The Startup Ideas Podcast - 3 Community-Based Products Doing It Right with April MacLean

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Today Greg is joined by April MacLean, Late Checkout's community designer and fountain of wisdom on all things community. In this episode, Greg and April talk about 3 community-based products that have it figured out. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comApril MacLean:https://www.aprilmaclean.com/https://twitter.com/mizmacleanSHOW NOTES0:00 - Intro2:00 - Building a product community for nerds: Lomography10:33 - Building a community-first product: View from My Window13:14 - Facebook Groups. Yes or No?31:10 - Community as the product: Common House42:42 - Communities of practice

What's your name again? Oh, I'm April McLean. And you? My name is Greg Eisenberg. Welcome to the show. Thank you. So this is a fun one because we work together. Yes.

You are the head of community at Lake Checkout. And 70% of the time we agree upon community-based product stuff and 30% of the time we violently disagree. Violently, yes. Like in our nice way, we buy only. Respectfully. Yeah. I wanted to bring you on the show because you're a fountain of knowledge when it comes to all things community and community-based products.

Give us a quick background on who April is. I have been building community in some capacity for a couple of decades, although the language formally wasn't there, I think until recently. I was a community builder for Sony music. I've done work with Lulu Laman, of course. And most recently before joining the team at Late Checkout, I was running the community at Trends, which was a newsletter started by The Hustle, which was acquired by HubSpot.

Sampar and the gang. Sam and the gang. Yeah, exactly. Salmon Co. Amazing. Yeah. The reason I wanted to bring you on was you always got your finger on the pulse

when it comes to what's happening in the community-based products. world and I asked you, hey, bring five of the most interesting community-based products. And let's just talk about it. And if we find it interesting, probably some other people might. So that's why you're here. I brought five, but I ended up actually just kind of getting excited about three in particular because I felt like they hit a couple of subsets of what community could look like.

So I'm excited to nerd out on them and disagree violently. All right. Let's start. What's your first one? So I got really into learning about this community. I'm going to butcher this name and then people are going to get so mad. But it's called Lomography, L-O-M-O-M-O-L-O-Mography. And so, okay, you have to get into the history of lemography. First of all, it's a product community, but you would never know it when you first stumble it. And you wouldn't even understand that that's what you just fell into because it looks like this community of, artisans, very user-generated content-based.

But lemography is really based on a specific type of photography, where the camera dictates the quality versus the subject. In 1982, this is how it started. There was this general, I'm going to butcher his name, General Igor Petrovitz Kornitsky. he was the right-hand man to the USSR's Minister of Defense. And he brought in this little compact Japanese camera and handed it over and they were very impressed by it and decided that they were going to improve it and then move it into mass production. So it started with just this like one product that they thought was sharp. And then a decade later, so 92, this entire society is built around it.

and it becomes a global society. So what's interesting about them today is that when you go to their website, it's pretty lo-fi. It's not the fanciest thing you've ever seen. But if you go to slash forward slash photos, it's all user-generated content. So it's all of this really rich artistic stuff to look at. They have events and exhibitions and they have a merch shop. But underneath it all, they're selling products.

They're selling cameras and lenses and gears. to this very specific niche subset community. They also have some really interesting competitions, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it looks like most all of their outward facing marketing is just content generated from the people that are using this style of photography and product. So they have essentially kind of replaced this idea of a funnel with a community.

Yeah, and I think that's, you know, that's one of the benefits. of building a community-based product. So we should probably define what that means. So what we're talking about is either the community itself is the product or the community enhances the product. So here's a great example of like the community is enhancing the product. It's interesting too because in some ways it felt to me initially like the community was the product because they did such a good job of highlighting the community as the first layer.

I actually had to dig a little bit before I understood. how are they monetizing this? How is this even working before I got to the product? But if you are someone who's into this style of photography, you don't have to dig that. You find that you have found your thing. It's like the juiciest kind of nerdiest subset of photography I've seen in a long time. Yeah, and it's not small.

So I think, you know, I'm just looking on their website. They've got 16 million photos that have been uploaded. I dropped their URL into AHS and they have, They have about 200,000 organic visitors a month, which is not like the biggest thing in the world, but it's very much enough to make a very good business off of this community and host of products. I'm guessing they haven't raised a lot of money. I'm looking right now. So they've actually raised a million dollars.

