[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to the First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by CEO and founder Rob Wenger of Higher Logic. Higher Logic. The industry leading human focus engagement platform delivers powerful online communities and communication tools to engage members and customers at every stage of their journey. I've never said that much for any intro. Rob, how are you?

[00:00:46] Rob: I am well, thank you. Good.

[00:00:50] Jay: It's a lot of, it's a lot of words there. What is,what is higher? It's a community building platform. Am I getting that right? What is it? and you know, maybe.

[00:00:57] Rob: Online.

[00:00:58] Jay: version.

[00:00:59] Rob: It's for hosting online communities. So we have, about 3000 clients. some big name corporate clients and then a bunch of, nonprofits and, all over the world. So we have offices in, the us, Canada, and Australia, and. Yeah, it's it's fun. It's a lot of fun building, building communities of thousands of people to talk to each other about whatever they wanna talk about.

It's usually professional stuff though, like, you know, doctors, lawyers, accountants, that kind of thing.

[00:01:26] Jay: Were you a community builder guy before this?

[00:01:30] Rob: I am a software builder guy. and I've worked with associations for, I how long, I don't know, more than 25 years probably.

And they're natural communities. They're just, that's what they exist for, groups of people to learn from each other and network and, you know, that kind of thing. And so. back when LinkedIn was pretty new, I joined pretty early.

and I joined, some friend invited me and I went in there and I'm like, I don't know anybody in this thing. And the idea was, well, hey, if you go to an association, they all do know each other day one. So if you had a LinkedIn just for associations, each one you brought up, the people would already know each other.

So that was the idea. It grew from LinkedIn style networking to, you know, sharing documents, thread of discussions, events, volunteering, and a bunch of other things. So it's grown over the 17 plus years. we've been doing this thing. And, yeah, it's, it's a, it is. Got a bright future too. I think AI is gonna make it even more valuable, so we're excited.

[00:02:30] Jay: What, what is something that you learned about communities in general or building communities that you didn't know before you started this?

[00:02:38] Rob: Yeah, something maybe that I wouldn't have expected is that, and it's just the law of large numbers. Any big group of people, there's a certain percentage of people that love to talk and most people don't. And that percentage is actually. Holds pretty steady, whether, you know, you'd think that engineers being introverts wouldn't, and yet they do.

And you think salespeople, you know, would be all over it. And they're just the same as engineers. So it's funny, on a scale of thousands or tens of thousands, their percentages are pretty steady, which I was surprised at that. you know, it does depend on the size, like I said. So a small group as a percent, there's a whole lot more participation than a big group, but.

Get really big. You get to those numbers, so it's 

[00:03:25] Jay: What's the ideal group size? For communication to stay active and for it to feel, 'cause I mean, as a, I consider myself a community builder guy, just because I've done it with gaming leagues and I have an astrophotography community, and we've got 2,600 people, and it's like, so I'm curious, just like, is there a size that things start to break down or become less active and then you have to do more stuff to engage people?

Like what's the breakdown?

[00:03:48] Rob: Yeah, I wouldn't say size is so much,the driver. It's more like, how important is it in your life? So you said gamer. if you're a gamer, gaming is very important in your life, right? I'm not that much of a gamer. Gaming's not very important in my life. I might join one and then never participate.

Right? But if it's like your job, then you know it's gonna, it's gonna work pretty well if it's your, your hobby that you love. Right, like gaming or golf or whatever, then it's gonna work pretty well. But if it's something like, you know, like let's say Dell computers, like no one's that into Dell computers.

And so in that case it tends to be huge numbers, but participation as a percent as low, when you need it though, right? So if I have a problem with my Dell computer and I want to go ask a question, I'm super glad that thing is there, but I'm not gonna join per se, right? So it just depends.

[00:04:39] Jay: What's the number one thing, other than activity, which is kind of the answer to this question anyway, to make a group successful and long lasting and exciting and engaging. Like, what is it? what is the magic sauce?

[00:04:55] Rob: Well, so it really depends on your goals. So engaging in assigning isn't necessarily everyone's goal, right? 

