Scott Gerber on What Goes Into a Great Professional Community

Jacob Cohen Donnelly: I want to start at a very high level, and then we’ll move more tactical on your about Page@community.co. In big bold letters, you write, long before community became a buzzword and its true community has become such a buzzword, chief just raised at $1 billion valuation. Why do you think community has become such a hotly discussed area of media these past few years? It’s all anyone seems to want to talk about.

Scott Gerber: Jacob, what I find funny about the world we live in today is everything that is old is new again, right now, all of a sudden this is in vogue. The reality is community has been around for generations in different forms. I think it’s first important to understand what do I consider community versus what don’t I consider community. Because I think today we’ve basically turned community into this catchall phrase of audience subscriptions, an event.

All these things that all of a sudden it gives a publisher or a third party the ability to say, look at my community. My definition of a community is the ability to convene like-minded individuals around a purpose. Simple as that. I use the word convene because that’s different than attending an event or buying a magazine subscription. I believe that those commonalities are what define a powerful community.

That doesn’t mean it just has to be professional or consumer or a specific industry vertical. It could be a parenting community as an example. There are all kinds of ways to look at community as a whole. Now to get to your question, what’s super interesting to me today is I think everyone is searching for this holy grail for two reasons. One is diversification of the media landscape is a crucial component of every P&L and this holy grail of how do I get people to pay for things that are not content-driven, headcount driven, CapEx driven, heavy financial investment driven.

All of a sudden community somehow ends up on the top of the list because it seems by definition so simple. All we need to do is get a bunch of people together and we have a community. The second reason is I think that the world is moving more towards this idea of verticalized interest in a niche capacity, both in a content sense as well as in a community sense. I used to say no one wants to go to a conference with 10,000 people. That is not a valuable experience for most people.

You know what is a valuable experience for most people? The speaker dinner of all the people that were on the stage after the conference that no one’s allowed to attend, that’s the valuable space. How can community in this grander sense be valuable, meaningful, purposeful, and yet small but at the same time meet all the obligations that a publisher or a media operator or a third-party brand are looking to do?

This is where I think thankfully companies like ours have figured out that it’s not about let’s create one big gigantic thing. It’s let’s be meaningful to the select view. That’s how I would look at what the media world is trying to do in a lot of cases when they’re not trying to bastardize the term for whatever version of marketing material they’re trying to put out that day.

Jacob: Besides the bastardization, what is everyone getting wrong about communities? What are they doing wrong?

Scott: I think they’re trying to create a community for community’s sake. In a lot of cases, it’s someone in the boardroom says, “We really need a community product.” There’s many things wrong with that sentence, but that’s the version of the sentence I’ve heard across many C-suites in media. The first problem is we need a revenue solution. The second you say, I’m building a community to make money as the core thesis of the why, you’ve lost.

The second thing is they use the word product. We need to build the product. This day is dead where people think there’s a button push like WhatsApp and boom, you’re connected. Discord. Oh, that sounds cool, let’s do a discord. If you ask most people, what’s a discord? They cannot actually tell you because they don’t understand that Discord is nothing more than a tech platform that’s one, for people of a certain kind to get together, but it is not like you could just repeat that instantly, and nor is it user-friendly for everyone.

There’s a lot of steps that I think companies are missing today because they are trying to identify a solution rather than an actual convening of people. What do I think needs to be done is sort of the thing that I’ve been doing with my team for years, which is why do people need to get together. What is it that I can deliver that has a true meaning of value of someone’s time, that they will feel they’ve walked away with real accomplishment or value exchange or something that isn’t just about being marketed to or sales or feeling like they’re part of an agenda of a P&L or other political means. What can I do? What can my team do to bring that value in partnership with the brands and the ethos that we are looking to convene around? I think that’s the first step that most people do as step 10 when they’re already dead.

Jacob: Let’s rewind to your very first community that you launched. I think you were in college or maybe right out to college.

Scott: 2010.

Jacob: All right. The Young Entrepreneur Council, why did you launch?

Scott: Sure. What’s so interesting about true community and there’s so many true communities, a true community is one that’s organic, wasn’t started with business purpose. Then if it morphs into something because it’s become powerful, then it’s about how do you sustain and grow. Not how do you rip as much money as you can personally or for your company?