So it's one of those business. Not a lot. It's not a lot. I mean, it's not a lot. I think what's also interesting here is like the big players are. probably not going to go into this space. That's exactly right. Yeah, this is definitely too niche of a subset, I think, for them to worry about that

style of competition. I also feel in terms of their raise, it's such a legacy product at this point. I mean, I wish I could say that 1982 was fairly recent since I was born around that time, but it's actually, it's quite, it's been quite a while since this has been going. and it had such a stronghold in its origins were in Vienna, and it just made its way globally to where I think they said they were in, I don't know, 42 countries right now of their community. Yep.

Wow. Yeah, it reminds me of a post I posted two days ago on Instagram about being a nerd. So I said the way to financial freedom is being a nerd. And I define nerd as a nerd is you can't talk about 99% of the things you care about with 99% of the population. The guide to nerd-based companies. Number one, be the biggest nerd you could be. Number two, attract other nerds like you.

Number three, and this is what they're doing, build products for nerds. And number four, have fun. It's that first part. When I get together with my contemporary dancer friends, our conversation is so boring and repetitive. and probably nauseating to people outside of our world, but there's nothing better than to the talk shop with other nerds.

It's like where you feel you're at your best, shiniest self. I wrote a post also about sort of this fast foodification of everything and how products are all becoming the same and all look the same. And it's not even just products, it's cities. And it's, you know, you walk into downtown Toronto and you might feel like you're in downtown Sydney. And, you know, when I go to just this website,

lemography, yes, it looks basic, but it's white. And the photos, like it's a white background, and the photos are just like popping up. And I think it's just, it's about the photos. And I think that really speaks to that audience. And what might look really ugly, quote unquote, to us, let's say, might look beautiful to them. I had this experience yesterday.

I was meeting with this woman who, again, to reference dance, I'm in the dance world. It's a big part of my life. She owns this kid's dance studio. And I was thinking about her website as I was driving over there. I'm thinking in general about how dance studio websites to me are really awful. It's like clip art logos and a lot of pink and some sparkly gifts. And I've always been a little bit judgy, I think, on that front. But as I was talking to her and thinking through her clientele, there is this whole subset of people, mothers who put their kids in dance mostly, that that is the signal to them that they have found what they're looking for.

And it's, I think from a design perspective, it's easy to get caught up in like sleek and cool and what looks good and all of these things. But there's all of these signals that aren't created for you. So I've noticed as I make my way through the world looking at all of these design elements, and feeling maybe like, that one kind of missed the mark. I would come back to this thing like, but for a specific kind of person, that's probably exactly the signal that they needed to know it was for them. Yeah, and I think from a web design trend perspective, where you're going to start seeing more in 2023 and 24 is custom fonts,

that, you know, that Y2K aesthetic of like really big eye-popping design, like less of that like clean cuts. sterile, you know, millennial colors. You're going to see this trend towards website design that feels very custom and feels very not afraid to use colors and stuff like that. And I think that's the reason why that's happening is because of web design for niche communities and creating experiences that really, really connect with them. Yeah, I agree.

And I also think Apple kind of gave way to this like this cookie cutter approach to like, you know, clean sans serifs and the really minimalist. And we were so hungry for it. And you always see the pendulum swing when it comes to design. But it just kind of leached everything of personality over time. And I've been excited to see. I'm back to late checkout. Recoletta was one of the first things I fell in love with.

I'm like, oh, God, it's such a breath of fresh air. Yeah. Okay. So that's number one. What's number two? Okay. So number two, I think, is we can, we'll probably spend the least time on this because I just feel like it's a very, it's a micro version of what these things can look like.

If you think about lemography, limography, there was a product first, and then they built a community around their product. And usually when you have communities around a product, they're serving one of four specific purposes. So they're for acquisition. Your community exists to bring you more customers, internally, at least. There are for retention. Your community exists because you're trying to hold on to maybe a subscriber base longer. The third is they're for success or support. So they're helping each other use the product better, which also is retention, but also reduces like support calls.

And then the last is they give you user generated content that you're using to do something. So you have all these like sort of north stars of these various communities. So with the lobography, they have a product. They built a community around it. With this other one, they started with a community. and the woman who was running the community, I don't think ever had any intention of building an audience. But I think she applied this kind of classic community-based product framework that we like to talk about.