[00:05:01] Jay: Sure. Okay. That's fair.

[00:05:03] Rob: Example, the goal is to give people 24 7 access to support, right? So that's a good goal. And you don't necessarily have to have an engaging community for that. You'll still have the people that love coming in and answering questions just because they do.

Who are non-paid, you know, volunteers love the brand, you know, that kind of thing. So they're engaged, but the broader audience of millions and millions of consumer customers probably isn't terribly engaged. Engaged. That said, like I said, what is really important part of your job, like maybe you're a Dell server administrator, that would be a better community because they would, every day they think about that stuff, right?

And so. In that case, they're gonna be much more likely to talk to each other, build relationships with each other, et cetera. So on LinkedIn, you know, I have, I don't know, four, three, 4,000 friends, right? Contacts, whatever they call 'em. But they're lawyers and accountants and everything else. And so I don't have I much in common with them as I do with a community of software CEOs, for example, which I belong to that community that's much more active and more important to me than, you know, LinkedIn.

You know, in general in terms of my engagement level. So I've answered your question, but yeah, it really does depend. But there are certainly 300 person communities that are super engaged 

they're helping each other all day, every day. And then there're 50,000 person ones that are not terribly engaged because, you know, there's, it's more come in, get your in and leave kind of thing.

[00:06:35] Jay: Well, I think, how important is it in your life? Sums it up very well. Like, especially with your Dell point. And by the way, we're not sponsored by Dell, so I don't really have any, I mean, we said their name a lot, but,but like, but like, I'm actually looking at my Dell monitor right now. if. If you only have a question once every two years, then you don't give a shit what's going on in that community every day. So like, it's really, I mean, I think you summed it up very nicely and it's an interesting kind of paradigm to think about when building a community. It's like the goal really is the impetus of all the interactions there, because it shapes and molds kind of the whole thing.

What's the strangest thing you've seen somebody build a community around?

[00:07:17] Rob: Strangest thing to build it around. I wouldn't say I've seen anything terribly strange 'cause we sell. Mostly to, you know, larger organizations that have a lot of money and they don't do things that are too crazy. I've seen some pretty strange conversations. my favorite one was, we, when we first launched the New Jersey Society of CPAs, right?

Certified public accountants.

[00:07:38] Jay: Wild bunch. Wild bunch.

[00:07:40] Rob: They're crazy. well, but this is exactly what I expected. And then what we do is we suggest they get some seed questions to get it going. So people are like, what is this thing? And they see some good questions and answers and they think, oh, okay, I could see the value of this Right?

Sort of a demo,to all the members. And they might have had, 40,000 people, but. Halfway through that one week of seed questions, a random member asked a question about, basically he said, I have a client who's a clown, literally a clown, and he wants to know if he can write off. I don't remember what it was, his clown car or whatever.

It's his floppy shoes, whatever it was. and that thread just blew up. Like it made that community what it is today. One guy asked

[00:08:22] Jay: That's great. 

[00:08:22] Rob: for hundreds of replies in the first day on people who'd never been in a community before. Probably well, never been in a community like this. And, and it blew up.

So you just never know, like, 

[00:08:32] Jay: Can you manufacture that though? Is there some way to bottle that and like is a seed for new communities?

[00:08:38] Rob: Yeah. I mean, we see questions, but they tend to be much more professional, right? Like these are professional communities, almost all of 'em when we do. and so they tend to be professional things like, like they're related to government bills, you know, what's going on in the world. We try and stay away from politics because.

You know, a big group of people's got people on both sides and it degenerates, quickly. So we advise people, you know, shut down politics type stuff unless that's what you do. Right. If you're a lobbying organization, obviously politics are your thing, but like the Trump versus not Trump, that just goes badly.

[00:09:10] Jay: a, not gonna go very well. Yeah.