What was so exciting about YEC is it came from a true need of mine. I had just come out of college a few years prior, I’d started a business in college that failed miserably. I almost bankrupted myself. This is a long documented story. Then when I started my first business, I corrected a lot of the heirs of my ways because I sought people my age that had been a little bit farther ahead of me just to pick their brains and talk about what did you actually do here when I zigged you zagged?

What was it that actually occurred? What I realized was the commonality of people I was talking to was twofold. One, everyone was sort of young and this was like, Zuckerberg et cetera was like the new guard. We were just starting to make that move into entrepreneurship isn’t the renegade’s choice, it’s a path that could be a viable career. Now it seems like it’s on every poster that you could find on any street in any place around the world. The second commonality is aspirational.

People our age in our generation wanted to give back. They wanted to help their peers more so in some ways than other generations at that point because that was the old guard of don’t tell it to anybody about your ideas. You want to help, but it’s about proprietary information, very corporate world thinking rather than this communal millennial feel. What I started to notice when I was asking about my own things is I actually knew answers to some of their questions even though I wasn’t in some cases a company that had made millions at that point yet, or in some cases raised tens of millions.

There were certain things like public relations that I understood very keenly around messaging or how to create a thesis or a foundation. There were some things I knew, like what does it look like to engage people in true conversation around some of the topics we were talking about just by being a natural extrovert and a lot of friends of mine were introverts. These idea exchanges got me thinking, why isn’t there a group that’s like this that can convene young people that are in some way shape, or form successful with some criteria around that just to make sure it’s not everybody and their mother can be a part of it and there’s trust.

Trust can transfer honestly in that circle. The joke is, I just one day said to my wife, like, “Oh, I think I’m just gonna create the Young Entrepreneur Council.” The idea was very simple. I wasn’t going to be a helpful sphere of influence in the circle, but I wasn’t the only one that was valuable to others in that circle. They weren’t the only ones that were valuable, but everyone could create a matrix of value.

Ultimately it went from 40 people to 400 and the rest is history as one of the fastest-growing young entrepreneurship organizations in the country at that time. It all started with this idea that people wanted to do well and do good. They wanted to do well by making themselves more successful capitalists and entrepreneurs, and they wanted to do good by helping their peers take the journey to, and that sort of taught us this very notion of if you can create a community of service to one another, you have a powerful idea.

What we then decided to say is, how can we take this powerful idea and expound on it without destroying the very original community we built? That’s where a lot of community builders that we’ve seen historically have gone wrong because they say, I want my community to now be everything to everyone rather than know what it’s good at. Then say, what can you do to create another compelling community structure?

I think the biggest difference between us frankly, and some of the groups at that time is that we were the only one that was speaking to the kind of individual that I was speaking to. The YPOs and the EOs of the world were getting older not younger. We found that niche at that point, which is also an important area of how to differentiate at that point in a cluttered world where entrepreneurship was becoming the very buzzword that it’s become today.

Jacob: At some point, you decided to move beyond just YEC and you launched Community.co which unlike many of the community operators out there that really just focus on the software side of things, you’re actually– The actual operator of each and every one of these communities in the network. Why did you make that pivot and how at a broad level does Community.co work?

Scott: Basically, the YEC experience taught us a lot of things. The most important thing is that building brand is super hard and it’s not guaranteed. If you were to look at YEC as a case study, you couldn’t repeat those variables ever again.

You were talking about coming out of the great recession, you were talking about 50% youth unemployment at that point where it was doom and gloom, everybody’s not going to get a job, your life is over. The perfect opportunity to promote a solution. You were talking about a time where entrepreneurship was still nascent, yet all of a sudden it was becoming buzzy around young people because nobody knew who these young people were.

Identifying them became really powerful because no one else was doing it. When you did it well, you built community that way. Lastly, it was just organic. People heard about it. I think the last check I remember something like 5,000 press articles, including two or three cover stories in The New York Times written about YEC over the course of the early stages of that community.

That was all organic. We weren’t paying PR firms, we weren’t building business development people, it was me, my partner, and four people. That was the key. What we said is, how can we take the methodologies, the ideas for what software should and could be, the very nature of the rules, the criteria, the vetting, the things that we knew were, the tangible and intangible elements, but not be the brand. Have to bring a brand that espouse the very virtues of what we felt could make for a great community, which was things like core meaning, belief in something, meaningful to its constituency, but maybe not doing anything or at least a good job of convening in the way that that audience or constituency would prefer to gather, or at least in a trusted circle versus again, say an event.