And it happened during the pandemic. So in 2020, when the world shut down, March 16th, I think it was, this woman, Barbara, and she was not an entrepreneur in the least, started this Facebook group called View from My Window. And the idea was she was looking out her window one day and realized this is going to be it for me for a while. Like what I'm seeing outside my window right now is what I'm going to see for the foreseeable future because we're on lockdown. And how many other people are having this same feeling? And what would it be like if I could see the view from their window as well? So at least we had a little bit of reprieve from staring at the same four walls.

So she started this Facebook group. She called it view from my window. And when I tell you that it went viral or cut on, like, I can't even overemphasize the popularity and how hungry people were to see other things at that time. I joined the community really quickly. I submitted my photo. This is in March 2020. My photo did not get approved and posted until November of 2020 because that's what

her backlog looked like. It's like people couldn't get their pictures and they're fast enough. So I'm just going through the group. There's almost 3.6 million members, and it's still growing. It grew 6,000 members just this week alone. It's huge. What do you think about Facebook groups as like, I know the answer to this, but I'm curious. What do you think about, you know, trends, for example, is a community that lives on Facebook?

Yeah. This is a thriving community that lives on Facebook. The narrative is really that like Facebook is dead. You know, is there room to build your community on Facebook? Yeah, I think that's a very dangerous narrative. Facebook is nowhere near dead. But it is dead for a specific demographic of people. So much like anything else, the first question is, who are you building for?

And whenever I'm thinking about community platforms, you and I have had this discussion so many times about like where is the community platform. We've had it like three times today. That's exactly right. One, there's never been a de facto, but two, I wonder if there ever will be because the thing is, you and I like to be in different places than my 20-year-old daughter than my, you know, 70-something-year-old. My mother's not 70-something something. But for a certain subset of people who are still on Facebook, it works.

The question is always what's more important in the long run user experience or traction? And I think for a lot of people, traction is more important. So they would rather sacrifice, like Facebook has a lot of drawbacks to its groups a lot. And they would rather sacrifice those features if they can get quick traction, then try to get people to build a whole new habit. Compelling people to return to a platform every day that they don't already have baked into their daily lifestyle is like, that's the stuff of separating the wheat from the chat for sure. Full disclosure, like we launched a community on Mighty. which is a great community platform. We launched it for,

you probably need a robot, which is an AI community, a free community, anyone can join. And we realized it wasn't the right platform for that community. And we realized that, hey, we have to consider potentially moving off because maybe if we want bots to exist,

we need to go to some place like Discord or Slack that you already have these AI bots like, you know, mid-jurney bots that, you know, people could see these images and it just flows right in there. So, and also, like, we took a poll on our private Twitter and people were just like, we want Discord or Slack. So it just goes to show you that there's room for all sorts of cuisines. You might, you might like Italian, but I might like Japanese. But I think I think you're right. I think when it comes to community platforms, there's, there's room for a food court. and it's really more like a food court than just like a single restaurant.

Yeah. And Facebook does play a really, really important role in that food court. I agree. There's also just tons of people who wouldn't consider themselves community designers by any means who have launched really successful Facebook groups and just kind of learn through trial by fire. And I don't think they would be able to learn those lessons if they had launched anywhere else. What don't you like about Facebook groups? I think the first difficulty is that you don't own the data.

So when people join your Facebook group, you don't get to own their email address. It's just a very, it's very rented attention. And while there's workarounds, they're very manual or they could probably disappear in the blink of an eye if Facebook just flips one little switch. There's no native way to own your list. The second part of it is the data that they give you, the metrics, are really poor quality. And they're not a helpful look at really how well your community is doing, whether it's thriving. There's no way to organize topic channels. I think those are the three things that I find the most bothersome.

And there's no good, solid onboarding feature. I mean, the way that you bring people into the fold is so indicative of the experience that you're likely to have in that community. And Facebook doesn't really give you a way to thoughtfully do that. I remember talking to you about data and community platforms and why it's so important. And one of the reasons why data is so important when it comes to building community is you want the ability to bring people back. And if you don't have a single source of data, like you can't say like, oh, hey, these 2,000 people haven't made a post in 30 days or 60 days. What can we do to bring them back? You just can't do that on Facebook.