[00:09:12] Rob: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:09:13] Jay: Yeah. Well, it's, I, it's just interesting the point with the lawyer, question I find fascinating because it's almost like you can, you could see a world where you could see community questions with something that's close, but like. Adjacent enough that it makes people be like, what the hell are they talk and then like it does spark conversation around.

So it is an interesting thought of like, how do you seed something brand? It's the, and the community thing is always interesting to me because it's like, as somebody who builds communities, like at first it's just you yelling into the void and there's nobody there and you have to figure out like, how do I. And it's always just this really interesting social experiment for me. Like, how do you take like literally like an empty forum and make it active?

[00:09:56] Rob: Yep. Yep. Yep.

[00:09:57] Jay: Have you found that the moderation group or the owner of the group or the leaders of the group or whatever, their interactivity drives a lot of the success of those groups?

Like I've, that's, I've found that like being part of the group more. Always kind of continues the mission, whatever that mission is. Do you find that to kind of be similar in those groups?

[00:10:21] Rob: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have two types of clients, so we've got the kind you're talking about, right, which would be, well, so the, let's say there's three types. There's the type where someone like you starts a community and you're the only person you're trying to build it, right? We do fewer of those than we do the other two.

The other two are. It's a company and they have clients and they want their clients to talk to each other and help each other and interact with the cust with the company, right? So we do it, we have our own, it's called Hug, the Higher Logic user group, and we have several, like four or 5,000 people in there and they talk to us and to each other.

And so our staff is there all day long. I go in and answer questions, et cetera. So that type you do. It does start with a big group because usually you say, well, let's take all of our clients and put them in, and then client base grows. The community grows, but it's not starting from nothing. then in that case, yes, the participation of the company's.

Representatives or whatever is super helpful, to, to making the community work. And the third case is we have these nonprofits, right? Like the CPA Society and they have a ton, tens of thousands of people. Boom. They're in day one. And in that case, these are professionals with their professional id.

Like they don't use avatars. They use your real face. You link to your LinkedIn and so they tend to wanna talk to each other. And the staff of the association, they're not CPAs typically, right? So they're not doctors and lawyers and accountants, so they can't really participate. They can guide and they can, you know, moderate, but they don't tend to participate because they can't answer questions on neurosurgery or, you know, heart attacks and they shouldn't.

Right. So.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so, so it depends on the category. like I said, we tend, we you tend not to buy software this expensive when you are one person.

because the footprint, you know, the minimum footprint is enough that you'd be making a bet that this is gonna pay off. So you start on something like a LinkedIn group or you know, Facebook group or whatever.

When you get to a point where it's successful, then you say, well, we need more professional management. I want all the data. I don't want Facebook and LinkedIn to take it and show ads for things that I don't appreciate or 

You know, I want your private version. you don't typically do that until you've got, you know, something of an audience.

[00:12:40] Jay: And is there zombie communities where like they were active and then they slowly just peter off into nothing? Like do you have those and like, what do you do if like, they're just kind of a ship out to sea with no captain?

[00:12:51] Rob: Yeah, that tends to happen more when you have, so when we say communities, we've got, our client builds a community site and within there you can have smaller communities, like in my O group, that I belong to, software CEOs in the DC area. There's the general community and that one's active, but then they always want to form some additional community, like people who wanna invest in other DC area companies.

And so they'll make a sub-community or another community, and those tend to peter out. Like they'll get a lot of activity for a while and then nothing. No one posts for a while, and then people forget about it and they don't, and then they post one again. So we don't see often that the main one dies. What we see is.

You two, you try and spread it too thin and the spread out ones die, and then we just kind of pull them back. You say you just can't post everything here, use tags, you know, instead of, separate communities, for example. 

[00:13:49] Jay: '

[00:13:49] Rob: cause they're professionals. Now whether they get the ROI or not is a question, right?

So a corporation might say, yeah, we're getting participation, but it's not deflecting enough cost to justify it. and then say. That's a fixable problem. All you have to do is X, Y, and Z. And we have all these plans. We have automation in there at mentions things that we can tell them how to do it.