The logical conclusion for us was the media industry was the perfect pairing of collaboration. The logic was, say you have an amazing company with a story like Forbes that’s been around now for over 100 years. They were convening conferences, they were doing great jobs at building content and magazines and all these things, of course. At the end of the day, you would go to their conferences you would say, “Oh, can I go and meet this person? Or Where do I go next?”

Their C-suite was doing a wonderful job at events, but at that point hadn’t done anything yet to really truly convene in small circles. Their now CEO, Mike Federle at that time had built similar programs that other publications he was at and gave us the opportunity to work with Forbes and really prove could we build the professional association of Forbes. That’s what we ended up doing.

Take the business brand that is meaningful to millions of stakeholders around the world and look at the different verticals we might be able to curate around. At that point, we started with the Forbes Technology Council, the idea being, C-suite people that are in the thick of technology from startup to enterprise, because there’s a lot of sharing that can happen behind closed doors, and the rest is history.

That program has since now built nine different communities, many thousands of people collectively across the entire portfolio. The value that they receive not only being connected to other individuals, but various benefits that help them build their actual businesses, really looks at community in our worldview as a utility belt. It’s how can we be there for different members of the community in the ways they want to receive value, but not say to them, this is how you should receive value? Be there for the different business developmental stages, curate different pods within larger communities that should know or connect with one another, but don’t be prescriptive.

I think that’s another thing a lot of I think folks that have tried is, they try to say it’s exactly this and nothing more. Whereas we say, a grouping of individuals should self-identify as wanting to be part of a group, should not be forced into a group, should not be forced to use a benefit, should not be forced to go to an event versus do virtual. They should have the tools and the different containers that allow them to participate in the ways that are going to help them at their various developmental stages.

Jacob: Let’s talk about community ideation. When you’re looking at possible media companies to partner with, what are you looking for? Let’s even take a step back and say that there’s an operator who knows nothing about what you guys do, but just says they want to create a community. What are the criteria that make for a good, profitable community?

Scott: I think you have to look at that in two lenses. What is an excellent community and what is a profitable community? Community at the end of the day should be something where people are happy in this context, to pay because they have identified with the value you are creating, and there are tangible and intangibles they can wrap their head around. It is not totally amorphous, but it’s not totally prescriptive.

I think that the most important thing for a solid community is the curation aspect. Who are you trying to convene? Why is no one doing it or doing it well? Determining, can you be that entity to do it well? I think where a lot of people go is, I’ll use the media industry as a punching bag for just a second, everyone wants to curate CMOs. Everybody says oh, we’re going to have a CMO community. Now why do they want a CMO community? They want their CROs and their publishers to have more access to the closest part of the money funnel. That’s the reason.

It’s not because they’re doing such wonderful jobs saying, my CMO community is better than your CMO community, is better than your CMO community. Again, that’s a business reason to start something, not a reason to build a community. A reason to build a community might be, and I’m using a hypothetical, you have a certain industry that you are very, very deep in.

There are different levels of individual in that community. Let’s call it 10, 80, 10, 10% are basically those folks that are aspirational, it’s very verticalized so it’s very specific. They want to learn, but they’re not there yet. The middle, the 80% are the people in the trenches. They’re your call it, $500,000 to $50 million company, and then your 10% or the home run hitters, they’re the C-suite of the Fortune 50. You say to yourself, where do you want to play?

It’s hard to say I want to play at the C-suite and the aspirational. You want to say, okay, do I have a connection to any of these specific audiences? What value do I deliver and why? Some people say I want to go with the highest end, and the value to them is the connectivity for other revenue activations. Not necessarily actually membership subscription, but it could be things like, we want to build deeper relationships by providing mutual value in these private speaker rooms or other things to get them to speak at our conferences, which we monetize in other ways to speak to people via our webinars or things of that nature or develop deeper relationships for our journalists to be able to have direct access to those individuals and we’re going to run it through editorial.