No, you can't. There's very limited way to reach out to those people at all. Another thing to understand about Facebook is that your group showing up in other people's feed. So when I log in and I'm scrolling, which I don't do, I will say, look, here's a free tip to all of our friends out there. You can install a Chrome plugin called Facebook News Feed Eradicator and you'll never have to see anything again. and I haven't seen a Facebook feed in years. But for those who do scroll their feed and you see things come up from groups that you're in, that's wholly dependent on Facebook's algorithm.

And there's nothing that you can really do to affect that to any great degree. And baked into your metrics is included. So when they say like active users, they're also talking about people who scrolled past your group as they were scrolling on your feed. That's not an active user. That's not someone who actively came to your group and participated. So there's so many. false data points baked into their metric system. View from my window, though, back to Barbara

and her story, like I said, it took off like hotcakes. And what's extraordinary about it is that as you're scrolling, you see someone's like gorgeous view from Paris that they're on a Parisian balcony. And then a minute later, it's like some Appalachian view. And then you're in, it's just an alley, just a concrete alley and a puddle and some sewer. And you really are getting the sense that you're seeing the world through the lens of, it's a total, sonder-like experience. So as this thing got more popular, she did the classic, like, listening to what people say to consider how you might be able to productized off of this

and ended up creating this coffee table book that lived forever by the same name of you from my window. It featured all of her favorite photos from the group. and she was careful not to select just the highest end photos, but like a real trip through humanity. And people were so honored to be included in the book. But she also, there was a backlash to it. I think there's kind of an important lesson there that we should talk about for a second. This part woman got a whole lot of flack for creating this product because people were in the community saying like, oh, is this what this is for?

You didn't tell us you were going to be using our photos or, hey, if you're profiting off of this, shouldn't we all get a piece of the pie? granted, it was probably the minority, but the minority are always the loudest. But there is a little lesson in there around how you manage expectations inside of a community. Because once you break trust with a community or members start to feel bamboozled, it's very difficult to ever dial that back. And that's probably maybe the one differentiator between somebody who has like a real community experience behind them and someone who's just kind of wing as they go along is understanding how to manage the expectations of your members. So if you were running that community, what would you have done differently?

I wasn't active enough to know how she led into the idea. From what I can see, she posted one day, hey, we're going to turn this into a book. Here's my, and never expected the backlash. Just thought it was going to be this really well-received announcement. And I think what I would have done is long as, started seeding conversations about like, what are the ways that we can memorialize what we've produced here? What are the ways that we can? Because what happens is community members start coming up with the ideas themselves and when they think it's their idea or when they contributed that idea,

there's much more like kind of ownership and grace in terms of they're so excited to see that you're creating this thing that they had an idea over. I think if I was going to do something like that, I probably would have started many conversations along the way, like leading down that path first. Also being open to maybe a book quote won't be the thing. Maybe as the community speaks to me, there will be other things that emerge that I can respond to. So it's not really about manipulating them towards your answer, but that's how I would have looked at it. Like deep transparency. And why do you think Pew from my window works or worked?

You know, like let's break that down because I think it's going to be helpful for a lot of people listening. who are trying to create their own version of this in whatever space they're in, aka how do you create a viral sensation? Okay, Greg. Well, if one of us is a viral expert, it's certainly not me. So that seems like a setup. But a while back, I heard Seth Godin talk about this restaurant, this Thai restaurant. I think it's in Queens.

I'm not positive. But it's like this tiny, tiny little hole in the wall place. And this restaurant was not in any Michelin guide. It wasn't popular by any means. But there was a small niche community called Chowhounds that caught winds of this Thai restaurant. And something happens when chowhounds start talking about a restaurant, which is usually, you know, if it's a popular restaurant, I go there. And we don't go to hole in the walls, but all of a sudden if it's being mentioned, we're going to go there. It got mentioned in, my gosh, some very common publication, I wish I remembered what.

And the place went gangbusters. So this Thai food restaurant has done an incredible amount of revenue. It's extremely profitable. It's very hard to get a seat inside of it. It just took off because it somehow appeals to this niche set of people. And somebody once asked Seth, like, do you think that the owner knew what she was doing? because the way that she conducted her business really kind of played into the desires and wants of this subset of people.

