Emotional Resilience and Personal Growth through Community

About This Episode

In this episode, we’re joined by Lloyed Lobo, an entrepreneur, podcast host, and community builder. 

He’s the Co-founder of Boast.AI and Traction. Lloyed is also the author of 'From Grassroots To Greatness’. Lloyed experienced the Gulf War as a young refugee in Kuwait, witnessing the strength of the community in evacuating the population to safety. As the co-founder of the fintech platform Boast.Al, he leveraged the Community-Led Growth model to help bootstrap the company to 8 figures in annual recurring revenue and secure over $100 million in capital. Lloyed is also the co-founder of Traction, a community empowering more than 100k innovators through connections, content, and capital.

In today’s episode, we'll dive into resilience -  a crucial skill for navigating challenges and embracing change. 

Studies show that being resilient not only improves your work and happiness but it can also reduce feelings of depression. 

So, we’ll discuss why having a supportive community is crucial for building emotional resilience.  Lloyed will also share tips on creating a strong community around your brand or personal projects.

Tune in for an engaging discussion on resilience with Lloyed Lobo!

| Pain is the precondition for growth. Anything great is a long, freaking slog. It's a marathon of the heart and mind. - Lloyed Lobo

This episode is for you if you’re curious about the following:

1. What is the most effective way to build resilience over time?
2. How important is having a supportive community in building emotional resilience?
3. What mindset helps build resilience, especially in children?
4. When pursuing social media influence, is it better to create your own content or conduct influencer outreach?
5. Can difficult life experiences (and trauma) like poverty, war, or depression increase resilience?

Connect With Lloyed

• Connect on LinkedIn
• Follow on Instagram
• Follow on Twitter
• Get Lloyed’s new book

Resources
Find on

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Chapters

• 0:00 Building Resilience Through Adversity
• 13:26 The Power of Resilient Companionships
• 27:36 Importance of Growth Mindset and Networking
• 31:20 Finding Your Tribe in Business
• 40:31 Building Audience, Community, and Movement
• 48:37 Building Personal Influence in Digital Age
• 54:39 Podcast Appearances and Book Promotion

Transcript

Katherine Watier Ong: 0:42

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the changemakers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs, and this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins what tactics or skills the guests use to align people with their marketing strategy. I'm your host, Catherine Watsier Ong, the owner of WO Strategies LLC. We focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise-sized, science-focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let's get into it and celebrate our victories. So today we're joined by Lloyd Lobo.

Katherine Watier Ong: 1:23

Lloyd is actually a co-founder of Boast AI, the author of From Grassroots toast AI. The author of From Grassroots to Greatness, the host of Attraction Podcast. He runs the Attraction community of 1,200 members. His experience as a Gulf War refugee, almost dying from COVID and struggling with depression and mental health issues is a live demonstration of resilience. That's what the show is going to be about today.

Katherine Watier Ong: 1:46

All about how can you build your resilience. It's a soft skill that's going to help you bounce back from setbacks, adapt well to change and endure hardships. It's been shown to positively influence work satisfaction and engagement, as well as overall well-being. It can lower your depression levels. We're going to talk about why community, potentially a social media one, is crucial to building resilience and how it can help you build your social skills, and how to start building this community of supporters for the brands you work for or yourself. And I think this is absolutely relevant as here in the US, we're seeing Google showing more social media posts and profiles and search results. I'm excited about today's episode, and you should be too, Lloyd, welcome to the show.

Lloyed Lobo: 2:25

Thank you so much for hosting me. I'm excited. Always a pleasure as a podcaster being on other podcasts.

Katherine Watier Ong: 2:36

Awesome. So tell all the listeners a little bit more about you. I gave a little bit in the intro but your background, how you got to where you are today.

Lloyed Lobo: 2:44

Definitely, I would say. I tell people that I'm an accidental entrepreneur. My family members, parents, nobody's an entrepreneur. Their definition of success is you go to university, you do postgraduate studies, you work through the ranks, you work till 65, you retire and that's the way to live, right? That's society's definition of success.

Lloyed Lobo: 3:08

But I did everything opposite that I was a very rebellious kid growing up and I didn't finish high school. I missed all my exams, don't have a high school diploma. Now, most kids who don't have a high school diploma would never apply to university. I did the opposite, applied to every university college that there was, and this was in Canada and a couple colleges reached out saying hey, can you write the entrance exam? I sent the previous year's transcripts. Anyway, the entrance exams went well and one university said hey, why don't you start the semester? And because we're in a hurry and we're getting started soon and give us the transcripts within a month. But if you don't, then you're going to have to on and roll. I made up some BS excuse as to why the transcripts were taking a while.

Lloyed Lobo: 3:55

Now, luck would have it, they never followed up and I graduated without a high school diploma, with a bachelor's of engineering and software. So the key realization is luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. A lot of people say I'm lucky and you know, tell me, tell me, oh, you're lucky, and all kinds of things, and I'm like, yeah, I'm lucky, but you know what? Luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. The ones that get lucky are the ones that never stop flipping risk, risk, risk, risk. That never stopped putting themselves out there. And I just did something that most people wouldn't. They would be like, okay, I'm not going to apply, I'm just going to accept my fate, that I was a bad student and I did the opposite.