That’s one way to look at it. The other way is to say, okay, we think that we are the definitive expert in X, Y, Z industry. We can provide insider information, curated and facilitated discussions, mastermind talks around business stages for that 80%. We’re going to say, okay, what if we were able to help put the right people in the room by a certain topic? For example, what does it mean to put together the key suppliers of a certain energy that ultimately are talking about issues that the media can’t know about right now because they’re deep entrenched in what’s going on in the world and need to be able to see what’s happening in ways you can’t just publicly talk about.

Same thing like a YPO and EO, et cetera. It’s about figuring out where your target is and what your goals are. If your goals are membership, you really have to think about attention and value. These are the busiest people on earth, entrepreneurs, business people, et cetera, in our world. We have to make sure when we’re providing value, that that time, that 15 minutes to an hour, a month, a week, whatever it is, we better be giving them really strong value on their time.

That doesn’t mean ROI quantifiably in dollars. It could be in information, it can be in new relationships, it can be in the case of publishing, which we do. We allow our folks to publish on some of the major media outlets that we work with. All these value centers that create a thing that makes sense for them and their time because that is the one important thing in B2B especially. I would say the most important thing about creating a good community is what’s the value you’re doing and who is the curation and what is the criteria of that curation.

From the profitable point of view, determine the business model that you’re looking for. Is it direct bottom-line revenue like membership? Is it you are building something towards a larger goal like a speaker roster, direct access for editorial, you monetize elsewhere. You determine how are we going to go about ensuring we’re going to bring the right initial people on? We call that founding membership where we hand-select people, we take individual phone calls with them, we talk to them about our aspirations for the community. We say, would you give it a shot?

Would you be a part of this? Do you think that you would be active? We want to make sure initially you’re really gungho about this, that you’re getting accredited both and the affiliation is valuable to you and it’s valuable for us to make sure you see value and we want to hear your feedback, so they become a partner. Maybe not in the Dow sense that has gotten so popular today in buzzword terminology, but in the actual sense.

They want to feel like stakeholders, owners and their voice will be heard because they themselves are so busy they can’t build their own communities, and if they could, we would probably be out of business. They would rather let someone take on all of the hard work of putting that curation time in and benefit by being a stakeholder than a builder. That’s what we’ve learned in how to start that process. Slow roll.

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Jacob: This episode is brought to you by Omeda on May 4th. They’re hosting Omeda Idea Exchange in Chicago, discussing some of the most important topics in media. I’ll be there hosting a special edition of the AMO Podcast, but you’ll also hear from executives at Access Intelligence, Endeavor Business Media, and so many others. Don’t miss your chance to register today. Visit omeda.com and click OX 5. Now back to our discussion.

Let’s assume someone has a great idea to build a community, let’s say for media operators. Someone wants to build that community for these people who work in the media business. It’s on the business side. Almost like what I do. What are the features, what are the things that should be offered to the community that make it stand out, that make it worth their time?

Scott: Again, this goes back to what is the value you are trying to create for the individual. Let’s say, for example, CROs of publishing companies are one of the verticals that you would have interest in this hypothetical AMO community that you’re looking to build. [laughs] I think the key is creating a trusted space where trust can transfer honestly amongst people.

Whether that’s facilitation, whether that’s guided conversation. As a starting point, does it mean it’s the end all be all? Think about the CRO, get in their mindset. Their job is to make sure you’re hitting goals, budgets, that you are looking at diversification strategies and no one person has figured it all out and all of them have failed and all of them have succeeded. More times than not, we put on the mask and we go in the world and we answer the trade pubs about how smart we are, et cetera, et cetera. All of that distilled information that could truly bring the entire industry up is either lost or quietly in small rooms that are amongst friends of private community connections that you have made versus a proper community.

The value I would say is how do you bring that grouping together for an honest conversation? Again, it could be a dinner series. It doesn’t have to be some big technology. It doesn’t have to be some 24/7 365 in-your-face thing. It could be quarterly, it could be biannual. There is no cadence that is the right or the wrong. There is no frequency that is the right or the wrong. There is no number of conversations on Slack per week that is right or wrong.

It’s when there is truly focused time in a truly thoughtfully curated space is value able to be effectively exchanged, honestly and transparently. That’s where I think a lot of these smaller niches like example media operators like you’re mentioning, that is invaluable. Then, you look at it almost like a framework. You start with let’s say one vertical, CROs. Then you might go and say, now it’s the COO, now it’s the CEO. Now you have over, let’s say, a year or two years multiple verticalized communities.