Like she didn't explain certain things on the menu. They don't offer any pad tie, which is like every American's tie go to. And Seth used this term that I would use now to talk about Barbara, the woman who started you from my window, which is that she had naive wisdom. I think part of the reason that this worked wasn't anything that was highly strategic or well thought out, but I think she had the naive wisdom to understand that this pandemic just hit. Everybody is feeling a sense of isolation that they could not have conjured up in their wildest dreams, their wildest terrible dreams, I suppose.

And she gave people the opportunity to feel like they were united at a time where they couldn't have been more isolated from each other. So one, I just think she got kind of lucky. and she knew to capitalize on this flexion point, I guess, in society. And then, too, if we think of what's community, it's this many to many relationships. So when people would post pictures, she would encourage you to say hello from wherever in the world you are. So here's my view out my window in Austin, Texas.

And then people are like, I'm sending love from, you know, wherever it was, Tuscany, hello from with their picture of Minnesota. and it was so bizarre to just feel like you had all of this connection to people and places that you would never think of. I think that that is so addicting. And I think that human loneliness is its own kind of epidemic and pandemic as it were. And she just happened to blend those two things really, really well. The slogan from view from my window summarizes everything perfectly.

The slogan is, it's just someone's little corner of. our world. Our world. And our world is the key phrase. The big thing that she hit upon was during a time when everyone felt siloed in their own rooms, couldn't go and hang out with loved ones, couldn't go to their places of work. Yeah.

She created a space for people to experience what it means to be a human being, which is a very social experience. and that's why it took off. And that's why it took off during COVID, but it actually has a lot of legs today still, because I think to your point, like people still suffer from loneliness. And there's an incredible set of products

to be built on top of her platform that can bring people together. That's exactly right. One of the things that I feel so fortunate about is that I am in community. And that I'm working with a team like us, like our team, that really does look at life through a community first lens. And the reason that feels so lucky to me is we happen to find something that is good for humanity,

that reduces human loneliness, and that happens to be a brilliant business strategy. And there's not many things, I think, that blend those two things so well. So the fact that community can mean just incredible ideas and profitability, but that community is also always means human good is a really fortunate little coincidence there. And I believe that they were inspired by V for my window because I actually think this came later, but there's this other website called window swap, window dash swap.com. It's actually my favorite website in the world. And in Windows swap, you tune in to these, I'm using air quotes here, to these.

live feeds outside of people's windows. And you can linger there as long as you'd like. And it'll tell you in the corner where in the world you are. So it'll tell you you're in Germany or you're in Manila or you're in Jakarta, wherever you are. And it's all of these volunteers globally who agreed to set a little camera looking out their window so that you can like drop into their home at any time of day. And sometimes if you watch long enough, you'll catch climpses of their life. Like I'll see in the reflection of the window that they're cooking behind and I'll hear the pan and the sizzle. And there's something so emotional about that, that you're in space with someone who's alone in there. And you wish you can say like, you're not alone. I'm hanging out with you.

Like, I love this view of yours. You can't. But there's something just so powerful about connecting people that way. It also brings us back to what really got me excited about the internet in the mid-90s when I grew up on it, which is it was weird. It was a weird place. Great. And it was a weird public place. There were places that you can go to that were public, that you can have some sort of shared communal experience.

What's really cool about both of those products, window swap and view from my window, is that it does feel like a part of the fabric of the internet. It's a public space that you can go to that you could experience something. what it means to be human, what it means to nerd out, and just experience something versus, you know, the, the traditional feed-based, uh, experience that a lot of us, you know, experience for 99% of our internet. You know, 99% of people's internet experience today is consumed via feeds. So I think what's really cool about window swap is they created like a custom app. custom experience. It's unique. It's got a good name. Greg and his name. I mean, it's got a good name. It's got a good name because like both that both actually have what wonderful names, you know, because both of them really tell the story of what exactly it does,

you know, a view for my window. And I think going back to what you were saying around, you know, community based businesses and why they often outperform, I guess, is the word of out on these community-based businesses are just so high. Meaning, like, I just heard about these two products and I just want to tell everyone about these products now. Right. And the same thing is true with the Thai restaurant that you mentioned, which, by the way, was outside Queens.

