning of social media, we had to figure out our culture. It was a small group of people and we all kind of knew each other that were figuring it out. What do I post on Twitter? How do I use this Facebook thing? And you have conventions that emerged like app and hashtags. There was a time not very long ago that those did not exist.

And I think that that's just an really important thing for any entrepreneur to remember is there was a time when that wasn't a thing, which means that there's always going to be opportunity for evolution and innovation. So what I think is so interesting is that once you figure out, oh, I'm building a new culture. And I just have to be more explicit with people in terms of this is not social media. This is not about showing up and thinking that the things that you're going to post aren't. a conversation with other people. It's a little bit like a party that nobody knows each other and that the host isn't actually telling you why you're here. It's like, what are we doing together? And so everybody's like awkwardly kind of sitting around. People awkwardly sitting around does not mean that people don't want their own destination. It doesn't mean that people don't

want to belong to multiple communities. They do. We have the data that backs it up. what is missing and it's very small. And once you do it, it's super easy, which is just letting people know what to expect. Should we be DMing with each other? When you offer a poll, that's what makes polls a really great icebreaker. We also built in icebreaker questions. So like when you join a Mighty Network, you can have the option of like answering a question so you're already typing the first session and introductions. And these are features that we again built because we, are building for people that don't already know each other, whereas other community platforms, whether it's Slack, where, again, you're working with people, Discord where you're gaming

with people, Facebook groups where, you know, again, they're just kind of their own animal, but they were always built assuming people already knew each other. There's no features that are the online equivalent of what we would do at a party. And to me, that's just dumb. And to my team, it's dumb. And that's why we built these things into a mining network. If this doesn't work, what do you think the reason will be? What are the biggest existential risks or challenges that you still face looking into the future that would get in the way of this one million communities happening? If I didn't think about that regularly, I should not be in my job.

I think it is fear of the unknown. And again, that's becoming less and less relevant. But certainly when we started, people were like, what happens if? if I leave Facebook. We're not saying, like, delete your Facebook account. We're saying, just don't build a Facebook. Because for us, it's about the hosts. Even as we enter a world where there's community ownership, it has to be thought of by some one or small group of people. I think it's this fear of, I really regularly just scratch my head at what a bad deal creators are getting. It's just a bad deal today. And this idea that you're going to go and you're going to

produce a bunch of content that you don't own on a platform that you are renting an audience, and that that somehow is the most exciting profession of the 21st century, when you can do so much of that creative work in the context of a community that you own, that's the risk. The risk is people are like, nah, I'm good. I'm going to stay on Facebook. I'm going to stay on Instagram. I'm going to stay on TikTok. It's not a delete your account situation.

It's that I believe what will happen, whether it's mighty networks or other platforms or things people build themselves, is that people won't ever delete their accounts. They're just going to spend less and less time. We're also going to just see new experiences show up and they're just novel and fun and different. I think we're tired of feeds. I think we're just tired of feeds. by the way, Mighty Networks has feeds, but as what we're looking at, just the future of product development is communities and spaces need to have whatever kinds of ways that people want to

connect, whether that's video or audio or going live or a course. Where innovation is going to come from is how those different things are mixed and matched. Again, always with that layer of mixed and matched so that the most relevant members can find each other, they can build relationships, they can move faster to achieve the results in transformation that they want to have in their lives. Yeah, I love it. And I love all the little tactics like polling, just excuses for people to see the existence of somebody else and then hopefully engage. You're the source of meaningful relationships. Probably good things are going to happen for your host and for the overall platform. In closing, I always ask everybody the same question. I'm really interested in your answer because

the entire idea of community itself is one predicated on kindness. I ask everyone, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you specifically? When I was 11, my dad was killed in a car accident. And it was sudden and it was, I still don't know on some level that it actually happened. Anyways, I felt that and my father had been a teacher in the school district that I went to, taught high school history in addition to restoring old cars. To this day, I felt so grateful that the other teachers who knew and had worked with him, I always got the sense that they were looking out for me and looking out for me, looking out for my brother and my sister,

in ways that were never overt, but just there. So when you asked that question, that was the first thing. I think that people have done lots of kind things for me, and I hope I've done kind things for other people. But in terms of when it really mattered and in a way that just felt like I wasn't alone, that was extremely meaningful. It's a stunning answer. And also appropriate because I feel like one litmus test of a good community is showing up when members need it. Not when things are good, but when things are bad. What an incredible powerful closing story. Well, Gina, I'm rooting hard for your success. I couldn't believe more in the power of this host-driven community model that you're building. Seems like it's needed and will work. And I'll be an eager supporter from afar. And it's so fun to learn from you here today. So thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. If you enjoy this episode, check out join colossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with transcripts, show notes, and research. to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.