That will bring the participation back up. usually when it dies, it's because both that happens and then they don't put anything into it. Like they get rid of their community manager or their moderators, and then it tends to, you know. Whether it fails or not, it tends to maybe not be as worthwhile as what they thought it would be.

[00:14:31] Jay: And are you guys, do you guys provide those community managers as part of what you guys do?

[00:14:37] Rob: We do not often. I mean, usually our clients are big enough that they have their own, 

[00:14:41] Jay: They have their own kind of what does the job, what does the job, just like where do you find one of those people? Do they have to be a community manager somewhere else first?

[00:14:47] Rob: it doesn't have to be first. Often they get, they're coming from like a marketing role or a 

[00:14:52] Jay: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:14:53] Rob: there are a whole ton of professional community managers. Now, there probably weren't 20 years ago today, there's thousands, tens of thousands probably. I don't think it's a degree yet, but like there, there are plenty of people you can find.

to Reddit. Reddit University. I

yeah,

[00:15:07] Jay: they'll take you. They'll take you in. alright, well let's talk about you for a second. I'm sorry,I get so excited about the community building stuff. I forgot to even talk about you. So, Hey Rob, how are you? what, why did you start this business and who was your first customer?

[00:15:20] Rob: So we started it because of this, that, that thing I was talking about with LinkedIn, it was like. I was like, I saw the vision of LinkedIn, but it's gonna take a while, was my thought. Right? And it was the kind you're talking about where you start with one and it builds up. Now of course they have a billion or whatever the number is now, so it worked.

but what I thought was, well, I would like to talk about my profession with others in my profession only. So sort of a vetted membership based thing. And so. And so the idea was, well, again and again, I was in the associated market already, and I just saw like, this is what's missing. Like they need a good way to share things online.

if you're doing, contracts, share sample contracts. If you're doing one of our, one of our first clients was, eye surgeons and they were sharing videos of eye surgeries, which by the way was a fun 

[00:16:13] Jay: shit. Good Lord. 

[00:16:14] Rob: on for me. I'm sure if you're a eye surgeon, but for me, I was like, oh, but but

[00:16:20] Jay: It.

[00:16:20] Rob: yeah, exactly.

but if you think about, like, what they told me when we first started talking to them was. They can get the best eye surgeon in the world who, you know, is in New York City or whatever, and is doing this great surgery. That's super important. And then some doctor in a third world country who doesn't have access to this kind of technology can just watch that video over and over.

And because he is gotta perform one tomorrow, or hopefully not tomorrow, but you know, at some point maybe he's got a few pigs in the way. But you know, like, like the point is you're taking the best of the best and disseminating that. and so you're, we always used to say, and it is a Kennedy quote, I think, the rising tide lifts all the boats, right?

So you, the more you share, the more everybody gets better. and so that was the concept. It started as networking and education, and then it turned into, you know, user generated content sharing questions, answers, support deflection. There's like all kinds of use cases for it, and most of our clients have more than one.

You know, you have the occasional one that is like just. Hey, I want people to come here, get their answer and leave like the Dell example. And Dell's not a client of ours, by the way. That's why I use them. but but then there's these ones where it's like, I'm super engaged. I do this job every day.

I need to know what's going on every day. So I forgot what your question was, but hopefully that answered 

[00:17:36] Jay: I did too. It's fine. It's okay. this is not even, nobody's gonna hear this. It's fine. Nobody listen to, it's okay. So who, how has the customer changed over time? Like, who's your customer today versus like when you were just setting out, you made this thing for yourself, you're like, all right, it's kind of viable, it's a solution. who are they today versus back then?

[00:17:55] Rob: You know, it's actually not all that different. I think the. The tools we deliver are bigger, right? The core product is actually the same conceptually, you know, not literally the same, but it's the same conceptually. So it's all about. Communication and sharing. And so I wouldn't say that the customer's that different now we have gone into the corporate market.

We have, you know, five or 600 big corporations as clients in all over the, you know, software and hardware and games and just like all kinds of things. and so I guess probably the use cases have expanded, more so than I think the audience has per se, but. The newest thing I think is the multiple use cases per, so where you might buy it just to do support deflection.