I think the story is it was outside Queens. And the fact that they don't have a pad tie is such a core feature of the experience because everyone expects the number one thing to be on the menu to be a pad tie and a great community experience, a great community-based experience speaks to the minority, not the majority. That's exactly right. It's just the right signal. And to drive this point home even more, the window swap site, I feel like I'm doing somebody a favor when I share that site with them. Like I'm gifting them. I'm going to give you this gift of the site that's just going to like develop more empathy

and love and how often do we feel that way when talking about products? Like that's when you know you've hit something magical when you feel like you're gifting somebody by being an ambassador, not just like, you know, here's my Instagram post of this protein powder that someone's paying me to talk about. Totally different. All right. What's your number three product? Okay.

So community-based, we did product then community, community then product. This one is more like community is the product, but it's a physical space thing, not a virtual thing. So it is common house. I'm sure you're not surprised that I'm bringing that up because I've brought it up many times in the past. But Greg, I'm so damn enamored with this. I don't even know what to do with myself. It's like seeing people build the world that I want to live in. And I'm so desperate to know how their business is doing. If anybody from Common House listens to this, can you just send me a message? I deeply need to know where you're at. So Common House, the first one that they built, they have like a flagship space. I believe the first one was in Charlottesville. That was their downtown Charlottesville.

It's a couple of guys who were really interested in how old society used to knit community together. So if you think about bridge clubs and supper clubs and all of those things where people used to come together for purposes pretty regularly. And they had all kind of started to dissolve. So these two guys decided to create physical spaces. They bought this huge, gorgeous historic building in Charlottesville. And now they have one in both Chattanooga and Richmond. And they just turned it into like a common house. It's a space that people come together.

And these spaces, it's kind of like. a hotel in that there's all these amenities. There's a co-working space. There's bars. What are those drawing rooms? Is that they used to call them drawing rooms or libraries? It's just this third space. Every one of them has cocktails and every one of them is gorgeously designed. So design was like a central element. And they're just trying to recreate this idea that there could be this space where you can belong, you have to pay a membership fee, and that you can form connections to all these people in a physical space again. And it's just, for me, it symbolizes all of, there's a lot of things about history that I would rather not bring back or see amplified again. But there's a lot of things

about history that I think were really, really beautiful or had beautiful bones. And this resurrects those bones. And I so want to know that they're succeeding and doing really well, but I have no data. I think they were called salons, right? Yeah, exactly. Like during the Renaissance time? I mean, neither you or I are history about it. It's not my thing. Yeah.

But the idea was, I think it was after the Renaissance or during the Renaissance, these essentially like groups of people who would connect around in different coffee shops and areas. And they call them salons. and it was just, you know, writers and poets and artists and they would go together and discuss ideas for long periods of time. Where you're kind of talking about common house feels a lot like a modern day salon. How does common house not become Soho House? So I love Miami and I was just at Soohouse and it actually felt the opposite of community. Like people were kind of just in their own world.

It didn't feel very cohesive in terms of the community that was there. And it felt like there was a particular type of person that they let in. I'm not a so-house member. I was a guest of someone. I see. How do you make it exclusive, not exclusionary? That is such a good question. And actually, one of the first things I thought about when I did come across Common House,

especially because it's the way it looks. It's just very beautiful. And I think that kind of elevated, curated, kind of gastropub vibe tends to appeal to certain subsets of people and not others. And I do love the question about how do we keep this from being a Soho House because I think the absolute key to this is how relationships are being fostered inside of those spaces. Never been to a Soho House. I've never been to Common House.

But from a community design perspective, some of the things I think about are how often you're allowing members into the physical space to just do their own thing, to co-work, to eat, to drink, to whatever, and how often you're actually providing any sort of programming or direction or opportunity for them to be making connections with each other. I think there's this element of community builders not wanting to ask too much of their members. I've seen this a lot where people like, they don't want to program too heavy. they don't want to be too restrictive about things. But I think that we have a lot more freedom to create the world that we want to see in our community than we think.

And we let a lot of that power go. So if I were putting myself in the shoes of the common house guys, there would be just specific requirements about how people participate in the programming in order to be a member. because if you want to go work and get out your laptop and bury your head or if you want to hang out with your best friend, go to Starbucks, go to the cocktail bar down the street. If this is a social club is our responsibility to foster relationship before anything else. Otherwise, this probably isn't a space for you. I think that's how I would approach that. Did you notice what kind of hat I'm wearing? It's a hotel.

It's yellow and very cheerful. So I just got back from an incredible vacation. Oh, yes. Probably the best vacation I've ever gone on. Is that right? I think so. Okay. It was at a hotel called Palm Heights in Grand Cayman.