Lloyed Lobo: 4:36

Now, when I graduated engineering, I didn't want to go and do a nine to five job. Everything I'd done all my life since childhood was against the grain and said I can't work somewhere nine to five. And I asked a few people I know in business that, hey, what's the best skill I could learn if I want to be an entrepreneur? And they said, hey, you got to learn communication. You got to improve that. Everything from convincing your spouse that you're not going to bring money to convincing customers that you have nothing, but please buy me, buy my stuff. To convincing employees to work on low pay, to eventually convincing investors, media, et cetera. It's all communication.

Lloyed Lobo: 5:15

Now here's the second realization I had. I knew I wasn't very self-motivated All my life. I jumped from thing to thing to thing like as rebellious kids do, right? And I said, hey, I'm not very self-motivated. And I actually believe that self-motivation is the biggest BS hoax that society feeds you. We berate the people that can't be self-motivated and we're like oh, you need to have self-motivation.

Lloyed Lobo: 5:41

It's not easy for most people. If you want to fix something, get better at something, you got to change your environment. If you got a pantry full of junk, let's face it, you're never going to get fit. Okay, like, I don't care what self motivation you have, eventually you're going to cave in. If you hang around with a bunch of drug addicts, let's face it, eventually something's going to happen. Like, why put yourself in an environment that forces you to cave in? Right? And so I knew that, because you know, all my company was bad. So I said, if I took a public speaking class, the chances of me dropping out the first time three or four people laughed me off stage would be very high. So let me find a job that forces me to communicate day in, day out.

Lloyed Lobo: 6:29

Let me find a job that just forces me to communicate because, nothing else, nothing else, like I won't stick, otherwise I can't take a class. And then five people laugh at me and I'm embarrassed. And everything I researched was sales. Like the only job that forces you to communicate day in, day out is sales. And here's the thing graduating as an engineer, no big company would give me a sales job. They're like you know, this is 2005. Why do you want to go in sales? If you're an engineer, you might be a bad engineer. That's why you don't go into sales. Well, you can't communicate either.

Lloyed Lobo: 6:59

Now, luck would have it, startups was just starting to come up as a thing right in the early 2000s and there was a startup founder in telecom that needed cold callers, and he didn't care what my education was, he just needed to fill a seat. So I took a job in cold calling. My parents lost it. They're like your friends are working at Johnson and Johnson and Microsoft and you're like making minimum wage cold calling. I kid you not fast forward. Today, everything I have is because of that first job, because the first cold call I made I practiced a few hours, of course, when the decision maker showed up on the line. I fumbled, I hung up all kinds of stuff. But I needed to make money and my environment was a bunch of young people just starting out cold calling. So that was the environment we're in we're just cheering each other on. And we kept practicing and practicing. You are what you repeatedly do. If you look at Mr Beast's first videos, they all sucked. He is like an icon today, right. So it's like consistency is the secret ingredient that turns those small actions into big outcomes. So I got better and better and better communicating on the fly, pivoting my messaging. It got really polished.

Lloyed Lobo: 8:13

And then now, because my first job was in cold calling, my girlfriend now wife got a med school in New Jersey. So I had to move, started applying to jobs in New Jersey. I couldn't get any big company to hire me, but another startup founder hired me in sales and then after that, the next job I also applied to I only could get. I went from like being a cold caller to being in sales and the next the job after that, when she got into residency at Drexel in Philly, was running sales and marketing. So my trajectory was very fast, because when you work for a startup or a small company, you operate in dog years. Right, everything is moving really fast. You're forced to learn if you're one of the first few, because you need to acquire customers, you need to build product and you need to move fast. And things are moving at a very fast pace and iterating, so you learn a lot more and you grow with the company.

Lloyed Lobo: 9:03

So I had that opportunity, going from doing cold calling to being in sales and product, to being head of sales and marketing for three startups back to back in a very quick succession. And so when my best friend from university called me with the idea for Boast, I jumped at the opportunity. I'm like, why work for somebody else Like these? They were all venture-backed, investor-funded companies. I knew the risk. I'm like, I knew exactly what it takes. I knew the risk because I work alongside the founder. I jumped at the opportunity because I'm like, why take low pay and work to build somebody else's destiny when I could build my own?

Lloyed Lobo: 9:46

And that doesn't come from something you're born with. It's not talent, that is your environment. If you hang out with five entrepreneurs, you'll be the sixth one. If you hang around with five people who have a six pack, eventually you'll be the sixth one. Right, that's your environment matters the most. Right, that's your environment matters the most. So that's how we. That was the journey of me ending up with BOST Very accidental, but came from you know. I think there's a lot of kids out there who are rebellious. There are a lot of people out there who are against the grain and they feel like, oh, they don't fit in this box that society creates. Like, oh, you need to fit in this to be successful. Like today I wear a hat, I wear a earring, I sit on the board of a public company. Eventually, I think if you just focus on being consistent and delivering value and being successful against the grain, then nobody's going to question you.

Katherine Watier Ong: 10:42

Yeah, yeah, it really reminds me anybody listening who has a kid who's dropped out of high school. It's very possible that you could go to my undergrad, hampshire College in Amherst, massachusetts. I believe they Well. First of all, you don't get any grades, tests or credits while you're there, so they love entrepreneurial type people and I don't believe the transcript is a really big deal. You write an essay and you meet with people and there's a whole other process to get into into school. So if you're, if you have a kid in that, in that environment, there's another school option for you this is 2024, right, this is like exactly 20 years ago, like sats and all of these things mattered.