Then what’s the next natural thing you can do? We’re going to elevate, we’re going to create a C-suite room so that all ideas can be exchanged. Everyone trusts the overall umbrella because it has done such thoughtful curation that as long as you are smart about why people are gathering. Never generalist. Nobody wants generalist stuff. For all the talk about consumer communities, it’s not my jam.

I’m not going to say they don’t work, but I think that the consumer who’s looking to spend 5 minutes and 15 seconds is a very hard thing to accomplish. Versus you need mission-critical information to do your job, to succeed in your career, to avoid missteps that could cost many thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is information that ultimately cannot be found by doing a Google search, by looking at a generic interview. It’s in those kinds of trusted spaces that the riches can be found for both member and organization.

Jacob: Obviously, your focus is B2B communities. That is what you care about. You even just suggested communities for consumers, very hard. Let’s put our consumer hat on for just a second.

Scott: Sure.

Jacob: If I told you you had to build a community for consumers, how would you do it?

Scott: It’s hard to say a generic. I’ll give an example of the kinds of things I would look for. First, you want something that has a real zealot audience around a topic. Again, that could be parenting. It could be food, it could be any of those things. Then you have to figure out again, what is the– I still would call it a professional organization in a way because it’s like what’s the club you’re creating and why should it exist?

Again, there’s tons of foodie places, there’s tons of parenting places. What is it ultimately that you’re solving for? Then I would look deeply into data and determine, let’s say I really wanted to create a parenting community, what is the value that I can do that you’re not going to find on 5,000 mom blogs out there today? That could be things like looking at each individual problem that a parent will find and creating an online community to solve those specific problems.

Where you’re putting together say, specialists or people that have had that issue and those that ultimately have not yet experienced or on their way to having that issue. Another way to look at it could be ensuring that they have direct access to people that they respect and admire. Again, this is nothing new. Webinars and other such things to learn information. Again, consumers at the end of the day are just like professionals. They don’t want time wasted. They don’t want generic connections.

There’s all kinds of things for like if you’re looking for things like dating or whatever, that’s a different kind of connection. This is truly like, I’m going to spend x amount of time every month in something. You have to be able to provide that in a value sense. One thing I’ve always been impressed by, you look at it like food and wine and what that Meredith has had with the food and wine festivals, I find that to be a fantastic example of what consumer community can be.

You are gathering people for an event, but they are zealots on their newsletters. They are finding ways to connect with that event in person with the chefs. They do great ways to combine chef content with that audience. Again, from a content consumer point of view, I think that is a very different way to look. Let me tell you why I advise against what I would call consumer community for dollars at scale.

The consumer today is a very different beast than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. Information overload is so high right now that valuing consumer day-to-day generic information versus mission-critical professional insights, super difficult, which is why it’s low ticket price, which is why it’s very hard to monetize. I would argue that you need to have a modeling that makes sense for other things. If you are looking at this from a more P&L point of view.

Again, you’re going to build a traveling food conference where the top foodies in the world travel or you’re going to build a rock concert series in partnership with artists. Those bands and their followers are going to get exclusive oriented behind stage access, meet with the artists that vibe in those kinds of worlds work really well. The attraction is ultimately some sphere of influence that is valuable versus here’s a sub, here’s a subscription, here’s 10 levels of content, and five benefits that usually yield discount on x that I just truly don’t believe is community.

That’s just simply subscription. I think if you are looking at more experiential consistency, you probably could create an annualized program again, in the festival space, in the foodie space, or similar really zealot categories like that but it’s going to rely on exclusivity, on like-mindedness. Commonality might be not criteria per se, the commonality and then the attraction that is behind the velvet rope. What is it that they are getting and experiencing that will make them either take their time or pay a higher dollar amount?

That shell, I think is the only way to truly make something work that would make sense for any material publication in a consumer space.

Jacob: With these professional communities, your end goal is to get someone to pay potentially thousands of dollars for access to the community. How did you determine the price point for these communities and what is the mechanism, what factors come into play when trying to decide exactly how much to charge for membership?