And I'm wearing a yellow hat right now. I haven't taken it off since I've been there because I'm just so, I had such a good time and so proud that I, like, I'm a part of their community. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see here's a Palm Heights coaster. He's all in. Here's our Palm Heights notebook. Not the not bad. I'm not going to, you know, I've got more, but let's just stop there.

And it really does feel like a community-based experience. And I'll explain why. Actually, I texted David Spinks as soon as I got there, basically. And I was like, you know, who is a community with. And I was like, you've got to go stay at this place. So first of all, It's kind of like the White Lotus. I'm setting the scene.

I'm setting the scene. Picture, you know, Cayman Islands, White Sandy Beach, you know, maybe like 50 rooms there, very small. Everyone kind of knows everyone at the space. Like all the hotel guests. Oh, this is someone new from Finland who's staying with us, you know? Like everyone knows everyone. Sat down for dinner. Waitress is like, hey, I was with my girlfriend.

And what do you, what do you guys doing after this? And we're like, I don't know, I'm going to sleep. She goes, oh, there's a secret bar just for hotel guests. And like, I check Google Maps. It's not on there. Never heard of it. Like, not on their website. And walk in there.

There's like, there's like me and a few other people. And there's like people doing interpretive dance. And I was like, this is the weirdest kind of experience in my life. And then, and, you know, That sort of programming and those sort of like, if you know, you know type experiences is what drives a lot of these community-based experiences. And for me, I had never gotten that out of a hotel. You know, usually when I go to a hotel, even if it's a nice hotel, it's a five-star hotel, it's just, you know, a five-star hotel is luxury. But it's not a community-based experience.

I was meeting people every day. There's programming. There's five or six or seven or eight things you can do. And I think more and more people are going to seek experiences like this and they're willing to pay extra for it. I don't think that people have ever been as hungry for community as they are right now. And I also don't think it's ever been easier to keep yourself out of community as it is right now. So it is a really interesting conundrum because what you're talking about is this idea, well, there's a couple tendrils to point. on here. You said, if you know, you know. And so how do you get to, I'm sorry, I'm so delighted by the

fact that you're wearing this hat now that I know this story, that it's just like, you're so proud and happy. Oh, yeah. I'm like proud dad moment vibes, you know. I have no, like, they didn't pay me to go there. I didn't get a discount. Like, I just had a really good experience. Yeah. And met some really interesting people and just felt, felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself. Well, and think about what you texted Spinks when you bought there. And you just told me about it. And you're doing, you feel like you're sharing something good with us. You don't feel like you're evangelizing a brand, right?

Like that's the power of a community-based experience. Like people can't wait to tell other people. And I think a lot of businesses, I'm sorry to say you, such harsh language, but I think a lot of businesses delude themselves into thinking that they're creating a business or experience that people are just can't wait to talk about, but very few are, at least not in this capacity. I'm reminded of, there's this book called You're Invited, that I really enjoyed reading a while back, written by this gentleman named John Levy. And I think John lived in New York, and he used to host these community dinners.

And the way it works is he would personally invite a small subset of people, 10 to 15 maybe. And the rules were you weren't allowed to tell people your name and you weren't allowed to tell people your occupation and that the group as a whole cooked cooked to the dinner together, prepped and cooked, ate the dinner, cleaned up the dinner together. And it wasn't until you sat down to eat your meal that you could finally talk about your name and what you did. and he would have like Pulitzer Prize winners and just these incredible high caliber people. But it was a level playing field while they were cooking that meal because no one could say use their work or career as an identity. So it was such a purely communal experience. It wasn't based on what people could get out of each other.

And the fact that they had to clean together and prep together and do all this work, they would come out with, it was almost like taking what would six months to a year of forming a friend. ship drip by drip and just compressing it all into a three-hour event. I think that kind of stuff can be so, so incredibly powerful, that communal-based experience. People couldn't wait to invite more people. They always had more people they wanted to add to the list and he had to keep restricting and keep restricting. So there's something, this evangelism thing is the key, I think, to these experiences.