Lloyed Lobo: 11:16

I don't think they matter anymore. I don't even think school matters anymore, uh, in the true sense of it, because the pace and the evolution of technology and knowledge is so fast, right. The amount of time it takes for a curriculum to get approved through the regulation and make it to the education system by the time it's already yesterday's knowledge. Right, you can acquire knowledge at such a rapid pace in this day and age that to me sometimes it feels and I have this argument with my wife, my wife is a professor at Stanford and she's a physician and I'm like okay, for medicine maybe. Right, of course, regulated industry. But if you're not in a regulated industry like legal accounting, medicine, what you do and how often you do it, the skill, matters more than a piece of paper in the long term.

Katherine Watier Ong: 12:08

And certainly so. My undergrad required a thesis to graduate, so I did my first thesis at my undergrad, which was hardcore. Skills that I took into my career Also made graduate school really easy. But yeah, I often the kids on my team at Ketchum would come up to me and say, hey, do I need to go to graduate school for digital marketing? And I was like, well, after you've been trained on the basics for me, no, just go straight into another career like skip the. You know, I I don't know if I I enjoyed my graduate program. I was also build your own program.

Katherine Watier Ong: 12:37

I enjoyed doing my thesis, which was first person, the first researcher on wearable computers back in 2003, which was kind of helpful to kickstart my career, but it was a lot of money. I don't know in retrospect if I would go that way or not. I don't know. So let's talk a little bit more about your resilience, because you've mentioned, like so, how you got up to boost AI. But I'm kind of curious about both that your experience from the Gulf War, your experience with COVID, this whole adaptability to change piece, which I think is critical for the crushing speed of our industry. What tips do you have there? What's your experience there?

Lloyed Lobo: 13:18

You know I'll go back in the story but I'll start with the headline here Pain is the precondition for growth. Anything great is a long, freaking slog. It's a marathon of the heart and mind. You might get lucky, but if you just say, oh, you know what I want to be in and out in two years, it's definitely not going to happen. It's a long slog. So you better enjoy the process, embrace yourself for the long slog and maybe you'll get lucky. And the long slog doesn't end up being so long, right, but anything good lasting, anything worth doing, is freaking difficult. But think about it. I'm going to give you an analogy to working out to the gym. When you go to the gym, the heavier weight you lift, the stronger you get right, because it puts load on your muscles. Your muscles tear, then it repairs and you get stronger. And as a function of lifting heavier weights, you're better for it, you're stronger for it. The same thing is your brain. The same thing is how you are in life. Taking on the hard, challenging tasks makes you more resilient and makes you stronger and makes you prepared for harder challenges. So it's just a function of you know.

Lloyed Lobo: 14:41

Growing up to immigrant parents, my parents were not educated. Growing up to immigrant parents, my parents were not educated, both from India. My mom grew up in the slums of Mumbai and my dad was a farmer. They weren't educated so they couldn't go out west and the only option was go to the Middle East. So my dad went to Kuwait and I think he started as a dishwasher and learned to cook and eventually became a very celebrated executive chef, but nonetheless very lower middle class family. My mom stayed at home to look after the kids because, of course, you know, couldn't afford a nanny, and that was life right. And so our summer holidays were not spent in Europe or somewhere fancy, they were spent in the slums of Mumbai. And so what I realized is, though, the less you have, the happier you are. Every summer, I'd go to the slums of Mumbai where this house that my grandparents lived in. He had 10 kids shacked up in this house, now grandkids as well.

Lloyed Lobo: 15:48

No bathroom, so you gotta line up every day to go to the toilets. And no water, so you gotta line up every day to pump water, enough water. Watching tv was a communal activity. Going in the bathroom was a communal activity, so I experienced that as a kid, and everyone was happy, like you know when you're a kid, you're naive. You don't know what's right and wrong. Right, you don't know what's luxury and what's not.

Lloyed Lobo: 16:09

And I think everyone, when they're embracing a new career and a new business, they got to be naive because sometimes, like, having too much knowledge just makes you afraid of taking on a risk. Right, having being naive will make you jump into things because you don't know. Like, say, I got a two-year-old. I got three kids, 10, five and two. My two-year-old he'll just do anything. If he gets hurt he may be deterred, but the first time he won't be, and any kid for that matter. Right, they're not deterred when they're new, but if it's not as painful or they overcome it, then they take on bigger and bigger leaps. Right, and the key is that naivety right.

Lloyed Lobo: 16:55

And so for me, being in the slums was a great experience. Every summer, when it was time to go back to Kuwait, I'd grab my parents by their feet and be like listen, I don't want to go back, leave me here. I had the best time of my life. Then, a few years later, kuwait was hit by the Gulf War. Wake up one morning and my mom's, like, can't go to school. My first reaction, of course, as a young kid, is yes, I don't have to go to school after a long summer vacation. But then it started to sink in that, hey, there's worry on their faces, something's up, currencies is invalid. You don't know if you're going to live or die.

Lloyed Lobo: 17:28

But one thing was very interesting. When I went down the building that day, people were coming together to just solve and find solutions. Hey, I'll guard the building from X to Y time. I'll organize food supplies. If you have displaced family members, I'll organize shelters. Every building became a sub-community that communicated with the next building and the next building and eventually communicated with different embassies and governments and probably one of the largest grassroots movements to evacuate people from a war zone to safety. The security had completely elapsed, and so that was a very good experience.