Scott: I wish I had the perfect answer for you, Jay. A lot of it is just historical analysis. A lot of it, in the beginning, was just gut check. It sounds really funny, and I know that people are going to wait on bated breath thinking that there’s going to be some exacting science of this. We came up with our first price because when I was originally calling every person we wanted to join myself, I asked them if we do our job, what do you think this is worth to you?

That’s how we set our original price points. I think you have to ask. A lot of times people are just so worried about price sensitivity and making sure there’s this magic P&L and what the up-until-the-right chart’s going to look like based on compounding it. All these things that are just so nonsense until you get your first five people in the door and they tell you you have value in their lives, that I feel like it’s more about being there every single step of the way for those initial members.

I’m talking not the scalable stuff. I mean, you should know them by name. You should be in the trenches in their events or gatherings. You should be participating. You should be convening them, you should be providing special value that isn’t on the website of benefits. Because when you lock those initial ambassadors, if they are sold in on value out and opportunity and return on their time the amplification of value that comes from that early cohort is invaluable because they will tell forever a better story than you will.

They will always be the ones that sell your members versus your sales script, your website, your anything. Again, this is not anything novel. Ambassadors, referrals, this is all common sense stuff for as long as there’s been “marketing.” When you are in the people business, don’t act like you are in anything but. That’s where I’ve seen most communities collapse under themselves. They put some fancy people on a website say, “Look who’s in, look what companies are part of our group.” All these things.

Then they assume that those flashing lights of, look at me, we are great. Oh my gosh, look at all these great companies that believe in us so much. Then what happens the second they get in? None of those people are participating. None of them will return those emails. Wait, the Slack isn’t, I don’t hear anything. I’ve sent 25 emails to this person. All of a sudden you get hit with 50 sales solicitations. This wasn’t what I was promised. Now you’ve broken the truth because you haven’t set up the rules, you haven’t taken the time to realize this isn’t a financial exercise.

It is building long-term value with long-term goals in mind. This is actually a super important point, and we do this in our company today. We ask every single new member at the point of onboarding in one year from now when you are up for renewal what is going to make the decision for you? They tell us verbatim it’s an open-response question and maybe a couple multiple choice. Our team, all we do all day long is figure out for that member how to deliver that value and put the actual equation reverse-engineered in their favor for minute one providing them value from the moment they give us information.

Because at the end we’ll be able to say, “Hey John, thanks so much. We love you being a member. We can’t wait to see what you do next year and we’ll ask you all the questions to be successful.” Again, let’s recap all the value that you’ve seen as part of this. What did you think? How could we improve? Et cetera, et cetera. You’re building conversation from combination of data and just true humanity from minute one.

Then whether you’re charging ’em $50, $500, $5,000. I know some organizations that charge $60,000 $70,000 $80,000. The money is secondary to the value being exchanged. That will be a natural progression in any community you build.

Jacob: When somebody joins. You’ve talked a lot about the marketing and I want to understand more about how you do drive ultimately members to sign up and all that. When someone joins historically what is the lifetime of a member? How long do they tend to stay engaged before they just find it’s just not worth it anymore? It’s not. I’ve got what I got from the community.

Scott: It’s different across the boards. We have some communities I couldn’t tell you because we haven’t lost enough people in nine years or eight years to tell you. In some communities, it’s four to six years. In some communities, I would say four years is probably around the target we look at. The rationale isn’t necessarily because they don’t see value anymore.

There’s a number of factors which is also important for people to realize. You have to make a conscious decision to be who you are and what you do. Your community’s going to morph and change. People are going to change jobs, people are going to leave industries, people are going to retire. I think the mistake I’ve seen a lot of communities do is, again, because they’re after this holy grail of 95% retention or whatever nonsense number people come up with they try to create all these offshoots.

Now you create this Frankenstein monster because we can’t lose that member because it costs us so much money from CAC to get that member. What can we do to keep that member happy? I think sometimes you have to be willing to say, “Thanks so much. We so appreciate your patronage and being a part of this community. If you ever need us again, we’re here. We hope you succeed with the rest of your career.”

That’s okay. I would argue that we really are focused on what we do and why we do it. If people have changing life, career, other pursuits we ultimately say, you know what? We wish you the best. Sometimes those people come back. By the way, we have many people that they might change careers or change jobs and then they find out we’re in another community that handles that particular role and they join that community instead. I think you just have to realize you are who you are and stay the course.

