Small Business Talk

The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster

How to Build an Iconic Brand Through Community Led Growth With Lloyed Lobo

Show Notes

Lloyed Lobo, Cofounder of Boast.AI & Traction. Also an author of From Grassroots to Greatness is an entrepreneur, podcast host and community builder, experienced the Gulf War as a young refugee in Kuwait, witnessing the strength of community in evacuating the population to safety. As the co-founder of fintech platform Boast.Al, he leveraged the Community-Led Growth model to bootstrap the company to $10 million in annual recurring revenue while also co-founding Traction, a community empowering more than 100k innovators through connections, content, and capital.

Communication is a Skill

Lloyed Lobo is immigrant entrepreneur from the US and was born in Kuwait refugee of the Gulf War and made his way to Canada. A few years after the Gulf War with his family, he finished engineering but didn’t wanna go and do a 9-5 job so he started asking people what’s the best skill he can learn if he wanna be in business someday? And repeatedly, he was advised that communication is the best skill there is.

As an engineer, communication is already there but you should learn how to improve that.

99% of people are not self-motivated. When you say self-motivation, it is not showing up when the conditions are perfect but showing up when you’re repeatedly punched in the face.

Not all people would like to talk in front of the people and enrolling in a speech class or public speaking might be too much for them so the best way to learn how to communicate is to get a job that would “force” you to communicate ever day and it was a job in sales department. At first, it is not easy at all but it is important that you keep showing up. The key here is when you’re bad at something, and want to get better, the best way to do that is to put yourself in an environment that forces you to do that something over and over again.

4 Key Things to Remember

Being an accidental immigrant entrepreneur, the journey can be hard but the key learning here is to point out for your listeners that there four key things that are super beneficial for anyone looking to make it an entrepreneurship. These are:

Your Community Matters
Communication is key
Your Ability to Create
Be Consistent

Top Things About Building an Iconic Brand

1.Have a definite target.

That specific audience really is where they’ve nailed it. what platform should I be on? should I get a Slack group? Should I get a Facebook group? Should I get a LinkedIn group? Questions like this isn’t getting nowhere. It’s like wanting to build a church but you don’t know if you are a Muslim or a Christian. You need to have a conversation first, get to know your audience. You don’t meet somebody at the bar and bend on your knees and present a ring and then ask them to marry you, right? It doesn’t work that way. It’s always visibility, credibility and then profitability.

2. Pick a market

A market that you have a passion for, that you love to create for because building a company as you know, it is a Marathon of the heart and mind, it’s a long slot. If you hate your customers, you’re not gonna be sustainably able to create for the long haul, you’ll eventually burn out so make sure you love this market or love this customer base or you can hang out with them. Make sure even if it’s a small niche, it’s growing because eventually it’ll turn into something big.

3. Propensity to pay

If they don’t pay you, you don’t have a business.

4. Ease of access

You may love this market but that’s what differentiates you from being a starving musician and maybe Iron Maiden or something right you have to have ease of access no matter what it is right?

No matter what you how much you love this, how much you have the passion for, if there’s no propensity to pay and there’s no ease of access, you can’t do it.

Types of Communities

There’s three kinds of communities you can build.

1.Community of practice. Meaning you bring people together to learn about a specific skill or a craft to become better versions about themselves.

2. Community of product. This is you bring people together to learn about a product, to get better at a product, to become evangelist of the product and this might be the Atlasian community or the Microsoft community.

3. Community of play. This is bringing people together to have a good time, to have fun. This might be the Harley DavidsonClub where they come together on the weekends, riding bikes or the Nike Running Club – things like that.