Lloyed Lobo: 18:02

And as we were going on this highway of death from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan and you can Google search highway of death, you'll see buses bombed and everything the adults should have been worried or crying or stressed right, no currency, don't know where we're going, not sure you're going to live or die, who knows what's going to happen. But one thing that's very interesting is they were singing and laughing and playing the guitar, and I realized that day, as I was reflecting back on my journey, is we often talk about the outcome, the destination, or we talk about the journey. And I came to realize, I think that day was a key point for me. That trip from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan is it's neither the destination nor the journey, it's the companions that matter the most. You could be on a crappy journey, on the way to hell, but great companions will make it memorable. I mean, have you ever been in an environment where you just toxic people and you want to get out of there?

Katherine Watier Ong: 20:06

I think I've talked on the show about how my agency experience has given me some PTSD. I think I've talked on the show about how my agency experience has given me some PTSD.

Lloyed Lobo: 20:13

So I guess we, we, we all have that Right. And then you're in a conversation with people pretty, you don't know really well, but you're vibing really good and it's ours and you don't want to leave Right. So I think your companions matter the most in terms of your mental health, your physical wellbeing and everything in between. And and for me, and despite going through all of this and a few years after the Gulf War we immigrated to Canada I never felt anything was difficult. Nothing felt like a hardship One, because I guess my parents never made me feel like we're going through some hardship or financial turmoil. But, more importantly, there were always people in that situation cheering each other on like everything's going to be okay or like nothing even happened, like it was a normal course of life. And I think a big part of that resilience mentally, physically is who you surround yourself with. Now, in that same environment, if you're around a bunch of people who are crying and moping and just saying, oh, we're just awaiting our fate and we're going to die, then that's how you're going to behave, right, that's how your brains are going to process it. But if everyone's saying, hey, it's going to be okay, things are going to be fine. We're going to work through it, finding solutions. That's how your brain is going to process it and for me, I've had those experiences of spending the summers in the slums of Mumbai where there was nothing and the hardest of hardships and the Gulf War and people were always solution oriented. And that was a key part of my environment, my nurture, and you can call it resilience, you can call it perseverance, any number of things, but I think it was shaped by the environment I surround myself with and I found myself that through all the hardships in life, nothing really felt hard, because I always was surrounded by companions who were hey, we're here for you, everything's going to be OK and if not, we'll work through it, kind of thing.

Lloyed Lobo: 22:19

The only time I actually got depressed and hit rock bottom was after we sold half the company and I left the day-to-day of the business. It also was the first time I came into any meaningful money. I went from living on my wife paying life salary being a startup founder across two, three, three startups over 10 years to, you know, coming into millions and I got depressed. Actually, I hit rock bottom, became a drunk, insufferable character and when I started to analyze that. I realized, you know, I felt like I lost my tribe. I lost my companions, right? I built my whole journey of 10 years in business around this community.

Lloyed Lobo: 23:04

So Boast was a community-led business. When we got to 10 million in revenue we had no marketing team. Marketing was the traction community we built and as a function of that we did SEO and everything else. But it was all centered around entrepreneurs, who we bring value to, and building that community and as a function of that we would get featured on blogs and do events and webinars and the whole gamut right. But it was a very community-led business. Our salespeople were essentially glorified community managers.

Lloyed Lobo: 23:37

So when I left the day-to-day I just felt lost, right. Because as an entrepreneur also, you're not very balanced. You spend 90%, 95% of your life on the business and then if there is anything left over, maybe it's for your family and friends and health in some order thereof. So when you leave, you just feel this lull, and so that's what I experienced. And then what uplifted me out of that was again joining a community of fitness-minded people, positive people. A big part of my journey coming out of depression was actually cutting out all negative energy from my life. I don't listen to the news. News happens right, but I think the media perpetuates negative energy because I don't know if you've noticed on social media and on news, on any form of media, negative content perpetuates and festers and turns into new monsters. People are more engaged.

Katherine Watier Ong: 24:35

Good news it does engage people more. It's just, that's the psychology of it.

Lloyed Lobo: 24:39

Yeah, good news doesn't carry on and everything's filtered to the end user.

Katherine Watier Ong: 24:44

So if you click one negative stuff, you'll end up getting potentially more negative stuff.

Lloyed Lobo: 24:49

Yeah, I could say like, hey, you won the Grammys, right and. And everyone's like, yeah, you won the Grammys, yay. And then it's not a discussion point three days from now. But if it's like a negative thing, like oh, somebody got killed or you know there's some bad thing happening, then it's a discussion point today and then tomorrow. Oh, then did you hear about it?

Lloyed Lobo: 25:07

Like, if you've worked anywhere right and been in the American workforce, workforce around the world every morning, I think, like a conversation started out or did you see that on the news, or did you hear about that? Did you? Did you see? It's all negativity. Very rarely it starts with like, did you hear a positive piece of news? And if it is, then that conversation ends very quickly. But if it's a negative piece of news, office gossip, whatever it just carries on and carries on and turns into cancer.

Lloyed Lobo: 25:38

And so a big part of that was cutting out negative people from my life, negative energy, that sort of thing, and, and doing that just changed my life. And you know, I think when you talk about resilience, there's two key factors, and I was just actually just did a clip on this on Instagram yesterday. Most parents that I know, and even growing up, especially the Indian parents we praise and reward the outcome or the results and we reprimand based on the outcome or results. Even in the workforce Right Like you suck because you didn't produce the results, or what a great job nobody appreciates the effort, the process and I think especially with kids, because a big part of what you do is how you're nurtured through your journey is appreciating the effort, the process.