Jacob: The relationship between you and your media partners, obviously you manage all of these communities and you own these communities and you run these communities but they have these very strong brands. How do they contribute to the audience development for these communities? Are they driving their audiences? Are they promoting it or is it like totally hands-off, they don’t think about you and you just have to figure out how to get these people?

Scott: I would reverse-engineer the question a little bit. We are very selective with who we work with at this point because we have to really believe that the ethos of that brand drives such loyalty and value. That once you enable our modeling, we can drive something that will truly be valuable for the end to consumer and member. With that in mind, I would say we are very intertwined with our media partners.

These are true joint ventures. We are working with them to determine what are the audiences we think collectively we should work with. How do we look at value? How do we look at tying in, say with some of their core opportunities that already exist? If they have an amazing conference how can we do something special just for membership at that conference?

Again, special access behind the rope, things like that.

We look at all different mechanisms to truly get intertwined. What I will say is that at the end of the day, and this is maybe me putting on my business versus community hat for a moment, I fundamentally believe that media companies are wonderful and incredibly impressive at building content and content models. We are incredibly impressive of building sustainable, ongoing, and growing communities in the professional space.

Like any business, I believe there are lanes for a reason because every side is good at what they do. If both sides were good at both things why are we working together? We really believe that we have to bring the business to that publication. We believe that if we didn’t need to do that, the publication would’ve already been successful. Because we find that most of our publishing partners are exceptional at building what I’ll call events or conferences type business generalized community versus specific community they wouldn’t be in our wheelhouse like we are today.

I look at it as how can we take everything that brand stands for, its assets, its very core messaging who it’s trying to talk to and speak to. Breaking down that larger audience into the cohorts that makes sense for deeper connection and meaningful convening and then really be able to attract and retain that audience. We do ask for a number of tie-ins and things, of course, like common sense, marketing-related, co-marketing-related assets, and exercises.

We really do bring the business in a box because we don’t want to be a headache or a CapEx spend or a technology spend or a financial spend for any of these folks. We want to do great work and tie it in directly with what they know how to do which is build incredible content meaningful reporting and valuable audiences.

Jacob: Obviously you bring the business to the table but let’s assume someone decides they do want to try to do it on their own for whatever reason. What is the team that they need to build to support one of these communities?

Scott: It’s certainly an interesting question. Our company’s over 200 people that do this across our portfolio. Certainly, I would not suggest go out and hire 200 people and see where it goes. I’ll also say, look, when YEC was started, it was me and my partner and one person. There’s something magical in not overthinking this. I think the biggest issue is people again are thinking about it wrong.

We started this interview they think about it as how do we get this goal out of this community rather than what is the goal that we want from the community? When you’re trying to reverse engineer for some P&L thing, you’re going to stack against it. You’re going to put metrics against it, you’re going to say, “This is where we have to be by quarter.” That’s just not how people businesses of this kind work, right?

They work organically and naturally. People, if they feel they’re being sold to they won’t participate if they feel they’re being rushed or if they’re being constantly bombarded by messaging or if they’re being told like everything about anything that matters that accept what matters to them, they’re not going to participate. I think the most undervalued person you can hire tomorrow is a community manager. Now, let me be clear because this is another buzzword that has come about in the community generation.

When I say community manager, I do not mean a social media manager. This is not the same thing. I am talking about someone who is high-end customer touch, high-end customer experience has worked in whether it’s hospitality, has pressed the flesh, has met people, has been involved in whether it is high-end events or things of that nature, and understands emotional intelligence at such a level that they’re going to go the extra mile. Regardless what the marketing copy says you get on the website, that is a very hard find, but it is not someone who’s going to tweet at you.

It’s not someone who’s going to say, “Oh, look at my cool community on a picture they took at the bar one night with three people.” This is not that person. That person’s your number one, you want to call them a chief community officer. I’ve heard that thrown around now. The reality is high-end, high-touch people that understands the human experience, the human need, and is going to be there for the first, what I’ll call 50 to 100 people.

Because I will tell you right now, if you don’t get to 50, you’re not getting to 100, and if you don’t get to 5, you’re not getting to 50. That first cohort, if it takes you two years, you have to be willing to say, “That’s okay.” If it takes you six months, great too, but it’s all going to be based on this initial person and how they treat that constituency and drive value for those initial people.