You find out, well now we've got a lot of participants. Let's make them into advocates, let's make them into references for us, or can speak at our conference, or can write case studies with us and things like that. And so those, then they'll give them a special sort of community space so they can engage with each other.

And then you could do it, you know, CEOs versus CFOs versus rank and file and it's like CEOs may not want to talk to, you know, low level marketing people. I'm just making this up, but like, I've never seen that, but it's possible. and so you can segment and then the use case for the CEOs is like, Hey, this is the only place I could talk to other CEOs.

'cause everyone else in my company. You know, is works for me. not the truth necessarily. Right? So, so you have these cases within cases and that's where it starts to get really interesting, because, you know, we have security that blocks people from seeing stuff they shouldn't see. and then that gives them these kind of private sp private spaces within private spaces.

[00:19:45] Jay: And how,how does the competitive landscape look for you guys today? You know, is there a ton, I'm gonna assume there's a ton of community building websites out there. where do you guys kind of fit in the list of who's who when there's community building software comes up.

[00:20:01] Rob: Yeah, I mean, in terms of professional communities, like the ones I've described, there's not a ton of companies that, you know, it's half a dozen maybe. and we're one of the one or two in that group, so, we may, we probably are the biggest in, in, in the professional ones you'll see things like Nextdoor, right?

I wouldn't count them a competitor, certainly, but they're building communities of. Like physical communities, right?

[00:20:24] Jay: Yep. Yep. 

[00:20:24] Rob: similar in concept, but, but you know, and then there's others like who do it for, let's say chambers of Commerce, where, you know, the members are all in my city, but one guy owns a gas station and another guy's a plastic surgeon like.

Do they have a lot to talk about? maybe not, but it's not the way we do it. Right? Ours are much more like we're, we have a very common interest in order to make this thing happen. or it's that kind of deflection type one where it's like, the common interest is we own the same computer, right?

but, yeah, so there's specialties, there's others who specialize in areas that, that our software might be good for, but there might be better just because they specialize.

[00:21:04] Jay: I feel we're doing this podcast in reverse because I'm asking all the question at the beginning at the end, but I do wanna ask it. where did you grow up and did that have an impact on you being the entrepreneur you are today?

[00:21:15] Rob: yes. I grew up in the Washington DC area, so I lived in Maryland, Virginia, and DC at different parts of my life, but all within, you know, 

[00:21:23] Jay: 10 seconds of each.

[00:21:24] Rob: 10 miles. Yeah, exactly. so, in terms of entrepreneurial, that probably came from my dad. he actually worked for the government, but he always had some, he was a sr.

He always had some side business going, that he was building things. My mom too,would, you know, start new businesses and things like that. So I think I got that entrepreneurial bug from them. in terms of. Software. It's not Silicon Valley, but it's probably number two or three in, in, in software companies.

obviously a lot work for the government, which I avoided the whole time, but. Not necessarily purposely, but somewhat purposely. and, and then of course associations. That's how I got into that. 'cause they're big there. 54% of the US associations are in the DC area because a lot of 'em lobby the government.

and so you wanna be in, you wanna be in Washington. And so we have plenty all over the country and all over the world. But the majority, you know, more than half are in the DC area. So, not necessary today, but back then you wanted to go and knock on doors and meet people and shake hands. You don't do that so much today, so it's less important.

But we do have an office there still, even though I live out in Utah.

[00:22:29] Jay: Okay. if you had to start over tomorrow.

[00:22:32] Rob: Yep.

[00:22:33] Jay: 2025 in the landscape that it is today with the Discords of the world and all the communities you know that are out there, what would be step one to start higher logic again tomorrow?

[00:22:46] Rob: Yeah, I mean, starting a company is both easier and harder today, I think, than it was when I did it. It's easier in that with ai you can make this stuff more RA more rapidly. It's harder in that it's hard to get. A business off the ground. I think, there's a lot of tools now that'll make it easier to reach people, but without the, I don't know it, without the physical meetings that used to take place, that got us started without the networking that you need, you know, not just to, for customers, but for helping you get your business started.