Lloyed Lobo: 26:34

Because when you just reprimand like like a harsh reprimand or a huge reward on the results, people then start to have a fixed mindset and they're like, hey, if I don't get this result, I'm going to get destroyed. So then they have this fear of failure and that deters them from taking on challenging tasks. In reality, you know this in business, in life, nothing is an easy road, especially in business or any endeavor where you're on your own. It's a journey of ups and downs and wins and losses. The ones that are rewarded are the ones that keep showing up consistently and you know what may look like a big challenge and a potential failure could just be a turning point. If you overcome it, yeah, if you have this fear of failure, you'll just like abandon and move on.

Katherine Watier Ong: 27:30

Yeah, we actually luck out because we homeschool our kids, mostly due to COVID stuff, but I've been an entrepreneur and entrepreneur my entire career and my husband plays for the presence on marine band at the white house, which basically those are top musicians. You have to audition for the role, um, and so both of us got to where we are because of growth mindset and practice, lots of practice, and so we're really focused on making sure with our kids, like the the most important thing. When we sat down and we said what are we, what do we really want to teach our kids? And the big thing was growth mindset, definitely.

Lloyed Lobo: 28:05

Exactly, and you know that combination is consistency a bias for consistency and a bias for urgency. Velocity, action, whatever you want to call it. If you combine velocity with consistency, you can build something big, you can get somewhere. So I think a big part of this is nurture and who you hang out with. If you hang out with people who are just constantly putting things off or, you know, just exiting at the first difficult turn, then you're going to be like it's going to be normalized for you and you feel like it's okay. It's like you know, you remember napster back in the day? Yeah, it was illegal, it was. It was illegal, right, but everyone was doing it. Why? Because if everyone's doing it, it's right. So if the 10 people, five people you hang out with all the time are just like job jumping or like quitting at every difficulty, it's going to be normalized for you and you're like, yeah, it's okay, right. And so I think you got to create the environment for yourself that will put you in the best position to achieve your goals.

Katherine Watier Ong: 29:24

And for the SEOs listening to the show. I've been in the industry for almost two decades now and there used to be a lot of negativity online. It was hard to find your tribe and people were pretty focused on cutting you down. I do remember, on purpose, sort of not asking for help with questions in various forums, but all of that has shifted a bit recently. So I want to give you two tips. So one I've plugged before.

Katherine Watier Ong: 29:48

So the Women in Tech SEO group is amazing. It's a Facebook group. It's also Slack. It's nothing but support from other women who do SEO globally Full stop. So if you're female, join the group. The second one is actually there's a different SEO Slack group called, I believe, seo Community. There's Google reps in there, which is helpful, because at one point John Mueller answered a question of mine, but also it's really focused on making sure that everyone's positive and supportive and it has been positive and supportive. So if you're looking for your tribe and you're in SEO, there's two free Slack groups that would be a great place for you to check out.

Lloyed Lobo: 30:24

So that's a great great resources there.

Katherine Watier Ong: 30:27

Yeah, so so you've shared this traction conference, so do you think conferences or sessions are a good place for social skills building your community? What have you seen from people that attend? I know we talked a little bit before we started recording about how you've grown your network with events. Talk to me a little bit about that and whether you've seen it shift any in this COVID world.

Lloyed Lobo: 30:51

You know when we started the company it's funny when we started to boast Soast is a very obscure offering. Right, we help businesses that build technology or products or services get money from the government. Globally, hundreds of billions of dollars are provided by governments, but it's a cumbersome, broken process that's prone to audits and receiving the money takes a long time. So we automate that. So when you start a business, your first thing is I need to get some customers. How do you get customers? First, you need to understand who you're going to sell to. So we said, ok, let's sell to manufacturing and construction and oil and gas, because they're the stable businesses that pay Reached out to them. Nobody would talk to us. It would be so hard to get meetings with them. So we said let's go to their events. When we started going to their events, it just fell out of place. We looked like two young guys who threw a suit jacket on top of a hoodie. They felt like the cigars club right, totally visualize this.

Katherine Watier Ong: 31:46

Yeah, I worked for a utilities telecom at one point, so it's it's a lot of white, older dudes, not a single female anywhere.

Lloyed Lobo: 31:56

Exactly so we we just couldn't resonate, so dejected. We started going out to the startup new business events and we felt like we found our tribe. They were starting out, we were starting out similar challenges. We started spending more time with them hanging out where they do eat, breathe, drink, sleep, where they do host events together, participate in hackathons together, and we felt we found our tribe. And when you're in the thick of things, it's always like I'm throwing spaghetti on the wall and God, make something work. When you look back, when you've achieved some success, it's a framework. So when you're starting out, the first step is I got to figure out who my tribe is going to be and the way I distill that to four or five points. One is do I love this audience? Or the problem set, or the content? Because, like we said through this conversation, doing anything successful is a long slog. If you hate your audience, you will not sustain. Do I love this audience is key, you will not sustain. Do I love this audience is key. And see, because I love that audience, we built Post as a community-led business. Traction is still going, despite me leaving the data of the business. I wrote this book for the same audience on community-led growth. It's never left me because I love that. It's my tribe, I love that audience. It's never left me because I love that. It's my tribe, I love that audience.