Jacob: I want to talk for just a moment about Senior Executive, which is your new publication targeting this very senior-level person. I obviously understand I think what you’re trying to do, but what is the long-term plan here, and how does this fit into your strategy when it comes to communities?

Scott: You’re going to make me break some news here, Jay. Thanks so much for that. Seniorexecutive.com, our vision for it is we believe there are a number of niches in the professional world, that have incredible people every day, whether running businesses or being executives of these businesses that don’t have a natural home, right? I’m talking about super-specific titles, super-specific verticals, or super-specific industries.

There might only be 5,000 people in the United States that have that specific thing, and because of that traditional conference businesses and other publications don’t see it as a big enough play to enter the space. We believe that through a combination of really great journalism, really great content, really great insights et cetera, we can develop hyper-specific niche publications under Senior Executive, that drive these mission-critical insights that ultimately can build community in the model we understand in many different niches and verticals over a period of time.

We look at this as an opportunity to really create the community for everyone. Not with everyone, not for everyone, but ultimately for this exacting group, but for many like them.

I see it as an opportunity for us to truly realize how we can build, even if it ends up being 5, 10, 15,000 people in the umbrella, but ultimately that might be hundreds of individual communities or dozens. This is our opportunity to really see, can we take what we’ve done for the last decade, and now basically be the one-stop opportunity for all things. This doesn’t mean in any way we’re not doing our core business and we’re not going to compete against our core business.

That would make no sense, but I just believe there are so many people that they don’t even know who to call. I’ve talked to some of our core demographic in the first couple we have in mind, and there is no organization, there is no publication, they don’t know who to turn to, and when they go to the “communities” they’re going to generalist information, not the specific person that understands me and my needs. I believe we can deliver that in a highly verticalized way.

Jacob: I want to end with the same two questions that I ask every operator that comes on the show. First, what is a mistake that you have made in your career that you wish you hadn’t, and what did you learn from it?

Scott: Okay. Wow. I will say the biggest mistake I’ve ever made is overspending, by assuming you need all these things, these bells and whistles and technology, and all these things. Until you’ve got in the traditional sense product market funnel called community market fit in this case because you’re building all this stuff thinking, “I’ve got to be like those guys. I have to compete. They have Facebook groups. Oh my God, what am I going to do? I can’t compete against a multibillion-dollar price.” We have to look, I used to say, we have to look professional.

That was the whole thing. What I learned was when we did these crazy things, no one used them. [laughs] I think what I learned is you can’t spend your way to community, no matter how much you want to spend. You can’t market your way to community, you can’t advertise your way to community. You can form community, you could be there for community, you can listen to community, and then the keyword, you can invest in your community. You can’t invest in creating a community. Big, big difference. I would say the biggest lesson was, listen more, spend less, and then once you’ve heard enough, spend a lot to make sure you harden and then are able to expand.

Jacob: My second question is, for someone who is thinking about launching a community, a professional community, what is some advice you would give them?

Scott: Again, I think this is the most important factor. I’ve said it consistently throughout this. Think about time as the number one thing and bandwidth, the number two thing. I guess those are technically connected in a lot of ways, but that people are going to judge return on their value of time. If you’re taking 15 minutes from me, what am I going to be able to participate in that makes that time worth it?

It doesn’t mean what am I going to earn or receive. It’s not necessarily an exercise in quantify this in a financial metric of some kind, but there’s a feeling, an emotional attachment, a longing for friendship or mentorship or connectivity, or again, mission-critical insights. What are you putting in that time slot so that people will make an instant connection and say, “I get it, I’m in.”

What is that unique thing you and you alone, your publication, and your publication alone can deliver that changes the game for someone in 15 to 30 minutes a month? Because I’m being honest with you, if you think on average you’re going to get people to Facebook get to WhatsApp and all day, it’s not going to happen. I would look at it more as less about time of engagement versus return of time of engagement because you don’t care if they’re on the site or on your experience or coming to every event.

You care about when they activate, when they’re involved, and participate. Do they walk away and say, “Wow, that was incredible.” Again, it’s not because they necessarily got something in the financial sense. It’s they got something they couldn’t have had elsewhere, meaningful connectivity, honest transparency, or something along those lines.