Yeah, and I think, you know, you and I, April, because we spend so much time building digital products, it's easy for us to forget that, you know, we can draw a lot of inspiration in the physical world and bring those experiences and nuances to digital products. Oh, yeah. Okay. So those are your three community-based products on your mind. Are you not going to give us one bonus one? Oh, I would say that I would give a shout out to Ness Labs, which,

was going to be on the list. I have been in that community. So it's one that I was also a part of. Steph Smith actually put me on to that one. And Ness Labs is a community of people who, I don't know, it's like this, this like interesting and fun blend of mindfulness and neuroscience and it's really around like productivity. But I think the thing that is so beautiful about it is it's science and strategy-based. It's not just like, we're going to manifest our best lives and take full of us and think good thoughts. But she's really done a beautiful job of unleashing that community because she gave kind of just the right parameters around what communities should look like and all of these best practices and set the tone. And the community just ran with it. There's,

like if you were to last time, I'm not in it anymore, but you would click the event calendar. And there was just endless events on deck that people were self-organizing without any sort of additional resources or support because they were so interested in talking about these practices and being a true community of practice. I think communities of practice have a really, really special place in my heart because there's something about learning and practicing a skill set as a group versus just like, you know, feed and comment. and chat and blah, blah, blah, but when we're actually putting these things to practice together, that makes a community incredibly sticky. So, shameless plug, I get to do a shameless plug right now. We're about ready to launch Late Checkout Land, which is our community that is really based around bringing founders and leaders and creators and builders together who are really

interested in this intersect of product and community and how these things can just create this highly kind of sticky space for people to hang out and learn things. And one of the things I think about the most when I'm thinking about this community is how do we turn this into a community of practice on a real ongoing basis? That it's not just, hey, here's more things to consume and read, but it's like, here's how we're going to get together and actually take steps towards mastering these skills and these frameworks, like building the version of the world we want to see. Last thing I'll say on this is Cody Sanchez had recently talked about, like, here's some

questions that I like to ask myself every Sunday night. It was this list of questions. And one of them was, what did I do this week to help build the world that I want to see? And I think about that a lot. Like, am I just doing busy work? Or what are the ways that I'm actually creating the world that I see in my head is the ideal? And that's part of what I think about with late checkout land is like, you're going to bring together really, really high caliber people.

And that means that you can arm them and unleash them to make some incredible changes. Like, how do you do that in a way that's more powerful than just consuming content? How much does it cost to join late checkout land? I'm so glad you asked that question because late checkout land is absolutely free. It's free, but if you're joining and they're applying, we want you to be active and we want you to take it seriously. It's more fun for everyone when, you know, people there are, you know, want to collaborate on ideas, want to share frameworks, want to, want to be a member and be active. So I think that's our only ask. And it also is a really good community design principle in general is most communities need to have a gate.

Because if community is just like a business and that if it's for everybody, it's just for absolutely nobody. So I will say we're only letting in 100 people to start and we're curating that list, like physically going through every single and just sort of choosing. And part of that is because you just, those first members really set the tone and the culture for the way that people treat each other and the way they show up and the way they engage. And so we're going to be really picky about that. But it will be a great place to hang out. Where do people go if they want to sign out? They can go to late checkout. Dot studio slash community.

Go right now. If you're on your phone, do it. If you're on a website, do it. Plus you'll be able to see our website, which is an example of, I think, a non-sterile, interesting website. Recoleta for the win. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, plus you get to hang out with Greg and I.

Like, Greg and I are actually going to be active in that community. That's true. That's true. huge win. Yeah. I think so. We think so. We think so.

Okay, cool. Well, April, I can't believe I get to work with you on a daily basis and have these conversations. It's cool that other people are going to witness our convos because we would have this behind closed doors. So it's good that we're having it with everyone listening. If people want more April, which you're crazy if you don't want more April, where do people go and follow you?

April mclean.com, M-A-C-L-E-A-N, but I'm on most social platforms under Ms. McLean, M-I-C. I chose it years ago and it was like, oh, it's too late. I've been out of too long, so we're stuck here. Yeah, it's okay. It's kind of amazing. You have your, Greg Eisenberg is your handle on everything like you won at that game. I mean, Greg Eisenberg is kind of like the view from, window or window swap naming.

It's what it is. It's just like it's very, it is what it is. That's the best way to describe it. Yeah. But Ms. McLean has way more character, I think. It's like you should stick with that. More people should have cool, interesting handles. I appreciate it.

I will stick with it. And thank you. And come back to the show when you want to share more cool community-based products. Heck yeah. All right, you're on. Thank you for having me. All right. Thanks, April.