Lloyed Lobo: 33:18

The second is is it a small but growing niche? A lot of people they want to start with the biggest niche because they try to copy others who are already at a specific destination, but don't follow what they're doing when they're at a destination. Don't follow Airbnb today. Follow Airbnb's struggles when they started at a destination. Like, don't follow Airbnb today. Follow Airbnb struggles when they started and what are the steps they went through right. And so if you follow somebody, just make sure you're following the journey to where they got and not the journey now right, because it's not relevant to you. And so we said we got a niche down, so we didn't go after all businesses. We went after tech businesses and we didn't go for all businesses. We went after tech businesses and we didn't go for all tech businesses. We went after startups and we didn't go for all startups. We went after startups in Calgary, alberta, canada and Vancouver. That's where we started. Eventually scaled across US and Canada Because my co-founder happened to be living in Calgary. And so when you niche down, you become very relevant to the first 10, 20 people, and that's what your first tribe is right Like.

Lloyed Lobo: 34:20

Is it a small niche that can eventually explode? You need to have conviction on that, because when you are connected with that small niche, you can make your content extremely relevant, you can make your interactions extremely relevant, you can make your communication extremely relevant. Where it feels like dude, it feels like we know each other for long, and the same goes for like SEO and any sort of marketing you do out there. The more relevant you are to somebody and you land in somebody's face, they just feel like, hey, this was for me. I feel like this is speaking to me Because we're in the sea of sameness today, right With this chat GPT, and I'm seeing I don't know if you're seeing this, but I'm seeing, like LinkedIn comments and Quora comments where it's so obvious like the 10 comments back to back are different versions of the same comment from ChatGPT. It's ridiculous. So how do people feel like you know authentic, like an authentic, genuine interaction with you, your brand? It's when you niche down and you make it very relevant for them. It's better to be an inch wide and a mile deep than vice versa.

Lloyed Lobo: 35:39

So we started with startups in a small city and when you niche down, you also find white space because nobody else is providing them that right. Nobody wants to target startups in Calgary, alberta, in 2012. So we did and we found two big white spaces. One was they were not getting any love from any service providers or media. Nobody cared. And number two, all the events that were happening for startups were high-level CEO platitudes. Right, it was done by event organizers who would be like let's bring the most famed speaker, but a famed speaker is going to talk about high-level, aspirational stuff. There's only so much Elon Musk you're going to listen to when you need to put food on the table. When somebody's starting out, they need to solve their specific challenges. The inspiration is good once in a while. Listen to Elon Musk and Alex Ramosi and all these guys are great. But how do I get my first 10 customers? How do I get my first employee? How do I crack that million-dollar enterprise deal? That's what I want to know when I'm starting out.

Lloyed Lobo: 36:41

So we found those two white spaces and we begged and convinced the local newspaper to give us a weekly column, which we call Startup of the Week, and this is something a lot of people don't do. When they put their content out there, they just hope that the platform they put the content on or the blog they put the content on will distribute them. But what you got to take the extra step on is distribute it yourself. So when the blog went on the local newspaper, it was part of the big national newspaper on the Herald. I went to everyone in my phone book, my WhatsApp book, my groups, my LinkedIn, everyone I knew email, and I said, hey, I wrote this column, can you give it a retweet, a like, a share? Instagram and stuff wasn't big for business back then.

Lloyed Lobo: 37:35

Podcasting wasn't big for business in 2012. It was mostly third-party blogs and events that were happening and I knew that if I tried to start a blog on our website with Neil Patel and all these guys I mean Neil Patel is a friend of mine now but like all these guys out there, I would never make it. But getting backlinks from the highest domain authority website in the country every week to my new website would do a lot for it. So I got everyone to like that post and then the editor called me and was like listen, I'll make it a recurring weekly column. If you commit to writing every week, I'll even turn it into a print column. Recurring weekly column If you commit to writing every week, I'll even turn it into a print column.

Lloyed Lobo: 38:23

So now what started to happen was every week I started getting people wanting to be featured fill up our form. I put a little form in there startup of the week and we'd get a backlink from the Herald newspaper to our website every week and two guys who nobody knew now went to getting some social proof. Hey, these guys are in the newspaper, they're probably not so bad, we should probably do business with them. And then everyone who applied to be featured, we'd then invite them for a meetup every week, for a standing meetup at a co-working space, and we'd invite a new speaker to speak on a very tactical topic. And the speakers we'd invite were not people who are like multi-billionaires. We'd invite were not people who are like multi-billionaires. So if I'm just starting out, I want to listen to an entrepreneur who maybe took his business to 1 million or 5 million, because that's going to be more relevant and actionable for me. And we just did that with consistency, day in, day out, and that turned into a big in-person community and it's 120,000 subscribers today and that evolved into a podcast and everything else.

Lloyed Lobo: 39:18

So the key lesson here for those whether you're looking to start a community or join one is go hyper niche which is closest to your goals. Right, it's better to hang out with five, six people whom you love and want to spend all the time in the world. Harley Davidson scaled this model and built an iconic multi-billion dollar brand right, the Weekend Warriors. And then they scaled from there. There's a small group of people getting together and getting together, but your tribe is a small group of people you can get together with and then scale from there, or start very small by nailing down your niche and I guess niching down as much as possible and then grow from there If you want to start a community or want to join one. Otherwise, you're just going to feel lost in the crowd, I feel now, with so many events and conferences and whatnot happening right, definitely.

Katherine Watier Ong: 40:14

So this sounds like tips that you would be getting from your book from grassroots to greatness, so can you give me a little bit more of a teaser about what you cover in the book?