It's just harder, I think. Today to do that than it was then. And of course, competition would be harder, right? So if this is an established player, like for us for example, I wouldn't wanna compete with us because we have, we generate between one and 2 billion interactions with our customers a month and having, you know, just terabytes and terabytes of data to work from gives us somewhat insurmountable advantage.

And so I think. It's difficult in software, at least, you know, as much as I might say, Hey, go use cursor and make a product, you know, in a 10th the time it took me to make it. you're starting with nothing. And it's, and Pete in that now if it's a greenfield thing, that's great. If it's a brand new idea and no one's doing it, and community was sort of that way 17 years ago, it's a little easier if it's.

It was something we were gonna go in and try and take it like a year ago. Everyone was like, oh my God, these tools are gonna make it so easy. These competitors are gonna pop out of nowhere. Five kids in a basement are gonna make the next, you know, awesome thing. It's like, yeah, but I don't think that's gonna happen at a rate any faster than it's happened historically.

You know what I mean? It happened with Facebook, it happened with Apple. It hap, you know, these famous stories of, you know, one or two people starting these, you know, fortune 10 companies, but. I don't think it happens in the next five years at a rate any faster, not significantly faster than it did then.

[00:24:43] Jay: Okay. do you pay any attention to personal brand?

[00:24:47] Rob: Personal brand

[00:24:48] Jay: Yeah. Your own personal, yeah. Your own personal brand. Do you pay much? Do you put much stock into it? do you do anything to kind of make, like what? What do you do to kind of control the narrative around your personal brand?

[00:24:58] Rob: Yeah, I mean, my brand is the company's brand. being co-founder and CEOI, you know, I care about. people buying our software or keeping our software, or buying more of our software. So I do get out a lot, right? I speak a lot, I write a lot. I post on LinkedIn. my, my marketing team markets me as much as they market the brand.

In some cases, not as much, but, you know, some fraction as much. so it gets developed, but it's really for higher logic. I, you know, I'm wearing my higher logic apparel. Oops, 

[00:25:29] Jay: I see that he is very spiffy. I might need to get one of those. Rock the brand.

[00:25:35] Rob: There you go. Exactly.

[00:25:36] Jay: Beautiful. All right, I have one more question for you.

This has nothing to do with, higher logic. Nothing to do with. Business, just Rob being robbed.

if he do anything on earth and he knew he wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:25:48] Rob: I knew I wouldn't fail. ah, that's a good question. I, you know, I live to work, so it's hard for me to think of anything outside. Probably it would be. Just build another software company, and have fun in the building stage. I mean, today hire likes 300 people and it is fun. I enjoy it quite a bit, but it was easier when there were three, right?

Or five, you know, it was more fun. We went to lunch together every Tuesday and always to the same sushi restaurant, you know, things 

[00:26:16] Jay: you could still do that. It would just be a very large

[00:26:20] Rob: And very expensive.

[00:26:22] Jay: Very expensive, large

lunch order. All right, so you'd start another software company, I mean. Typically I don't, I typically, I'll push people for a, like a different answer, but I do feel like that you just enjoy it and I feel like,

you know, it's a fair, it's a fair answer for somebody.

That's all they enjoy, so. All right. Fair enough. Rob, you were fantastic. Where can people reach out to you directly if they wanna talk to you about something they heard today?

[00:26:43] Rob: LinkedIn's easy. It's just Rob Wanger, email rob@higherlogic.com. or, yeah, those are probably the two best ways.

[00:26:51] Jay: All right, and we'll point people to higher logic.com for all their human focused engagement, online commun. I'm not gonna read it all. Rob, you're great man. I appreciate you, brother. Be good. And, we'll talk again soon. All right.

[00:27:04] Rob: Lot of fun. Jay. Thanks for 

[00:27:05] Jay: Thanks, Rob. See you man.

[00:27:06] Rob: See you. 

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