Lloyed Lobo: 40:23

Yeah, definitely so. One of the things I talk about right is every obscure idea that eventually became a global enduring phenomena. From Christ and Christianity to CrossFit Went through the exact same four stages. People listen to you or buy your product or service. You have an audience. When that audience comes together to interact with one another in a regular cadence, it becomes a community. When the community now comes together to create impact towards a purpose that's beyond your product or your profit, it becomes a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals, over time it becomes a cult or a religion audience, community, movement, religion.

Lloyed Lobo: 41:12

And I unpack that through different tips and strategies, but I'll go through really quick on some of the steps. The first thing is you got to figure out an underserved niche which we talked about and identify their pains. Figure out where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep. Figure out their pains and their aspirations too. Their pains and goals will give you maybe product one or two right, but their aspirations will give you multiple content, ideas for the long haul, and that changes over time. So you got to keep understanding your audience. Once you have that ICP nailed ideal customer profile or ideal community profile nailed, write down the three Fs around them. Who do they follow? This will give you a list of influencers you can either invite as speakers to your events or you can interview on your podcast. It gives you social proof as a function of their brand rub, right, then who do they fund Meaning, what other services and tools they pay for? This will give you a list of potential partners somebody you can co-host with, somebody you'll sponsor. And then where do they frequent Meaning events, magazines, platforms. This will give you a list of places you need to distribute your content or be present. And so what happens then is, let's say, you do an event and they see the influencers they listen to all the time and they see the partners that you've invited that have booths. There are tools they pay for already. They feel like they've entered their tribe. It's their circle, right.

Lloyed Lobo: 42:45

But a lot of this you can just engineer by nailing down an ideal customer profile and then drawing their circle of influence and then building relationships with that, and then from there you start by creating an audience through content, because I think doing events today is a little more expensive endeavor unless you have a free co-working space. I still love the in-person, because anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you build stronger connections. We're sound in sight. If we were in-person, we'd be taste, touch, smell, kind of thing, and would stay longer. Right, I mean, we've seen this with people you meet in person. You just build stronger connections with.

Lloyed Lobo: 43:23

But, nonetheless, if you don't have the budget or you don't have a free co-working space, start by creating the audience online through content. Right, you can either be a curator, so summarize content from experts, or a niche, like by interviewing on a podcast. You do a podcast like this. You can record the audio and the video. The audio, you put on all the podcast channels. The video, you can put the full on YouTube. Then you can slice it into multiple short form content and put it on YouTube shorts, put it on Insta shorts, put it on TikTok, and then the text you pull out from it, and there's tools to do all of this. Right now, you can turn it into a thoughtful LinkedIn post and a Twitter thread. The key is, though, doing this very consistently, and so you can, and then you can summarize everything and start a newsletter, subscribe, substack newsletter, for example. Right, and over time, you'll start to build this audience, and now the key is can I turn this audience into a community where they're interacting with one another. If you want to do it online, maybe you open up some of these sessions. You make it live and interactive. So you maybe do a 30, 40 interview and then you open up for audience interaction with the guest or with one another and do it on a cadence.

Lloyed Lobo: 44:34

We were exclusively offline until the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, I'm like we got to do something right. We can't do a big conference anymore, we can't do events. So I reached out to all the conference speakers and asked them if I can interview them on Zoom every week and we'll invite the audience. So we had a live audience. That one week live webinar turned into two and over time I think entering the pandemic we had 30,000 subscribers and exiting it we had 100 plus. So I think that consistency because now we're getting the social proof of the speakers and it's like a TV show. Every Tuesday, thursday, they're tuning into the traction live at 11am. We don't do that anymore Since I left the day to day, but that was a big lift right.

Lloyed Lobo: 45:24

People are joining, they're tuning, they're interacting with one another, they're learning and those are things you can do very easily. Now people will be like oh, how do I drive audience Email? Email's not dead. Email's the biggest converter of everything I've done in my life. You know your ideal customer profile. Reach out to them. Look at your phone book, look at your email contacts and send them an email saying hey, xyz, we're hosting a webinar or an event on this specific topic. Here's top three things you'll learn.

Lloyed Lobo: 45:58

Very tactical, If you've niched down and you understand your audience, you'll come up with the content that's relevant for them. Would love for you to join and give them a link to sign up. And if it's a good speaker, they'll join right. Or they'll come. And I think you know if you want a hundred people to show up, you got to email maybe a thousand people. If you want 10 people to show up, you got to email a hundred people. But don't think that you can just throw something out there and it goes viral on its own. That's very rare. You've got to seed it. You've got to seed it and then doing the rest of it with consistency and a lot of people are like, oh, I don't have content ideas. Well, do this. Write down a hundred burning questions that your niche, your audience, has right. So think about. If I had to write the ultimate guide to X, y, z, what would be the chapters, subchapters, the topics and the tactical takeaways it would include.

Katherine Watier Ong: 46:53

Well, I don't think there's any excuse now for not knowing what those questions are. So Mozcom has got free. I think it's 50 queries a month, so you can spin up a keyword research account and go ahead and start brainstorming some questions. And two ChatGPT is great for this. It's in Bing and free. You can totally give Bing your persona and the topic and it will actually tell you questions and subtopics that your persona is interested in. Then you can ask it what are the uncommon ones? I mean there's a thousand prompts. Y'all know I've got a prompt database, but there's no reason that you can't come up with these questions in today's day and age. You know you've got a brainstorming partner now with AI and if you know how to prompt it well, you're going to have plenty of ideas.

Lloyed Lobo: 47:37

Definitely.

Katherine Watier Ong: 47:39

So let's talk about a little bit more about. We've talked about the community bringing success to you. I think the only thing we sort of haven't covered which is sort of new maybe to some folks that are listening is influencer outreach. Only because we've got here in the US with the perspectives and then just plain old search. We've got social posts showing up in search and in perspectives, we've got all this social feed and video and TikTok and whatever, and so suddenly, if you want to appear for your topic in the US, you might actually need to be out reaching to an influencer who could produce that content for you potentially, or talk about you as they're producing their content, because most of my clients are starting with a social media profile of like zero or tiny. So what are your tips for starting some influencer outreach?

Lloyed Lobo: 48:30

You know, I think first, in parallel, try to build your own influence. It's so hard to reach out to influencers the big ones anyway because why should I talk to you? Yeah right, if you don't have a very expensive gym membership or don't hang out where these people hang out, like? I have the fortune, good fortune, of living in dubai and they launched the influencer visa and I keep running into so many of them, but nonetheless, um, if you are not, don't have one of a few things to give. They don't want you either money or any influence, right? And a lot of people don't have the money or the budget to spend on influencers. So then there's another category of influencers and those are micro-influencers 10 to 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, on Instagram. You can reach out to them, but all of these people actually want money.

Lloyed Lobo: 49:22

I'm a big fan of spending the time and energy to create your own influence. If you don't do that, you're going to have to keep paying for somebody else, and the way to do that is to just keep creating daily. Put a camera, like we do have, right in front of us, stick your phone under a ring light. You have those 100 burning questions, record 30, 60-minute shorts. Use something like vidyo, videoai, or like Latte Social or Opus Pro, or use CapCut to edit and throw captions and put it on Instagram. The thing is, you won't have anyone view it the first time, the second time, the third time, the fourth time. You got to do this for 100 days. Commit to doing this for 100 days. Identify ideal customer profile, provide very specific knowledge, value to that niche. And the third thing which people don't do is reach out to everyone in your contact list and ask them to follow you.

Katherine Watier Ong: 50:21

Right Leverage your own network that you already have, which is the other benefit of being in some of these communities. So the Women in Tech SEO group actually has an Amplify section, which I try to go into regularly, where I amplify other people's smart thinking on LinkedIn or Twitter. So you've already got this sort of community that wants to amplify smart female stuff related to tech SEO All right, so this has been super helpful. Just about out of time.

Lloyed Lobo: 50:56

So what kind of win or resource do you have that you could share with our listeners today, other than, actually? I don't know if the landscape changes regularly. I still believe in 2024,. Seo is all about. If people are looking for a piece of content, google polls the worldwide web and sees, when this content is being talked about, who is the most relevant person they're talking about. I don't know if that's changed or not. There's all kinds of hacks and everything else, but ultimately, if you Until AI becomes, until the search generative experience becomes live.

Katherine Watier Ong: 51:39

That is sort of the basics of how Google pulls stuff.

Lloyed Lobo: 51:42

Yes, yeah, and I'm worried now what happens is where does this go if Google search turns into a chat GPT-like interface? Right, where it's giving you answers and not links. Right, and giving you a series of links? It might change the experience in a little bit but nonetheless, you guys know where to go, you guys are the experts and you got Catherine here to guide you, so I'll give you a lot of soft skills.

Lloyed Lobo: 52:08

One of my favorite books to read and I read it every so often is how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It's a fantastic book. All I've learned eventually started there, got its roots in there, as this kid who couldn't communicate coming out of university and needed to learn. So that's a great book. Influenced by Robert Cialdini is also another book, very good book, similar and this book called Spin Selling by Neil Rackham.

Lloyed Lobo: 52:43

A lot of us we think marketing and sales is separate. But what does marketing exist for? To accelerate sales, right. And if you can't communicate, not just to educate and educate but also convince people to convert, then what is the point? And that book actually has a good questioning framework that you can adopt into your style of writing for convincing people to convert kind of thing, convincing them to buy into your solutions. It's a lot about framing the situation, then framing the problem, then framing the implication of the problem and then framing the payoff so people feel bought in, kind of thing. So a lot of what I talk about is advice, is learning from that perspective. Alex Ormosi's book 100 Million Offers and 100 Million Leads his podcast is really good, and then Stephen Bartlett's podcast also is very good. So some resources here that as you're walking, as you're thinking and as you're thinking um and have a spare time, just tune in. I listened to everything on two X.

Katherine Watier Ong: 53:59

I'm not at two X yet, I'm at 1.5, but I'm there with you. It's in my ear constantly. Um, so how can people learn more about you?

Lloyed Lobo: 54:06

Definitely. Just I've taken, I'm on a LinkedIn sabbatical and so you can follow me on Instagram. Double l o y e d l o b o. I'm trying to be active there, posting some nonsense every day, whether it's life, whether it's fitness, whether it's business kind of thing. And I'm on LinkedIn, lloyd Lobo, and then my website, lloydlobocom. Just have the book right now. We'll have a bunch of resources probably in the next couple of months there. All the podcast appearances and a workbook for the actual book, I think.

Katherine Watier Ong: 54:38

Awesome, well, so this has been amazing. Lots of great tips for listeners. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Katherine Watier Ong: 54:45

Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we're up to, go to digitalmarketingvictoriescom and, if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Rate us, comment and share the podcast please. I'm always looking for new ideas, topics and guests. Email us at digitalmarketingvictories at gmailcom or DM us on Twitter.